Here Lies Linc (12 page)

“You’re kidding. Already?”

Delaney proudly told me about her findings. “He used to be head of the law school at the university. I guess he was kind of famous back then. There was a whole bunch of stuff about him on the Internet.”

“So what about that woman Jeeter told us about? The one who puts the sunflowers on his grave. Who do you think she is?”

Delaney frowned. “I’m still not sure. It can’t be his wife. She would have died a long time ago. Maybe it’s his daughter.” Delaney stood there thinking, gnawing her bottom lip. “I’ve already looked online and checked the phone book, but there’s not a single listing for anyone named Raintree. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. His daughter could have gotten married and changed her name, or maybe the Raintrees have an unlisted phone number.” Delaney’s shoulders drooped. “I just wish there was a way I could talk to that lady from the graveyard.”

“Well, why can’t you?” I asked. “Jeeter said she’s come every single Monday for as long as he can remember.”

“Uh-huh, but he also said she comes around two o’clock. I’d have to skip school to talk to her. I doubt Mama’s gonna like that idea.”

“But wait,” I said. “Don’t we have a Monday off coming up?”

“Oh, you’re right.” Delaney gasped. “There’s one of those teacher conference days week after next. It’s on that Monday right before Halloween. We could go then!”

My heart gave a little jolt when she said the word “we.” “Yeah, we can stake out the graveyard all afternoon and be waiting for her when she gets there.”

But then Delaney’s face clouded over.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about Mama.” Delaney snatched a nervous look in my direction. “Didn’t you notice the other day? My mother’s expecting a baby.”

I nodded. “So … I should say congratulations, right? Aren’t you happy about it?”

“Oh, I’m happy,” Delaney said quickly. “It’s just that the baby’s due in a month. But you never know. So it’s been kind of hard to plan ahead about things.”

Before I could ask more questions, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I turned to find Beez and Amy grinning at me. “So!” Beez began. “I hear you’re an absolute genius with microfilm.”

Amy gave him a flirty little whack on his arm. “He is.” She giggled. “He helped me a ton.”

“So where’d you learn all that stuff?” Beez asked. “I guess it was your mom who taught you, right? The nutty professor?”

I didn’t answer. I knew he was just trying to stir things up, hoping I’d take the bait and say something goofy. I turned back to Delaney, muttering under my breath, “How many football players does it take to thread a microfilm machine?”

“Whoa!” Beez took an exaggerated step backward. “Listen to you! Mr. Comedian!”

Delaney was tugging my sleeve, ready to pull me away, when Mellecker came strolling over. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, casting an uneasy look in my direction. He must have seen me bristling, scowling at his buddy Beez.

“Not much,” Beez told him with a chuckle. “Just trying to get some research tips from Mr. Professor Junior here.”

“Hey, I could use some tips myself,” Mellecker said, quickly smoothing out the prickly conversation. He turned to me. “I don’t get it, Crenshaw. With a vault like the one they’ve got in Oakland, I thought the Ransoms would have been pretty famous in town. But I couldn’t find a single word about them on the Web. So what do you think?” he asked. “Where else should I look for clues?”

As soon as Mellecker called me Crenshaw, I could feel Beez turn watchful. Of course he was wondering why his friend would be giving a nerd like me the time of day. So suddenly I was itching to say something impressive—something that would put Beez in his place and prove I was worthy of Mellecker’s attention.

My answer flew out before I could think it through. “You could look inside the vault,” I said.

Mellecker blinked. “What do you mean? How would I do that?”

“I could get you the key.”

“The key?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I told him, trying to keep my voice even. “The key to the Ransom vault. I can get it for you. Don’t you want a look inside?”

Mellecker grinned at me in astonishment. He began to nod. “That would be awesome,” he said.

Beez hooted. “Crenshaw, my
man
!” he yelled out, and raised his hand for a high five. I reached up to give his palm a hard slap as Amy bounced on her toes beside us and asked if she could come too. But then I glanced over at Delaney, who was observing with her eyes wide, and I felt my palm start to sting. And that’s when I thought,
Oh, no, what did I just do?

I
ONLY MANAGED TO RUN
about a mile with the dogs that afternoon. And the word “run” was an exaggeration. I plodded up and down the blocks in my neighborhood like I was slogging through sand, with C.B. and Spunky dragging me along as I stewed over what in the heck I was going to do about my promise to deliver the Ransom key.

When I came scuffing back to Claiborne Street, Mr. Krasny was exactly where I had left him, sweeping leaves off his front porch. “Back already?” he called out.

“Yep,” I said as I slowly climbed the steps to hand over Spunky’s leash. “Sorry Spunk didn’t get very much exercise today. But I’ve got an awful lot of homework, and, well …” I couldn’t hold back my sigh. “It’s just been one of those days.”

Mr. Krasny leaned on his broom, peering at me through his thick glasses. He nodded sympathetically.
“Understandable. Have days like that myself sometimes.” Then his watery blue eyes turned hopeful with an idea. “Would you like to come inside and have a Coca-Cola? The dogs can have a romp together in my backyard. I bet they’d enjoy that.”

I could almost feel C.B. glaring at me through his eyebrows as he sat waiting to be taken home. I didn’t want to go into Mr. Krasny’s stuffy little bungalow either. I had always wanted our house to be cleaner, but Mr. Krasny’s house felt too neat somehow—with the way its knickknacks and doilies and furniture were locked in their permanent spots, like some sort of museum or movie set from the 1950s. I glanced down at C.B. again, trying to think of an excuse, but then Mr. Krasny’s doormat caught my eye.
BLESS OUR HAPPY HOME
, it said. It must have been lying there for years, since before his wife died, before their two sons grew up and moved out to the coasts.

The next thing I knew, poor C.B. was trapped in the backyard with Spunky, and I was wedged at Mr. Krasny’s kitchen table with a glass of warm Coke in front of me. Mr. Krasny plunked down a plateful of cookies next to my Coke. “Here, have one,” he ordered. “I made them myself.” He told me what they were called—something that sounded like “shankies,” but I couldn’t quite catch the name.

I picked up a cookie, took a bite, and tried not to make a face. It was so plain, it tasted kind of like chalk dust.

“You need to dip it!” Mr. Krasny instructed from across the table, where he was settling himself with a cup of coffee.

“Excuse me?”

“Dip it.” He lowered a cookie into his cup, waited a beat, and then took a loud, slurpy bite. “Tastes much better this way.”

Yuck
, I thought, but I shrugged and gave it a try.

He was right. It worked, even with warm Coke. We sat chewing in silence for a while, and I almost cracked up at how funny Mr. Krasny looked, happily munching away. He had floppy earlobes, and his white hair sprang out from his head like dandelion fuzz.

“So you’ve got a lot of homework, do you?” Mr. Krasny said after a minute or two. “What are you studying in school these days?”

“Oh, nothing too exciting.” I stretched back in my chair. “I guess we’re doing factoring in prealgebra and … a bunch of grammar work sheets in English. You know, the usual stuff.” As I shrugged and let out a big breath of air, it occurred to me how much I was sounding like the typical bored adolescent—the kind of kid that Mr. Krasny’s generation worried about. “But my class went on a pretty cool field trip to the historical society today,” I told him with a little more enthusiasm. “They kind of let us have the run of the place so we could get started on our research projects.”

“Oh?” Mr. Krasny perked up. “What kind of projects?”

I quickly ran through the basics of my Adopt-a-Grave assignment, forcing myself not to glance up at the loudly ticking cuckoo clock that hung on the wall by the refrigerator. Then I finished up by telling him a few things I had found out about the Black Angel monument that day. “Supposedly, the
people buried there came here in the 1870s, from a place called Bohemia … wherever that is,” I added under my breath. I reached for another cookie. Maybe if I dunked one more of his shankies, Mr. Krasny would be satisfied and let me go.

But now he was watching me with an amused spark in his eyes. “Don’t you know? Those are Bohemian cookies you’re eating.”

I stopped chewing. “Really?” I mumbled with my mouth full.

“Yes.
Sušenky
,” he said, pronouncing the word more clearly this time. “It’s an old family recipe. My father was Czech. He came from a village not too far from Theresa Feldevert’s.”

I coughed in surprise, and a tiny spray of wet crumbs flew out. “You’re kidding!” I said with a hard swallow. “Did he know her?”

Mr. Krasny chuckled and handed me a napkin. “Not very well, as I remember. But they were certainly acquainted. Anyone who lived in this neighborhood back then knew about the Widow Feldevert.”

Mr. Krasny took a slow sip of coffee, collecting his thoughts, and I felt my leg start to jiggle with impatience. But then, all at once, he was back to his habit of firing out words like bullets. “This side of town used to be full of Czechs, every one of them from that same region in the middle of Europe called Bohemia. You’ll have to look at the map, Linc. Look for the Czech Republic, the western part. Germany and Poland
on the north, Austria on the south. That’s where Theresa Feldevert and my father and all those others came from way back when. Hoping to make a better life in America. By the time I was born, the Widow Feldevert had definitely made a better life for herself. But she was a miserable old lady. Turned into something of a recluse.”

I scooted my drink aside and leaned over the table. “Why do you think she was so miserable?”

“Oh, she had a hard life. Lost her loved ones. After her son Eddie died, she disappeared for years. Moved out west somewhere. The other Czechs said she met a rich old German rancher and married him in a heartbeat. That’s how come she changed her name from Dolezal to Feldevert. Then what do you know? He died too. Left her all his money, and one day she appeared in town again out of nowhere. Folks said she had come back to dig up her son and bury him, along with her rich husband, in the fine style they deserved. She hired a famous sculptor from Chicago to make the Angel. Paid five thousand dollars! Quite a bundle back then. It was the talk of the town.”

Mr. Krasny sat back in his chair and shook his head as if he were finished with his tale. But then he said, “I saw her once.”

“You did?”

“Yes, indeed. I couldn’t have been more than six years old, but I’ll never forget it. My older sister and I, we used to love to pick blackberries on the edge of the cemetery. That’s when we saw her. We were heading home. Buckets full. And
here she came, the old Widow Feldevert herself, squeaking along the path in her wheelchair.”

“Wheelchair?” I interrupted.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you.” Mr. Krasny’s voice had turned low and mysterious. I felt my heart thump against the wooden edge of the table. “She only had one leg.”

“What?” I whispered.

“That’s right,” Mr. Krasny went on. “People said she had been bitten by a rattlesnake when she was out west living on that ranch with her husband. The infection from the poison was so bad, she had to have her leg cut clean off.”

I felt my eyes widening. A rattlesnake? Amputation? How was I supposed to prove my no-curse theory with mishaps like those lurking in Theresa’s past?

Mr. Krasny’s gaze drifted to the kitchen window and his story slowed down. “Such a long time ago. But I can still hear that sound. That
squeak-squeak
of her wheelchair when she pushed herself along the path.”

He squinted his eyes shut for several long seconds, as if he were watching the scene flash across the insides of his lids. “She looked like she was still in mourning. Black bonnet. Long black dress. Black collar buttoned up high. Long cane across her knees. And her face, the picture of sorrow. I’d never seen anyone look so sad.”

We both jumped when we heard Spunky scratch at the back door. Mr. Krasny blinked a few times. “Forgive me, Lincoln,” he said with a faint smile. “I’ve been rambling.”

“No, this is exactly the kind of stuff I need for my project,” I said, hurrying to reassure him. “Do you remember
when Theresa died? It’s weird—there’s a birth date for her on the monument, but no death date.”

“That
is
strange,” Mr. Krasny agreed. “You know, I can’t recall hearing much about her death, and I don’t remember any sort of funeral. I wish my father were here. He could tell us. He made it his business to know about all the other Bohemians in town.” Mr. Krasny took a last gulp of coffee and hefted himself to his feet.