Here Lies Linc (26 page)

I scrabbled sideways and snatched up the strap. Kilgore stopped cold as I raised the old army canteen and took a deep sniff from the open spout. My head flooded with boozy fumes. I winced and made a sour face. “What’s this?” I asked, pretending to be shocked. “Sure doesn’t smell like water.”

“Give me that,” Kilgore growled.

I took a step backward into the gloom. “I don’t know,” I said. “The police might need this for that report of theirs.”

“Listen, you little smart-mouth—” Kilgore lunged at me, grabbing for the canteen. Before he could rip the strap from my hands, I hurled the canteen at his face and sidestepped around him. Delaney was already racing for the door, yanking it open.

“Go ahead!” Kilgore yelled behind us, his voice thick with rage. “Run! I know where to find you!”

T
WO DAYS LATER
I was standing at the sink full of dirty dishes, looking out at the graveyard, when Winslow, Dobbins, York & McNutt finally decided to break their silence. They weren’t bickering this time. They were singing, all together in their gruff, scratchy voices.

I wheeled away from the window, rolling my eyes, and went over to the phone to dial Delaney’s number again. I stood there listening for ten rings, then ten more—longer than I had listened yesterday afternoon or last night or early this morning. Why wouldn’t Delaney pick up the phone? And why didn’t the Baldwins have an answering machine?
Even Lottie had broken down a couple years ago and signed us up for voice mail.

I banged the receiver back on the hook. Delaney had to know I wanted to talk to her. We hadn’t spoken since Friday night, when we’d run out of the graveyard, wild-eyed and gasping for breath. Beez and Mellecker were sitting on the hood of the Mustang, and Beez’s brother was still zonked out inside. “Where have you guys been?” Beez had screeched, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “We thought you were right behind us.”

I had let Delaney do the explaining. I was too rattled, and too angry with them, to get the words out. But now, in the safe light of day, all I wanted to do was talk to Delaney, to go over every crazy detail of what had happened with Kilgore in the tomb.

Maybe
I
was the one Delaney was mad at—for getting her into such a big mess. She didn’t know Kilgore like I did. I had a feeling he was bluffing about calling the police, especially since I had stumbled upon that canteen of his. But Delaney was probably petrified right now, thinking Kilgore might be trying to hunt us down at this very minute.

I stormed back over to the sink and ran the water full blast over the dishes, hoping I could drown out the background noise. The old men were still singing.

I must have jumped when Lottie blew into the kitchen, carrying a clinking tower of dirty coffee mugs from her office. “Sorry,” she said as she unloaded the stack of cups on the counter. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lottie crossing her arms and leaning one hip against the counter. I busied myself fishing for a sponge at the bottom of the sink while she stood there assessing me, as if she were still gathering information for her “Linc’s Abnormal Behavior Since Junior High Started” file.

“Listen, Linc,” she finally said. “This is getting ridiculous. You can’t keep up this silent treatment forever.”

I stopped fishing for the sponge and stood with my hands submerged in the soapy water, trying to decide how to respond.

Lottie took a little step toward me, her face softening with concern. “Look at those huge circles under your eyes. Do you think you could be coming down with something?” She reached out to feel my forehead. Before I could catch myself, I dodged her hand, splashing us both with dishwater in the process.

Lottie dropped her arm to her side with a wounded look.

“Sorry,” I said, reaching for a dish towel. “But … I know I don’t have a fever. I feel fine. Really.”

“All right, Linc,” Lottie answered in a clipped voice. “I give up.” Her expression had already gone cold as she brushed
past me and went over to sort through the pile of mail on the kitchen table.

I give up too
, I thought as I gazed blankly out the window over the sink.

CUT! CUT THE MUSIC! Did you hear that, fellas? He said he’s giving up!

Yeah, we heard. Dumb. He’s not even a teenager yet, and he sounds like he’s ready to move in with us
.

Good grief. Wouldn’t you think he’d see the resemblance?

What resemblance is that, Winslow?

Well, look at him! Standing there with his mouth zipped, trying to pretend nothing’s wrong. Just like his mom
.

You gotta hand it to her. She taught him well
.

“Okay! Okay!” I said out loud.

Watch it, Tomato Head! You don’t have to get huffy. We’ll go back to playing dead anytime you’re ready
.…

Lottie was staring at me, a piece of junk mail still clutched in her hand. “Okay, what?” she asked.

I shrugged and gave her a shaky smile. “Okay, I know how much you hate doing dishes.… I’ll wash,” I offered, “if you dry.”

We never got done with cleaning the kitchen that afternoon. I decided to unload my biggest secret first—Adeline Raintree—and then work my way around to the rest of my confessions from there. While I scrubbed and rinsed and began to tell about my trip four days earlier to Fulton Lane, Lottie dried and stacked, listening in startled concentration.
But when I got to the part about the box full of letters in the Raintree dining room, my mother dropped her dish towel and went over to the kitchen table to sit down. She leaned over the table in stunned silence, staring at the crumbs scattered between her forearms while I told about the photos tucked in each envelope—Dad’s baby pictures, snapshots from his first communion, and graduation day.

Lottie shook her head. “How could Ellen have kept such a secret from your father?” she asked, her voice weak with disbelief. “Even after he was a grown man and completely capable of understanding.”

“I guess that was the agreement between the Crenshaws and the Raintrees,” I said. “Since Adeline Raintree never wrote back until it was too late, Dad’s parents probably didn’t know how awful she felt all those years. They probably thought she got married and had more kids of her own … and lived happily ever after.”

“Looking back now, I should have suspected something,” Lottie said, more to herself than to me. “There were little clues here and there. Maybe that’s why your father was so intrigued by finding that letter. Maybe he had a feeling.”

I nodded. Then I bit my lip. “Lottie, that’s not all.”

Lottie looked up at me. “What?” she said. “What else could there be?”

“Adeline Raintree thinks Dad’s still alive.”

Lottie closed her eyes. “You didn’t tell her?”

“I couldn’t, Lottie. I was kind of … in shock, you know? Things just got all mixed up, and she seemed so overjoyed about finally getting to meet us.”

“Oh, no,” Lottie breathed. “Are you telling me she’s over there in that big old house, all by herself, waiting for him to come?” When I nodded again, Lottie sprang up from her chair and began to pace back and forth across the kitchen floor. C.B., who had been sleeping on his dog bed for the last hour, hopped up too and zigzagged across the kitchen, hoping it was time to go outside.

Lottie stopped and frowned down at C.B. panting at her feet. “I don’t know if we can take this on right now,” she flung out. “I mean, from the sounds of it, she has no other family. And you said there might be some dementia going on?”

“I didn’t say she was demented, Lottie. I said she was kind of … different.”

“I just need to think for a while, Linc,” she said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyelids. “Before we do anything else, I need to think.”

After Lottie had retreated back to her office, I stayed at the kitchen table, trying to figure out what to do next. Relief and then worry crept over me like the shivers. I felt ten pounds lighter without the story of Adeline Raintree balled up inside. Lottie had taken the news much better than I’d expected. But now she was starting to get that caged-bird look in her eyes. And I hadn’t even begun to tell her the rest of my troubles.

The rest of my troubles.… I grabbed C.B.’s leash, and we hurried out the door.

J
EETER’S LITTLE SHOE BOX
of a house was only a couple of miles from ours. I had never been there before, never known where he lived until I had spotted his name and address in Dad’s book in the attic. But I could tell I was at the right place as soon as I saw the front yard. His small patch of grass was groomed with the same golf-course precision that he used when he mowed around the tombstones at Oakland. And I had heard all about the cast-off slab of granite perched beside his front stoop. Etched with a picture of a bass and the words
GONE FISHIN’
, it was originally intended to be sitting on top of a grave at Oakland instead of in Jeeter’s flower bed. According to Jeeter, the man who commissioned it for his father’s plot refused to pay when he realized the fish was a bass instead of a walleye, like he’d ordered. When Jeeter saw the half-finished monument, he shook his head and called it a
thing of beauty, and his stone-carver buddy decided to give him the slab right there on the spot.

C.B. pulled on the leash and sniffed at the grass around the Chicago Cubs mailbox—another surefire sign that I had come to the right place. The only hitch was that Jeeter’s battered old truck was missing from the gravel parking space. He probably wasn’t even home. I let C.B. sniff along the curb for a minute more as I tried to decide whether it was even worth it to go up and knock on the door. Soon we had edged past Jeeter’s house, and that’s when I heard the sound of hammering drifting through the alleyway.

I found Jeeter in his backyard, inside an old wooden outbuilding. The rickety double doors were propped open, and he was bent over a rough length of board stretched between two sawhorses. Maybe if he hadn’t had three nails pressed between his lips, Jeeter would have shown more of a reaction to my unexpected visit. Instead, when he glanced up to find me standing in his doorway, he had a few seconds to compose himself while he slowly reached up to retrieve the nails. “Well, what do you know?” he drawled. “If it isn’t the two famous outlaws—Lincoln Log and his canine sidekick, C.B.”

“Hey, Jeeter,” I said softly. “I didn’t think you were here at first. Your truck’s not out front.”

He reached for the tape measure hanging on his belt and bent over the board again. “I sold it.”

“You sold it?” I was shocked. Jeeter had always loved that old truck.

“I got to eat, don’t I?” he asked as he scratched a mark on his board with a carpenter’s pencil.

I blinked down at the top of his head in dismay, wringing the end of C.B.’s leash until I couldn’t hold back anymore. “I’m sorry, Jeeter,” I said in a gush of emotion. I could feel the hot sting of tears building up behind my eyes. “I know I’m the one who got you fired. You stuck up for me when Kilgore said I stole that key to the vault. So I wanted to come see you and apologize for everything.” Jeeter wasn’t looking at me. Without taking his eyes off the pencil mark on his piece of wood, he lifted a circular saw from its perch on a nearby stool. “And I wanted to tell you the truth,” I rushed on. “The truth is I didn’t deserve you taking up for me. Kilgore was right. I
did
steal that key.”

The saw roared to life, making me jump and C.B.’s tail disappear between his legs. The blade bit into the chunk of wood with a hungry shriek. Then, just as quickly, it was quiet again. My ears were still pulsing from the blast of noise when Jeeter said, “I knew you took the key before Kilgore did.”

“
You knew?
But how?”