Abandon (21 page)

“Don’t do that,” Uncle Chris said. “Don’t ever do that.”

I widened my eyes at him. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Don’t put yourself down,” he said. “I know what happened to you. I heard about it, even though I was away. Your mom kept in touch with me and sent me pictures of you, too. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Well, it’s true.”

I stared at him. He was right. I hadn’t heard this.

“And when I heard about what happened to you — how you weren’t doing too good — I told your mom not to worry.” He smiled at me, the same sweet smile he always gave me.” ‘That one’s going to be okay,’ I told your mom. ‘You can see it in her eyes.’ Now, Alex? Alex I’m not so sure about. Sad to say about your own son, but…” He shrugged. “I worry about him.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I worried about Alex, too.

“And it’s not just because you’re a girl, either, or Deb’s daughter.” He shook his head. “Deb was never anything like you.”

“I know,” I said. I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
“They still have all the trophies she won for the school. The trophies
both
of you won. They’re on display in A-Wing.”

He looked bewildered. “What’s A-Wing?”

“It’s — never mind.” I guess he and Alex really didn’t talk much. “They redid the high school since you…went away.”

“They redid a lot of things since I went away,” he said. “But that’s not what I meant. Deb’s just…everything’s easy for her. Like winning those trophies. Everyone knew Deb was going to make it off this rock someday. No one thought I would. Except the way I did.” He laughed shortly. “Guess it just goes to show, the trophies you win in high school don’t necessarily mean much.
So…” He looked away, off towards the pinkening clouds of sunset. “Don’t ever let them tell you that you’re too stupid to do something. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy for you, the way it was for your mom. Maybe you’re going to have to work for it a little harder than other people, which I know isn’t fair. But that doesn’t mean you should just give up. Because if you do that, then where will you be?” He looked at me and shrugged.

“Um,” I said. “On a bike?”

“Yeah,” he said. “On a bike.”

Except I was pretty sure the correct answer was Living with the lady who owns Knuts for Knitting after having just served a sixteen-year prison term.

Now I was starting to get what Dad meant about Uncle Chris going on a reign of terror and revenge now that he’d gotten out of jail. It was the whole “still waters run deep” thing. There was a lot more going on inside Uncle Chris’s head than I’d thought.

“So your mom said for me to tell you she’s running late; she had to go back to the office for a meeting,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, I have a meeting, too —”

“Okay,” Uncle Chris said. “Well, I’m going to put the furniture in the back away. Unless you need a ride to your meeting or something…”

“Oh, no, I’m good, thanks.” I steered my bike towards the front gate. Noticing his downcast expression, I added, “But maybe tomorrow you could take me for a driving lesson.”

I saw how his face brightened, and I knew I’d said exactly the right thing.

“Great,” he said. “It’s always so good to see you, Piercey.”

If I’d known then how that evening was going to turn out, I might not have just smiled and waved back at him, then opened the gate and ridden off. I might have canceled my meeting with the cemetery sexton and stayed glued by Uncle Chris’s side for the rest of the night. To make sure the evil didn’t get him. This was supposed to be my new hobby.

But I didn’t know then how much the cone of uncertainty had narrowed, or that it was pointing directly at Isla Huesos.

T
he office of
the cemetery sexton, as he’d reminded me, closed promptly at six. It was way past that when I tapped on the door.

“You’re late,” Richard Smith grumbled when he threw it open. “But I wouldn’t have expected anything less. Come in.”

He stepped aside, allowing me to enter his immaculately neat office. Because the sun had already started sinking past the tree-tops, he’d turned on a small brass desk lamp, the only thing that seemed in keeping with the historical aspect of the Isla Huesos Cemetery, which a brass plaque by the door outside explained had been established over 150 years earlier, in 1847.

Which I suppose might have surprised most people, considering the fact that the office was housed in a quaint, whitewashed
cottage complete with a picket fence, tin roof, front porch, windows with turquoise shutters, and original pine floors.

But inside, it was exactly the way I remembered from ten years earlier, though Richard Smith hadn’t been cemetery sexton then: all metal file cabinets and shelves containing badly photocopied applications for internment and construction permits for the sealing and setting of tombs.

That’s what cemetery sextons do, though. Supervise the burying of dead people. They’re not exactly supposed to be into decorating.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Richard Smith said grumpily, closing — and locking — the door behind me. “Sit down.”

He indicated one of several faux-leather chairs that sat in front of a large wooden desk. They were a little different from the ones I remembered from my last visit, but not by much. I hadn’t gotten to sit in any of them then. Grandma had sent me out before I got a chance. They were comfortable. But I still found myself wanting to fidget.

John had told me not to come back to the cemetery. It’s not safe for you here had been his exact words. Not unless you really do want to end up dead. Forever this time.

Well, I was back in the cemetery. Or at least the office of the cemetery sexton. Was I going to end up dead because of this visit?

I really didn’t think that would be fair.

Mr. Smith must have sensed my agitation, since he lowered himself into a creaking office chair behind the desk and got down to business with surprising quickness. Removing my necklace
from a top drawer, he laid it upon the dark green desk pad in front of him.

“Recognize this?” he asked, peering at me over the rims of his glasses.

I’d tried to figure out on the ride over how I was going to handle this.

And I’d decided that, as when dealing with the police about Mr. Mueller, denial was probably the safest way to go.

But it was difficult — with the way the dark green leather pad seemed to show off all the necklace’s best features, the gleaming gold chain, the stormy gray stone. Did it look paler in the middle than usual, or was this a trick of the light? — not to just grab it and go. What could he do if I did? He couldn’t chase me. He was old. Older than the jeweler had been, even. He’d probably have a heart attack on his own, without John’s help.

But I couldn’t do it. Not to him. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. He hadn’t been very nice, not to me or to my mom.

Denial. That was the way to go.

“No,” I said, tearing my gaze from the necklace and looking him in the eyes. It wasn’t the lighting. The stone
did
look white in the middle. Something weird was going on. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Richard Smith said, smiling. “What’s interesting is that I, on the other hand,
have
seen it before.”

My heart sank. Oh, great. Not another one. This was exactly what the jeweler had said. How did I get myself into these situations? And with my own two feet? I just seemed to walk — or pedal — into them constantly.

“Never in real life, of course,” he went on. “Only in artist renderings. You see, in my spare time, when I’m not in here processing grave site reservation applications or out there trying to keep idiotic teenagers like you from desecrating hundred-year-old tombs, I read. Mostly about death deities…those who escort the newly deceased to the afterlife,” he added, I suppose because he thought, as one of those “idiotic teenagers,” I wouldn’t understand the term.

He didn’t know, of course, I was an NDE and, as such, highly familiar with all things relating to the dead.

“My partner thinks I’m crazy, too,” he said with a shrug. “And I guess I do take my work home with me a bit. But I find our culture’s fear of death a bit ridiculous, when death is really only a natural part of the life cycle. I’m not saying life shouldn’t be enjoyed to its fullest, because I certainly enjoy mine. But you should see people’s reactions at parties when they ask, ‘What do you do?’ and I tell them. They can’t get away from me fast enough.”

“Oh?” I said, just to be polite. I knew how the people at the parties must have felt. Also, not to be mean, but I thought his partner might be onto something with the crazy thing. Although I was hardly one to be casting stones.

“So you see,” Richard Smith said, “that’s why, when I stumbled across this” — he patted the necklace — “in my cemetery this morning, I not only knew exactly what it was, but I also knew it hadn’t been dropped by some tourist who just happened to be passing through our little graveyard to take a few pictures on her way back to one of the cruise ships. And when I found these
attached to it” — he smoothed across the desk pad some strands of my long, dark hair, which had clearly been gently extracted from the knotted tangle that had been caught in the chain — “I thought, who have I seen in the cemetery lately with hair like this, who might possibly have gotten her hands on such a singular item? It certainly couldn’t be that young lady I see in here almost daily, who not only refuses to abide by my simple request not to use the paths as a public thoroughfare but who also habitually wears a long gold chain around her neck. Could it?”

I realized I had underestimated him back in the New Pathways office. The bow tie and tassels were just window dressing.

This guy was good. Really good.

“I’ve never seen that necklace before in my life,” I said. That was my story — for now — and I was sticking to it.

He smiled some more and went on as if I hadn’t spoken.

“I thought a young lady who whips through this place with no regard for pedestrians, almost as if she were in training for the Tour de France, might say that the night after a terrible act of vandalism was committed here. So, naturally, I went to the area where the vandalism occurred. And look what I happened to find lying by the gate.”

He held up another long, dark hair. First he laid it down alongside the ones he’d extracted from the necklace. “Same color. Same length.” Then he held it up in the air and closed one eye, as if measuring it against the hair tumbling from the top of my head down past my shoulders. “A good match, I would say.”

There was no way to know, of course, if he’d really found it by the gate. There was no way to tell if any of it was true or if he was
just putting all of this on for show, to get me to crack and trick me into admitting I’d been in the cemetery last night.

But suddenly, I felt weak. Like I was going to faint or something.

Please, don’t mess this up for us,
Mom had asked me. Not in words but with her eyes. I was messing this up. I was messing this up big-time.

Why? I asked myself. Why wasn’t I seeing red, when I most needed to? What was wrong with me? This guy wasn’t
that
good. He was just what Dad would have called a kook.

Maybe that was why. He
was
just a kook. I didn’t get the sense that he wanted to hurt me.

So what
did
he want?

“That…doesn’t prove anything,” I managed to murmur.

“No,” he agreed, sweeping all the hair back into his desk drawer and locking it away. Evidence for later, I thought bleakly. “It doesn’t. I only mention it because I was so surprised to see you, of all people — Carlos Cabrero’s granddaughter — involved with something so…messy. I would think you’d want to stay
out
of trouble, at least for your uncle’s sake.”

Oh, God. Not Uncle Chris. He really
was
good.

“I do,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “I
do
want to stay out of trouble.” That’s what John had given me the necklace for.

And now look at what had happened. Why had he thrown it away?

It’s not safe for you here.

“Well,” Richard Smith said, looking a little taken aback, perhaps because of my tears. “You’ve certainly got an interesting way of showing it. Now, tell me. Who gave you this necklace?”

I looked down at the stone. It wasn’t the lighting. It wasn’t my imagination. The diamond wasn’t gray anymore. It was white.
White.

The opposite of what it had become outside his office windows, where it was now almost as dark as night. Thunder rumbled. It was distant, but it was there. Maybe it was the feeder bands Uncle Chris had mentioned we were supposed to get. They seemed to have come on awfully quickly, though, considering we were supposed to have been only under a watch.

I shook my head.

“I can’t tell you,” I said. It was hard to talk with the tears prickling my nose. “I’m sorry. I’d like to. But you seem like a nice man. And…” I couldn’t help thinking about what had happened to the jeweler. I didn’t think John would be coming back — ever. But I didn’t know for sure. “I just can’t.”

Mr. Smith frowned, obviously frustrated with me.

“Miss Oliviera,” he said. “Are you aware that this diamond is stolen? Not just stolen but
cursed?”

I sucked in my breath, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was so like John to have given me a cursed, stolen diamond.

“It’s quite famous, actually, in certain circles,” he went on. “Well, mine, anyway. Allegedly, it was mined by Hades, the Greek death deity, to give to Persephone, his consort, in order to protect her from the Furies.…”

I felt goose bumps break out all over my entire body. Cemetery Sexton Smith, of course, was seated too far away to notice.

The Furies. John had mentioned them.

“As a death deity, Hades was, of course, disliked by the spirits of a good many souls who weren’t satisfied with where they ended up after they passed through the Underworld,” Mr. Smith went on, oblivious to my discomfort. “The Furies — this is what the spirits who disliked him so much were called. There’s some scholarly dispute over it, of course, but I believe this version. The Furies could be quite tricky in their efforts at retaliation. So Hades needed to make sure his consort had a way to protect herself, or supposedly — Are you all right, Miss Oliviera?”