Abandon - Meg Cabot [52]
Then the cemetery sexton laid my necklace aside, opened his briefcase, and lifted a stack of papers from inside it.
“I was hoping you all might help me distribute these flyers.” He turned around, walked over to us, and handed each of us a pile. “They explain the cemetery’s new visitation policy, and I’m quite eager to get them handed out as soon as possible.”
Tim, standing next to me, looked down at the pages the cemetery sexton had thrust into his hands. He seemed confused.
He wasn’t the only one.
“You could have just given these to the main office,” he said. “They usually handle these kinds of things, you know, Richard.”
“Oh, yes,” Cemetery Sexton Smith said as he bustled around, officiously passing out his piles. “I know. But I’ve found the staff in D-Wing so much more accommodating.”
I stood there staring down at the sheets of paper in my hands. The red that had been oozing down the walls of the New Pathways office was beginning to disappear, my heartbeat — and breathing — to return to normal.
But then I noticed that my flyers were different from everyone else’s. On the top page of mine, a note had been scrawled in what appeared to be fountain pen, in flowing cursive.
Make an appointment to see me, the cemetery sexton had written. You will do this if you don’t want trouble.
Underneath the message, there was a phone number.
Trouble was the last thing I wanted.
The problem was, as John had pointed out last night, trouble seemed to follow me no matter where I went.
I stared down at the message, trying to make sense of it — How had he known? How had Richard Smith known it was me? — until I heard a click. When I looked up, the cemetery sexton was just closing his briefcase.
With my necklace locked up inside it.
“Well, good-bye, all,” Mr. Smith said, lifting the briefcase and giving us a cheerful wave. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”
Then he left the office, whistling a little tune as he walked out — looking me right in the eye as I stared after him through the office’s wide glass windows.
It wasn’t until later that I realized the song he’d been whistling was “Ring Around the Rosie.”
Which doesn’t mean anything, really.
Unless you’re someone who died once and then came back from the dead. So you’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet, looking up weird facts about death. Like that some people believe the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” is really about the Black Plague, which killed a hundred million people or so during the Middle Ages.
“Huh,” Jade said after he was gone. “That is one weird dude.” She tilted her candy jar at me. “Licorice?”
I looked down at the red whips. “Uh,” I said. “That’s okay, but thanks anyway.” I’d lost my appetite.
I think Mom must have been feeling the same way. She smiled at me — too brightly — as if to show that everything was fine.
But I could see that she was holding on to the strap of her purse so tightly, her knuckles had gone white. She knew everything was far from fine just as well as I did.
“So!” She looked from Alex to Kayla to me and then back again. “Island Queen! Won’t that be fun?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’ll be epic.”
The land of tears gave forth a blast of wind,
And fulminated a vermilion light,
Which overmastered in me every sense.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
I could think of a lot of things I’d rather have been doing than standing in a twenty-person line outside Island Queen — Isla Huesos’s down-market version of Dairy Queen — in the burning-hot late afternoon sun.
Sleeping, for one thing. I hadn’t gotten a lot of it the night before. And okay, that had been mostly my own fault. But still.
Getting my meeting with Richard Smith over with, for another.
But he hadn’t picked up when I’d called him from the girls’ room before meeting Alex and Kayla down at the student parking lot — probably because he hadn’t gotten home yet. The number he’d left me might not have been a cell. He didn