Abandon - Meg Cabot [69]
“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