Abandon - Meg Cabot [74]
Suddenly, my knees felt weak. I fumbled for the chair, then sank down into it, clutching my necklace to my chest.
“You mean you —”
“Yes, yes,” he said, patting his chest impatiently. “Heart attack. Bypass surgery. But I just saw a light.” He sat back down in his chair and gazed at me with a completely different expression than he’d worn before. Now he looked…well, a little impressed. As if I weren’t the “idiotic teenager” he’d originally thought me.
Which, I had to admit, I’d been acting like, sort of. But there’d been mitigating circumstances.
“What about you, Miss Oliviera? How did you pass?” His gaze was gentle.
“I tripped and hit my head,” I said. “And drowned. But I had hypothermia,” I added, because I hated the way I died. It sounded so stupid. Especially when you factored in the bird.
He nodded. “Ah. Of course. That’ll be why they were able to revive you.” He fumbled with his glasses again, polishing the lenses with a cloth that had been lying on his desk, then putting them back on, and then eyeing me some more. “You said something about throwing…tea in his face?”
I looked down at the floor. “Yes. That’s how…well, that’s how I escaped.”
“I see,” he said in a completely nonjudgmental tone. “And this would have been about…a year and a half ago?”
I glanced up again, surprised. “How did you —?”
“Oh, just a guess,” he said, his gaze suddenly far off. “It would explain a lot, that’s all.”
“About what?” I didn’t understand.
“Never mind,” he said, looking back at me. “So.” He leaned forward in his chair, causing it to creak. “Tell me what happened with the necklace. If you don’t mind, that is. I’d ask him myself, but…well, he hasn’t been terribly communicative lately.” He grinned suddenly, his eyes twinkling from behind the lenses of his eyeglasses. “Now of course I know why. Though I’m sure you’ll agree, John does have his moments.”
I shook my head, unable to believe what I was hearing. All this time, I’d been insisting to people that John was real, and no one had believed me.
And now, sitting across from me was someone who not only believed me but had seen him — spoken to him — himself.
And apparently didn’t think he was a monster. He called him John. Just like that. Just…John. John does have his moments.
I wasn’t crazy. I had never been crazy.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You talk to him? You talk to him. You two have…talks.” I needed a soda, an espresso, my pills, a very, very fast ride down a hill on my bike, something. I could not process this information. The idea of John sitting in this office, in this chair, talking to this man, did not compute.
“Well,” Richard Smith said, leaning back in his chair and looking thoughtful. “Not often, of course. But occasionally, yes, I run into him out there, and we chat. It hasn’t always been easy. He can be a bit…what does your generation call it? Oh, yes. Moody.”
Moody? Popping in and out of nowhere, attempting to murder everyone who touched me? That was putting it mildly.
“But I have the advantage of having experienced death before, which my predecessors in this position — who left numerous warnings about John’s…moodiness — did not,” the cemetery sexton explained. “So I am fearful of neither death nor the things that come with it, such as John.”
My eyes widened. The fact that Richard Smith wasn’t afraid of John, or the place he came from, struck me as foolhardy to the extreme.
“And some of the warnings, I will admit, have turned out to be warranted,” he went on. “As he is, of course, quite a tormented young man. Who wouldn’t be, in his position? But the stories about him — the things for which people tend to want to blame him around here — have grown completely out of proportion. The vandalism, for instance —”
“Are you kidding me?” I stared at him in shock. “Are you talking about the gate? Because that was him. I was there. And that was totally him.”
Richard Smith’s eyebrows rose.
“Well, he certainly isn’t responsible for all the mysterious deaths for which my predecessors —”
I shook my head. “Let me ask you something.