Here Lies Linc Read Online Free PDF

you’re dead tomorrow morning, we’ll all know the legends are true.”
    From the startled expressions on everyone’s faces, Lottie had to know her little speech had gone too far. But I guess something about the awkward pause that followed struck her as funny, because all at once she started to laugh. First it was only a little laugh that bubbled out. But then her giggle turned into a cackle, and I watched in growing horror as she pressed her knuckles to her mouth and spun away from us with her shoulders shaking, struggling to regain control. If we had been anywhere else, I probably would have burst out laughing too. But not here. Not on my junior high field trip, with my whole class staring at my mother like she was a lunatic.
    “Okay, everybody,” Mr. Oliver broke in nervously, givingLottie a chance to compose herself. “I think the professor is saying that’s
enough
questions about the Black Angel. We’re not focusing on legends today. We’re focusing on historical facts and what this graveyard can tell us about our town’s early citizens. Agreed?”
    Mr. Oliver shot a warning glance around our group. Then he cautiously turned back to Lottie. “Shall we continue, Professor?”
    Lottie finished wiping the tears from under her eyes. “Certainly,” she said with a businesslike little sniff. “You had asked about Governor Lucas’s grave. Why don’t we head over there?”
    Mellecker fell into step beside me as we all set off behind Lottie. He nudged my arm, tapping his cartoon with the point of his pencil. “See what I mean?”
    “Yeah,” I muttered before I could stop myself. “Definitely. You should draw a fruitcake next to that peanut. And while you’re at it, add a rocking chair.”
    “Whoa,” Mellecker exclaimed under his breath. “Nutty as a fruitcake … off her rocker. You’re good.” He hunched over his drawing again, more eager than ever.
    I let myself be herded along, wishing I could sink down into the ground with the corpses for a while. How could I have said those things about Lottie? I was a traitor. A mother backstabber. And then another thought dawned on me—an idea that made me feel even worse. What if Mellecker really
did
remember me from four years ago? And what if he remembered my mother too and was just taunting me, waiting for me to spill my stupid secret? I racked my brain tryingto recall when he might have met Lottie at Dr. Lindstrom’s. Even when I was eight, I had always walked back and forth to school by myself. But we Ho-Hos used to put on all sorts of special plays and performances for our parents. Maybe Lottie had come to one of them and Mellecker had seen her then.
    “Hey, look at this, Linc,” Mellecker said in my ear. “I got another one. Cuckoo clock.”
    I didn’t answer. Beez had shoved his way closer to see the latest additions to Mellecker’s cartoon, and now Amy and a couple of other kids were drifting over to find out what was so interesting. I started to edge away from them. Our class had strayed off the paved walkway, and we were zigzagging around family plots and through rows of headstones. When I looked around to get my bearings, I realized with a jolt where we were headed. Lottie was taking us on a shortcut to Governor Lucas’s grave—a shortcut that happened to lead straight past our house.
    Ours was the last one in a block of old bungalows that dead-ended at a side entrance to Oakland. There weren’t any important graves close by. So even with all my worrying the past few days, I hadn’t considered the fact that my entire class might be walking right past our run-down backyard, with its ugly stretch of C.B.’s digging holes and my old Big Wheel covered in vines and the vegetable patch I had tried to start that was too shady to grow anything besides weeds. It was all too close for comfort.
    But up ahead, Lottie seemed to have completely lost track of her surroundings. She kept marching along, sweeping herhands back and forth as she explained