Here Lies Linc Read Online Free PDF Page B

some point to Mr. Oliver and Sylvie and Delaney, the only ones in the group who appeared halfway interested in what she had to say.
    I dropped a few steps behind Mellecker and his crew, keeping my gaze pinned on the ground. By now we were coming up on the stretch of graves that ran alongside my house. I could even smell the leaves from our maple thick on the ground and the mossy pile of tree house boards that Dad had stacked in the backyard before he died.
    I held my breath as Lottie kept lecturing and moving along. We were almost past the woodpile, past our rusted barbecue grill, past my upstairs bedroom window.
    Then I heard it. A yip rang out across the cemetery. I knew right away it was C.B. But what was he doing
outside
? I had left him asleep on his dog bed when I took off for school that morning. My stomach turned queasy as I realized what had happened. Sometimes during nice weather we left C.B. tied to the clothesline pole in the backyard. Lottie must have come home from the airport and put him outside before she rushed over to meet us.
    I clenched my fists and plowed forward, praying C.B. wouldn’t notice me in the crowd. But the sound of his whimper obviously caught Lottie by surprise. She stopped and whipped around, her lecture about graves cut off midstream.
    “Awww, look at the poor doggie!” Sylvie cried out. I stole a glance over my shoulder and got a quick glimpse of C.B. straining on his rope, leaping higher and higher as if hisstubby legs were mounted on pogo sticks. Lottie tried to shoot me a look of apology as I stalked past her, staring straight ahead.
    “Come on, everybody!” she called, sounding just as frantic as C.B. “Mr. Oliver, we’ve got to keep the class moving if we want to stay on schedule!”
    Then I heard Beez shout. “Hey, look! Pooch on the loose!”
    I stopped and turned around just in time to see C.B. streak into the graveyard, trailing a long piece of frayed rope from his collar. He flung himself against Lottie’s legs, covering her purple skirt with muddy paw prints.
    “Hey there, boy,” she said, bending down to bury her hands in his scraggly fur. “How’d you get loose, huh? C’mon, buddy, calm down.”
    Everybody crowded around to watch the reunion. “Is that
your
dog?” Mr. Oliver asked.
    “Yep,” Lottie said, and sighed, taking hold of his frayed rope and scratching his favorite spot under the collar. “It sure is.”
    “Awww, he’s so cute,” Sylvie said. “What kind of dog
is
that?”
    “Nobody’s quite sure,” Lottie told her. “Even the people at the animal shelter didn’t know what to call him. But we call him C.B. It’s short for Cerberus.”
    “Cerb-rus?” Beez scoffed out of the side of his mouth. “What kind of a name for a dog is that?” Beez probably thought he was being quiet. He didn’t know my mother had ears like a bat.
    She stood up in surprise. “You kids haven’t heard of Cerberus?” She swiveled around to face Mr. Oliver. “Don’t you-all teach Greek mythology in that school of yours?”
    I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew what was coming.
    Before Mr. Oliver could reply, Lottie was already rattling off an explanation of our dog’s unusual name. “So Hades was the god of the dead,” she said briskly. “Otherwise known as king of the underworld. And Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded Hades’s house on the River Styx.” She reached down to give C.B. another rub. “And since this guy absolutely
loves
to dig and bury things underground, especially dead stuff, we decided to call him Cerberus.”
    Mellecker poked me in the ribs with his elbow. Somehow he had ended up standing next to me again. I felt a tight ball of anger growing red-hot in my chest. I wasn’t sure who made me madder—Mellecker with that smirk on his face or my mother for acting like she had just been let out of the psych ward on a day pass. All I knew was that I would explode if I had to stand in that spot, stuck between the two of them, for much