Abandon (24 page)

I shook my head. “That’s weird.”

The cemetery sexton eyed me over the rims of his glasses. “Why is it weird?”

I’d been about to say,
Because she’s the one who introduced me to John
.

But she hadn’t, I remembered. In her kitchen, she’d actually insisted I’d made the whole thing up.

It’s not safe for you here.

Underworlds? Death deities? Furies? John hadn’t been kidding: It wasn’t safe for
anyone
in this cemetery. No way Grandma would have let me out of this office if she’d had a clue.

“It’s weird,” I said instead, “that Grandma didn’t know. Because you said everyone knows.
Everyone
knows about John, and that Isla Huesos is just sitting over the top of this Underworld.”

“There’s knowing,” Mr. Smith said, “and then there’s believing. Your grandmother knows the stories about John. Everyone around here does. But whether or not she believes they’re actually true…that’s different. Your grandmother is well known for having her feet planted rather firmly on the ground.”

He was right. Grandma didn’t believe in anything she couldn’t see with her own two eyes, except for what it said in the Bible. That’s what she’d told Mom about the dispersant Dad’s company had used.

“I haven’t seen any sign of it,” she’d said. “Or of any of that oil people were complaining about so much.”

“That’s the point, Mother,” Mom had said. “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. No one knows what damage it could do to the ecosystem years from now.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Deborah,” Grandma had said. “I put in my claim for lost tourist income, and that company paid up pronto, every last cent. So I’m sorry, but why should I care about a bunch of dumb birds?”

“In any case,” Richard Smith was saying, “your grandfather and I always espoused a theory that there must be as many John Haydens in the universe — souls who, for whatever reason, are destined to spend eternity sorting out the spirits of the dead and setting them on the path to their final destinations — as there are Underworlds.”

“But then how did I get sent to
this
Underworld, in Isla Huesos, when I died in Connecticut?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense for me to go to one in, say, Bridgeport?” I’d been to Bridgeport. If there was an Underworld in the tristate area, it definitely seemed to me it would be located under Bridgeport.

He looked thoughtful. “You said you met him before, when you were seven. Maybe that’s why.”

I shook my head. It wasn’t that everything Mr. Smith was saying didn’t make sense.…It was just that I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind for so long. And I still had so many questions.

“And there’s nothing anyone can do?” I asked the cemetery sexton. “About the Furies? To help John?”

He smiled at me a little sadly. “What do you propose we do about them, Miss Oliviera? You’re talking about a region where people’s souls go after they’re departed. Are we to storm it with lighted torches and pitchforks? How are we even to get there without dying first?”

I wanted to cry. Furies seemed like an even worse disaster than the one Dad’s company had helped cause.

“How did John get chosen for such a crummy job anyway?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem fair. What did he do to deserve it?”

“
That
,” Mr. Smith said firmly, closing the book, “is something you’re just going to have to ask him yourself.”

I flushed.

“I can’t talk to him,” I said flatly. “He hates me.”

“Oh.” Mr. Smith stood up. He was clearly preparing to leave. “I’m certain that’s not true.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’ve
tried
talking to him. It’s all I can do just to get him to listen. I tried apologizing to him for what happened — well, when we met. About the tea. And do you know what he did? He threw this necklace across the cemetery.”

“Finally,” Mr. Smith said, looking vaguely amused, “an explanation for why I found it next to the Wolkowsky family plot this morning.”

“He’s a nightmare,” I said. It felt good finally to have someone to vent to about this stuff. Someone who would actually listen, who knew what I was talking about. It was just too bad it was an old man who clearly didn’t know about anything except death deities. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. If I’d known about any of this — that Isla Huesos was sitting on top of some kind of Underworld — do you think I’d have agreed to move here? And all I ever did was die. Then, just because I recognized John from meeting him in this cemetery when I was seven, I thought he might be able to help me, and I casually made a few suggestions as to how he could run the place a little better —”

The cemetery sexton, who’d started shuffling papers into his briefcase, winced. “Oh, dear. I’m sure he didn’t like that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know, right? And then the next thing I knew, he had me in this room
with a bed,
saying we were going to be spending forever there or something because I missed the boat, which I happen to think he made me do on purpose, by the way, and what was I supposed to do? I was freaking out. You would have been, too.”

“Well,” Mr. Smith said. “Yes. I’m sure I would have been, er, freaking out.”

Suddenly, I was up and pacing the little office again, clenching the necklace. Outside, the rain streamed down as hard as if all of the angels in heaven were weeping for me at the same time. Except, of course, they weren’t, because I was pretty sure all of the angels in heaven had turned their backs on me, or none of this would be happening.

“Do you realize that ever since I’ve gotten back from that place, every time I turn around,” I informed him, “he’s either giving someone a heart attack, or pulverizing their hand, or smashing a gate right in front of me, and
I’m
the one who gets blamed for it? Every time!”

He looked troubled. “I hardly think you can hold John responsible for
all
of those —”

“I saw him do it!” I exclaimed. “I had to keep him from doing anything worse! And now you’re saying I’ve got to
talk
to him? How can I talk to him? Every time I talk to him, something horrible happens. I came here with my mom to try to make a new start, to be normal. Even though the word
normal
isn’t therapeutically beneficial. But how can I be normal when you tell me I have to talk to someone who’s in charge of some Underworld, and who, by the way, gave me a necklace that Hades gave Persephone, and P.S., killed a thousand people?” I shook the diamond at him. “This whole thing is
crazy.”

“No,” Mr. Smith said, closing his briefcase with a determined snap and turning towards me with a face that had suddenly gone as grimly gray as the stone I held in my hands. “It isn’t. It all makes perfect sense to me now. When I first started working here, John was a challenge, it is true. But I was able to get through to him, probably because like you, I’ve seen death.…There’s very little that scares me anymore. But exactly a year and a half ago, something happened that turned John into the, er, nightmare you describe. I never knew what it was until tonight because he wouldn’t talk about it. But now I do. It was
you.”

I lowered my arm in surprise. The rain had started to slacken off.

But the tension in the sexton’s voice didn’t.

“Miss Oliviera, I just bury the dead. John sorts out where their souls go after they’re departed. I don’t know what role
you
play in all this…but I do know that you need to figure it out, and you need to do it quickly. Because it took me
months
after you came along the first time to get John settled down. And everything was fine until last night, when you got him all riled up again. Next thing I know, my gate is smashed, there’s a dead queen’s necklace lying in my cemetery, and now a hurricane has sprung out of nowhere and is apparently headed directly our way. So if I might make a suggestion for all our sakes, why don’t you try” — his brown eyes were pleading — “just being a little sweeter to that boy?”

I opened my mouth. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to Richard Smith. One was that no matter how sweet I was to John, it wasn’t going to make a difference. John was a wild thing and, like any wild thing, was going to do whatever he wanted, and no one could stop him.

And two, it didn’t matter how sweet I was to John Hayden. He could go anywhere and do anything he wanted to with just a blink of his eye.

But then I realized saying all those things would be the wrong thing to do. It would be like dashing Richard Smith’s romantic notions of the Underworld, with its five rivers of sorrow and lament and whatnot. Pointing out the hideous truth — about the tattooed guards and the boats and the lines and the freezing beach — to this old man wasn’t going to make anything better.
What good would it do? It would just crush him, learning those things he loved didn’t really exist.

The same way it would crush Mr. Smith to know that John had not, whatever he might think, fallen in love with me, for all he’d said he knew my nature because of what he’d seen in my eyes and the fact that I’d cared more for the poor people down there than I had for myself.

If he was so in love with me, as Mr. Smith seemed to be implying, why hadn’t
he
been a little sweeter? All those months when I’d been suffering in my own coffin, instead of popping up and trying to kill people in front of me, why hadn’t he just
told
me he loved me, if that was true?

Of course, there was always the possibility he’d grown so wild — being tortured night and day by Furies for letting me get away — he’d forgotten how important it is to people to hear the words
I love you.
Maybe he didn’t know how to say the words
I love you.
He certainly seemed to have a problem with the words
I’m sorry.

Oh, God, what was I doing? I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the idea of taking Mr. Smith’s suggestion seriously. He was an Isla Huesos kook — no different, really, in his own way, than my grandmother. Who owns a knitting store in a place where the median temperature is eighty-seven degrees? And no wonder they’d appointed Richard Smith cemetery sexton: He was obsessed with death deities!

Coming to his office, I realized, had been a bad idea. What had I really accomplished, anyway? Nothing good. Except that I had gotten my necklace back.

My necklace that, I had learned, killed whoever touched it. Great.

“Look,” I said to the cemetery sexton, dropping the chain back down over my head. When I felt the pendant’s heavy weight thump against my heart, I felt a little calmer. Which in and of itself was depressing. “Never mind. It’s fine. I understand.”

He looked at me in the lamplight. “Do you, Miss Oliviera? Because I get the feeling I haven’t been any more successful at getting through to you than I’ve ever been at getting through to John.”

“Well,” I said, “now you know why I wasn’t so thrilled at the idea of spending all of eternity with him. Because he’s impossible.”

The cemetery sexton looked thoughtful.

“Impossible, yes,” he admitted, after a few seconds. “But interesting. Like you. And eternity
is
a long time. So if you have to spend it with someone, I could see wanting to spend it with someone impossible…but interesting.”

H
oney, some boys
stopped by to see you. They had wood.”

That’s the first thing Mom said to me when I got home. It took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. Then I realized what must have happened.

“Sorry, Mom,” I said, when my anger at Seth Rector had abated enough to allow me to speak. “I didn’t tell them they could do that. I said I had to ask you if it was okay first.”

“That’s what they said.” Mom was in our new kitchen — which I guess wasn’t so new anymore — making pasta. “But they said they couldn’t get through to you. Since your phone was in your book bag in the garage — as I found out when I tried to call you, too, and that’s where I finally heard it ringing — I’m guessing that’s probably why.”

I winced. I couldn’t believe I’d spaced this. Actually, I could. No wonder there was so much speculation over at Grandma’s about me.

“Mom,” I said. “I’m so sorry. But they shouldn’t have just —”

“Honey, it’s all right,” she said, sliding a bowl in front of me as I sat down at the counter. “They explained that it was for Coffin Night, so I told them it was fine and let them come in. They seemed very nice. Even if they ma’amed me.”

Mom mock scowled as she took a seat next to me in front of her own bowl of pasta. She hated being called ma’am. She said it made her feel old, and wondered when she’d gone from being a miss to a ma’am.

She didn’t seem to hold it against Seth and his friends, though, nor did she give me her usual lecture about forgetting my cell phone.

I found out why after her gaze fell on the chain around my neck.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re wearing it. That’s funny. Today in the New Pathways office, I could have sworn that horrible old man from the cemetery —” She made a face, then took a sip from the glass of wine she’d poured herself. “You know what? Never mind. Maybe I need bifocals. Anyway, I assumed it was all right to let them in. It was, wasn’t it?”

What could I say? I’d been intending to tell Seth and his friends that, unfortunately, my mom had said no. Too bad, so sad.

How had they known this was what I’d been planning on doing? No wonder Alex hated them so much. The dirty sneaks.

I put a fake smile on my face and said, “No, Mom. It’s great. Super, in fact. Exactly what I wanted.”

Oh, well, I told myself. At least this way I could enact Phase One of my plan: Steal Serena’s cell phone, find incriminating photos on it (she seemed like the type who’d have them), then blackmail her into leaving Kayla alone.

“Anyway, you’ll never guess what happened,” Mom said. “You know that guy Tim from your New Pathways program? Well, he asked me out.” She winked. “That’s why I don’t really mind so much that those friends of yours ma’amed me. I guess your old mom’s still got it.”