DEAD CONNECTION : a novel by Charlie Price

« THE DEPUTY

PEARL OF THE CEMETERY

Pearl didn’t think about things. If your Dad worked in a cemetery, would you think about things? Death just around the corner? Nope. She’d save her thinking for homework. She was a private person, and those backbiting queen bees in her classes weren’t going to get a shred of personal information to use against her. She had a few friends but none she really trusted. School didn’t feel safe in that way.
      Today she didn’t care about school. She was focused on that dorky kid who talked to graves. She knew he had seen her a couple of times, but he didn’t know that she had actually heard him talking to the headstones.
      She knew he was spending nearly all his time after school here. She knew that two or three times a week, her dad had to ask him to leave at nine, when he locked the gate. Her dad was the groundskeeper for the Forest Grove Cemetery. He didn’t dig graves or anything gross like that, but he managed the landscaping, arranged the burials, and sold new plots to families who needed a pretty place to bury somebody.
      Her dad did a nice job with the flowers and even the road. He blew leaves and weeds off the lanes and kept the vines off the big metal gates. Pearl liked the funny stone houses where some families put their relatives, and all the different types of crosses and the statues of angels and saints that watched over everybody. When she died, she wouldn’t mind being put here. But she wouldn’t want that kid sitting over her and talking. She was certain about that.
      Pearl decided to bust him while he was doing his thing with the graves. She would let him know he wasn’t fooling anybody, let him know she was the boss in this cemetery. She knew he was usually just down the hill in the late afternoon. Since her dad was still working, this was the perfect time.
      She left the cottage, being careful the screen door didn’t slam, walked quietly down the road and right up behind where he sat in front of a tombstone, and said, “They’re dead, you know!” He jumped about a foot, which wasn’t easy from a sitting position.
      He started stammering at her. Totally irritating. She told him to calm down or she’d make her dad tell him to leave. Then she got mad at herself. Here’s a ninth grader going to get her dad to come help her!
      “What are you doing talking to a headstone?”
      “I’m not talking to a headstone.” He was looking at her like she was the idiot.
      “You’re talking to yourself?” she asked.
      “No.”
      “Well?” she said. She had her hands on her hips like a traffic cop.
      “It’s really none of your business,” he said, turning his back to her.
      “Everything that happens here is my business,” she told him. “My dad runs this place.”
      “You’re Janochek’s kid?” he blurted, surprising the heck out of her.
      “How do you know his name?”
      “What’s your name?” he asked, before she could get back on top of things.
      “Pearl.” Shoot! She wanted to go on the offensive. “I’ve seen you slinking around here, day after day”—shaking her head like he was beyond help—“You’re just a goofy grave sniffer!” There. That’s more like it.
      Murray gave up hoping she would just leave. He turned to face her. Pearl was standing right up close to him, looking belligerent.
      “Damn it! Don’t you have any manners?” He was losing patience.
      “Me? I’m not the one creeping around a cemetery like a body snatcher. It’s supposed to be quiet and dignified here.”
      Murray skidded back and forth between anger and amusement. He hated being talked to in that tone of voice, but on the other hand, she was kind of cute, trying to be so tough with her bad-guy pose, and at the same time leaking a smile at the corners of her mouth.
      “I am not bothering you. Go do whatever it is you do and leave me alone!”
      “No.”
      “No . . . ?” He was getting tired of this game.
      “Tell me what you’re doing.”
      “You’ll just keep hassling me.”
      “No, I won’t,” Pearl said, taking her hands off her hips and softening her expression. “I’m not really trying to hurt your feelings. I just kind of like messing with you.”
      “Can you see that I don’t like it?”
      “Yeah, but you’ll get used to it. I’m a lot of fun to be around.”
      Murray barked a laugh in spite of himself. “Who told you that?”
      “My dad.”
      “Jeez, he has to say stuff like that. You’re his kid.”
      “No, he means it.”
      Murray massaged his forehead. “You’ll just tell and I’ll get in trouble and everything will get screwed up.”
      Pearl looked him right in the eye. “Are you doing something bad?”
      “No. No! It’s nothing like that. You’d never understand in a million years.”
      Pearl took a half step toward him. “Hey. I’m sorry I scared you and acted, like, so tough. Tell me what you’re doing. Please.”
      Murray looked at her. She was probably thirteen or fourteen. She had a curly blond tangle of hair and she wore overalls with a colored T-shirt underneath a faded jean jacket. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her brown walking shoes were scuffed. She had a decent face with straight teeth and a smudge of dirt near her chin. She smelled like woodsmoke from her dad’s workshop stove. Her face now held a sincere pleading look that begged to be trusted.
      “No,” he said. He saw the way her face fell and felt a quick pang. “No,” he repeated, more softly.
      Pearl turned and stomped away before he could say more.

      Back up the hill, she stormed into the workshop and slammed the door. She didn’t respond to her father’s offer of ham sandwiches and coleslaw, didn’t say a word as she passed through the back door and walked into the small two-bedroom cottage the cemetery provided as housing. She went to her room and closed the door. She tore her jean jacket off and threw it at the wall by her bed, hitting the poster of Cheryl Miller coaching during a timeout in a WNBA game and the one beside it of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. She loved his movie with Robert Duvall. The posters rattled with the jacket’s impact but neither fell.
      That wack . . . that stupid dick! She was too mad to sit. She’d fix that kid. Count on it!

JANOCHEK : KEEPER OF THE GROUNDS »

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