by Meg Cabot
“Oh,” I said. Unlike Uncle Chris, I wasn’t too eager to see my dad. I could only imagine what he was going to think of John. I had a feeling that, compared to meeting Uncle Chris, John’s meeting my dad was going to go a lot worse.
“Where is Alex now, Mr. Cabrero?” John asked my uncle, gently. I think John could sense that Uncle Chris wasn’t doing so great.
“Alex? He’s out with one of those New Pathways kids. That girl, Kayla.”
I looked up at this, startled. I liked Kayla. She’d been one of my only friends at Isla Huesos High School. One of? Make that my only friend….
“Alex is really worried about you, Piercey” — Uncle Chris’s glance at me was apologetic — “but he was here all day and finally asked if he could go out for a while, and I said yes. Stupid of me, I know, but this was before I knew about the drugs —”
“And Pierce’s grandmother?” John asked, before I could insist once again that Alex wasn’t on drugs.
“She went home to rest,” Uncle Chris said, looking at him curiously. “She had a long day. Why?”
“I’ll bet,” I said, unable to restrain a bitter laugh. “Her facial lacerations bothering her?”
“Hey.” Uncle Chris looked stern. Or as stern as Uncle Chris could look, which wasn’t very. He was better at watching TV. “That’s your grandmother. You show some respect. I don’t know what went on between you two back at the high school yesterday, but she was probably just trying to do the right thing. Maybe she thought your friend was the one who was on drugs.” His gaze jerked towards John. “No offense, but if you want to be with my niece, you should think about getting a haircut. My mother is very conservative.”
“No offense taken,” John said mildly. “What about the police? Are there any police officers inside the house?”
“Hey,” Uncle Chris said, narrowing his eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”
“Pierce would like to see her mother,” John explained. “And I wouldn’t want her to run into any … inconveniences.”
“Oh,” Uncle Chris said, instantly affable again. It was easy to see how he’d gotten along in prison for as many years as he had. “There’s a police car parked right outside. I don’t even know how the two of you got in here without them stopping you. And there’s this fancy machine hooked to the phone so if your kidnappers call, we can record it. Although I guess you weren’t kidnapped, were you? We should tell your dad. He’s supposed to have someone driving down from the FBI branch in Miami tomorrow —”
“The FBI?” I was surprised my dad hadn’t called his buddies at the CIA, as well. “That’s just great. But Mom’s right inside?”
“She said she was going upstairs to take a shower,” Uncle Chris said. “I swear she hasn’t done a thing since she found out you were missing except worry. I was about to order Chinese when I looked out the window and saw you. Hey, do you two want to stay? We’re getting moo shu.”
It was so like Uncle Chris to go from wanting to beat John up one minute, to inviting him for moo shu the next.
“Uh, maybe,” I said. I pointed to the French doors, looking questioningly at John. He nodded. “Let’s see how it goes, okay, Uncle Chris?”
“That’d be good,” Uncle Chris said. “We could talk all this out.”
John followed me inside, Uncle Chris trailing behind us, his expression curious rather than suspicious.
“I hate it when families fight,” Uncle Chris was saying. “It makes it so uncomfortable….”
I suppose I should have counted it lucky that it had been Uncle Chris, and not some other adult, I’d run into first at home. I wasn’t sure if it was because of all the years he’d spent out of mainstream society — he still had no idea how to text, or what Google was — or if his personality was really this childlike. I’d been a baby when he’d gone to prison.
There was no one but us on the lower floor. I could hear water running in the bathroom off the master bedroom, upstairs, however.
A lot had changed since I’d been gone. There were stacks of “missing” flyers everywhere, each featuring the same unflattering photo of me that had been in the paper Mr. Smith had shown us. The normally meticulously neat living room was in disarray. Mom’s housekeeper would have had a fit at how smushed-in all the throw pillows on the couch were, and how many mugs and teacups had been left without coasters on the coffee table.
The biggest change of all, though, was in the garage. When I opened the door, I saw that all the pieces of four-by-eight plywood that Seth Rector and his friends had left stacked so neatly there were gone. So were the paint and other coffin-building supplies.
“This is not good,” I said, looking at all the outside patio furniture that was piled up in the garage to keep it from being blown away in the coming storm, thinking maybe I’d missed something. But I hadn’t.
“What’s not good?” Uncle Chris asked. “Piercey, what have you gotten yourself involved in?”
There was no reason not to tell him. He and my mom had both gone to Isla Huesos High School. I’d seen all the sports trophies they’d won, still on display in the administrative wing. He knew all about Coffin Night because it was football-related, and he’d been on one of the winningest teams in Isla Huesos history.
But Uncle Chris had enough to worry about, being a suspect in Jade’s murder, and all.
So I said simply, “It’s nothing. Seth Rector and his friends asked if they could store some stuff in here, and now it’s gone. They must have come to pick it up. That’s all.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Uncle Chris was immediately on the defensive, looking like a mother bear whose cubs had been teased by tourists.
“Store some stuff?” he repeated, his tone incredulous. “You let Seth Rector store some stuff in your mother’s home? What kind of stuff?”
I swallowed. I’d never been yelled at so much by Uncle Chris in one day in my life … I’d actually never been yelled at by him before at all. It felt terrible.
“The senior coffin,” I said, in a small voice.
I wanted to assure him that I had a very sound reason for doing something so foolish … that ever since the death of my good friend Hannah, I’d appointed myself a sort of watcher of people I cared about, and that included his son, Alex.
Uncle Chris didn’t give me a chance to say a word in my own defense, however.
“Do you know what the juniors did when they found the coffin your mother’s senior year, Pierce?” he demanded, in a heated voice. “They torched it. And the house it was in caught on fire, too. It burned to the ground.”
I lowered my eyes, too ashamed to meet his gaze. Like the crime John had committed to get himself sentenced to being protector of the dead of Isla Huesos, whatever Uncle Chris had done that had gotten him a twenty-year prison sentence was never mentioned … at least, not in our family. But I knew it was something even more serious than burning down someone’s house.
“So perhaps,” John said quietly, from the doorjamb against which he leaned, his arms folded across his chest, “it’s a good thing the coffin was moved.”
I glanced up at him. One of his dark eyebrows was arched. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious.
“Yeah,” Uncle Chris said, not looking convinced either. He’d begun to dig around in the pockets of his jeans. “Well, I don’t know about that. Tell me something, Pierce.” Pierce. I was “Piercey” no longer. That hurt. “Is Alex involved in this? Coffin Night?”
“Um.” I felt like I had no choice but to tell him the truth. “Well, he knew the coffin stuff was here. Alex doesn’t really like Seth, for whatever reason.” It wasn’t hard to guess the reason; I just didn’t want to say it out loud in front of Uncle Chris. Seth Rector, good-looking president of the senior class and son of the richest man in Isla Huesos, had everything, including a shiny new F-150 truck he’d gotten for his birthday. Alex Cabrero, newly enrolled in New Pathways and son of an ex-con, had nothing. His car was a piece of junk his Fury grandmother was alway
s threatening to take away so she didn’t have to make the payments on it anymore. “Maybe the reason it’s all gone is because Alex took it to get back at Seth. In which case, Seth and those guys are going to be really mad when they find out —”
Mad enough, maybe, to stuff Alex in the class’s new replacement coffin.
Before I’d even completed the sentence, my uncle was hitting a button on the cell phone he’d pulled from his pocket.
“I’m calling Alex,” he said. He didn’t look angry, though. He looked resigned, as if someone had told him he had only a few months to live. He was pale, and kept dragging his fingers through his hair. It stood raggedly on end, both because of its thick texture and the fact that he’d let Grandma cut it … big mistake.
John laid a hand on my shoulder. “Go see your mother,” he whispered in my ear.
“I want to make sure Alex is all right,” I whispered back, watching Uncle Chris intently. No one seemed to be picking up on Alex’s end.
“I’ll do that,” John said. “You go.”
I knew he was right. I turned and climbed the stairs to the second floor, just as my uncle’s voice said, “Alex? It’s Dad.”
I felt my shoulders sag with relief. So, that was all right. Uncle Chris would make Alex come home, and I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore … just my new life as queen of the Underworld. Great.
Upstairs, I could hear the shower in my mom’s bathroom still running. My dad and I had always joked that for someone who was so environmentally conscious, Mom was the biggest hot water waster in our family, taking the world’s longest showers.
I went to stand in my bedroom doorway, looking at my room for what I knew was most likely the last time. This was going to be my only opportunity to pick up anything I wanted to take back with me to the Underworld.
What do you pack for eternity? My gaze roved the room. The only jewelry that held any sentimental value to me was the necklace I was already wearing around my neck. I’d never collected stuffed animals or designer clothes or shoes or anything like that. Really, my room was kind of empty, except for my laptop and the books on my bookshelves. John had already said he’d get me whatever books I needed, and it wasn’t like there was a web to surf in the Underworld. The only difficulty, really, was my music. I had all the songs I liked stored on my phone. But what about when the charge ran out? And how was I going to download new music?
I’d never considered a life without music, although I supposed deaf people got along without it. And if Mr. Graves could get along without seeing, I could certainly get along without iTunes.
I shoved thoughts of music from my head and went to my closet and looked inside. There was one thing … the white dress I’d worn to the Welcome to Isla Huesos party Mom had thrown for me. John had liked how I looked in it so much, he’d asked me to wear it on our first date … a date we’d never had a chance to have because of Jade being murdered, and then my grandma trying to kill me.
I took the dress from the closet.
Then my gaze came to rest on a photo in a silver frame on my nightstand. It was of me and my mom and dad in happier times, before the divorce, before the accident, which I now knew hadn’t been an accident at all.
I picked it up. The dress and the photo were all I would take, I decided. In fact …
I sat down on my bed, then opened my book bag. Now was a good time to divest myself of things I didn’t need, things that were only weighing me down in my new life, like my econ textbook and school notebooks. I didn’t need my pill case, either. I knew from the dozens of doctors I’d seen after my accident that I was supposed to take my pills for all the aftereffects I’d suffered from what my grandmother had done to me — pills to wake me up, and pills to put me to sleep, and pills to help with the headaches from the pills that woke me up and put me to sleep.
Since finding myself in the Underworld, however, I’d taken no pills, and had no trouble waking up or falling asleep.
Maybe what I needed — what I’d always needed — was not pills, but to find my true place in the world … which was a completely different world than this one.
It was as I was digging through my leather bag that I realized someone had actually added to the assorted junk I’d been carrying around. Which explained why my bag had felt a little heavier when Mr. Smith had handed it to me in the yard outside his office.
I was surprised to pull out the bag of birdseed I’d found in the kitchen of the cemetery sexton’s cottage. I hadn’t put it there. Mr. Smith must have.
That wasn’t all, though. Beneath the bag was a book.
It was small but thick, the brown hardcover showing its age in the flaking gold script across the front, A History of the Isle of Bones. When I opened it, the sepia-colored pages gave off a scent vaguely reminiscent of vanilla wafers, an odor I’d always loved, because it reminded me of being taken as a child to the children’s section of the library for storytime. It was the smell of books.
Of course. This was the book Mr. Smith had said he was going to give me, about the Liberty. He must have put it, along with the birdseed, in my bag when he’d gone inside to call the ambulance. I suppose he thought he was being a “Fate” — doing something kind.
A History of the Isle of Bones was four hundred and fifty-six pages long.
“Seriously?” I said in disbelief, forgetting where I was. “He couldn’t have given me the abridged version?”
“Pierce?”
It was my mother.
My mother’s voice was coming from across the hall.
Realizing I could no longer hear the sound of water running, I got up from the bed and hurried to the hallway. My mother’s bedroom door was open just enough for me to be able to see that she was wearing the soft, fluffy bathrobe I’d given her last Mother’s Day. I felt a pang when I saw it, and had to restrain myself from running towards her and flinging myself into her arms.
Because her next words stopped me cold.
“Zack, how can you even say such a thing?” my mother asked in an agitated voice as she squeezed the ends of her long, dark hair with a towel. “I refuse to believe Pierce would ever run away, especially with a boy.”
She was on the phone. And she was talking to my father. Arguing with my father, actually. About me.
Well, what else was new? Their arguments about me, starting from the time of my accident, for which my mom had always somewhat irrationally blamed my father — though it was my own fault, not Dad’s, that I’d died. Oh, and Grandma’s — were what had ended their marriage.
But where had my father gotten the idea that I’d run away?
“When? When did this happen?” my mom demanded, going to sit on her bed. She looked upset. “When did Pierce call you and say she wanted to leave Isla Huesos?”
Standing in the shadows of the hallway, I felt my heart skip a beat. Oh, God, of course … the phone call I’d placed to my father a few nights earlier, when I’d seen the Coffin Night supplies in our garage … and learned the truth about my necklace.
And John.
That had been before, though, when I’d been unhappy and overwhelmed and — I might as well admit it — scared to death. I was still scared, of course, and a little overwhelmed, and I certainly wasn’t always happy.
But I didn’t want to leave Isla Huesos anymore … or John.
It sounded like my mother was on my side, though.
“Zack, that was her first day at a brand-new school,” Mom said, into the phone. “It’s natural she called and asked you if she could come home. The counselors at New Pathways said she might. Every student feels insecure and miserable their first day at a new school. That doesn’t mean she’s run away. What about that boy on the security tape? Pierce didn’t look as if she was going with him willingly. And he punched my mother, you know.”
My father must have made some kind of colorful remark about that — there’d never been any love lost between him and Grandma — since I heard my mother inhale, then sarcastically reply, “Ye
s, well, I understand you’ve always wanted to punch my mother, Zack, but that doesn’t make me think that boy is someone whose company Pierce would keep. Did you see him? I know the photo was grainy, but he looks like one of those death metal goth heads, or whatever they’re called. All dressed in black with long hair —”
I took umbrage at my mother describing my boyfriend this way. John was the Lord of the Underworld. How else was he supposed to dress?
“And why are you only telling me about this phone call from her now?” Mom wanted to know.
She had switched the phone on to speaker, probably because my dad’s remark about her mother had agitated her so much, she needed to do something else while she listened to the rest of what he had to say … which in this case was stand up and rub the towel vigorously through her damp hair. Although my mom liked to think I’d inherited my attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity from my dad, she was the one who had all the track, tennis, and academic decathlon trophies from high school. A guidance counselor had once told me that there were many high achievers with ADHD. They’d just learned to hyperfocus their tremendous amounts of energy, the way my mom had.
“— because I didn’t want to upset you.” My father’s booming voice — strong and deep and sounding slightly harassed, as always — filled the room. “I know how hard you’ve tried with her, Deborah. But there’s been no trace of them, no sightings, no ransom request, nothing. Taking into consideration her phone call the other night to me, asking if she could come home, and the fact that there was always something a little squirrelly about the Mueller case —”
Mom looked up from her toweling, astonished. “That pathetic teacher of hers who poor Hannah Chang was having the affair with? Zack, that was ages ago. What has that got to do with anything?”
“The police never believed Mueller’s story that it was Pierce who broke his hand that day at the school.” My father’s voice was flat … but I could hear in it an undertone of anxiety. “Mueller’s a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound man. How’s an average-size high-school girl like our daughter going to get the advantage over a thirty-year-old man that size, and walk away without a scratch on her? The cops have always thought there was a boyfriend involved, Deborah.”
