Spotted Dog Last Seen

by Jessica Scott Kerrin

  Although I was not the best student at school, I did study, especially when I knew there’d be a quiz. And I still kind of liked it when my mom posted my better efforts on the fridge door. I think she had even saved the portrait of my grandfather. She said it was a keeper.

  Merrilee gave me a withering look.

  But that didn’t bother me nearly as much as the table pounding that was sure to come if I failed the quiz, so I got to work. Pascal studied the sheets, too. Then we took turns writing out eroded dates and seeing if the other could guess the correct numbers.

  Eventually, Loyola returned to our table to chat. She noisily scraped a chair across the marble floor and sat down.

  “So, what do you think of the donation?” she asked Merrilee.

  “Looks pretty good,” Merrilee said, leafing through a book. “I’d like to sign it out.”

  I stopped quizzing Pascal. “What donation?” I asked.

  “Several copies of the book Merrilee has arrived by mail this morning. There’s no return address, no way to find out who the donor is.”

  I leaned over to read the cover of Merrilee’s book. The Purloined Parrot.

  “What does purloined mean?” I asked.

  “Stolen,” Merrilee said.

  I shrugged. The book still sounded pretty girly.

  “How’s it going here?” Loyola asked brightly, despite the surrounding gloom.

  “Okay,” I said, tidying up Creelman’s papers of eroded numbers. “But what’s with all the table pounding and whatnot?”

  “Mr. Creelman’s dead serious about the cemetery,” Loyola said, grinning at her choice of words. “He’s a founding member of the Twillingate Cemetery Brigade.”

  “Are they ever coming back?” Pascal asked, leaning into the central aisle for a better view of the front door.

  “Oh, sure,” Loyola replied. “Mr. Preeble and Mr. Wooster are probably finishing up at the cafe down the street by now, and Mr. Creelman is likely pacing the shop’s back alley, trying not to smoke.”

  “He smokes?” I repeated.

  “Poor guy,” Loyola said. “He told me that he wants to quit for good just once before he dies.”

  There was a commotion at the door, and we craned our necks to watch the arrival of the Brigade. They made a beeline for our table while Loyola returned to the front desk, pushing a squeaky trolley of books along the way.

  “Ready for your quiz?” Creelman demanded, his two cronies on standby.

  “You’re dripping,” Merrilee said kindly. “Let me get you some paper towels.”

  She got up from the table with the slightest grin.

  She didn’t fool me. I knew exactly what she was doing. She was getting out of the quiz, that’s what she was doing, and she was going to take her sweet time finding those paper towels.

  From his pocket, Creelman dug out a stack of cue cards wrapped in a thick elastic band, each with an eroded date on it. And that’s how it went — him holding up a card and us calling out the year. Merrilee took forever to return, and sure enough, by then, we were done.

  Creelman scooped up his yellowed papers from the table.

  “See you next Wednesday. Thirteen hundred hours sharp.”

  “Thirteen hundred hours? I thought we were only volunteering on Wednesdays for the next three months,” Pascal said. “Just until we graduate.”

  Creelman shot him a sober look before leading the Brigade away without a word.

  I lingered until they were gone, and then I explained military time to Pascal. We packed up our knapsacks to go.

  Outside, it poured. I stood on the steps to zip my coat while Pascal took off in the direction of his home. Merrilee remained behind to sign out her book. I looked across the street at the cemetery, glad to have avoided my duties in there, at least for now.

  Lightning flashed.

  Thunder clapped.

  Darkness descended.

  I half expected to hear an evil laugh coming from the other side of the looming iron gate.

  “Well,” I half joked to myself out loud. “This certainly has all the makings of a horror movie.”

  Two

  _____

  Gravestone Carvings

  I PUSHED DARK thoughts about cemetery duty away until the next Wednesday. I hoped it would be raining hard again so that we could have another lesson in the safety of the library. Instead, I woke up to a blue-sky day.

  Instant dread.

  “How’d you sleep?” my mom chirped, her standard question at breakfast.

  But I could hear an edge in her voice. She knew it was Wednesday, too.

  “Good,” I lied.

  She looked at me just a little too long.

  I didn’t feel like telling her that I had had a nightmare last night. The same one I had had for months and months when I was little, always waking up screaming in a cold sweat.

  The one with the orange rubber ball.

  I had not had that nightmare in years. I had almost forgotten about it. Perhaps this was just a random glitch, and things would go back to normal. Yes, that was it.

  I dug into my cereal, even though I didn’t feel like eating. The flakes somehow tasted like wrinkled yellowed paper.

  Back upstairs, I took deep breaths. Then I got dressed and put on my t-shirt that read, If the sky’s the limit, why are there footprints on the moon?

  Pascal and Merrilee were waiting inside the iron gate when I arrived that afternoon. It was warm, but Merrilee still had on her red plastic bunnies-and-carrots jacket.

  “Where’s the Brigade?” I asked.

  “At the library,” Pascal said.

  “So we’re back in the library?” I asked. I practically whooped as I took an eager step in that direction.

  “No. They told us to wait here.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Oh.”

  I reluctantly rejoined the group.

  “Why’d you sign up for cemetery duty?” Pascal asked. “You don’t seem the type.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I had pink eye. The cemetery was all that was left.”

  Pascal nodded sympathetically.

  “Dentist appointment,” he said, pointing to himself and shrugging.

  “What about you, Merrilee?” I asked. “Were you sick, too?”

  “No,” she said matter-of-factly. “This was my first choice.”

  First choice! We looked at her as if she might turn into a werewolf or a vampire at that exact moment. She fiddled with the drawstrings of her hood, in no hurry to give us further explanation. We kept staring.

  Dead silence.

  Finally, she muttered, “I like to be outside.”

  So do werewolves and vampires, I thought warily. Especially in cemeteries.

  “Here they come,” Pascal warned, looking past my shoulder.

  I turned. Creelman, Preeble and Wooster were making their way along the sidewalk at a surprisingly brisk pace. They had just crossed the street from the library. Loyola Louden stood on the steps to wave them off, then disappeared back inside.

  “Uh-oh,” Pascal said. “Looks like we’re in for another lesson.”

  Each member of the Brigade was carrying a small stack of books. Pascal and I groaned.

  Creelman greeted us, eyeing my t-shirt, but choosing to ignore it.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, almost like a challenge.

  I wondered if Preeble and Wooster ever spoke.

  We mumbled some polite words in reply.

  “So, which headstones are we tackling today?” Pascal asked, boldly ignoring the books.

  He stood with his hands on his hips while surveying the vast selection of skulls and crossbones before him.

  “Tackling?” Creelman snapped. “That’s not how it works. You need to know about what you’re
tackling first before you learn how to tackle it. Today’s lesson is symbolism.”

  Pascal dropped his hands to his sides and tilted his head with a confused look.

  “Sym-bol-ism,” Creelman repeated syllable by syllable, as if dealing with preschoolers.

  He thrust his stack of books at me. Preeble and Wooster handed theirs over to Pascal and Merrilee.

  “We want you to make your way around this part of the cemetery, from the gate to that first hedgerow. Study all the carvings, and if you don’t know what a symbol means, look it up.”

  “A symbol,” Pascal said pensively. “Is that the same as a simile?”

  “A what now?” Creelman asked, sticking out his lower jaw.

  “He’s confusing his terms,” Merrilee said. She turned to Pascal. “A symbol is a thing that stands for something else. A simile is a figure of speech comparing two completely different things.”

  “What’s the difference?” Pascal asked.

  I jumped in, having included a few similes in my collection of t-shirt sayings.

  “A tree in a graveyard is a simile if I say that the tree stood alone like a pirate on trial for looting. But a skull and crossbones is a symbol for pirates because it means danger.”

  I looked at Creelman, pretty pleased with myself.

  “You think a skull and crossbones is a symbol for pirates? Not here, it isn’t,” he barked. He pointed to my stack of books and jabbed three times at the cover of the top one. “Look. It. Up. We’ll be back in an hour. There will be a quiz.”

  It sounded like a threat.

  Creelman turned on his heel and marched away, with Preeble and Wooster following in tight formation. I thought I heard him grumble something about pirates.

  I checked out my stack of books. They had deadly boring titles, such as Grave Matters, Final Destination and Eternal Landscapes. Each was filled with grainy black-and-white photographs of grave markers, a sea of gray when I flipped through the pages in fast motion.

  I couldn’t believe it. The school’s sign-up sheet for cemetery duty had promised that “volunteers would be in for a charming and delightful romp through the ages.”

  Hilarious.

  I looked around. Merrilee was already wandering among the teetering stones, having abandoned her pile of books on top of a gravestone that had fallen face first to the ground. Pascal had moved to a nearby marker, flashing sunlight across the carved numbers with a mirror that he had pocketed.

  “Is it working?” I asked, remembering last week’s lesson.

  “Yes! Look!” he exclaimed.

  The numbers magically popped out from the shadows.

  I was about to call Merrilee in my excitement, but by then she was too far away, floating from stone to stone like a butterfly in a meadow.

  “I’m going to start over there,” I announced to Pascal, feeling the need to report in to someone. I pointed to a particularly old section with plenty of lichen on stones that stood bunched together in small family groupings, all facing the same direction.

  Pascal barely glanced at me as he moved to another stone with his mirror, leaving his pile of books beside Merrilee’s.

  I headed out on my own. Really, I had no choice. There was that threatened quiz, after all. But I was actually glad to look up symbols. It would keep my mind off things. I just had to make sure that I didn’t wander too far away from the cemetery gate, in case I needed a quick escape route.

  First things first. What were all those skulls and crossbones about? I flipped through my books until I found a photograph of one that looked almost the same as the one carved in stone right in front of me. It turned out that skulls and crossbones were meant as reminders that everyone dies and had nothing to do with pirates.

  As I picked my way among the stones, the not-pirate symbols were everywhere. Then I discovered carvings of tipped-over hourglasses. That meant time had stopped for the person buried below. Several stones away, I spotted a winged hourglass. That meant time on earth was fleeting.

  Then I came upon a carved butterfly. I had done a science report on butterflies a few months ago and learned all about cocoons and metamorphosis. So I thought a butterfly would symbolize rebirth. I was wrong again. According to one of Creelman’s books, it meant a life cut short.

  “Come and look at this one,” I called to Merrilee, who had drifted into my zone.

  She sidled over and inspected the carving by running her fingers over its wings. Then she said in a deadpan voice, “I think I’ve come across a secret code.”

  “Where?” I asked, peering closely at the butterfly.

  “Not in the cemetery,” she said, shaking her head. “In the mystery novel I signed out from the library last week. The Purloined Parrot. The one Loyola told us was anonymously donated.”

  “Well, sure,” I said, stepping back from the gravestone. “Mystery books often have secret codes. And smoking guns and suspicious butlers and red herrings.”

  Where was she going with this?

  “No, you don’t get it,” Merrilee said, rooting around in her knapsack. She pulled out the library’s copy of The Purloined Parrot. She handed it to me. “Look on the dedication page.”

  I flipped to the page at the beginning of the book.

  “‘To my darling Arlene,’” I read out loud.

  And then I noticed a list of words handwritten in pencil in the margin. The writing was cramped but tidy, and whenever the letter a occurred, it was written with a hood, as if it was typed, rather than how we were taught to print it, like a ball and stick. The words in the list were out of the ordinary but unconnected as far as I could tell: helicopter, flashlight, tripod, radiator, basket, orchid.

  “Just looks like an unusual list of words, right?” Merrilee said.

  I nodded.

  “At first, I thought so, too. But then I noticed that each of these words first appeared in the same order in the novel. And then I remembered a book I had signed out a few months ago about writing secret codes. I did a project on it. One of the simplest types of codes is the classic book code.

  “The classic book code,” I repeated, trying to follow along.

  “What you do is write down a secret message, then grab a book and find the first appearance of each of the words in the message in that book. Then you write down the word that is right before each of the words in your message. String those new words together in the same order to make the code. That’s what this list of unusual words is. A code.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re saying that you found each of the words on this list inside the book, and then you wrote down the words that followed each of the words you found? Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you know what? Those new words put together gave me The Case of the Waylaid Water Gun.”

  “The case of the waylaid water gun? Sounds like the title of another mystery book,” I said.

  “You’re right,” Merrilee said. “Turns out it is.”

  Except I wasn’t following. The name of another mystery novel? So what! It was probably just some weird coincidence, like how all the grave markers that surrounded us were facing the same way.

  Merrilee stopped nodding and scowled at my lack of enthusiasm.

  “You still don’t get it,” she said with annoyance. She dug around in her knapsack and pulled out another book, which she handed to me.

  “The Case of the Waylaid Water Gun,” I said, reading the cover.

  “Look at the dedication page,” she said impatiently.

  This time, I didn’t read the dedication out loud. Instead, I immediately spotted another list in pencil. It was written in the same penmanship with the same letter a.

  “So, you’re going to have to read this book, too, just to get to the next message?” I asked, handing the novel back.

  “Exactly!”

  “Where’s
this going?” I asked. “All it sounds like is just a bunch of reading from one book to the next, like some kind of secret mystery book club.”

  “It’s more than just books. I can feel it. I genuinely can,” Merrilee said, pushing her glasses higher on her nose with a jab.

  This from a girl who liked to spend outdoor time in cemeteries. Any minute now I expected her to admit that she had special powers and saw dead people or something equally disturbing.

  I stood waiting.

  “Still. Who’s behind the codes?” I asked after a minute had passed without her admitting to anything.

  Merrilee shrugged.

  “Loyola said the book was donated anonymously, remember?” she said.

  She tucked the book under her arm and returned her attention to the butterfly on the headstone I had spotted.

  There was another long and awkward silence.

  “Butterflies give me the creeps,” she said at last.

  I guessed we were done talking about secret codes. At least for now.

  “Butterflies give you the creeps?” I repeated. “I thought girls loved butterflies, right after unicorns, ballerinas and mermaids.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I find them creepy.”

  There we were, standing in an old cemetery, surrounded by ghosts galore, talking about secret codes written in anonymously donated mystery books, but it was butterflies that gave Merrilee the creeps. Good grief!

  “What’s so creepy about them?” I asked.

  “They don’t know who they are,” she said. “One day they’re a caterpillar with a million legs. The next day they’re fluttering their wings.”

  “That’s what makes them special,” I argued.

  “No, that’s what makes them creepy,” Merrilee insisted.

  She took off her glasses, breathed on each lens, then rubbed them clean with a tissue from her pocket.

  “Well, creepy or not, according to Creelman’s book, a butterfly is a symbol for a short life.”

  “I rest my case,” Merrilee said, putting her glasses back on. “Butterflies are creepy and sad.”

  I could tell that I wasn’t going to win this pointless argument any time soon. Instead, I surveyed the cemetery, looking for Pascal. I spotted him in the far distance, a flash of brilliant light catching my eye. Obviously, he was still playing with his mirror.