Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls

  Mrs. Keltner drops her voice and asks me, “Do you know anything more? The cemetery is that man’s life. It’s his family. I feel horrible that he’s been fired.”

  I sort of shrug and shake my head and bite my tongue, because it seems like anything extra I have to say will only make her feel worse.

  “Well, anyway,” she says brightly. “It was great seeing you. Come by the house anytime.”

  “Okay!” I tell her, then give Elyssa another hug. “See ya!”

  Now, I was kinda late getting home, so I pushed extra hard to make up some time. But the whole way home what Elyssa and her mom had said about Dusty Mike was wrestling around with what everyone else seemed to think about him.

  Who was right?

  Was he the cemetery’s guardian angel?

  Or a nutcase who should be avoided.

  I also kept picturing his hoe. Something about seeing it just lying there in the graveyard bothered me.

  It was like he was just lying there in the graveyard.

  I tried to shake off that thought and forget about him. I mean, maybe it was lying there because he’d gotten sick of being unappreciated and had thrown in the towel.

  Or, you know, the hoe.

  Anyway, as much as I hurried, I was still definitely late getting home. So instead of making excuses, I just came in and said, “I know I’m late and I’m sorry and it won’t happen again.”

  Grams smiles at me from inside the open bathroom. “I hope that’s the first lie you’ve told today.”

  Well, I’m more than a little surprised by that, but then I notice something else. “Lipstick?” I ask her. “Where are you going?”

  “To dinner and a movie,” she says all prim and proper like. “If that’s all right with you.”

  “With Hudson?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then it’s fine with me.”

  “You’ll have to fend for yourself for dinner.”

  “Ramen does sound good.”

  She sprays her hair, then gives me a little frown. “You can do better than that.”

  “Ramen and homework?” I say with a grin. “Just getting in shape for college.”

  “College!” she says, blinking at me. “You’re not even in high school!”

  “But I’ve heard all you can afford to eat when you go to college is ramen noodles.”

  “Who’s talking about college?” She’s seriously blinking now. “How can you even be thinking about college?”

  I shrug. “They talk about it at school all the time.”

  “Who does?”

  “Teachers, counselors …”

  “Well, don’t listen to them!”

  I laugh. “Now that’s a first.”

  Her face crinkles up and she says, “And stop it, would you, please? Just stop growing up!”

  I go in and hug her. And then while she finishes getting ready, I get busy in the kitchen making my chicken-flavored ramen. When it’s done cooking, I set myself up with soup and homework at the kitchen table, and the rest of the time Grams is there, I feel pretty good.

  But after she leaves?

  All of a sudden I have the worst time concentrating.

  It’s not because of everything that’s happened, either.

  It’s because I’m home alone.

  Now, what’s scary about being home alone is not that someone might break in and mug me.

  Please.

  I live in an old farts’ home.

  No, what’s scary about it is that I’m free to break out.

  I can go anywhere and do anything and Grams would never know.

  And as much as I need to do my homework, there is actually someplace I’d like to go. Just for a minute. Just to check.

  But I’m also a little scared to do it, so I try to get back to my homework and forget about going anywhere. Trouble is, the more I try not to think about it, the more I do think about it.

  Pretty soon I’m up and pacing around, thinking about it.

  So I finally pick up the phone and call Holly.

  “Hey,” she says when she’s on the line. “What’s up?”

  “Can you get away?” I ask her. “I need to check on something and I don’t want to go by myself.”

  She hesitates. “Skateboard or no skateboard?”

  “Skateboard.”

  “Time?”

  “Now. It’ll probably take half an hour.”

  She hesitates, then says, “So I should count on an hour?”

  I laugh. “Meet me at Maynard’s in five minutes?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  We hang up and then I scramble around getting ready.

  I put on a dark sweatshirt and a ball cap.

  I put a flashlight in my pocket.

  I grab my skateboard and my softball bat.

  Then I take a deep breath and slip out of the apartment, even though I know …

  This is a bad idea.

  I explained everything to Holly on the way over to the cemetery, and once we got to the gate where Casey and I had said goodbye, we checked to make sure no one was watching, then ducked inside.

  Dusty Mike’s hoe was not leaning against the wall.

  “You want to park the skateboards here?” Holly whispers.

  “Good idea,” I whisper back.

  So we put them along the inside of the wall and start moving through the graveyard.

  “Déjà vu, huh?” Holly whispers.

  “Oh, this is much worse,” I whisper back. “And darker.”

  “No kidding. Why don’t you turn on the flashlight?”

  To me a flashlight is only for when you’re desperate. When it’s on, your eyes adjust to having light so if you have to switch it off you’re pretty much blind. It’s also like a little beacon telling other people that you’re there.

  But since it is really dark and I am feeling pretty spooked, I click it on.

  “You’re jumpy,” Holly whispers after we’ve walked a ways, ’cause I’m flashing it around all over the place.

  “I know! I’m just all … I don’t know what to think!”

  “You mean about whether Dusty Mike’s a serial killer or a guardian angel?”

  I whip around to face her. “Who said anything about him being a serial killer?”

  She blocks the light from her eyes. “I thought that’s what you were thinking. You know—because those three people have disappeared?”

  Thinking about this makes my heart hammer even harder. “Do Meg and Vera know where you are?”

  “I didn’t know where we were going. I just told them you needed some help and I’d be home in about an hour.”

  “And they let you go? What were they thinking? It’s nighttime! People are disappearing all over town! And I’m notorious for doing questionable stuff.” Then I whimper. “I should have left a note for Grams!”

  Obviously I’m having a little breakdown, so Holly tries to be brave, saying, “Let’s just do what we came to do and get out of here.”

  “Right.” So I try to be brave, too. I tell myself to take deep breaths. I try to keep a steady beam coming out of the flashlight. But in my head I’m wish-wish-wishing for a second softball bat, and every nerve in my body is quivering.

  “We’re close,” I finally say. “It was right …”

  And there it still is.

  In the exact same place.

  Dusty Mike’s hoe.

  All of sudden there’s a rustling sound that makes my heart jump into my throat. “What was that?”

  Holly snaps up the softball bat as I flash the light around the base of the nearby tree. “I don’t know,” she whispers.

  Then we hear it again.

  “Up there!” Holly whispers, and when I flash the light into the branches above, I see Dusty Mike up in the tree, ready to pounce.

  “AAAAAGH!” I cry, jumping back.

  Only it’s not actually Dusty Mike.

  It’s an owl.

  And it bombs us.

  We d
ive down and the owl swoops right over Holly’s head, then vanishes into the night.

  “That thing’s huge,” Holly gasps.

  I scramble back to my feet and yank her up by the hand. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Fear is like a runaway train. Once you lose control of it you just have to hold on and hope you don’t totally derail and fly off a cliff. And Holly and I were definitely riding a runaway train. We ran and stumbled and fell and scrambled to get out of the graveyard as fast as we could. By the time we’d made it to the gate we were both out of breath and shaking.

  “Wow,” Holly says after we’ve collected our skateboards and squeezed out. “That was crazy.”

  We don’t waste any time escaping up to Stowell Road, but by the time we’re waiting at the light, the train’s leveled off and coasting to a shaky rumble.

  “So what now?” Holly asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a hoe, right?”

  She eyes me. “Meg always tells me to listen to my gut.”

  I think about that a minute. “My gut tells me something’s happened to Dusty Mike.”

  “But if he’s a serial killer, that’s a good thing, right?”

  “But if he’s a guardian angel, it’s not.”

  She nods. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I really don’t know.” I look back down Nightingale. “He lives somewhere right across the street. I guess we could go door to door.”

  “Like, trick-or-treat for Michael Poe?”

  I snort. “Yeah. Something like that.” But then I get another idea. A quicker idea. “We could check mailboxes?”

  “For mail addressed to him?”

  “Yeah. If there’s mail in the box, he hasn’t been home today, right?”

  “Well, at least not since it was delivered.”

  “Right. But it would also mean he wasn’t expecting to be gone.”

  “Or that maybe he just didn’t get around to taking in his mail? And if there’s no mail in the box we still won’t know whose house it is or where he lives.”

  She’s right but I still like the idea. “At least it might give us a clue.”

  Holly’s not so sure. “Isn’t it a federal offense to tamper with mail?”

  “We won’t be tampering … we’ll just be looking.”

  She checks her watch. “Okay. But we’ve got to be quick.”

  The houses all around the cemetery are like most of the houses in the old part of Santa Martina—small and either really cute or really run down, and most of them have a one-car, detached garage set back from the sidewalk. But the mailboxes are all up by the street, which makes it easy and quick for Holly and me to look inside them.

  Now, in the first mailbox I do notice that there’s a piece of paper taped inside the door, but since there’s no mail in the box I don’t pay any attention to it. But after checking a few boxes, I realize that there are little papers taped inside every mailbox door. So finally I shine the flashlight on one to see what these little pieces of paper are about.

  “It’s names!” I gasp.

  “Names?”

  “Of who gets mail here!”

  We hurry to the next box, and the next, and sure enough every door has a little cheat sheet for the mailman, all in the same handwriting. Sometimes it’s a list of last names, sometimes it’s just one.

  What we also discover is that we don’t really have to worry about people thinking we’re tampering with their mail, because it’s so late in the day that every one of the boxes is empty.

  And then all of a sudden there’s one that’s not, and staring up at me from inside the door is only one name: POE.

  “This is it!” I whisper, and my heart starts hammering as I pull out his mail and flip through it. There’s a gas bill, a Coupon King envelope, and a flat cardboard mailer, all addressed to Michael Poe.

  I put the mail back, close the box, and look at the number on the front of the mailbox—736-B.

  “Where’s the B?” Holly whispers. “It’s a house, not an apartment.”

  Now, I know from experience that B usually means that the garage has been converted into a place to live. So I whisper, “Come on,” and lead her to the driveway.

  It’s bright enough from the nearby streetlight to see the little garage behind a low fence with a gate at the end of the driveway, and that the swing-up garage door has been plastered over.

  “My guess is, that’s B,” I tell her.

  We sneak down the driveway and see that what used to be the side of the garage now has a front door and two windows, and that it’s got a big stick-on B on the doorframe.

  “Sure doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” Holly whispers, and she’s right—there’s no light shining out from anywhere.

  “You want to ring and run?” I whisper back. “Just to see?”

  “We could knock and say hello.”

  If I’d been alone I’d have probably just done a ding-dong-ditch, but I had Holly, a softball bat, and a skateboard, which together made me brave enough to go through the gate and knock on the door.

  Nobody answered, so I knocked again.

  And again.

  Then I put my ear up to the door to see if I could hear a television or, you know, somebody snoring.

  Finally Holly whispers, “Nobody’s home, Sammy. Let’s go.”

  So we head out, riding toward home pretty fast because it’s already been almost an hour. And even though riding my skateboard usually helps clear my mind, my brain is still a muddled mess when we reach the intersection of Broadway and Main.

  My gut, though, has a definite opinion.

  Holly sees me thinking and pants, “Maybe he just went to visit relatives.”

  I shake my head. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Are you going to call Officer Borsch?”

  “He already thinks I’m nuts because of the skulls, and the guys at the cemetery made Mike sound like a real creeper.” I know she’s antsy to get home, so I just tell her, “Whatever. I’m really glad you went with me, thanks.”

  She nods. “I’ll see you at school, okay?”

  So she heads across Broadway while I go across Main, and then I sneak up the fire escape and into the apartment. And I do try to get cracking on my homework, but I can’t concentrate. It’s like my brain keeps walking slowly across a teeter-totter.

  Up, up, up.

  Over, over, over.

  Down, down, down.

  Then I turn around and do it again.

  Up, up, up.

  Over, over, over.

  Down, down, down.

  I can’t seem to decide if Dusty Mike is a guardian angel or a lurking devil. I mean, I’d never spent as much time with him as I had on the day we’d followed him to Ofelia Ortega’s grave. Before, I’d kind of accepted that he was a little different, but that day I had felt the creeps.

  What kind of person eats lunch in a crypt with dead people?

  But then there was Elyssa and Mrs. Keltner’s reaction to him being fired and how I used to believe, like they did, that Dusty Mike was a little strange but kind.

  So maybe they just hadn’t spent enough time with him.

  Maybe he’d never told them about eating lunch in the Sunset Crypt.

  But what also kept scrambling through my head was how often I had misjudged people … and how often they’d misjudged me. Like how Officer Borsch had thought I was a juvenile delinquent … but I wasn’t. And how I’d thought Officer Borsch was a big blustery jerk … but he wasn’t.

  Well, okay, big and blustery yes, but not a jerk.

  And then there was Shovel Man and the Vampire—two people we’d been sure were trick-or-treater haters. People who’d seemed like bad guys. But then seeing things from the other side of the table—or, actually, tombstone—they—well, at least Gordon—seemed reasonable.

  Plus there were things Dusty Mike had said about Gordon that just didn’t seem like the truth anymore. Like how Gordon was afraid of the old section. He sure didn’t se
em that way to me. We’d watched him walk right through it with Officer Borsch.

  So maybe he’d just stayed away from the old section to avoid running into Dusty Mike.

  Maybe it was as simple as that.

  I’d also been wrong about El Zarape. I’d thought he was a desperate trick-or-treater—someone kinda like us—but he turned out to be a skull robber who had no problem pulling a knife on a kid.

  Added to all of that was the fact that everyone had jumped to conclusions about us, too. People at the cemetery thought we were tombstone-tipping troublemakers, but we’d had nothing to do with it!

  So was Dusty Mike like us zombies? Strange looking and misjudged by people?

  Or had he maybe pushed over the tombstones himself to get his old job back? Maybe this was a case of him faking vandalism so he could say, See? You need me here. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been here.

  So maybe El Zarape had nothing to do with Ofelia Ortega’s grave. I mean, come on—digging up a grave to take out the skull?

  But then … what was El Zarape doing, running around the graveyard with two skulls?

  Plus the office manager said she’d seen kids knock over the tombstones, which eliminated Dusty Mike.

  So I really didn’t know what to think. And by the time Grams got home from the movies, my brain was fried and my homework was still not done, and there was really only one thing I could think to do.

  Pack it in and go to bed.

  Heather was back at school the next day strutting around in a pair of distressed black jeans that had metal studs in the shape of a dragon going up one leg.

  “Wow,” Dot whispered. “Those must’ve cost a fortune.”

  Holly just shook her head. “I don’t know how she does it.”

  Heather was getting a lot of attention for the jeans, but she still didn’t seem happy. Oh, she’d smile and nod and agree that they were the coolest jeans ever, but when she wasn’t holding court she looked all … furrowed.

  I had nothing to say to her and that’s exactly what I tried to do. But on my way into history she was waiting at the classroom door and hissed, “You’re gonna wish you were dead.”

  “Cool jeans,” I told her, and took my seat.

  Still, I knew I had to be careful, and not just for my own sake. Maybe a sane person would be thanking Casey for defending them in front of Danny, but Heather was queen of Psycho City, so instead she’d do whatever she could to get Casey in trouble, even kicked out of the house.