“Well,” Yellow Vest said. “Hello there.”
The city hadn’t had time yet to put up orange CAUTION signs. There must have been too many other downed trees — and worse — across the island.
Mr. Mueller was gone. They had been able to remove his body by cutting away the section of the tree that had trapped it. The maintenance worker held a chain saw. The rest of the sapodilla still lay sprawled across the road. The maintenance worker appeared to have been getting ready to cut the trunk into pieces and throw the pieces into a large wood chipper sitting nearby before he’d stopped for his smoking break.
“Please,” I said, panting. “I need to get to the cemetery.”
“This road,” Yellow Vest said, “is closed.”
Too late, I remembered Uncle Chris had mentioned that it would be … to vehicular traffic, anyway.
“I know,” I said. I didn’t look behind me. There was no need to. I could hear the brakes of Officer Poling’s squad car squealing to a halt a few yards away. “But I really, really, really need to get to the cemetery.”
The maintenance worker took a long puff on his cigarette. Then he took one step to the left, revealing the space in the tree where Mr. Mueller’s body had lain. It was the same size as the space between the guardhouse and the swing-arm barricade at Dolphin Key, perfect for a single bicyclist.
“So go on already,” the maintenance worker said.
“Oh,” I said gratefully. “Thank you very much.”
“Stop,” I heard Officer Poling shout. “That girl is under arrest!”
I hesitated.
“What are you waiting for?” Yellow Vest asked me.
“I … ” I glanced back at Officer Poling, who was getting out of the car. “He’s not right in the head.”
Yellow Vest grinned. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said, and raised his chain saw. “I can take care of myself. You scoot now.”
He pulled the chain saw’s cord. The motor roared to life, the sharp, tiny blades beginning to spin madly.
I didn’t wait a second longer. I hurried through the space between the sapodilla’s enormous trunk. Only when I was through, and putting my feet back on my pedals, did I look back. The worker had returned to where he’d been standing, in front of the empty space, but he must have decided his break was over, since he’d stamped out the cigarette and was staring in Officer Poling’s direction.
“Well, hey there,” he said, as pleasantly as he’d spoken to me, albeit a bit more loudly in order to be heard above the noise of the chain saw.
I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation because I didn’t stick around. I saw that Chief of Police Santos’s cruiser had pulled up just behind Officer Poling’s. Yellow Vest was right. He could take care of himself.
I couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t the maintenance worker tried to stop me, when the police were clearly in pursuit of me? I was obviously a criminal.
I didn’t have time to ponder it. I could only pedal, so close to the cemetery now that I could see the black wrought iron fence looming in front of me. Even if he got past the guy with the chain saw and Chief Santos — which seemed extremely unlikely — there’d be no way Shawn Poling could follow me into the cemetery, because the gate would be closed and locked. Mr. Smith had assured all of us that day in the school assembly that the gate would be locked all through Coffin Week.
And Officer Poling wouldn’t be agile enough to climb that high, spiked fence. He’d never catch up to me now. Or by the time he did, I’d be safely back in the Underworld, where John and I would try to return everything to normal … or as close to normal as things could get in the Underworld.
Except there was no possibility of “normal” anymore. Though the day was turning out to be one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen on Isla Huesos — the sky was a pure, cloudless blue, the temperature perfectly warm, the wind a little too strong for boating — what I saw in front of me as I grew closer to the cemetery filled me with horror.
25
DANTE ALIGHIERI,
The ravens that had been circling my mother’s house were now swooping low in the sky above the graveyard. And the storm that had raged past Isla Huesos the night before hadn’t spared one inch of Isla Huesos’s burial ground.
Branches torn from trees lay thrown across the top of tombs like drunken sailors on shore leave, and nearly every decorative stone angel or cherub was missing a wing. Coconuts had been fired like missiles by the gale- force winds through any mausoleum containing a stained-glass window, shattering it, and the formerly neat pathways through the crypts were carpeted with fallen palm fronds.
The place looked like a battle zone.
There was no need for me to climb the fence, since the thick black gates that Mr. Smith had assured us all would be so securely bolted now swayed obscenely ajar, looking as if something — or someone — had battered them from the outside until they’d simply given way.
The cemetery sexton’s office hadn’t escaped unscathed, either. The windows of the small cottage where Mr. Smith kept his office had been safely shuttered in preparation for the storm, but that hadn’t spared the house’s roof from being crushed in half beneath the weight of the large Spanish lime tree that had fallen on top of it … the Spanish lime tree that used to litter its fruit all over the cottage’s backyard, and in the branches of which Hope had once huddled in fear of Mike, the cemetery’s (now former) handyman, when he’d tried to kill me.
Worse, everywhere I looked, I saw people … people who’d wandered into the cemetery through the wide- open gates, carrying rakes and hoes and other pieces of gardening equipment, probably to clean up their loved ones’ graves.
“Oh, no,” I couldn’t help murmuring with a groan. “No, no, no … ”
A sickening sense of foreboding grew in the pit of my stomach. If winds could twist solid metal the way they had the cemetery gates, and blow over a tree as thick and sturdy as that Spanish lime, how could a structure as old as John’s tomb escape without damage? It was so old — the red bricks that made up its walls so decrepit — would it even be standing? And what about our tree — the poinciana under which we’d met and kissed, its blossoms forming a scarlet umbrella above our heads?
I pedaled more quickly, my heart booming so loudly in my chest I could no longer hear the sound of the chain saw, or even the sirens. I couldn’t even hear the crunching of sea grass and palm fronds beneath my bicycle’s wheels as they passed over them. My only thought was that I had to see how badly John’s crypt had been affected by the storm, if the poinciana tree was even still there …
… And then I rounded the corner and saw that it was.
Well, most of it was.
Every single blossom was gone from the tree. They lay upon the ground like an undulating carpet of scarlet silk.
The tree had also lost a large limb. It had fallen across the roof of the crypt, causing part of it to cave in.
I was relieved to see that was the only damage. The redbrick structure still stood, the word
Standing in the middle of the carpet of red poinciana blossoms was a man. His back was to me. The sun was so high in the air and shining so brightly that, since I wasn’t wearing sunglasses, it was difficult for me to determine his identity.
For a second my heart lifted, because I was certain it was John, returned from his journey to fetch the boats my father had found for him. Even now, the passengers in the Underworld were probably being boarded, order was being returned to the realm of the dead, and my father was back at my mom’s house.
