Mississippi River Blues (4 page)

I was just being funny, but as we crept quietly up to the schoolhouse Tom surprised me.

“We're what you call engaged, Amy and me,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I've been sweet on her for about—”

He stopped dead. He stared through the window and into the room. Frankie and I peered in also.

There was a girl sitting in a seat near the window. She was not bad looking. She had on a blue dress and wore her blond hair wound into two long braids.

“Is that Amy Lawrence?” Frankie asked.

“Amy who?” Tom replied, his jaw going slack.

“Wait, you mean you don't know this girl?” I asked.

“I'd sure like to,” said Tom. “She must be new.”

I grinned. “Oh, I get it. The old
Love Boat
has floated up the Mississippi. Uh-huh, and it's docking right here!”

Frankie snarled. “Uck! Don't make me barf, Dev—”

“Oh, and look who's getting off the boat. It's Dr. Love himself! Tom, your problems are over. Dr. Love is here to give you love advice—”

“Devin, don't you dare!” said Frankie sharply. “If you mess up this story, there may be no way out of it!”

Suddenly, there was a rap on the window. And, in place of the pretty girl with braids, there was the face of a scowling teacher guy!

“Mr. Dobbin!” Tom gasped. “Let's get in there fast!”

But when we dashed into the schoolhouse, we nearly dashed right out again. The place was so small, the inside was almost outside. It was just one classroom with a roof. It had no computers, no overhead projector, no bookcases, no tissue boxes, and no lights. The kids were all crammed onto hard benches, the girls on one side and the boys on the other.

Frankie and I sneaked into the back of the room. Tom tried to, too, but he got caught.

The teacher swiveled on his heels and glared at Tom. “You won't get past me, Thomas Sawyer. So tell me: where have you been?”

I watched Tom's eyes drift around the room, then suddenly he twitched. I glanced where he was looking.

“The new girl!” I whispered, nudging Frankie.

Next to this girl was the only empty place in the room.

Tom looked straight at Mr. Dobbin and said, “I stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn!”

“Ackkkk!”
went Mr. Dobbin. “You … you did what?”

Still grinning, Tom repeated his sin.

“I stopped to talk with Huck Finn!”

Making a big sucking noise with his nostrils, Mr. Dobbin cried, “Huck Finn! That … that … well! I will deal with you later, Thomas Sawyer, but first, go—yes, go—and sit with the
girls
! I see a place next to Rebecca Thatcher. Go! And let this be a warning to you!”

Nudges and winks and whispers and giggles rolled across the room, but Tom strode boldly over to the new girl and plopped himself right down next to her.

That's when I realized that Tom had pulled another scam. He had admitted that he'd visited Huck just so he'd be told to sit next to the new girl!

“Oooh, Dr. Love is in the building,” I whispered.

“Gag me!” Frankie replied under her breath.

“Quiet back there!” shouted Mr. Dobbin.

I watched as Tom and Rebecca (Frankie told me that in the book she was mostly called Becky) Thatcher started to whisper to each other under the teacher's nose. Soon, they began passing notes back and forth.

As soon as I saw the notes, I thought of note paper. Then I thought of just regular paper. Then I thought of paper pages in a book. Then I thought of one particular missing page in a book.

“The scribble page might be here!” I whispered to Frankie. Like a detective, I squinted my eyes and looked around.

Frankie spotted the teacher fussing with some papers in his desk. “I'll check that desk at recess. Wait, they do have recess, don't they?”

They did, actually. A big recess. In fact, those lucky students only had school till noon! At the bell, they stampeded out the door and began to play.

While the other kids whooped and yelled loudly, Tom went to sit by himself on an old stone wall that surrounded the schoolyard. But he never took his eyes off Becky Thatcher. “Golly, I like her,” he said to us.

I smiled. “Don't worry. I'm the Love Expert—”

“Kkkkk!”
went Frankie, clutching her throat with both hands. “Choking! No air. Brain dying—”

I ignored her. “Listen, Tom,” I said. “Here's how you meet girls. Let me tell you. My system is foolproof.”

“Yeah, foolproof,” said Frankie, unchoking herself and glaring at me. “It proves you're a fool. Tom, don't listen to this guy.”

I took the insult in stride. “Tom, everyone is amazed at my powers with girls.”

“The power to make them sick,” said Frankie.

“At least it's a power,” I said. “Frankie, why don't you check the teacher's desk for that treasure we're looking for, while I help Tom with his love life.”

Frankie gave me a look. Then she stormed back to the schoolhouse. “At least I don't have to watch!”

“Never mind what Frankie says,” I told him. “Let me feed you lines. It never fails.”

“Feed me lines?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll be crouching down below this wall and whisper great lines for you to say. Girls love romantic goop. I see it all the time on TV. It never fails.”

“What's TV?”

“Just something that never fails,” I said. “Now, are you with me on this?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

While Tom sat on the wall, I squirreled myself down on the far side of it, just as Becky came waltzing over.

I was pretty sure she couldn't see or hear me, since the other kids were making lots of noise playing loud games in the yard. It was perfect.

Tom cleared his throat. “Ahem!” It was his signal to me to start feeding him lines.

“Nice day, isn't it, Becky?” I whispered.

“Nice day, isn't it, Becky?” repeated Tom.

“Mmm,” she said. “It reminds me of one of those poems Mr. Dobbin read to us.”

Ah! Poems! She wants the romantic goop! Even though the other kids were making so much noise, I came up with something good and goopy.

“Becky,” I said.

“Becky,” said Tom.

“You are like …”

“You are like …”

“A poem!” I said.

Some kid shrieked just as I said that.

“A worm?” said Tom.

“What!” said Becky sharply. “I'm like … a worm?”

“No, you're like a poem!” I repeated, as the kids yelled yet again.

“No, you're a live worm!” said Tom.

“Tom Sawyer! That's a hateful thing to say!” Becky cried. She stomped off a few feet and frowned at him.

I had to think fast. “Quick, Tom! Give her something. Girls like boys to give them stuff. It's on commercials all the time. And don't ask what commercials are—just give her something!”

Tom dug into his pockets and came up with my jumbo paper clip. “All I got is this!”

“That's good!” I said. “It's shiny. Girls like shiny things!”

“What?” said Tom loudly. “Girls are slimy things?”

“Slimy things?” said Becky, who had returned to give Tom a second chance. “So it's back to worms, is it?”

“No, please, Becky, take this … this … paper clip!”

She narrowed her eyes. “You idiot!” She threw the paper clip to the ground and ran off.

Tom growled at me, looked as if he wanted to kick me, then stomped off through the woods the other way.

“Good work, Dr. Love,” said Frankie, coming up behind me. Then she whacked me hard with the book.

It hurt. And when I opened my eyes, it was nighttime.

Midnight, to be exact.

And Tom and Frankie and I were staring at that old dead cat again.

“Meow!” it said.

Chapter 7

Actually, it wasn't the cat who meowed. It was Huck.

“Meowww!” he repeated.

In a flash, we climbed through Tom's window and tumbled out next to Huck who was hiding in the bushes, grinning his sly grin again.

“Follow me, whoever's ready to say good-bye to warts forever!” he said.

“Mmm,” said Frankie. “Nice invitation.”

“That cat still dead?” asked Tom.

“Deader,” Huck assured us. “Now, come on. It's nearly time.” His smile was as wide as a jack-o'-lantern's as he darted off quickly and quietly toward the woods at the edge of the village.

At the end of half an hour, we were all wading through the tall grass that sprouted up wildly between the tombstones.

The setting was the kind of graveyard you see in old-fashioned western movies. It was built on a hill, about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy wooden fence around it, which leaned inward in some places, and outward the rest of the places, but was upright nowhere at all.

Grass and weeds grew thickly all over the hill.

And, oh yeah, all the old graves were sunken in.

A faint wind moaned through the trees.

“That'll be the spirits of the dead,” said Tom. “They're coming, and they don't like being disturbed by us.”

Frankie snorted. “Well, we're even. Because I don't want to be disturbed by them!”

But Tom and Huck kept moving deeper into the cemetery. In a little while, we found a fresh heap of dirt, which meant that someone had been buried there recently.

“I really don't like this,” I said.

“You don't like it!” Frankie grumbled under her breath. “I'm the one with the fear of dead stuff. And here I am, hanging out where the dead people live.”

“It's Hoss Williams's grave,” murmured Huck, creeping stealthily up to the dirt mound and sniffing it. He held his hand up so that none of us would come closer. I was grateful for that. Nearby the grave was a clump of three thick trees. Tom motioned for us to take our places behind them.

The spirits began to moan again at that point, and I have to say I began to sweat.

“I just had a thought,” Frankie whispered to me.

“Did it hurt?”

“Sort of. My thought is, if the lost page is actually buried in that dead grave over there, you'll have to dig it up.”

I made a scoffing noise. “Why should
I
do it?”

“The fifty-fifty rule,” she said.

I frowned. “What fifty-fifty rule?”

“The one that says that when one of us thinks up an idea, the other one has to do it.”

“I never heard of that rule.”

“It's new.”

“Shhhh!” hissed Huck. “The evil spirits are coming!”

A muffled sound of voices floated up from the far end of the graveyard.

“Who … or what … is it?” I whispered to Frankie. “What does the book say?”

Frankie's eyes were bugging out, trying to catch a ray of moonlight to read by. She shook her head. “I don't know. The words are too blurry to read! What if Huck is right? What if there really are evil spirits?”

“And what if they're coming—for us?” I added.

Some vague figures approached through the gloom, surrounded by an eerie glow that freckled the ground with little spangles of light.

Huck shuddered. “It's the spirits, sure enough! Three of them! Anybody know how to escape from evil spirits?”

“I thought
you
did!” said Tom.

“I thought
you
did!” said Huck.

“Oh, man!” said Frankie

“Here they come!” I said.

Chapter 8

As the spirits approached, I could see that the eerie glow that freckled the ground with little spangles of light was coming from an old-fashioned tin lantern.

“Um, do spirits carry lanterns?” I asked.

Frankie almost jumped for joy. “They're not spirits! They're … people! Three of them ….”

“And one of them is Muff Potter!” whispered Tom.

“Cute name,” I said. “Not so cute guy.”

Muff Potter was a large, sloppy-looking man who staggered out front, his arm out and his chubby fingers seeming to point to the grave. Two others were following him, but it wasn't easy to see what they looked like.

The cemetery, of course, was darker than dark.

“The second one is Doc Robinson,” said Huck. “I can see his long coat.”

Then, out of the shadows came the third member of the pack. It was a guy about seven feet tall, all muscles, and with a face that could stop a bus. Actually, it looked as if it had stopped a bus. The nose was all pushed to one side and the cheeks were bumpy and wide and the mouth was in a permanent angry sneer. He wore a hat pulled low over his brow, but the lamplight caught and flickered on his eyes, which were black and piercing and spooky beyond belief.

“Who's that?” I asked.

“Why, that's none other than Injun Joe!” said Tom.

A shiver went through me when he said that. I turned to Frankie. We were both thinking the same thing.

“Um, sorry, Tom,” whispered Frankie. “Time out. We can't call the guy that name. First of all, it's
Indian
, not ‘Injun,' and second, we would say Native American. I know that you're from a long time ago, but it's not nice to label someone with his ethnic heritage. It's insulting, and just plain inappropriate.”

I nodded, big-time. “If that man is going to be a character in this story, we're really going to have to change his name.”

“What should we call him?” whispered Huck.

“Well, he's tall,” I said. “How about Tall Joe?”

Tom shrugged. “That's okay, I guess. But he's mostly mean and scary, not just tall. Plus, he smells awful because he never changes his clothes.”

“How about Stinky Joe?” said Frankie.

“I like Stinky Joe,” said Tom.

“Shhh,” said Huck. “Look!”

We all went silent as we watched Muff Potter and the man now called Stinky Joe drive a wheelbarrow up to the fresh grave. In the barrow was a thick rope and a couple of shovels. The doctor put down the lantern at the head of the grave and came and sat down with his back against one of the trees we were hiding behind. He was so close I could almost touch him.