Watchers

Dead People

The following morning, after I'd assured myself that my guts were still in the right places and hadn't been left behind in Goldenrock Cemetery, I biked over to Adam's. The day was actually cloudy. There was no sun out in the sky, but it was still as hot as ever. It might have been worse, actually, because the air was humid and made everything sticky. I started sweating right when I left my house, before I'd even started to do anything to make myself sweat. Those were the worst kind of summer days—the real muggy ones. You couldn't escape the awfulness of them unless you wanted to sit in your basement all day and not move a muscle. That, of course, was exactly what Adam was doing when I reached his house.

His mom let me in, and I wandered down the basement stairs where Adam was propped like a mannequin on the sofa, watching some sort of anime. Those Japanese cartoons. I liked them sometimes. Adam liked them all the time. To me, they all started to look the same after a while.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

He didn't even answer me. He just kept staring at the TV like a zombie. Thinking of zombies made me remember why I was there.

"Hey, I wanted to talk about last night."

He rolled a little so he could rest his chin on one arm. "What about it?"

"I'm just still confused. I don't really get why you think your mom is getting stuff from a dead guy. There's probably more than one person named Ted Barnes. And how did you know to go looking for his grave, anyway?"

Adam clicked the TV off, which I was grateful for. I couldn't compete with anime. "You know stuff has been coming for my mom, right?" he asked quietly, sitting up all the way. I nodded my head. "Yeah," he continued, "and it's all been sent by a guy named Ted Barnes."

"Right. You told me that."

"Well, there's never any return address on the envelopes—just this guy's name, ok? So I wanted to know who the heck he was. It's just not right, my mom getting stuff like that. But I didn't want to ask her to her face because she keeps acting like nothing's even coming in the mail worth reading; she wouldn't tell me anything about it if I mentioned the name. But you can find anything online. So I went and looked up Ted Barnes and tons of stuff came up. I mean tons. That's a really popular name, I guess. But I narrowed my search by putting in her company's name, where she works. Because I thought maybe it would be someone she works with. Well, nothing came up with that. So then I typed in Goldenrock, and up comes this old death notice about this guy who died in a car accident around ten years back. That's when I figured we should go check it out, just to make certain there really was a guy named Ted Barnes buried in the cemetery. That was last night. There. Now you know as much as I do."

It was an interesting story, really, but I was still doubtful. "Come on, Adam," I said. "You just said that there were tons of guys named Ted Barnes. So how do you know it isn't someone in another city or state who your mom met somewhere? Maybe he lives out of town. He could be anyone."

Adam was going to be stubborn. "No. I know it's this guy. I know it."

"How? You have no idea. Just because some person with the same name is buried here doesn't mean that it's the exact guy."

"Shut up, Cole. I know what I'm talking about. I just feel that it's him."

"Yeah? Then how do you explain your mom getting mail from him? Because I don't know about you, but all the dead people I know can't exactly write letters and put them in the mailbox. They pretty much just sit and rot underground."

He snorted. "I bet that's not what you thought last night."

Now he was turning into a pain. "Oh, and like you weren't thinking the same thing. Like you weren't freaked out by that . . . thing."