Free A Brilliant Death by Robin Yocum Page A

senior class secretary. She wanted to go to school to become a court stenographer and, according to her diary, Big Frank described this as ‘a royal waste of time and money.’”
    “Even then, he was such a charmer,” I said.
    “Yep. That’s my dad. Always encouraging people to chase their dreams and better themselves.” He rolled his eyes. He looked back down at the notebook. “Oh, yeah, she was five-foot-six, a hundred and fifteen pounds, brown hair and . . . check it out.” He put an index finger to the skin below his right eye and pulled down, revealing most of his lower eyeball. “She also had green eyes.”
    “Did she have grotesque red veins in her lower eye, too?”
    He ignored me. “I love going through her stuff,” he said. “I love touching the things that she touched. Holding the things she held. I’ve read that diary cover to . . . well, she never got it filled out cover-to-cover, but I’ve read it all three times. I wish I knew what she sounded like. I wish I could hear her voice saying the words.” He closed his notebook and fought back tears. “I wish I could.”
    While I was not personally reading the letters or diary, I was getting a pretty good idea of the mental image Travis was creating of his mother. He believed that she had been sweet and caring, the kind of person who smiled and laughed a lot. He was certain that she’d had happy eyes, always bright. And, nothing against Mrs. Malone, he said, but he was sure his mom would have been the best in the world. He was painting the picture of the perfect woman. What he wanted was to believe he was the product of at least one person with some redeeming qualities.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Our freshman year and following summer passed without further progress in Operation Amanda. Travis had gotten a job bagging groceries and stocking shelves at Kennedy’s Market. I had a lawn-mowing business and was playing baseball for the Brilliant American Legion. We had spent three Friday and two Saturday nights that summer camping at the cemetery. My parents thought we were somewhere on Tarr’s Dome. I lied to get out of the house, as I’m sure my mother would have been apoplectic at the notion of her son hiding behind tombstones trying to catch the mystery bouquet deliverer. Fortunately, I had no encounters with poison ivy or apparitions. Unfortunately, we had no encounters with the mystery man, either.
    While we had been unsuccessful in catching the mystery man, the flowers continued to show up periodically at the memorial. I got my driver’s license that October, which helped considerably with our ability to keep surveillance on the cemetery. While we didn’t know what time of day the flowers were being placed on the grave, they most frequently appeared between Thursday morning and Friday evening. During the first week of November, we found no flowers at the site on Thursday night but discovered a bouquet of six yellow roses when we returned Friday evening. “That’s it,” Travis said. “All we need to do is camp out on a Thursday and we’ll find out who it is.”
    I said, “Okay, first of all, the flowers don’t show up every Friday. Secondly, it’s probably just someone from the church. And, thirdly, I am not camping out in the cemetery in November on a Thursday night. It’s a school night and my parents will have none of that, and friendship has its limits.”
    “Fair enough. Can we keep doing the drive-bys—keep trying to see which nights are his favorites?”
    “No problem. It’s virtually impossible to get frostbite in a Buick.”
    While this seemed to suit Travis, he had little else to do in regard to Operation Amanda. He had pored through the contents of the box retrieved from the attic several times. Consequently, he had a lot of time to speculate on the identity of the mystery man, which he did continually throughout our first-period American Government class. This was bad for me because I actually had to listen to absorb