The Secrets of Lily Graves (10 page)

We exchanged a couple of messages about how he loved any movie with Seth Rogen and then I went to bed.

The following day, I texted this:
You won't believe what happened.
Next to it was the photo of my brutalized arm.

Henderson cringed. “You sent that to him?”

“Yes. Around six on Saturday night.”

“And what was his reply?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you call him again?” Henderson asked. “Or text?”

“Both. But, like I said . . . nothing.”

Mom sniffed triumphantly. “There. Are we through?”

Henderson ignored her. “No personal visits? No rendezvous in the cemetery, perhaps, in your special love-nest tomb?”

How did he know about that? I shot a look to Mom.

“I need your answer verbally,” Henderson prodded. “Tape recorder can't pick up a reaction.”

“No,” I barked.

“All right. No need to shout.”

Henderson repeated the order of events twice more and then he closed his tablet. Finally.

But as I pushed back my chair, he said, “Just want to be clear on one thing. You've known Matt since elementary school, but you didn't become close until this summer. Why?”

We'd already been over this. “Because I had to tutor him in US History so he could pass the course and play football, remember?”

“Memory's not what it used to be. I'll get my prompter.” He signaled to the two-way mirror, and almost immediately the door flew open and in walked a trim, bald man about my mother's age. Henderson introduced him as Detective Zabriskie from the Pennsylvania State Police, homicide division.

Ah, yes, the PSP backup Henderson had requested in his fax.

With a courteous bow to Mom, Zabriskie whipped around a chair and straddled it, regarding me from behind a pair of steel-framed glasses.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Graves,” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for your time.” He clicked a pen and scanned the notes Henderson had just taken on our conversation, riffling through the yellow pages noisily. “We'll try not to keep you much longer. Detective Henderson has done an excellent job, but I need to refresh his memory.”

“And we need to get going,” Mom said.

Zabriskie tapped the tablet. “This will take only a minute, ma'am. Just to make sure I have the facts right, Miss Graves, starting in July you began tutoring Matt Houser twice a week in US History. Is that correct?”

I understood that a girl had died and they had to be thorough, but this was like beating a dead horse. “That's right.”

“What day did Mr. Houser call to request your services, exactly?”

“I don't remember.”

Zabriskie waved this away. “No problem. If necessary we can subpoena your phone records. We've already got a court order to get Mr. Houser's.”

“Subpoena!” Mom exclaimed. “I'm not very comfortable with how this is going.”

Neither was I. If there was a court order to get Matt's phone records, then that meant the cops might already have received a warrant to search his house and car and locker. It meant . . .

“You seriously believe Matt's a suspect,” I said, “don't you?”

Zabriskie adjusted his frames. “And you have some objection?”

“You're after the wrong guy. Matt didn't kill anyone and neither did I. All I did was tutor him so he could pass a makeup test and play football. All Matt did was stick with Erin because he was concerned about her mental state. That doesn't exactly sound like a killer to me.”

“Uh huh.” Zabriskie was unmoved. “By the way, why did Mr. Houser ask you to tutor him when his girlfriend got an A in that class too?”

“His parents thought Erin might be too much of a distraction.”

Zabriskie sucked his teeth. “And this is what his parents said to you directly.”

“No. I've never even met the Housers.”

“So you don't know if they were aware that their son was being tutored to take a makeup exam in history.”

This reminded me of how I felt at camp when we played a game where the name of a famous person was taped to my back and I was supposed to guess who it was based on a series of questions. Except I couldn't figure out who I was (Marie Curie) and people started laughing.

“Well, they had to have known,” I said dully, “because Matt's father is the assistant football coach and he wouldn't have let Matt play if he hadn't passed history.”

The cops exchanged knowing glances. “What if I told you, Miss Graves,” Zabriskie continued with a touch of glee, “that there wasn't a chance that Matt Houser would have been benched this season?”

Goosebumps rose on my arms. “Why?”

“Because he finished the class with a B.”

That didn't make sense. “He didn't get a B. He failed.”

Zabriskie reached into the folder and removed a piece of white paper with the instantly recognizable Potsdam High Panthers logo on top and, below, Matt's grades for junior year. The line for US History was highlighted in bright yellow, ending in a big, bold B.

The floor wobbled. I gripped the table edge to remain steady.

“I don't get it,” I whispered, searching for a logical
explanation. All those summer evenings, all that reading. Him out the door at eight sharp as if he couldn't stand one more minute. “He paid,” I said. “Twenty dollars a session.”

Zabriskie let out a loud, low whistle. “Wow. He must really like history to lay down two hundred bucks for no reason. Unless . . .” He paused, stroking his chin. “. . . the money was a down payment for something else. Some service you promised to provide in the near future, a way for you to apply your expertise in anatomy.”

I was stunned. Had Zabriskie just implied I was an accomplice to murder?

“That's it,” Mom declared, leaping out of her chair so fast it fell backward and hit the floor. “We are done. I am sick of watching you harass and intimidate my daughter, who, by the way, was only trying to do the right thing. Come on, Lily. Bob is going to hear about this.”

She reached over to grab my hand, when something else caught my attention. Zabriskie was dangling a ziplock bag, inside of which was the treasured Persephone necklace I'd lost last summer. Just that morning I'd been searching my dresser and under my bed looking for it, on the off chance it wasn't at the bottom of the quarry.

“That's Lily's,” Mom said. “Where'd you get it?”

Zabriskie rose from his chair. He towered over both of us. “I'm afraid to say, ma'am, that our search team came across it on Sunday. They found it snagged on a branch in the woods on the day after Erin was murdered, not twenty feet behind her house.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
he day I lost the Persephone necklace was the day Matt and I went swimming, the day he told me his secret.

We were in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave so punishing a local TV reporter cracked a raw egg on the sidewalk and filmed it frying. The sticky temperatures and lazy air were definitely not conducive to studying, especially since Matt and I could no longer go to the air-conditioned public library, not with Erin watching our every move.

Matt complained it was too humid in the usually cool cemetery to concentrate on World War I. The headstones were hotter than fireplace bricks, offering
no relief from the blistering ninety-plus temperatures, and the cicadas buzzing in the woods created the aura of a Southern gothic graveyard. Some Spanish moss hanging from the trees, a glass of sweet tea, and a few drawling vampires, and we could have been on the set of
True Blood
.

I slapped a mosquito and fanned myself with a notebook. “What were the ‘overt acts' that convinced Woodrow Wilson to go to war?”

Matt lay in the shadow of a rose granite tombstone, his shirt half off and his hand resting on his tanned, bare flat abs. A line of faint hairs ran tantalizingly from his belly button to the mysterious world under his shorts.

“Something to do with subs?” he guessed.

“Close.”

He rolled over onto his stomach. “Subs reminds me of water and water reminds me of swimming. I can't work in this heat, Graves. Let's quit this and go somewhere cool.”

Couple of problems with that. For one thing, with the exam only a week away, we'd added an entire afternoon to our schedule so we could get past World War II by the end of the day. We couldn't knock off now, with the United Nations, the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor untouched.

“But the makeup is next week,” I said. “And we've barely touched the twentieth century.”

“Who cares? I've crammed enough history to pass.”

In light of how much money he'd forked over, his nonchalance had surprised me.

“What if Erin sees us?” I said.

“Don't worry about her. She's probably lounging around her own pool with Kate and the rest of them.”

I wasn't willing to risk a chance encounter, so I made another suggestion. “Sara and I have a secret spot at Miller's Creek where hardly anyone goes. We can study there.”

Our hideaway was a pretty glen of soft green grass surrounded by honeysuckle bushes. With a beach bag of towels, a couple of Diet Cokes, and the latest issues of
Us
magazine, we had spent entire afternoons there reading, laughing, and wading into the babbling brook when we needed to cool off.

Matt balked. “That thing's probably a mud hole these days.”

Possibly. That left only one alternative, besides the disgusting public pool: the quarry.

My mother had designated the quarry as strictly off-limits due to its unpredictable danger. Last summer, she'd been assigned the unpleasant duty of transporting a body, submerged for days, that the
search-and-rescue divers had found. He was in his twenties, still wearing his gold chain, with a tattoo of an angel that, along with the rest of his skin, disintegrated upon touch. Boo said that his body felt as slippery as leftover soap in the shower.

He wasn't the only one. Over the years, more than a dozen people had drowned in Harper's Quarry, either hitting their heads on rocks or suffering the misfortune of catching their feet in the crannies that riddled its perimeter. Most of them had been drunk. Or stoned. Often both. Stupidity was a common risk factor. As was darkness.

There were lots of myths about Harper's, like that it had no bottom and that the water reached the Earth's core, where it turned boiling hot. There were pieces of rusting construction equipment (true) and monsters (not so much) in the quarry. It was rumored that swimmers had felt their ankles tugged by invisible creatures below and that the trick was not to resist, because if you fought too hard, you'd use up all your oxygen and die. The best approach was to try to extricate yourself slowly and, most of all, not panic.

Matt eyed me cautiously. “You really want to go to the quarry?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Why not? If you know where to
dive, it's okay. My aunt Boo took me once and pointed out the safe areas.”

I did not elaborate that she did this after we got the so-called “sinker” with the soap body, or that in so doing she'd faced one of my mother's extra special rants. In Aunt Boo's opinion, it was better to know how to avoid danger than to avoid dangerous places. Those were two distinct concepts people foolishly confused.

He rolled over and blinked at the sky. “I wish there was somewhere else. Erin has such a sweet setup.”

Of course she did. Everything Erin had was prettier, smarter, newer, and better. “Well, I'm sorry I don't have a chichi inground pool. But if you don't want to go to the quarry, that's okay. I'll go alone.” I stood and gathered my stuff.

“You can't go alone,” he said, sitting up. “It's in the middle of nowhere. What if you hurt yourself? Or . . . whatever.”

“Then it'll be on your conscience because you were too chicken to go.”

A half hour later, Matt's truck was kicking up dust as we exited onto a dirt road that ran through a field of weeds, conquering a swath of industrialized destruction. We bounced over ruts and ditches, past discarded white fuel tanks and rusted barrels, to the
broken chain-link fence. Matt boldly parked in front of a
WARNING
!
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
sign that had been shot through with BBs.

My stomach knotted. Maybe this was a mistake after all.

“I thought you were cool with this,” Matt said, getting out.

“I am. Just that . . .” I pointed to the signs.

“No sweat. Jacks and I have been here a million times and never gotten caught.” He found the break in the fence and held it wide for me to go through.

I ducked under his arm. “To go swimming?”

“Um, no. Other stuff.”

I chose not to think about what he'd been up to, or how the mustard-yellow
DANGER
!
DEEP QUARRY
!
KEEP OUT
! had triggered a burst of jitters in my gut. This had been my idea. Now was not the time to be a wuss.

We wound our way through the grass. Here and there were charcoal circles of extinguished fires littered with faded beer cans and melted packs of Marlboros. I dared not take off my sandals lest I step on broken glass or, God forbid, used condoms.

When we got to the edge, I let out a gasp. This was a more precarious drop than I remembered from coming here with Boo, and I wondered if she'd taken me
to a different jumping-off point, since this had to be at least twenty feet straight down. The dark water below was surrounded by steep cliffs and jagged rocks striated with gashes left over from mining. Also, the slate surface was fragile. A scrape of your toe could cause it to crumble to bits.