The Secrets of Lily Graves (20 page)

Matt leaned across the seat. “What's wrong with you?”

“What's wrong with
you
?” I said, gasping. “That was almost a hit-and-run.”

“Don't be dramatic. Get in,” he said, opening the door. “What were you doing running like a scared chicken?”

I clicked my seat belt. “I was not a scared chicken. Someone was following me.”

“Yeah, me.” He shifted into first, checked his mirror, and shook his head. “It's never a dull moment with you, Lily.”

“Why were you looking for me, anyway?” I asked as we bumped and bounced down Laurel, a road not famous for its smooth surface.

“Sara called and said I had to pick you up.”

That was a shocker. I didn't even know she had his number. “Since when did you two become buddies?”

“Since she told me at the wake last night that you met up with Alex Bone.” He wagged a finger. “That dude is bad news. I've been doing some checking, Lil. Did you know he served time?”

“He let that drop in the conversation, yes.”

“For assault. He's violent.”

I stared out the window, debating whether to relay what Allie said about Erin hooking up with an older guy.

“Also, he deals,” Matt said. “Nasty stuff that can mess you up permanently.”

I spun around. “What do you mean?”

“It's not even weed, what he sells. They're just regular cigarettes laced with something. Jacks tried one at a party and said he spent the rest of the night on the
couch having a conversation—with himself.”

One Jacks was bad enough. “And he got it from Alex?”

“Bought it at the coffee shop. Jacks told me he literally stepped outside of his body and he was like two people. Never wanted to do that again.”

Exactly what Allie had said. We turned the corner to the school, the blue flashing light of the cop car in the distance. “Was it PCP?”

“Have no idea. Whatever it is, it's called wet.”

At that moment, I had an out-of-body experience of my own. “Stop! Now!”

Matt yanked the wheel to the right and drove off the road. “You okay?”

“No. No, I am absolutely not okay,” I said, gripping my stomach. Oh, this was bad. Really, really bad. “Okay, so, our insurance company has been after us to install a security camera in the prep room.”

“You made me stop to talk insurance?”

“Listen. All the funeral homes are doing it now. You know why? Because there've been so many break-ins by kids stealing embalming fluid. And do you know why they're stealing embalming fluid?” I didn't wait for his response. “Because it is mostly formalin and formalin is what you need to make wet weed. They soak weed in the stuff, then dry and sell them for huge profits.”

Matt nodded. “And this, I'm guessing, is why they call it wet.”

“I think that's what Allie, Kate, and Cheyenne were smoking with Erin the night she was murdered.”

He went white. “You're telling me that Erin, who could barely handle a sip of communion wine, was smoking
wet
?” He frowned. “Bull.”

“That's what Allie said. Also, the cops searched our house last night and took down the serial numbers of the embalming fluid.” I realized then that this meant the cops thought I was the supplier. “Like I was in on it.”

“You'll be okay,” Matt said calmly, stroking my arm. “We're getting closer to finding out who did this and you know the cops are, too.”

I said, “Yeah. You're right.”

We were both becoming expert liars.

Matt dropped me off at the bus stop so the cops wouldn't see us arriving in the same vehicle. It was totally inane, this business of going through the metal detector and being searched, and it didn't solve anything. The murderer wasn't going to show up at school with a kit of knives and drugs.

If the murderer had been lost in a formalin-induced psychosis, he might not even have remembered what he did.

This was a perfect example of why I could not exist without Sara. No doubt somewhere in the recesses of her vast knowledge of her cheesy true crimes, there was a case she'd watched about some fool out of his brain on wet, slicing and dicing a person to pieces.

I tried her cell and got no answer. Then I made the mistake of sending her the following text:

Two minutes later, I got this strangely formal response:

First off, who texted like that, in complete paragraphs with punctuation and everything? Second off, Sara wouldn't need a phone for a while? What did that mean? And what was her mother doing reading and replying to her texts?

Homeschooling. Ugh. I bet that's what the McMartins were planning. Poor Sara, stuck at the kitchen table memorizing psalms or whatever.

After sitting through a particularly grueling calculus class, I made the executive decision to blow off the rest of the day and devote my energy to getting to the bottom of this wet weed business. The cops were obviously barking up the wrong tree if they were raiding Boo's supplies in an effort to implicate me. And I certainly wasn't about to let them steamroll Matt and me into some Bonnie-and-Clyde murder rap.

The key, I concluded, was cajoling Kate and her groupies into fessing up to the police, though this was against their selfish interests. College season was upon us, and “I got stoned on wet with my best friend the night she was murdered” was not exactly the dream beginning to an admissions essay.

But I would make them see otherwise. The trick would be to approach them individually, when they would be more vulnerable to suggestion.

As luck would have it, opportunity knocked at noon, when I came down the stairs of the atrium to find Kate Kline with her surgically improved nose in a World Cultures textbook, alone and out of sight, on a couch reserved for seniors.

“Hello,” I said, flopping down next to her. “Long time, no see.”

She was not nearly as delightful as she'd been at the
wake. “Buzz off, freak. I have a quiz next period.”

“My, that's not very friendly.” I peeked over her shoulder. She was reading a passage about Chinese family life. “The Chinese have totally messed up death rituals,” I said. “Do you know if you die single, your family just leaves you at the funeral home because you're considered worthless? Also, if anything in the color red comes in contact with the body before it's buried, that person becomes a ghost. They believe ghosts are everywhere.”

Kate lowered her book. “And you wonder why you don't have more friends.”

“Oh, not that much.” I did a quick scan for her henchwomen. “Where's your entourage?”

“Skipping school. Where's your deformed twin?”

I clucked my tongue. “You know, you won't be able to keep up this politically incorrect dialogue once you're out of Potsdam.”

She went back to reading. “Bye-bye.”

“Though I suppose leaving Potsdam isn't really happening for you, is it? Considering.”

Kate sighed and said, “All right. I'll bite. What's up?”

“I need you to go to the cops,” I said. “And tell them what happened Saturday night.”

“Not that it's any of your business, but I've already
been interviewed by the police.”

“Sure. But I don't think you told them everything.”

Kate closed her book. “Like what?”

“Like the fact that you, Cheyenne, and Allie were smoking . . .”

“We smoked weed once,” she cut in, checking over her shoulder. “It was just a coincidence that Erin got . . . you know. And what do you care?”

“I care because you weren't smoking weed. What you were smoking was Alex Bone's concoction of cigarettes and embalming fluid, which produces a cheap, brain-bending, psychotic high with huge profit margins for Stone Bone Enterprises.”

Kate swallowed. I'd really caught her by surprise with that one. Or so I thought, until she said, “Embalming fluid? That is so gross.”

I shrugged. “Depends what you're using it for.”

“It wasn't embalming fluid,” she said with disgust. “The weed was soaked in
formaldehyde
. Erin brought home a bottle from the hospital. It's not illegal or anything. You can buy it off the internet.”

“You mean
Erin
made the wet?”

Kate curled the corner of her lip. “I love how you keep saying ‘wet,' like this is
Breaking Bad
. You're such a nerd, Lily.”

Yes, I thought, but at least I didn't go around
inhaling formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to fifteen different types of cancers. Not that I was about to point this out to Kate, since that would have only been more nerdlike.

“Okay,” I said. “So if it wasn't illegal, and Erin got it from her summer internship at the hospital and borrowed a bottle of formalin like you borrow paper clips and rubber bands from the office, then you won't have any problem telling that to the police.”

Kate went back to her book. “See ya!”

“You need to come forward about this and what you know about Erin's baby daddy.”

She kept on reading.

“Because you don't want that guilt for the rest of your life. Erin was your best friend, and if I know anything about the dead, it's that they demand justice. She's watching you, Kate, and waiting for you to do right by her. Or else.”

I left Miss Kline to stew about that for a while. My words might have gone in one ear and out the other, but I had reason to hope. As I walked up the stairs, I peered over the banister and saw she was still staring at that passage about Chinese family culture.

Ghosts. The Chinese weren't so far off about them being everywhere.

The Sara thing was really getting to me. All morning, I'd had the feeling that I was forgetting something, and then I'd remember . . . it was my best friend. There was no one to relate, detail by detail, the deliciousness of my juicy encounter with Kate Kline, no one to analyze the wet weed twist or trade notes in physics. I even missed her occasionally tedious rundowns of criminal cases gone wrong.

Finally, at lunch, I couldn't take it anymore. I found Matt and asked him to give me a lift downtown to Boo's salon so I could borrow her car and go to Sara's. The only problem there was that I had to hide in the back until he showed his ID, proving he was a senior and therefore free to go, and we were safely past the police guard.

“This is getting old, very fast,” I said, crawling out of the back to the shotgun seat.

Matt gripped the wheel. He looked troubled.

I said, “What's happened now?”

“It's probably nothing, but I got a text from Allie when I was walking out to the parking lot. All it said was, ‘I'm sorry.'”

“Good. She should be sorry. Kate's convinced her that if they go to the cops and tell them what happened Saturday night that their lives will be ruined.” I threw up my hands in helplessness. “Doesn't matter that your
life will be ruined and possibly mine . . .”

He ran a hand through his hair, standing it on end. Football season was almost through, and I was dying for it to be long again. Not a fan of the military look.

“I'm still going to check on her after practice. She wasn't in school today and she hasn't been herself lately.”

That was nice of him. Maybe too nice. “Um, is there a thing going on between you and . . .”

He turned to me, exasperated. “Geesh, Graves. You have a habit of underestimating yourself, don't you?”

“No.” To be quite honest, I'd often worried that I had too much self-esteem, if that was even possible.

“Then, what is it?” he asked. “Don't you like me?”

Now, I was completely confused. “I think we're having two different conversations simultaneously.”

We got to the corner of Main and Pine and I said he could let me off there. As I hopped out of the truck and thanked him for the lift, Matt leaned over and said, “Someday this whole nightmare's going to be over and then . . .”

“Yeah?”

He shook his head. “Forget it. Talk to you later.” He pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts so he could head back to school. I watched him go and smiled all the way to Boo's.

Boo's salon was one of three in downtown Potsdam, distinguished only by the fact that its awning was green while the other two were white. Its plateglass storefront featured bottles of sun-faded hair products and pictures of women glancing down and to the side modestly so you'd focus on their unmanageably nineties styles.

A bell tinkled when I opened the door to a haze of hairspray and chatter. Boo was one of the more colorful stylists, seeing as how she was covered head to toe in tats, and one of the more popular, too. Friday was her busiest day, but that didn't stop her from giving me a big hug and telling me to take a seat in the free chair next to her station.

She was finishing up a perm on ninety-year-old Mrs. D'Angelo, who would likely end up on Boo's
other
workstation in the not too distant future. This was a more common pattern than people knew in Potsdam, especially among Boo's regulars. They'd trusted her to make them look their best when they were alive, why should it be any different when they died?

“School out already?” Boo asked. Then, checking the clock on the wall and seeing it was only twelve thirty, she said, “Lily. We've been over this. You
promised to stop cutting.”

I twirled in the chair. “I have a crisis, and I can't concentrate.”

She sighed. “Okay, let's situate Mrs. D'Angelo under the dryer and we'll get a cup of coffee.”

Mrs. D'Angelo picked up right where their conversation had ended when I'd apparently interrupted, therefore I was treated to a recitation of complaints—why jars were
so
hard to open these days, how kids were
so
obsessed with electronics they couldn't communicate with fellow humans, and what a shame it was that the one good teenage girl in town had to meet such a brutal end.