Read The Secrets of Lily Graves Online
Authors: Sarah Strohmeyer
I did so to indulge her, and suddenly I couldn't get enough. I was as dry as a desert inside. Three glasses
of water later, I was sitting up and beginning to gather my wits.
Erin Donohue was dead. She'd killed herself.
I needed Sara. Stat.
“I know this is difficult,” Mom said, “but if you're okay by yourself, I wonder if you could answer the phones while Boo and I retrieve Erin's body. Oma has gone over to the Donohues' ahead of us to help them fill out paperwork.”
“Absolutely,” I said, trying to rise to the occasion. This was a huge client for our business, and already I'd caused a delay by fainting in the casket room and keeping Mom from doing her job.
“Will you be all right?” she asked.
“Sure. I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me.”
“Only the worst thing possible. Don't expect to recover from this anytime soon.”
Mom knew from experience how bad this was, having dealt with death on a personal as well as professional level for eons.
“By the way,” she added, “it's probably best if we keep this quiet for now. It won't help the Donohues if our funeral home becomes gossip central, which it will be if Sara hears about this, especially since Erin interned for her father last summer.” She gave me one last knowing look and left.
I waited two whole minutes before I got out my phone and called my best friend.
“It doesn't seem real,” Sara said, sounding close to tears. “Okay, so Erin and I were never what you'd call buddy-buddy, but this? This is the worst thing ever!”
I mumbled in begrudging agreement.
“Erin was in our living room just the other day, sitting on the kitchen stool talking to Mom and Dad, reminiscing about all the silly mistakes she'd made when she started interning.”
“Did anything seem off?” I asked.
“Aside from her hypercheerfulness? No. But by then she'd already decided to do herself in. They say that's the way it is with suicides.”
Erin's family lived around the corner from Sara in the same cookie-cutter development of oversize houses with humongous garages and kitchens built for hosting small conventions. Because their families were so friendly, Sara's dad, Dr. Ken, offered Erin an unpaid job in his pediatric practice at the hospital, babysitting kids in the waiting room while the parents were in appointments with their other children.
The idea had been Erin's, since she was thinking of majoring in pre-med at Villanova and also, again, because of that college résumé she was forever building.
All that hard work, all those great grades and spectacular extracurriculars . . . for slit wrists in a bathtub?
None of this felt right.
“She wasn't that hypercheerful when I saw her Saturday afternoon,” I said. “She went berserk and attacked me for no reason.”
“Well, like you said yourself, Lil, she probably got the wrong idea about you and Matt.”
Sara had never been a big fan of Matt Houser because he was one of those cute jocks with, as she put it, “a third bicep for a brain.” However, I'd always suspected there was more to it than that. Sara resented Matt because ever since he'd asked me to tutor him in US History last summer, she and I hadn't hung out as much. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when I normally would have been over at her house lounging by her family's sweet inground pool, Matt and I had been in the (air-conditioned) public library downtown or in the cool shade of the cemetery studying. It was definitely a wedge in our friendship.
“My relationship with Matt is purely platonic,” I said, repeating what I'd told her a zillion times before.
“I've got news for you. Members of the opposite sex who call each other every night before they go to sleep while they're in bed are more than just friends.”
I felt myself go hot. “It's nothingâhe just razzes me
about being such a morbid nerd.”
“His teasing is adorable and you know it. And so did Erin. Not that you should blame yourself for her suicide,” Sara was quick to add. “I'm just stating facts.”
Sometimes Sara's love of “facts” got on my nerves, but then I'd remember that she couldn't help herself, because her whole goal in life was to become a famous criminal prosecutor. The only television she watched were back-to-back true-crime shows on Investigation Discovery about deadly women and Southern murderers and serial killersânecessary preparation, she claimed, for Harvard Law.
“Okay,” I said, “but those âfacts' are wrong.”
“Possibly,” she conceded. “But Matt
did
come to you first about whether he and Erin should split. So even if you didn't want to be roped into their drama, you were.”
I would never forget that night, how Matt scaled the wall of our garden and tapped on my bedroom window, scaring me out of my wits. I'd climbed out and both of us stood there in the warm September air, what we didn't say more important than what we did. He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned close. I had stayed still. As much as my body was dying to kiss him, I refused to be “that” girl.
A no-win situation.
“I never told him to break up with Erin,” I said. “I remained totally neutral, the same way I was toward you when you were breaking up with Ty.”
“If I recall, your exact words were âDump that idiot, Sara, before he dumps you.'”
“I was right, wasn't I?”
“Yup. But a monkey could have called that.” She paused. “How's Matt dealing, anyway?”
I checked my phone to see if any messages had come in while we'd been talking. “I don't know. He's hasn't replied to any of my texts.”
“When was the last you heard from him?”
“Friday, when he wrote that on a scale of one to ten in movies, one being anything with subtitles and ten being any movie with Seth Rogen,
Ted
was a twenty.” That seemed so long ago.
“I thought you told him about Erin's attack.”
“I did. I even sent him a photo of my cuts and wrote, âYou won't believe what happened.' You'd think that'd be intriguing enough for him to text right back, but I guess not.”
Sara went silent for a bit. “And you never heard from him again?”
“No.”
“
Fascinating.
”
I didn't like the way Sara said that, as if she were
concluding a cross-examination before a rapt jury.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“You don't want to know.”
But I knew.
I think a part of me always had.
That night, after Mom and Boo had come home and gone to bed, I tiptoed upstairs to Mom's office to conduct a search. Since the cardinal sin of morticians was gossip, Mom wouldn't be forthcoming with info now that she had a professional obligation to keep her client's confidentiality. So if I wanted learn anything about Erin's suicide, I would have to break a few rules.
Fortunately, rule-breaking was one of my better honed-skills.
Erin's file was the top entry in Mom's Word documents and thoroughly disappointing in its ordinariness. There would be calling hours on Thursday at the funeral home, followed by a funeral on Saturday at St. Anne's. The Donohues had filled in the standard form Oma used to assemble an obituary for the local paper. It listed Erin's awards and achievements, survivors, and places to submit donations (ASPCA) instead of flowers. Of course, people would send them anyway.
I closed out, logged off, and was pushing back Mom's chair when I spied the thin white sheets of
paper curling out of the fax machine. I turned them over and smoothed them flat. The letterhead of the Potsdam Police Department was stamped on top.
TO: Robert R. Amidon, Chief of Police
FROM: Detective Joe Henderson
RE: REQUEST FOR THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE CRIME LAB
DEPARTMENT USE ONLYâCONFIDENTIAL
It appeared to be an internal police memo. It was so unlike Perfect Bob to release something this top secret, much less fax it to Mom. Had to be bad.
At approximately 1420 hours on Sunday, October 28, Potsdam Police Department dispatch received a 911 call from a female identifying herself as Elaine Donohue, reporting a nonresponsive female, age 17, in the upstairs bathroom of their house at 322 Maple Drive. Ambulance and rescue personnel were sent to the scene, along with Officer Crowley and myself.
Upon arrival, I observed the body of a teenage girl lying face up in a bathtub, several lacerations on both wrists, naked aside from a pink towel. Both
the edges of the towel and the water in the bath appeared to be red with blood. Emergency personnel confirmed that the female was indeed deceased.
The Medical Examiner was immediately notified and the area secured at 1448 hours.
Preliminary observations revealed that on the tile floor by the bathtub there was an ordinary 8 oz. drinking glass containing clear fluid, which I marked for analysis. There was no obvious evidence of razors, knives, or other sharp objects that might have been used to inflict the lacerations. Nor could any blood be superficially observed outside of the immediate bathtub vicinity.
Riley and Elaine Donohue, owners of the house, identified the female as their daughter, Erin Anne Donohue, age 17. Riley Donohue advised that he and his wife had returned to their home at approximately 1400 hours after spending the weekend closing up their summer cabin in the Poconos. Their daughter had remained at home, as she frequently had done in the past.
Mr. Donohue advised that the screen door to the back patio was open and the other doors locked when he and his wife returned. Erin's car, a 2012 Mini Cooper, was in the garage. The family dog, Sparkle, had defecated on the living room rug,
indicating it had not been let outside that morning.
Mrs. Donohue went upstairs and located her daughter in the master bath. She called for her husband, a former volunteer firefighter, who attempted first aid, including a heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while Mrs. Donohue called 911. Officer Crowley and I arrived five minutes later, along with the Center Valley Regional Rescue.
At 1530 hours I interviewed the Donohues' next-door neighbors, Eugene and Joan Krezky of 320 Maple Drive. They advised that at approximately 2200 on October 27, they telephoned the Donohues to complain of loud music from what appeared to be a party. Several minutes later, three females exited the premises and left in a “Jeep-like” vehicle. The music stopped.
At 2230, Mrs. Krezky accompanied their dog into the backyard before going to bed. From her vantage point, she was able to see into the Donohues' living room window, where she observed a female she identified as Erin Donohue arguing loudly with an unidentified male approximately six feet in height.
Based on the above observations, along with the facts that, after a thorough search, no sharp objects were located near the deceased victim, and that the
only blood found at the scene was in the bathtub, it is my belief that Erin Anne Donohue was the victim of a homicide.
Considering the sensitive nature of the case, the age of the victim, the residential location of the crime, and the potential for DNA as well as other highly technical laboratory analysis of evidence to identify the perpetrator(s), I am officially requesting the assistance and use of the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Lab as well as supporting personnel.
Respectfully submitted on Oct. 28 at 2020 hours
Detective Joseph L. Henderson.
The paper fell from my hand and fluttered to the floor while I sat there, stunned.
Homicide.
Erin hadn't taken her own life. Someone else had. That a stranger or, worse, a person Erin knewâpossibly a person
I
knewâhad invaded her house, slit her wrists, and then left without a trace, was so terrifying that I went ice-cold.
Especially after I read the neat block letters in Perfect Bob's handwriting at the bottom of the page.
KEEP LILY AWAY FROM MATT HOUSER
UNCORRECTED E-PROOFâNOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Y
ou'd think that, the day after Erin was found dead in her bathtub, there would have been grief counselors to greet us at the school door. When T.J. Hawkes ran his snowmobile into a tree last winter, you couldn't take a step without some patchouli-scented earth mother rushing to offer herbal tea and tented fingers. But come Monday morning, there was no administrator in the lobby aside from the nurse, who was always there to nag the ADD students into taking their Adderall.
The single official acknowledgement of Erin's passing was during homeroom, when Principal Kemple got on the intercom to request a moment of silence in honor of the senior class president. He didn't even
use the D-word, supposedly because Kemple was cautioned against “canonizing” Erin for fear of copycats. As if we'd have killed ourselves to be mentioned in the morning announcements.
I don't know why I didn't tell Sara about the classified police memoâmaybe because despite my differences with Perfect Bob, I didn't want to get him in trouble for leaking it to Mom.
Or maybe I was trying to protect Matt, because Sara would have immediately invented a bazillion theories for why he'd murdered Erin, along with motives, methods, and evidence. If I'd told her about Bob's note, Sara would have done everything in her power to keep me from having any contact with Matt. It would have been 24/7 of her saying “I told you so.”
“Where are the Tragically Normals?” I asked her at lunch.
The head table, usually reserved for Erin, Matt, his best pal, Jackson (too cool for a first name), and Erin's ladies-in-waitingâKate Kline, Allie Woo, and Cheyenne Dayâwas ominously deserted, the chipped fake wood laminate sparkling under the fluorescent cafeteria lights.