The Secrets of Lily Graves (4 page)

“At home trying to deal, probably,” Sara said, stirring her yogurt. “Can you imagine? Never in a million years did they expect that one of them would kill herself. Then again, those types never do.”

Of course. That's why we'd dubbed them the Tragically Normals, because they were truly living the ultimate high school experience. Good grades? Check. Lettering in sports? Check. Nice cars, cute boyfriends, adorable girlfriends, clear skin, ideal physical proportions? Check, check, check, check, and check.

Sara and I, on the other hand, were kind of the Happily Twisted. I'd been warped, for better or worse, growing up in a funeral home and being lulled to sleep as a toddler by the whirr of Boo's embalming machine injecting pink-tinted formaldehyde into the veins of corpses in the room below. That alone had made me such a freak in elementary school that no one would come to my birthday parties despite my carefully handwritten invitations, pony rides in our huge walled garden, and Oma's spectacular three-tier chocolate cakes.

In fact, the only person who ever dared to sleep over was Sara. She didn't mind the creaky floors of our ancient mansion or the fact that our basement refrigerator contained not ice-cold Cokes, but cadavers on ice. Then again, I suppose Sara had ghosts of her own.

She didn't like to talk about it much, how her birth mother had been so repulsed by Sara's withered left arm that she'd abandoned her at the Russian hospital when Sara was only three days old. It was Sara's mom, Carol, who told me that when she and Dr. Ken arrived
at the orphanage in the Khabarovsk region, Sara had been confined to an iron crib for two years, totally neglected. No one had held or played with her, sung her songs, or read her stories. Ever. For six months, Sara screamed whenever Carol tried to pick her up.

Of course, you'd never know that now. Carol and Ken dote on her every whim, and Sara's such a willowy white blonde with crystal blue eyes that boys swoon. She also became an expert at concealing her arm, so that by the time a guy fell madly in love, she could have been half lizard and he wouldn't have cared.

Perhaps that explained why, even as far back as second grade, Erin started picking on her, not because of what Sara was, but because of what she would someday become: Erin's biggest competition.

I drove by Matt's house on my way home from school that day. Big mistake.

Usually, Sara did the driving, but she was in Philly meeting with the pricey college counselor her parents had hired to get her into an Ivy League school. With the early decision application to Yale due Thursday, this was the final edit before she sent in the whole package—2600 SATs, a 3.9 GPA transcript, and an essay about being a Russian orphan. So there was no room in her busy schedule for stalking.

That's what Sara would have called my drive across town to Westwood, where Matt lived in a simple brick house with his mother and dad, an assistant football coach at Potsdam High. I was just checking to make sure he wasn't too lonely or guilt-ridden. Good Samaritan, totally platonic friend—that was me!

The entire football team, along with a posse of Tragically Normals, were gathered in Matt's front yard, hugging and crying. Kate and Cheyenne stood side by side with raccoon eyes, mascara streaming down their cheeks. Allie sat on the grass, face in her hands.

But there was no sign of Matt.

“Yo, freak!”

A body hit the front end of my car and suddenly Matt's best friend, Jackson, was on the hood. I slammed the brakes and swallowed my guts.

He rolled off, totally fine, and sauntered over to my window. “What's up?” he asked.

I'd never particularly liked Jackson. There was something about his smarmy grin and the cocky, yet insecure way he always had to draw attention to himself that was mildly disgusting. It was as if he expected every girl to throw herself at his feet just because he had sandy blond surfer hair and was our soccer team's best attacker.

“Driving home from school,” I said, embarrassed
to have been caught spying.

Jackson grinned. “Kind of out of your way, isn't it?”

I gripped the steering wheel. In my peripheral vision, I could see that Kate, Allie, and Cheyenne had gathered in a clump of perfection and were peering at us curiously.

“Gotta go,” I said, shifting into drive.

“If you're looking for him, forget it,” Jackson said. “Word is, he's on house arrest. Not allowed to see anyone . . . even you, freak.”

“I wasn't looking—”

“Don't start. We know that's why you're here.” He stepped back, but still held on to my car door. “I'd ask you to join us, but turns out no one wants you around, Lily Graves. You're like the Grim Reaper, man, giving everyone the creeps with your witchy wardrobe.” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers.

The trio of TNs stifled their laughter.

I stepped slowly on the gas and, after a fleeting fantasy of driving over Jackson's feet, headed down the street. In my rearview, I could see Kate, Allie, and Cheyenne burst into hysterics.

Three girls were spotted coming out of Erin's house on Saturday night, according to the police report.

Kate. Allie. Cheyenne.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

I
t was after five when Mom and her assistant, Manny, returned from the autopsy with Erin in the back of our hearse. It beeped slowly down the incline in reverse and stopped. Mom emerged, looking frazzled, while Manny proceeded to the rear, flipped open the latch, and removed the gurney.

My gaze fell to the black vinyl body bag. That was all that was left of Erin. Bones and rotting flesh. Mom and I stood side by side quietly while Manny rolled the gurney through the garage door and into our peach-colored prep room, where that night Boo would perform her magic. With my assistance.

“Do you have a moment?” Mom asked, gingerly
pulling off her leather gloves finger by finger. “I'd like to have a talk.”

This was more of a command than a request.

We headed upstairs and down the blue-carpeted hall, with its creamy walls and framed paintings of pastoral landscapes, along with a zillion boxes of tissues. Though our rooms were designed to induce calm, I was feeling anything but.

She ushered me into her office, the pretend one for meeting with clients, not the real one upstairs loaded with files and her computer. This room was all tidy tranquility. The air was scented with lavender and a sound machine emitted white noise to mask the sound of weeping clients. Two green leather chairs faced a mahogany desk, above which hung a framed photo of five-year-old me, smiling gap-toothed between Aunt Boo and a young version of my mother, our hands positioned protectively on the shoulders of Oma.

Mom took her usual position behind the desk. “We have a problem.”

“I gathered as much,” I said, perching on the chair across from her.

“Bob would like you to come down to the station and undergo a buccal smear.”

She could not be serious. A buccal smear was where they swabbed the inside of your cheek to get a sample
of your DNA. You didn't have to watch as many true-crime shows as Sara did to know that much.

“I'm not happy about it,” Mom continued. “Needless to say, Bob and I have differing opinions, but he has finally managed to convince me that this is for your own good, and he's promised that this will be the end of your involvement in Erin's case.”

I said, “Case? What case? Erin committed suicide, end of story, right?” Since Mom had no idea that I'd snooped in her upstairs office, I had to play dumb.

She exhaled through her teeth. “Not exactly. Now, I know this is upsetting, but it seems there is evidence that Erin was, well, I guess the only right word is . . .
murdered
.”

I popped my eyes wide in feigned disbelief. “No way! That's awful!”

Mom did a calming-motion thing with her hands. “Try not to panic, Lily. You're perfectly safe. Bob says the police have a suspect on their radar, and they won't let him out of their sight until he's arrested.”

This was why I was panicked. I perked up. “Tell me it's not someone from school.”

“I can't say who it is, but you'll just have to trust me for now that everything's under control.”

“Then why do the police need to do that swab thingy if they already have a suspect?”

Mom began tidying the desk, rearranging the stapler and magnetic paper clip holder with her usual OCD efficiency, a sure sign that this was driving her crazy. “The way Bob explained it was that if Erin fought off her attacker then his DNA might be under her nails, and they needed to separate it from yours.”

“Oh.” I deconstructed what Mom said, looking for clues. “So they think it was definitely a guy who did it.”

My mother shrugged. “Supposedly, a neighbor saw Erin in an argument with a boy on Saturday night and . . . How come you're not more surprised? I thought for sure you'd be shocked that Erin didn't commit suicide.”

“I am. I am!” I brought my hand to my chest to emphasize my ignorance. “It just hasn't sunk in yet.”

Mom knit her brows, reflecting on this explanation. “At any rate, it would be best if you didn't announce this to the world, including Sara. And definitely not to Matt Houser.”

“I get Sara, but why not Matt?”

“I have no idea,” she said, her elbow accidentally bumping the stapler to the floor. “Anyway, the best thing for you to do is to let the police handle it, sweetie.” She leaned over to pick up the stapler and resurfaced with the complexion of a tomato. “Let it go.”

How could I let go of something so nightmarish as
a nice guy being framed for a murder he didn't commit? “But—”

“No buts,” Mom said firmly. “Stay out of it and that's that.”

We stared at each other across her desk, and not for the first time I wondered what had happened to this woman.

When I was little, Mom was my own personal goddess. I would imitate her every move, the way she graciously listened and never interrupted our overwrought clients, the discreet manner in which she averted her gaze when grieving families erupted into tears or arguments, often simultaneously. Everyone called me Mini Ruth.

That was fine as long as I played by her rules. But in middle school, when I started dressing the way I wanted, in sweeping black lace and dyed hair to match, Mom got all agitated. She became even more uptight when she found under my bed the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, along with several mortuary catalogs, dog-eared to beautiful urns and caskets I particularly admired.

“This is not normal,” she'd murmur, tracing the lines on my neck where I'd outlined the crucial embalming veins in red Sharpie.

I found that kind of ironic, since I clearly remembered her doing the same to her own body when she
was in community college studying for the mortuary science degree she needed to run the funeral home after my father died.

Besides, I figured she'd have been thrilled that her daughter wanted to go into the family business, right? At age eleven I lusted over custom-built, hand-crafted pine caskets from Vermont the way other girls craved Vera Bradley backpacks. At fifteen, I solo-prepped my first body from head to toe, and the corpse looked so alive Boo proclaimed me a “gifted natural.”

Instead, Mom thought I was, as she put it, “acting out.”

“Let me see those scratches again,” she said with a tilt of her chin.

Reluctantly, I showed her my arm. A healthy dose of Neosporin had reduced the menacing red streaks to faint pink swirls. Even so, my arm was swollen ugly and bruised a greenish purple.

She winced. “Is it still painful?”

“You have no idea.” I pulled down my sleeves and tried to ignore the burning pain from even that light friction.

“Speaking of Matt, have you heard from him lately?” Mom asked.

This was turning out to be the million-dollar question. I shook my head.

“Can't say I'm disappointed. Matt is a boy with . . .”—she bit her lower lip—“bad intentions, I think. The more distance between you two, the better.”

But I would never distance myself from Matt. And Mom knew it.

You could tell by the fear in her eyes.

While my mother supervised a wake, I ate a quick dinner of chicken soup and PB and J at the kitchen table, accidentally dotting my calculus homework with sticky purple spots of jam that I tried in vain to erase. Then I washed the dishes and waited for everyone to file out into the crisp October air, chatting amicably as they stepped into their cars and sped off.

It was my job to clear away the coffee cups and cake crumbs afterward, to refresh the tissue boxes and wipe the bathroom sinks and run the carpet sweeper everywhere, from the Serenity to the Eternity parlors, with a stop in between to dust Paradise. Only when those duties were finished was I free to escape to the prep room.

“Hey, Lil!” Boo said, turning off her radio. “Perfect timing. I was just about to come upstairs and get you.”

Boo had come straight from working in the hair
salon, so she was still in her professional clothes: a red faux-leather miniskirt, black fishnet stockings, and fabulous studded suede boots. Her blond hair had been tinted purple at the ends to match the amethyst stud in her nose. It kind of clashed with the red, but I liked that, and the
K
in
Karma
that peeked out from the cleavage of her white blouse.

“I did what I could. It wasn't easy.” Boo waved to Erin, stretched out on the steel table, her autopsy incisions neatly sewed. She was so thoroughly preserved in formaldehyde that her corpse emitted the slightly vinegary smell reminiscent of those fetal pig dissections we did in bio. It burned the insides of my nostrils.

It was odd to see Erin this plasticized and defenseless, her newly washed red hair in a halo around her vacant face, her mouth glued into a pleasant smile. On closer examination, I noticed her inner thighs were riddled with scars, as were her waist and breasts.