The Secrets of Lily Graves (14 page)

Then I tossed a handful of Reese's, closed the door, and headed downstairs to see what was up with Boo, since Mom was out with Perfect Bob. Halloween was a guaranteed night off in the funeral biz. No one wants to hold a wake with the doorbell ringing every two seconds.

Boo was bent over Mrs. Dubovsky, slipping flesh-colored contacts under her eyelids so they wouldn't appear sunken. Mrs. Dubovsky was the other first grade teacher, the one I didn't have at Potsdam Elementary. Age had not been kind to her, I thought, assessing her apple-dumpling physique, blue hair, and a permanent frown that Boo was valiantly attempting to prop upward.

“A little help?” Boo lowered the volume on the police scanner and nodded for me to pinch the corner of the mouth while she applied an extra-thick coating of morticians' glue. “You have any Halloween plans tonight?”

“Yeah. I'm meeting up with Matt at the cemetery.”

Boo squeezed the tube so hard, drops of glue sprayed
onto Mrs. Dubovsky's nose. “Shoot!” Fetching a paper towel, she gently wiped it off before it hardened. Then she redid it with painstaking care.

“You are not going to see Matt,” she said. “It's not safe. Everyone was talking about Erin's murder at the salon today, and the general consensus was that the boyfriend did it.”

Ex-boyfriend.
“He didn't.”

“Don't be so sure. You remember Carla Remson? She used to be the school nurse, and she said sometimes football players like Matt suffer concussions that go undiagnosed and turn them violent.”

I lifted my fingers. “Matt is not brain-injured, if that's your theory.” The smile fell. I pinched it up again. “Anyway, I have to see him. There are a whole bunch of questions I need answered and Matt doesn't want to call or text.”

“That right there is alarming.” She squinted at her work, lowering the side I'd been holding so Mrs. D. didn't end up mimicking a demented clown. “I've come around to your mom's view, Lil. The more distance you put between yourself and him, the better.”

This was a new and disappointing development. Until now, Boo had been generally cool about Matt. “What changed your mind?”

“Can't say. Sworn to secrecy.”

“To Mom?”

“Who else?”

“But—”

“No buts. An oath's an oath.” Boo rubbed the excess glue from her fingers. “There. How's that?”

The smile was about one-eighth of an inch higher on the right side, thereby lending a hint of skepticism to Mrs. D's smirk, as if she were still ribbing some poor kid for missing school picture day.

“Excellent. Could not look more like real life.”

I wanted to talk some more about Matt, but apparently rigor had begun and Boo needed my assistance to help arrange Mrs. D's arms into position. This was a bone-breaking job, sometimes literally, and it required all our strength to cross the forearms and arrange the elbows. By the time her hands were peacefully intertwined, my own muscles were sore.

“Pay attention,” Boo said. “I'm going to show you a technique that will save your life. If some guy is attacking you—”

“Are we talking Matt here?”

“Whatever, trip him to the ground if you can, sit on him, and quickly do this.” She took both her thumbs—nails painted in a zebra stripe—and pressed them on either side of Mrs. D.'s windpipe. “You have to do it hard and with force. No wimpy moves. Press with all
your might into the carotid and jugular simultaneously, you know where those are. He'll pass out and you can get away. Now you do it.”

I leaned over Mrs. D., who continued to smile peacefully as I pressed my thumbs into her wrinkled flesh. It was ridiculous.

Over the crackling police scanner, a dispatcher called for Fish and Game to pick up a dead deer by the side of Route 22. Boo shook her head. She despised that squawk box.

“Why does your mother listen to that thing?” She pulled out a scalpel and sliced into Mrs. D.'s neck to search for the very carotid artery I'd just been taught to cinch off.

“Because when Mom hears a ten-seventy-nine, she calls the cops personally and reminds them that she's available for transport.” A 10-79 was code for coroner request. To my mother, that was like money in the bank.

After locating the artery, Boo expertly yanked it up, tugging it once or twice for slack before inserting the needle from the embalming machine. Then she did the same for the vein on the left, linking it with a tube that connected to the drain at the bottom of the stainless steel table. Since Mrs. D. arrived in one piece, the transference of fluids would only be about three hours.

I was shooed out of the room for this part, since formalin, the clear base of embalming fluid, is a known carcinogen and Boo was paranoid about me getting cancer. I didn't even want to think about the latest trend of people soaking pot in the stuff and smoking it for a crazy high. If they had any idea how vile this fluid was, that it could literally rot your body from the inside out, they'd never do it.

“Could you go into my office and get the catalog on my desk?” she said, tying a blue mask around her nose and mouth. “I might as well do some inventory while I'm sitting here keeping Mrs. D. company.”

Boo's office was hardly more than a refurbished closet with a TV, a couple of chairs, and a desk, on top of which lay an empty can of soda and a funeral home catalog open to prep room supplies. Boo had circled in pen a set of dental simulators (“Provides a natural appearance. Flesh-colored.”) and Nev-R-Lead powdered incision heal that she probably used on Erin to fuse the autopsy cuts.

I folded it closed and did a double take. Underneath the catalog, on Boo's desk calendar blotter, was a white form downloaded from the Pennsylvania Health Department's death records section to which only funeral directors and certain public officials had access.

It was a printout of the preliminary confidential death
certificate for Erin Donohue, chock-full of pertinent details.

It noted the reporting person was Mrs. Donohue. The medical examiner had estimated the time of death to be 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, October 28. The cause was still unclear:
Fatal toxicity due to unknown poisons. (Amended report to be filed.) Massive blood loss from lacerations to both wrists as secondary.

I read that again. So my hunch had been correct. Erin hadn't died from her wounds. Those were listed as secondary causes.

But that wasn't what stopped me short. It was the two little words at the top of the next entry.

Pregnant? Yes.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

N
o. Freaking. Way.” Sara's astonished voice blared from the Bluetooth system in Boo's Honda. “The girl who founded the Purity Pact was . . .
pregnant
?”

It was hard to concentrate on the road with her shouting. “I read it in black and white.”

“It's like the world just flipped upside down,” Sara said. “We—or at least
I
—spent an hour this morning being told by Kemple that Erin Donohue was the saint I could never hope to be and . . .”

I checked my rearview. A pair of headlights that had been with me since I pulled out of the driveway was still there. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that it was midnight on a Wednesday in Potsdam
and hardly anyone was up and about at this hour on my side of town.

Maybe I should try to lose him, I thought, taking a sudden right on Cedar Crest just to throw him off.

“. . . that's it for Matt, of course. He's toast.”

I went back to listening to Sarah. “Why?”

“Because
obviously
he's the father. Here's the scenario: He breaks up with Erin Saturday morning. She tells him he can't break up with her because she's preggers and, oh yeah, being super Catholic she won't get an abortion, and just like that there goes his precious freedom so he kills her. It happens all the time.”

“He might not be the father. It could be Alex Bone.”

“You and Alex Bone. Give it up, Lil. Matt was dating her for years. Of course they had sex, Purity Pact or not.”

I took another right on Swaymore and tried not to think about Matt having sex with Erin.

“It's a statistical fact that women are more likely to be victims of domestic homicide when they're pregnant,” Sara said. “There was this episode of
Happily Never After
where this guy from Boston claimed he and his wife were carjacked on their way back from a birthing class when—”

I got to the middle of Swaymore and slowed, waiting. Two seconds later, the headlights rounded the corner.

“Sara,” I cut in breathlessly, “I think I'm being tagged.”

“What?”

“He's been with me since I left home. It didn't bother me until I got to Cedar Crest and noticed he was still on my tail.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the intersection of Swaymore and Easton Ave.”

“You know what you should do? Pull into someone's driveway and let him pass.”

“What if he doesn't?” I said, peering for a driveway that looked fairly deserted.

“Then I'll call 911 on the landline. I'm right here for you. Now, do it!”

Without using my blinker, I swung right and prayed whoever lived there didn't have mean dogs. The car behind me almost stopped dead in the street, then, after a moment's hesitation, took off, squealing around the corner on two tires so loudly that a light went on in the top floor of the house.

“I heard that,” Sara exclaimed. “Was that him?”

“Yeah.” My hands were shaking on the wheel.

I was so nervous I could barely remember how to reverse, accidentally shifting into neutral and almost stalling in my eagerness to get out of there before the car returned or the homeowner came outside. I
couldn't decide which was worse.

“That nearly gave me a heart attack,” I said, breathing deeply and trying to remember how to get to Hillside Cemetery, a hangout I'd been to a thousand times. It was late and I was tired, hungry, and emotionally spent from the rollercoaster week. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping me going, and after the spike from the stalker, it was plummeting fast.

But I could not give up. Not now when the evidence against Matt looked more ominous than ever. I'd been born and raised in Potsdam and I knew how it worked in this two-bit town. Once people got an idea into their heads, they wouldn't let it go.

Which meant even if the police never charged Matt formally, he would always be suspected of murdering Erin and getting away with it. For him, scholarships might be lost. For me, it could be the future of the Ruth B. Graves Funeral Home. Reputation ruled the funeral home industry. And nothing would trash our rep faster than an allegation that I had been Matt's coconspirator.

Not to mention that the real killer would be walking free, preparing to strike again. That scared me more than anything.

“Lily?” Sara asked. “Are you still there?”

“I'm still here,” I said, parking the Honda at
Tip-Top Dry Cleaners across the street from the cemetery. “Just thinking.”

“I wish you'd forget this and go home,” she said wistfully. “It's Halloween at midnight in a cemetery. You know how crazy people get around here.”

I removed the key from the ignition and switched to my phone. “Don't worry. Matt will be waiting for me.”

“Exactly.”

After we hung up, I sat in the car, rubbing my sweaty palms on my jeans, trying to get my heartbeat to slow. Weapons. That was what I needed. Something I could use to defend myself, since I wasn't too sure about that move Boo had just demonstrated.

Flipping open the glove compartment, I searched past the driver's manual and insurance packet for anything handy. Tire gauge. AAA card. Flare. And then I found it: an aneurysm hook. About the size and weight of a light screwdriver, the sharp angle at its metal end allowed you to puncture flesh and lift out a blood vessel.

“Bless you, Aunt Boo,” I whispered, giving the tool a loving smack.

To add to Boo's awesomeness, I found a fresh can of flesh preserver wedged under the passenger seat. This car was a treasure trove of riches, I thought, deploying
the spray and immediately wishing I hadn't. The fumes were so noxious, I had to open the door for oxygen.

With the aneurysm hook stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans and the can of flesh preserver in the pocket of my fleece hoodie, I dashed across the street to the graveyard, squeezing through the familiar hole in the fence. My sixth sense urged me to do as Sara said: to go home, to flee.

But all the other five told me it was too late.

I'd been spotted.

The figure behind the angel tomb near the top of the hill wasn't a ghost, though local legend had it that a spirit haunted that grave. Spirits were ethereal and white. This one was wearing a Potsdam Panthers athletic jacket, and it looked perfectly solid.

“Matt?” I hissed into the chilly darkness, my breathing heavy as I trudged up the hill, one hand on my aneurysm hook, the other on the can of flesh preserver. “Is that you?”

He disappeared.

“
Matt!
”

Nothing. Now the only sound was the crunching of my boots through leaves. The rose granite gravesite where we used to study was vacant, so I headed farther up toward the woods—toward our tomb. After all, that's where he said be, right?

“Right,” I answered out loud, to no one.

Wind rattled the bare branches over my head as a figure stepped out from behind a stone obelisk, his face an unreal white. I stopped, my heart doing a two-step when he began to trudge purposefully in my direction.

A fluttering erupting in my chest. “Don't mess, Matt.”

The approaching figure said nothing, which freaked me out even more. I felt like I was the dumb blonde in a teen slasher movie, which was not a comforting thought.