“You could teach those professors a thing or two,” Boo often said. She was probably right. I highly doubted that most of the esteemed staff of CVCC had read the Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying from beginning to end or that, by age eight, they had learned never to use the femoral artery as a point of injection for embalming fluid when the cadaver was obese. Always go with the carotid if possible. Always.
Unfortunately, Kemple’s reptilian brain was too unevolved to grasp the complex logic behind my skipping, and I soon accumulated enough detentions to equal a suspension. I stood my ground—I was going to study what I wanted, when I wanted, and if Kemple had a problem with my “nontraditional” approach to education, then he could kick me out.
He never did. At least, not until I looked up from my chapter on chicken blood potions to see a pair of pale, watery eyes glaring at me over his bifocals.
“There are two gentlemen waiting for you in my office,” Kemple’s doughy lips mouthed. “I’d like you to come with me.”
There was nothing to be had in telling Herr Kemple that I was simply performing my civic duty by talking to the cops. He wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.
“So sad about Erin,” I said, scurrying after him as we proceeded down the hall.
Kemple said nothing. Nice.
We entered the school office, where even the normally friendly secretary, Mrs. Foy, avoided eye contact as I passed by on my way to Kemple’s private quarters. Inside his office, two uniformed police officers rose to attention with lots of crackling leather.
I recognized the chinless one from that morning’s security detail. Kemple introduced him as Officer Wohotek; the other was Officer Delray. He tipped his hat politely. I assumed he would be playing the role of good cop.
“I’m going to nip out and check where they are,” Kemple said, making a quiet exit.
I wanted to ask who he was checking on, but Officer Wohotek said, “So who are you supposed to be?”
I stared at him blankly.
Delray translated. “Like, who are you being for Halloween?” He waved to my attire. “A vampiress or something?”
“Oh. No.” I studied my black lace, having temporarily forgotten that to some people this was not considered normal school wear. “Halloween’s tomorrow. This is how I always dress.”
Wohotek cracked his knuckles, and Delray said, “Takes all kinds.”
After two minutes of awkward standing around, Kemple popped his head in the door. “They’re ready.”
“Shall we?” Delray asked, placing his hand lightly on my upper left arm while Wohotek secured my right. Then they guided me out the door, and it hit me too late that I had been suckered into an impromptu walk of shame.
But it wasn’t until I spied Jackson at the end of the hall in his goofy out-of-season plaid shorts and Adidas sandals that I understood I’d been conned. Next to Jackson was Matt, texting on his phone.
At the sight of him, my feet stopped and my blood froze. All this time wondering how he was, what he was thinking, if it was true he hated me or if that had been just another of Kate Kline’s lies. And there he was, within reach.
Jackson nudged Matt, who looked up from his phone and met my gaze, his entire demeanor instantly changing from bored to alert. He seemed surprised and relieved, but also something else: angry.
Wohotek and Delray pulled me forward, but I resisted. If Matt so much as swore, he’d be playing right into their hands. Clearly, Kemple had arranged for him to see me in police custody in an attempt to elicit a reaction, hopefully one that might lead to admission of guilt or, better, a false confession.
We’d been set up.
“Hey!” Matt said. “What’s going on? Where are they taking you?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to smile so he wouldn’t worry.
“Doesn’t look like nothing.” He confronted Wohotek. “You can’t just haul her away. She’s didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That’s for the law to decide,” Wohotek said.
At that, Matt lunged toward them like he was on the football field. Delray yanked me away and Wohotek blocked him with a stiff arm. “Hold on there, son. You wouldn’t want to do something you’ll regret later.”
Jackson yelled, “Dude, what are you doing? Are you nuts? You don’t mess with the cops over a girl. Let it go.”
“Like hell.” Matt refused to budge and stood there, ready to bust through Wohotek. “You guys need to back off!”
My heart pretty much snapped in two then.
I said, “Seriously, Matt, it’s fine.”
But my words were lost in the melee that followed. Kemple, Jackson, and Mr. Quinn, the athletic director, who seemed to have miraculously emerged from nowhere, swarmed on Matt and pinned him to the wall while Delray ushered me into the school lobby.
I didn’t have to look back to know he was watching, just as I didn’t have to ask if he still cared.
He did.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
EIGHT
The buccal smear turned out to be fairly tolerable. A female officer brought me into a back room, where they scanned fingerprints and made me sign a bunch of forms saying I was doing this willingly. Then she ripped open a sealed plastic bag and, with latex gloves, removed a long-handled Q-tip that was swiped along the inside of my cheek. She did that three more times, deposited the swabs in tubes, and we were done.
Mom was there to cosign the paperwork since I was a minor. And Perfect Bob tried to put me at ease in his dorky Boy Scout way by praising me for being a “good girl” and saying how the police department’s work would be cut in half if everyone was so cooperative.
“Don’t forget that Lily and Erin were friends,” Mom said, which the three of us knew was a lie. Bob had been there the night I got back from the graveyard. He saw.
And he didn’t forget.
“Would you be willing to give a statement about what happened that evening?” Bob asked, handing me a stick of Trident to remove the cotton-mouth sensation. “We sure could use any assistance you could provide.”
I was tempted to ask what the consequences would be if I refused, but there was Mom wringing her hands anxiously, so I said, “Okay.”
We were ushered into another room, this one obviously reserved for questioning. It wasn’t cinderblock like on Sara’s Investigation Discovery reenactments, but the floor was concrete and the heavy wooden chairs were worn. It smelled of ground-in coffee and stale cigarettes from back in the day when smoking was allowed. To add to its whimsical charm, the walls had been painted a bilious yellow with pictures of the governor and the president above the state seal of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
On the other wall was the two-way mirror.
Due to a glaring conflict of interest, Bob couldn’t take my statement. That was the duty of one Detective Joseph Henderson. As in Henderson from the fax I shouldn’t have seen. I practically blushed when he entered the room, as if I’d been caught snooping in his underwear drawer.
Bob said, “Take it easy on her, Joe. She’s a friend.”
Mom couldn’t help smiling a little when Bob left on some pretense of having to prepare for a press conference, though I’d have bet my last dollar on him observing from the two-way.
Henderson was a short, squat, potbellied man who made an admirable effort of upholding the poor fashion sense of plainclothes cops. The brown polyester tie with blue dots didn’t even make sense with his red-and-blue-striped shirt or the tweed jacket. It was probably a tie he kept in a permanent knot and hung on his office door for fieldwork and office parties.
The three of us took our places, with me at the head of the table and Henderson across from Mom. He asked how the smear went and said that it would drive him nuts to have cotton in his mouth. He could barely stand getting that dry-air spritz at the dentist’s.
Mom put her purse in her la
p and clutched it, her complexion paler than usual against the black suit she always wore. “This won’t take long, I hope,” she said, eyeing the fresh set of forms Henderson had produced from a manila folder. “Lily has homework.”
“Oh, no. Nothing major,” he said, shuffling the papers. “We’re just gathering statements.” Turning on his digital recorder, he said, “Lily, you are free to leave at any time. Do you understand?”
Meaning, I wasn’t under arrest. Yet.
The pretense for this meeting was that Henderson simply wanted a statement about what went down with Erin on Saturday evening in the graveyard. And that was how the interview started, but soon he was nosing into my relationship with Erin (“We’ve had our ups and downs”), and then my observations of Erin’s relationship with Matt (“They had their ups and downs”), and finally my relationship with Matt.
Mom let out a sigh. “I knew this was where we were headed,” she said, dismayed. We’d been there for over an hour already.
“Like I stated at the outset, Mrs. Graves, we can stop the questioning at any point,” Henderson said. “You give me the word and we’re through.”
If we stopped the questioning, it would look fishy. It would appear that Matt and I had something to hide when we didn’t.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I just don’t want to get Matt into trouble by accidentally saying something that’ll be misinterpreted.”
“You don’t want to get Matt Houser into trouble, huh?” Henderson’s mouth curled cynically. “Yeah, I can see how you wouldn’t want nothing bad to happen to him.”
From beneath his yellow tablet, he removed another manila file. “Mrs. Graves, what I’m about to show your daughter are crime scene photos. You might want to look away.”
Mom had to bite her lower lip to keep from laughing.
“She was at the crime scene,” I said. “Hell, she did the retrieval.”
“Don’t swear, Lily!” Mom said sharply, but I could tell that she was pleased. Nothing yanked my mother’s chain like a man who dismissed her as a cupcake.
“My apologies. I forgot.” Henderson parted his lips to reveal brown cigar- and coffee-stained teeth. “How about you, Lily? These are very upsetting photos.”
I knew Mom didn’t want it revealed that I helped prep bodies, including Erin’s, because she could lose her license for that, so I played coy. “It might be difficult, but I’ll do my best.”
“Much appreciated.” Henderson opened the file with an overly dramatic arc of the arm and slid out the first photo. He was right. The picture was jarring, even for an experienced dead-person handler like myself.
At first, I couldn’t even make out Erin, there was so much white on white. It was the pink towel rimmed in red blood that served as the focal point, followed by her eyes. They were glassy and open, turned toward the viewer in an expression of pathetic helplessness. Her glorious copper hair was barely visible behind her face, which was alabaster white aside from two dark-red lines of blood streaming from her nostrils.
I swallowed hard and said, “Poor Erin.”
“That’s an understatement.” Henderson showed me the next, a close-up of her arms, each with its identical vertical incisions.
Whoever did this knew what he was doing. The cuts were right through the arteries, no running into bones or tendons. There was an almost surgical precision that would have been impossible to inflict if Erin had been struggling even slightly.
Could someone else have been holding her down? Maybe two other people?
I studied the first photo of the scene. That was another thing. There should have been more blood. But there wasn’t. None on the bathtub or walls. Only in the water, on the towel, and on her upper lip. It took at least fifteen minutes to die from slitting your wrists—an unpleasant, extremely painful way to go—and Erin would have certainly been thrashing.
The human heart is capable of pumping one hundred pounds of blood one mile high, and if there are open vessels around, that blood is going to spray everywhere. The only logical explanation for the pristine white tile walls, therefore, was that Erin’s heart hadn’t been beating when she was cut. Whoever did this to her had killed her first and staged it to make it look like a suicide. Now I understood Henderson’s fax and why he requested the crime lab.
We were dealing with a psychopath.
My gaze fell on the glass of clear liquid upright on the bathroom floor, possibly the same one I read about in the police report faxed to Mom. Might be a clue.
“Are these pictures really necessary?” Mom asked. “I mean, honestly, Lily has already been traumatized as it is.”
“Erin was traumatized, too,” Henderson said, tapping the photos. “So how do you feel about Mr. Houser now?”
I sat back. “Matt had nothing to do with this. He wouldn’t know how to slice through someone’s arms without making a mess. The killer here knew exactly where the radial arteries were hidden in relation to the bone and he wasn’t a millimeter off.”
Henderson raised an eyebrow. “And you do?”
“I’ve read a lot of books on anatomy and embalming. We have them around the house from when Mom was getting her mortuary science degree.”
“Lily’s planning to take over the family business some day,” my mother said proudly.
“Really?” Henderson said. “Okay, Lily, then how about you tell me what you were doing in the early morning hours of October twenty-eighth?”
Mom jumped up. “You promised this wouldn’t be an interrogation.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Henderson was merely wasting my time and taxpayers’ dollars, stupidly targeting Matt and me. But if that was the way he wanted to roll, so be it.
Returning Henderson’s bloodshot gaze with my clear one, I said, “I was in my bedroom watching Netflix on my laptop. Around 1:00 a.m., Mom knocked on my door and told me to go to bed.”
“That’s true,” Mom said, lowering herself into the chair. “I woke up and heard her laughing. The girl keeps the hours of a vampire.”
Henderson checked his digital recorder and jotted a note. “When did you last hear from Matt Houser, Lily?”
“Friday night. By text.”
He nodded to my iPhone resting on the table, muted. “Mind if take a look?”
I scrolled through my phone messages and let him read Matt’s own words in response to my suggestion that he watch my favorite movie, Local Hero.
Ur films suck nothing ever happens in them
b/c u r a moron, I responded. Try expanding your brain. the dude from animal house is cute and he has a little bunny.
that he ate. nice.
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 footb
all, 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 . . .
The Secrets of Lily Graves Page 7
