The Secrets of Lily Graves

by Strohmeyer, Sarah

  “Because it’s not cool to spread personal information that you got from a confidential death certificate. I’m surprised you’re not more worried about the legal ramifications, Lil. You could get in serious trouble.”

  Sara was right. She usually was whenever it came to legal stuff. “I guess finding a murderer was more important than obeying the law.”

  She pushed open the door, clearly dismayed by my lack of respect for bureaucratic protocol.

  The temperature must have dropped ten degrees while we were in the café. The long sleeves of my knit dress felt flimsy in a breeze that was almost wintry in its sharpness. Sara found a small wrought iron table in the corner and rubbed her good hand over her bad arm, though she had on a warm baby-blue cashmere turtleneck.

  “Feels like it’s going to snow,” she said loudly, to attract Alex’s attention. “Wish I had your coat.”

  Alex did not look up from his writing or offer his coat, which was draped artistically over his shoulders. We brushed dead leaves off our chairs and positioned ourselves so that I had a good view of him while appearing to watch the foot traffic parading on the cross street. He scribbled madly, occasionally crossing out words with violent strokes, pausing now and then to sip his coffee or puff on his cigarette.

  “Cough, cough!” Sara made a big production of faking an asthma attack. “Can you believe people still smoke in this day and age?” She waved her hand back and forth. “Cancer much?”

  Alex calmly placed his pen on the tablet and rotated in his chair. “It’s a free country. If you don’t like it, may I suggest you find somewhere else to sit?” He trailed his fingers toward the door. “Perhaps inside, from whence my kind has been banished.”

  Tam appeared with our pumpkin hot chocolates and, sensing the tension, cautioned Alex with a scolding glare. “Now, now, Al,” she said, placing our cups on the table. “Let’s play nice with Sara and Lily.”

  He must not have seen me before because as soon as Tam said my name, he got all excited, as if we were long, lost friends. “Lily Graves? Hey, how are you?”

  “Um, hi, Alex.” I smiled as Sara stifled a laugh with a gulp of hot chocolate.

  His eyes were so red, they almost glowed. “You know, when I was at that pit called Potsdam High, you were the only one I thought might be able to understand my interests, seeing as how you too were mocked and ridiculed for yearning to be among the dead.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “I don’t know if I yearned to be among the dead, exactly. Since I live in a funeral home, the dead pretty much come with the territory.”

  Sara put down her cup. “You love the dead!” She cut her eyes to Alex, a cue to play along.

  “Oh, the dead. Yes, I suppose that’s why I’m having such a hard time dealing with Erin Donohue’s murder, because I know—as do you, I’m sure, Alex—how death is so . . . permanent.”

  “What a segue.” Sara kicked me under the table so hard I nearly let out a yelp.

  Alex stubbed out his cigarette. “It’s especially hard for me, because not many people are aware of this, but Erin and I were very close.”

  “Really?” Sara said, resting her cheeks on two fingers. “How close?”

  I kicked her back. She blinked, but otherwise acted as if she were hanging on his every word.

  “So close, that . . .” He shook out a cigarette from his pack and lit it with a pink Bic. Then he exhaled and went on. “. . . I think I know who killed her.”

  “You do?” I said. “Wow.”

  Alex played with the silver lip ring at the corner of his mouth, debating, I supposed, whether to divulge this nugget of info. “I must explain my relationship with Erin.” He took another drag. “She used to come into the café every morning in her prissy clothes with not a hair out of place and ask for a chai soy latte, no sugar. Just another Potsdam homecoming queen wannabe, right?”

  I said, “Sara and I call them the Tragically Normals.”

  He extended his cigarette. “Tragically Normal. I like that. Anyway, one day she came in clutching a volume of Emily Dickinson, and when I handed her the usual chai soy latte, no sugar, I said, ‘Oh. I could not stop for Death, so Death kindly stopped for me.’”

  I dared not look at Sara for fear of cracking up.

  “That started a conversation about poetry, and the next thing I knew, we were out here at this very table . . .” He gestured casually to where he’d been sitting. “. . . talking about poetry and books as if we’d just learned how to really breathe.”

  Sara raised a questioning eyebrow. “Even with all that smoking?”

  Alex clasped his hands to his chest. “You have no idea how refreshing it was to meet a true fellow intellectual. There was just one obstacle. While I had managed to free myself from most institutions, Erin was still very much confined.”

  “What do you mean by ‘institutions’?” I asked. “Like prison?”

  Sara was going to kick me for that, too, but I blocked her with my foot.

  “Actually, I have done some time behind bars,” Alex said with a bow. “However, I’m referring to the other institutions that drain our creativity—school, church, family.”

  “I hear that!” Sara said. raising her hand. “School, church, family. Welcome to my prisons.”

  “See?” Alex said. “For Erin, too. There was so much pressure on that girl to compensate for other people’s failings by being the best at everything.” He ticked off on his long, spidery fingers: “The best at academics. At athletics. At volunteering. Along with being the best daughter, girlfriend, and, though this is an oxymoron in my opinion, she was even the perfect virgin.”

  Alex may have been a skeeve, but he was raising interesting points. I’d honestly never stopped to consider the pressure Erin had been under or how she dealt with all those expectations of perfection.

  “So how did you help?” Sara asked.

  “I gave her permission to break her bonds. I told her she didn’t have to be her parents’ puppet, that rules were meant to be broken early and often.” Then he leaned close and whispered, “And I got her a little weed.”

  The dude wasn’t called Stone Bone for nothing.

  Sara leaned back, hiding her bad arm under her good one. “How did Erin take it?”

  “Like a fish to water.”

  The door opened again, and this time Tam was more than curious about Alex. She was downright pissed. “You were supposed to be back on duty ten minutes ago. You’re not the only one who needs a break, you know.”

  Alex ground his cigarette under the heel of his boot and got up from his chair, swinging the duster like a matador with a cape. “Been nice chatting with you ladies,” he said, closing his notebook. “Next time you stop in, the coffee’s on me.”

  Tam untied her green apron and handed it to him. “Here. It’s the only clean one left.”

  “Wait,” I said, just remembering. “You never told us who you think killed Erin.”

  He pulled his head through the loop of the apron. “Think about it. Who was on her case? Who was mad that she was experimenting with freedom? Who found her body?” He shrugged. “Obviously, it was her parents.”

  “Whoa,” Sara said, when he’d gone. “Talk about intense.”

  Tam took his seat and elbowed his cup aside. “Alex isn’t that intense, just stoned twenty-four-seven. He’s like one of those guys from the antidrug commercials. Lots of big talk and no action. Look. He’s supposed to bus the tables and he leaves his own cup.”

  She was about to pick it up when I practically leaped from my chair and threw myself onto the table. “Do you mind?” I said. “I’ll pay you for the cup, but I’d like to take it with me.”

  Tam made a face. “Why?”

  “It’s complicated, but I have my reasons.”

  After we gave Tam a tenner for the cup, I slipped a napkin under the handle and dumped the contents in a planter, putting it securely in my bag. Sara and I left the patio and went back to her car without detouring through the
café.

  “So,” Sara said, as we drove off. “Do you think Alex is the baby daddy?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “Any guy who notices if a girl’s clothes are prissy or if she has a hair out of place, isn’t interested in the opposite sex.”

  “Then they were just friends like he said.”

  “Or something else.” I checked my bag to make sure the cup was in one piece. “At any rate, we’ll find out soon just how close they really were.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  FOURTEEN

  Mom was in such a tizzy when I got home that she didn’t even notice I was late.

  Snow was forecast. Not a lot, just a few flurries, but enough of a nuisance that if the line for Erin’s wake stretched from our front door to the outside, as we expected, people would be griping about how Riccoli and Sons had done a much better job of handling the mayor’s calling hours last year.

  I hid my bag in the locked hall closet so I’d have it at the ready if I got a moment alone with Perfect Bob. In the three years Mom and Bob had been dating, I couldn’t think of a time I’d ever wanted to get him alone. But now there was no one I wanted to speak to more.

  Besides Matt.

  “There’s no use in worrying about the weather,” Oma said soothingly as my mother anxiously watched our retrieval guy, Manny, tack an awning above our walkway. “We’ll get a few space heaters, some blankets, and I’ll make hot chocolate.”

  “Sounds more like a tailgate party than a wake,” chimed in Boo, who was at the kitchen table, high heels on the chair, folding pale-lavender memorial cards. “I say let them suffer. A teenager was murdered, for Chrissake. No one’s going to grumble about a little snow when you’ve got two devastated parents barely able to stand.”

  Boo was right. When tragedy struck, people wanted to suffer—as long as they didn’t have to suffer too much.

  “I’m with Auntie on this one,” I said, inspecting one of the memorial cards. It featured a photo of Erin smiling in her prom dress. Below, her name appeared in raised silver print.

  ERIN ANNE DONOHUE

  MAY 1, 1995–OCTOBER 28, 2012

  A LIFE THAT TOUCHES OTHERS GOES ON FOREVER . . .

  It especially goes on forever when that life touches you with sharpened stiletto nails, I thought, massaging my itchy scars.

  Mom turned away from the window and, as if just noticing I’d arrived, said, “Did you get the folding chairs out of storage and set them up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Get on it, then. We need fifty in both Paradise and Eternity. Check to make sure the displays Kate Kline and Allie Woo set up are in the right places. Is that what you’re wearing tonight?”

  How did she do that? Nagging without stopping to breathe.

  “I look fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “No, you don’t. You look inappropriate.”

  “Ruuuuuth,” Boo cautioned, keeping her focus on the memorial cards. “Let it go. Lily is meeting you halfway.”

  Seriously. Compared to Boo or even my regular wardrobe, I was fairly conservative. No corsets or ominous heavy crosses. Just a plain scoop-neck gray sweater—tight-fitting, sure, but what wasn’t in my wardrobe?—and a ruffled black lace skirt. I’d even toned down the eyeliner so it was less Sharpie, more Bic fine point.

  Mom straightened her posture. “With all due respect, Barbara, I know how to raise my daughter and run this business. The Donohues are going through hell, and the last thing they need is my child directing all the attention to herself.”

  I was so not directing attention to myself.

  Boo eyed Mom knowingly. “The Donohues are in a blur of grief. They’ll never remember what Lily wears. You’re just worried about what the cops will think.”

  I said, “You mean Perfect Bob.”

  “No,” Boo said, tidying the stack of memorial cards. “I mean cops. After the wake tonight, the place is going to be . . .”

  “Ahem.” Mom cut her off. “We’ll discuss that later.”

  Behind her, Boo pantomimed a slice through her throat.

  I decided to get those chairs.

  The Eternity parlor was our biggest room. It connected to Serenity via a field of dirt-defying speckled beige carpet, which led to the more secluded Paradise. Paradise was smaller, with only one bay window shielded by the frilly dove-white satin curtains found in every mortician’s catalog. It smelled permanently of lemon Pledge.

  This was where the family would stand, tissues wadded in hands, to nod in polite gratitude while mourner after mourner somberly recounted some bittersweet story from Erin’s past—how she once babysat their kids and taught them how to weave God’s eyes with Popsicle sticks, how she always wore a sweet smile and was so pretty, so very pretty. And bright, too!

  Students, friends, and awkward teenagers of whom their daughter had never spoken would claim to have had a close personal bond. If I were in the receiving line, I would wonder which of the hands I shook had killed Erin.

  Call it a hunch, a sixth sense from having spent my life in a funeral home, but I knew the killer would be here. Because he knew that if he didn’t show, that in itself would appear suspicious.

  After setting up the chairs in Eternity and Paradise, I was lugging some more into Serenity when I almost stumbled upon the mahogany casket and froze.

  It was closed, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the last time Erin and I were alone was Saturday in the graveyard when we had our fight. I couldn’t help but feel that there was unfinished business between us and that somehow she had managed to wreak more revenge on me while she was dead than when she was alive.

  Okay, no, I told myself, arranging the chairs. Boo might have claimed she “sensed” the spirits of the dead when she worked late at night down in the prep room, but I’d never had that experience, and if I did, I would pack up and move to Sara’s.

  Flipping on the lights, I cranked the dimmers to full brightness so I could see what Allie and Kate had tacked to the easel they’d set up for Erin. There was a framed baby photo of Erin in the bath, bubbles on her head shaped into a crown. In a white dress and veil for her first communion. As a Girl Scout selling cookies. On a nearby table, they placed one of her championship trophies, her medal as a member of Model UN last spring in Harrisburg, and a sepia-toned Instagram picture of Matt and her at the junior prom. Erin was in a skimpy pink dress, Matt gazing at her with absolute adoration.

  I was thinking Allie and Kate did a lovely job when the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Slowly, I repositioned the photo of Matt and Erin and turned.

  His wire frames glinted under the light as he approached the table, our ancient floorboards squeaking under his footsteps. Detective Zabriskie from the Pennsylvania State Police, Homicide Division, at my service.

  “Lovely couple,” he said, picking up the prom photo for a closer look. “Her mother tells me they were going to get married someday.” Putting it down, he stressed, “Were.”

  There was so much he didn’t know, it would be laughable—if Matt’s innocence weren’t at stake.

  “Calling hours aren’t until seven,” I said, setting a vase of white lilies nearby so the flowers bent gracefully.

  “Guess I’m early, then.” He positioned the photo next to Erin’s favorite doll from her childhood, a worn teddy bear in a plaid skirt. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Just the other day she was a baby, the apple of her parents’ eyes.” He ran his fingers over her baptismal gown, white with a lace bonnet. “And then some selfish bastard decides it’s within his right to take her life just because she got in the way of what he wanted.”

  I batted my eyes, amazed that a man with his training could be so daft. “Can I help you, Detective Zabriskie?” I asked, flicking off a dead leaf that had fallen from one of the flower arrangements. “Because if not, I have some homework to do befor
e the wake.”

  He strolled over to the casket and, without so much as a by-your-leave, lifted the lid. Erin was there, just as we’d left her on Monday night, eyes closed and sleeping blissfully. If Zabriskie was gambling that the sight of her would be a shock, he was mistaken. I’d probably seen more corpses in my seventeen years than he’d seen in his lifetime.

  “We received a tip that you and Matt Houser were in the cemetery last night.”

  “Oh?” Where did he get that?

  “You mind telling me what you two were up to?” he asked, swiveling away from Erin.

  “Detective Zabriskie,” I replied calmly. “I’m not a cop, and I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but you’re wasting your time on Matt and me. We didn’t kill Erin. I didn’t kill Erin. Matt didn’t kill Erin. Whoever did is laughing himself silly that you’re focusing on us when you should be focusing on him.”

  The corner of Zabriskie’s mouth twisted. “Then I’ll take that as a yes, you do mind telling me what you were up to.”

  Forget it. I couldn’t win. “How about a compromise? I’ll give you some info if you give me some info.”

  Zabriskie squinted. “Depending on the intelligence, it’s a deal.”

  “Okay. Stay right there.” I went around the corner and down the hall to the coat closet, opening it with a key we kept under the vase on a side table. I passed through the kitchen to get a ziplock bag, ignoring my mother’s hysterical shrieks about whether I’d set up the stupid chairs, and returned to Serenity.

  “Here,” I said, slipping a pen under the handle of the cup and transferring it to the ziplock bag. “Compare the prints on this to the prints you found at Erin’s house. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  Zabriskie pinched the bag at one corner. “What is this?”

  “A cup that was used earlier today by one Alex Bone, aka Stone Bone. He’s a barista at Pots and Cups and a ‘friend’”—I put friend in air quotes—“of Erin’s. He is also one weird dude.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Miss Graves, but Mr. Bone has an alibi for that night.”