“Drinking?”
“Well, that, but also . . .”
“Smoking . . . weed?”
“Um.”
I wanted slap her for being so coy. This was not a game. Lives were at stake. “Be specific.”
“It was the kind of weed we did. We didn’t know any better,” she said sheepishly. “Erin was the only one of us who’d smoked before. And Kate, once, at her cousin’s. Me? I never.”
I was lost. “What was so special about this weed?”
“It was powerful, like it had been spiked. It wasn’t our fault. We thought it was Erin’s, but she got it from Alex.”
Alex Bone. I made a fist. I knew Stone Bone was somehow involved.
“As soon as we started smoking it, it was scary. It wasn’t fun the way everyone said it would be. My skin started itching, like I couldn’t stand being in it. I wanted to rip it off—it felt like bugs were underneath.”
I shivered. What kind of pot would make you crawl out of your own skin? “Do you think it had PCP in it? Or, maybe, crack?”
“That’s what Kate and I think,” she said, nodding vehemently. “The thing is, we were so freaked, we left Erin alone, high on that stuff. And the next we heard, she was dead in her bathroom with slit wrists.” Allie scrunched up her face into a wrinkled prune. “We killed her, Lily. I killed her.”
I rewound those last two statements. “Did you just say you left her alone?”
“I know. We shouldn’t have. You don’t have to beat me up any more than I already am.”
“No, what I mean is . . . Alex wasn’t at the party?”
She wiped snot from under her nose. “Alex . . . Bone? Eww, no. We just smoked his weed. We didn’t actually party with him.”
I was so perplexed. Then who was the guy Erin had been seen arguing with? Mrs. Krezky described someone like Matt. But he could have been the older guy pretending to be younger by wearing a Panthers jacket. A thought was making its way into my head no matter how hard I tried to push it out.
There was a knock on the prep room door, followed by Boo asking if I was in there.
“Just chatting,” I said, shooing Allie off the table. “Come on in.”
Allie jumped to the floor and smoothed down her dress. But not even our big, fake smiles could hide our shock at the sight of Perfect Bob, flanked on either side by uniformed and undercover officers wearing rubber gloves and carrying plastic bags.
“They have a search warrant,” Boo said quietly. “There’s nothing I can do to stop them.”
Apparently, Bob had given Mom a heads-up about the search as a courtesy, on the condition that she didn’t tell me and we didn’t try to remove evidence. All Mom had asked in return was for Bob and his force to hold off until the wake was over, which they did—barely.
Allie went home along with the Donohues and the other stragglers. Boo, Mom, Manny, Oma, and I cleaned silently, sweeping up crumbs and doing dishes while police officers trudged up and down the stairs. I didn’t stage a protest until one headed down the hall to my bedroom.
“What’s he . . . ?” I said.
Mom put a finger to her lips. “He has a warrant. My hands are tied.” She went down the hall to check anyway.
“Don’t let them take my laptop,” I called after her. “I still have a paper to write tonight.”
“He’s not going to take your laptop,” Boo said, dumping a dustpan of dirt into the trash.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Erwin told me.”
Who was Erwin?
Oma shook suds off her hands. “Who’s Erwin?”
“Detective Zabriskie.” Boo acted as if this was no big deal. “Of the Pennsylvania State Police.”
“My, my,” Oma teased. “That’s an even higher rank than Ruth’s beau. She’s slumming it with a rinky-dink police chief in comparison.”
Manny laughed. “Undertakers and cops. Just figures. Stiffs like stiffs.”
Boo flung a dishrag at his head, but he ducked, caught it, and tossed it back
Mom returned to the kitchen and placed her hands on her hips. “I can hear you guys on the other side of the house. What’s so funny?”
“Barbara has a boyfriend,” Oma sing-songed. “A statie, and you-oo don’t.”
“Zabriskie?” Mom said. “I saw you two talking. He’s awfully short.”
“Taller than you,” said Boo.
Unfortunately, Bob stepped in just as Boo was accusing Mom of not liking any of the guys she dates. He cleared his throat. “We’re done.”
“What did you take?” Mom coldly.
“Not much. A couple of scalpels . . .”
“My scalpels?” Boo said, incensed. “What am I supposed to use?”
“I promise you’ll get them back,” Bob said. “We just need them for testing. And we wrote down the serial numbers of your embalming fluid.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s part of the investigation, Lily. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”
I didn’t understand why he needed the serial numbers of the embalming fluid until the following day.
But by then, regrettably, it was too late to help Allie Woo.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
SIXTEEN
Can’t pick u up 2 day.
Parents have gone mental
I stared at the message on my phone in bewilderment. Sara had offered to drive me to school every day since the day her license was six months old. This was so bizarre.
Are you skipping? I texted back.
Today. And every day. Cant talk now. GTG
I got dressed in a daze, trying to remember the few instances when Sara and I hadn’t been attached in school. On the rare occasions when she was sick, I barely knew how to function. Lunch was downright intolerable without her. That line about skipping school forever . . . She couldn’t have been serious, right?
Then again, I’d called her the night before to tell her about the search and what Allie said and she didn’t call back. Didn’t text, either. So something definitely was up.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mom asked when I dragged myself to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee.
“Nothing.” I listlessly added some cream.
“If this is nothing, I’d hate to see what something’s like.”
I put the cream back in the refrigerator and shut the door. “Sara just texted me that she can’t pick me up this morning and oh, by the way, she’s not going back to school. Ever.”
Mom put her cup down so hard she spilled some over the edge. “You’re kidding! What’s that about?”
I popped an English muffin in the toaster. “Beats me.”
“Do you think it has to do with the wake?”
“When Carol showed up drunk and started harassing Detective Henderson?”
“Is that what happened?” Mom shook her head. “Ay yi yi. I thought the McMartins didn’t drink alcohol.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
My muffin popped up and I immediately slathered it with butter, despite my mother’s insistence that her vegan spread was a healthier choice. If there was such a thing as vegan kale-almond butter, Mom and Perfect Bob would buy it by the case.
Mom didn’t give my English muffin a second glance, though. She was staring at her manicured pink nails, thinking.
“Might be better if you give Sara some space,” she said quietly. “The family might be having issues.”
“What kind of issues?” I said, biting into the buttery bready goodness.
Mom leaned over and pinched my lips closed. “Grown-up issues. And please, try to remember not to talk with your mouth full.”
With Erin’s funeral scheduled for 11:00 a.m. the next day, Mom couldn’t spare thirty minutes in her busy schedule to drive me to school, though personally I think she derived secret pleasure in making me walk two m
iles to the city bus.
I didn’t actually mind the walk and, begrudgingly, I admitted that my mother’s fanaticism for fresh air and exercise had its benefits. The air was crisp from last night’s snow, and where shadows darkened the sidewalks there were slippery patches. But it was decidedly sunnier, which helped lift my mood as well as improve my ability to notice the silver sedan parked at the bottom of the hill.
It could have been the paranoia that seemed to have seeped into all our pores since Erin’s murder. Sure. It also could have been the same car that had been following Sara and me earlier in the week.
At Elm, I took a chance and crossed at the red, not daring to look back as I heard the crunch of gravel and the distinct squeal of wheels turning in a U-ey. A horn beeped. Twice. I ignored it and cut through the backyard of an old red Victorian house and then down a driveway until I ended up on Laurel.
Safe at last, I tugged my backpack over my shoulder and was about to step off the curb when a blue pickup came careening over the hill and braked to a stop.
Matt leaned across the seat. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you?” I said, gasping. “That was almost a hit-and-run.”
“Don’t be dramatic. Get in,” he said, opening the door. “What were you doing running like a scared chicken?”
I clicked my seat belt. “I was not a scared chicken. Someone was following me.”
“Yeah, me.” He shifted into first, checked his mirror, and shook his head. “It’s never a dull moment with you, Lily.”
“Why were you looking for me, anyway?” I asked as we bumped and bounced down Laurel, a road not famous for its smooth surface.
“Sara called and said I had to pick you up.”
That was a shocker. I didn’t even know she had his number. “Since when did you two become buddies?”
“Since she told me at the wake last night that you met up with Alex Bone.” He wagged a finger. “That dude is bad news. I’ve been doing some checking, Lil. Did you know he served time?”
“He let that drop in the conversation, yes.”
“For assault. He’s violent.”
I stared out the window, debating whether to relay what Allie said about Erin hooking up with an older guy.
“Also, he deals,” Matt said. “Nasty stuff that can mess you up permanently.”
I spun around. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not even weed, what he sells. They’re just regular cigarettes laced with something. Jacks tried one at a party and said he spent the rest of the night on the couch having a conversation—with himself.”
One Jacks was bad enough. “And he got it from Alex?”
“Bought it at the coffee shop. Jacks told me he literally stepped outside of his body and he was like two people. Never wanted to do that again.”
Exactly what Allie had said. We turned the corner to the school, the blue flashing light of the cop car in the distance. “Was it PCP?”
“Have no idea. Whatever it is, it’s called wet.”
At that moment, I had an out-of-body experience of my own. “Stop! Now!”
Matt yanked the wheel to the right and drove off the road. “You okay?”
“No. No, I am absolutely not okay,” I said, gripping my stomach. Oh, this was bad. Really, really bad. “Okay, so, our insurance company has been after us to install a security camera in the prep room.”
“You made me stop to talk insurance?”
“Listen. All the funeral homes are doing it now. You know why? Because there’ve been so many break-ins by kids stealing embalming fluid. And do you know why they’re stealing embalming fluid?” I didn’t wait for his response. “Because it is mostly formalin and formalin is what you need to make wet weed. They soak weed in the stuff, then dry and sell them for huge profits.”
Matt nodded. “And this, I’m guessing, is why they call it wet.”
“I think that’s what Allie, Kate, and Cheyenne were smoking with Erin the night she was murdered.”
He went white. “You’re telling me that Erin, who could barely handle a sip of communion wine, was smoking wet?” He frowned. “Bull.”
“That’s what Allie said. Also, the cops searched our house last night and took down the serial numbers of the embalming fluid.” I realized then that this meant the cops thought I was the supplier. “Like I was in on it.”
“You’ll be okay,” Matt said calmly, stroking my arm. “We’re getting closer to finding out who did this and you know the cops are, too.”
I said, “Yeah. You’re right.”
We were both becoming expert liars.
Matt dropped me off at the bus stop so the cops wouldn’t see us arriving in the same vehicle. It was totally inane, this business of going through the metal detector and being searched, and it didn’t solve anything. The murderer wasn’t going to show up at school with a kit of knives and drugs.
If the murderer had been lost in a formalin-induced psychosis, he might not even have remembered what he did.
This was a perfect example of why I could not exist without Sara. No doubt somewhere in the recesses of her vast knowledge of her cheesy true crimes, there was a case she’d watched about some fool out of his brain on wet, slicing and dicing a person to pieces.
I tried her cell and got no answer. Then I made the mistake of sending her the following text:
Have lead on E’s murder. When can we talk?
Two minutes later, I got this strangely formal response:
Hello, Lily. Dr. Ken and I have decided to suspend Sara’s account. She won’t need it for a while. I’m sure you’ll receive a good old-fashioned letter in the mail explaining all. God bless. Mrs. M.
First off, who texted like that, in complete paragraphs with punctuation and everything? Second off, Sara wouldn’t need a phone for a while? What did that mean? And what was her mother doing reading and replying to her texts?
Homeschooling. Ugh. I bet that’s what the McMartins were planning. Poor Sara, stuck at the kitchen table memorizing psalms or whatever.
After sitting through a particularly grueling calculus class, I made the executive decision to blow off the rest of the day and devote my energy to getting to the bottom of this wet weed business. The cops were obviously barking up the wrong tree if they were raiding Boo’s supplies in an effort to implicate me. And I certainly wasn’t about to let them steamroll Matt and me into some Bonnie-and-Clyde murder rap.
The key, I concluded, was cajoling Kate and her groupies into fessing up to the police, though this was against their selfish interests. College season was upon us, and “I got stoned on wet with my best friend the night she was murdered” was not exactly the dream beginning to an admissions essay.
But I would make them see otherwise. The trick would be to approach them individually, when they would be more vulnerable to suggestion.
As luck would have it, opportunity knocked at noon, when I came down the stairs of the atrium to find Kate Kline with her surgically improved nose in a World Cultures textbook, alone and out of sight, on a couch reserved for seniors.
“Hello,” I said, flopping down next to her. “Long time, no see.”
She was not nearly as delightful as she’d been at the wake. “Buzz off, freak. I have a quiz next period.”
“My, that’s not very friendly.” I peeked over her shoulder. She was reading a passage about Chinese family life. “The Chinese have totally messed up death rituals,” I said. “Do you know if you die single, your family just leaves you at the funeral home because you’re considered worthless? Also, if anything in the color red comes in contact with the body before it’s buried, that person becomes a ghost. They believe ghosts are everywhere.”
Kate lowered her book. “And you wonder why you don’t have more friends.”
“Oh, not that much.” I did a quick scan for her henchwomen. “Where’s your entourage?”
“Skipping school. Where’s your deformed twin?”
I clucked my to
ngue. “You know, you won’t be able to keep up this politically incorrect dialogue once you’re out of Potsdam.”
She went back to reading. “Bye-bye.”
“Though I suppose leaving Potsdam isn’t really happening for you, is it? Considering.”
Kate sighed and said, “All right. I’ll bite. What’s up?”
“I need you to go to the cops,” I said. “And tell them what happened Saturday night.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve already been interviewed by the police.”
“Sure. But I don’t think you told them everything.”
Kate closed her book. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that you, Cheyenne, and Allie were smoking . . .”
“We smoked weed once,” she cut in, checking over her shoulder. “It was just a coincidence that Erin got . . . you know. And what do you care?”
“I care because you weren’t smoking weed. What you were smoking was Alex Bone’s concoction of cigarettes and embalming fluid, which produces a cheap, brain-bending, psychotic high with huge profit margins for Stone Bone Enterprises.”
Kate swallowed. I’d really caught her by surprise with that one. Or so I thought, until she said, “Embalming fluid? That is so gross.”
I shrugged. “Depends what you’re using it for.”
“It wasn’t embalming fluid,” she said with disgust. “The weed was soaked in formaldehyde. Erin brought home a bottle from the hospital. It’s not illegal or anything. You can buy it off the internet.”
“You mean Erin made the wet?”
Kate curled the corner of her lip. “I love how you keep saying ‘wet,’ like this is Breaking Bad. You’re such a nerd, Lily.”
Yes, I thought, but at least I didn’t go around inhaling formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to fifteen different types of cancers. Not that I was about to point this out to Kate, since that would have only been more nerdlike.
“Okay,” I said. “So if it wasn’t illegal, and Erin got it from her summer internship at the hospital and borrowed a bottle of formalin like you borrow paper clips and rubber bands from the office, then you won’t have any problem telling that to the police.”
The Secrets of Lily Graves Page 15
