Adventures of a Graveyard Girl (A Kait Lenox YA Chick Lit Mystery) (Funeral Crashing)

by Milda Harris

I felt my cheeks turn pink. I wished I could hide my emotions better. This was embarrassing. I hoped Ethan couldn't read me like that yet. I wanted to be cool, sexy, and mysterious to him.

  Leonora frowned, "Just make sure he treats you right. A gentleman should always open your door. And, don't let him kiss you right away. And, make sure you keep him on his toes. Make him work for your affections. And, don't always do what he wants you to - be your own woman."

  "Okay," I said, almost choking on my saliva at the last piece of advice.

  Leonora did have a lot of life experience and she was pretty much telling me to go with my gut on what I did with my life. Currently my gut really did want to solve this murder mystery. Was this life's way of telling me to go for it, despite my promise to Ethan?

  I decided to clarify, to be sure, "So, Leonora, are you saying that you didn't always do what Jacob wanted you to do?"

  Leonora looked at me incredulously, "Goodness no. If I did, we would never have done anything exciting. He was a homebody, always happy to stay at home and read the paper when he wasn't at work. I was the adventurous one and booked vacations for us and forced him to get out and see the world."

  "Didn't he get mad at you, though? Like when he wanted to just stay home?" I asked.

  I wasn't quite sure that investigating a murder was like getting your husband out of his lazy comfort zone and off the couch and into the world, but I was curious now about what Leonora would say. She did have a lot more life experience on the subject than I did.

  Leonora sighed, "Sometimes. But that's the thing about love. He always forgave me, no matter what."

  I nodded, pondering. That was a true enough statement, I thought. If Ethan really like liked me, he'd see that I had to investigate and find out what happened to Madison. I had even dreamt about it. I wanted to help, just like I had wanted to help Ethan find out what happened to his half-sister. It hadn't been all about my crush that time either. I genuinely wanted to make things as right as they could be in this messed up world, by giving the grieving left behind some kind of closure. He'll love me no matter what, I told myself. Or, well, at least like like me, since I didn't exactly know where we stood just yet on the whole love thing or even the dating thing. How did you find that out anyway?

  Chapter 4: Secret Sleuthing

  Feeling immensely lighter at deciding to break my promise to Ethan, for his own good, and to keep us out of a comfortable box, I went straight home from the graveyard, dug out my yearbook and looked up Madison Brown. Even from her photo, it was hard to believe she was dead. She had this contagious smile and lopsided grin, like she was always smiling. She had short brown curly hair that looked like maybe it was permed, but it could have been natural with the help of some hair products. She was a senior this school year, so I didn't really know her and she wasn't in any of my classes, but besides recognizing her name from the night before, I found that she did look familiar for some reason. I stared at her picture, but nothing came to me. I looked at the list of activities under her name, wondering if that might give me a clue. Maybe she was a cheerleader or something, she kind of looked cheer-y.

  Then I saw it. Madison was in a club: Pep Club. The group that had helped decorate the dance last night according to Sarah. I looked at Madison's picture again. It totally fit with that grin of hers, actually, but that's where I knew her. I had idiotically tried to join Pep Club at the beginning of the school year and it had been a total disaster. My dad had drilled it into my head that I needed to start thinking realistically about colleges. My grades were decent. They were nothing like the straight A's Ethan got or anything. Still, I mostly got A's and B's and I was pretty happy and proud of that. Although, I would have done cartwheels if I ever got straight A's. There was always just one class, though, and usually at least two that always prevented that from happening.

  Anyway, I thought Pep Club would be something easy to do, as far as clubs went. I mean, you just went to games and made signs and stuff. It was all about school spirit. I could do that without too much effort. And, I didn't mind the effort of a club or anything. There were just no clubs that I really wanted to join. Still, my dad said I had to join something and so, I decided on Pep Club.

  I knew the cheerleaders, the jocks, and most of the popular kids went to all the games from football to basketball to whatever, but people like Ethan went to all the games too. And, I had already thought he was cute. So, what was wrong with spending a night here or there watching some cute guys play sports and cheering them on? Especially if one of those guys was Ethan?

  It sounded like a good idea at the time, but when I got to the first Pep Club meeting, I found Ariel there. Sarah and Megan were probably there too, but I focused on Ariel. I mean, didn't she have boys to chase or something? How did she have time for Pep Club and shopping too? Still, for her, I guess it was an easy club. She was already cheer-y.

  So, long story short, the day I signed up for Pep Club, I quit. My name was still on the list, though, and I never actually quit, quit. I just never made it to the meetings. I still planned on putting it on my college applications. I did go to the first meeting, after all. I had the rest of the year to attend another one too, to make it really official. Two meetings was enough, right?

  Still, that day proved to be important in terms of my investigation. I remembered Madison pretty well. She was the President of Pep Club. She was super into it too and tried to get all of us potential new people excited and peppy about joining. I've never seen someone so on, unless they were onstage, but this girl was totally all over the place and trying to ramp us up. It would have been a really fun and energetic club meeting too, if Ariel hadn't spent it giving me dirty looks at crashing her club meeting. At one point, I got frustrated enough that I wanted to walk over and tell Ariel off. I didn't know that she was going to be there and the looks were getting super annoying. Not that I was actually going to talk to Ariel and tell her that. I'd let Ariel think that I was trying to follow her or emulate her or something. That was a better revenge. Besides, Ariel would think it anyway. She was narcissistic like that.

  I was sure I had seen Madison in school too, but it was definitely that day in Pep Club that I remembered her from. She had been so full of life. Why would anybody want to kill her? And, why at the Homecoming Dance? There were way more private places to kill someone. Was it a crime of passion instead of a planned and thought out crime? That was something to really consider. It would be way better to go after someone in a dark alley than a crowded dance and it wasn't like girls weren't in and out of the bathroom every few seconds fixing their hair and make-up. I was surprised nobody had seen anything.

  It occurred to me that school on Monday was going to be insane. Madison Brown's murder was going to be the talk of the entire student body. There hadn't been a tragedy like that in my school since I had been there, so it was going to be interesting to see the after effects. I wondered if they were going to close off the bathroom near the gym that they had found her in. I knew I wasn't going to be paying it visits anytime soon. I'd have to find out which stall too and definitely avoid it. I wondered if prom would be cancelled even though it was seven months away. Would Ethan have asked me? I ignored the thought, instead just hoping that Ethan wouldn't still be mad at me by then for breaking my promise to him regarding investigating the murder. It was important that the case be solved, although a prom date when it came time would be nice too.

  I wondered how Madison's friends and family were doing. I felt really bad for them. I knew how big of a hole a loss like that could be, especially when it came so unexpectedly and totally blew your world apart. I opened a window on the internet and logged onto Facebook. I hadn't been friends with Madison, but her profile was public so I was able to check it out without a problem. Her wall was filled with posts from grieving friends. I read through them one by one. Madison sounded like an amazing girl. She seemed like the real deal - smart, nice, peppy, and she had tons of friends. I almost wished I had decided to stay in Pep Club an
d gotten to know her. Then I reminded myself that doing so would have meant a lot of quality time with Ariel making posters and going to games and I knew it would never have happened.

  From Madison's Facebook page I garnered a few tidbits about her: She was a big fan of Lady Gaga. She kept posting lyrics from her songs as her status updates. Her favorite movie was The Notebook because it made her cry. On an opposite note, she was a huge sports fan. It looked like she even took part in a fantasy football league, which was so not in type with how she looked. Still, guys probably thought it was super hot. And, Madison loved, loved, loved the Pep Club. There were tons of pictures of her at games, making posters, and cheering her heart out. She was all about the school spirit.

  I also noted that I knew some of Madison's friends. I didn't know if they were close friends because it was Facebook and Madison might have just added people and well, I didn't know, know them exactly. Like, we weren't friends, but they were in some of my classes and in my grade, so I knew of them even if we never really talked. I wondered if I should start by talking to them, to get more of an idea about her and who might have had reason to kill her. Then it occurred to me that I might weird them out by doing that. I had never spoken to them before this and the first thing I did when I finally talked to them, was talk about a murder. Yeah, they might legitimately think it was weird.

  I opened a window outside of Facebook and googled Madison Brown's name to see if there had been an obituary posted. It was already online, including the date, time, and location of the wake and funeral. That had happened fast.

  Madison Brown, 18, died Saturday. She was an honor student at Palos High School. Her motto in life was to live life to its fullest. She always did and will be sorely missed. She is survived by her parents Jennifer and Kevin Brown and her sister, Lana Brown. The wake will be held on Friday from 3-9 pm at Palos Funeral Home. The funeral is Saturday at 10 am.

  It was so sad, but at the same time I was surprised. I thought maybe they'd keep the body a little longer to do forensics stuff. Then again, we were in a small Illinois suburb. They probably didn't have a forensics unit. Maybe I watched too much CSI. Actually, I almost felt sorry for Detective Dixon. He was probably buried in paperwork after this sudden jump in the city's murder rate in the last couple of months.

  Still, Madison wasn't being buried until late in the week. The police must be holding the body for forensic evidence or something. Usually, people got the funeral over with quicker than that for the simple fact, that you had to get it over with, in order to start moving on with your grief.

  Actually, I didn't feel the full extent of my grief over my mom until after her funeral. It hit me a couple of days after and I couldn't get out of bed. At that point, my dad wanted to take me to the doctor and get me on antidepressants, so I dragged myself out of bed and went to school. I'm not a big fan of pills and in my opinion I kind of had a reason to be sad, you know? I was pretty okay after that. Especially after I started funeral crashing and visiting my mom at the graveyard. She kind of found a way back into my life again. What had destroyed me so much after the funeral was that I had thought I lost her entirely, but she was still out there even if it wasn't in exactly the same way.

  I found myself thinking back to the dance. If it was a murder of passion, did Madison have a fight with her killer at the dance? Was it someone Madison knew and was friends with? Maybe it was even one of the people posting a sympathy comment on her Facebook wall? Or was it an enemy, someone that hated her for some reason? I looked back on Madison's Facebook page. She was listed as single. I wondered if she had any exes to worry about or a new potential guy that could have turned killer. I knew how that is he or isn't he my boyfriend thing went, so it was also possible that she wasn't single at all. I mean, I was still listed as single on Facebook, technically, and what were Ethan and I? I hoped I wasn't sabotaging myself on that front.

  I ignored my thoughts of Ethan and pulled a blank notebook out of my desk drawer. I always kept a couple in case I needed one for school to replace the one I had filled up. I was an excessive note taker. It probably wasn't a good thing. I wanted to write everything the teacher said down, which meant I also had a lot to study when it came time to prepare for a test.

  I started writing down the names of Madison's friends. There were over three hundred of them on Facebook. That was a lot of suspects. I stopped. What was I doing? Nobody had asked me to investigate Madison Brown's death and here I was starting to write up a list of potential killers to start crossing suspects off. What was wrong with me? I had almost gotten myself killed investigating the murder of Ethan's half sister. Ethan was totally right. I should stay out of this.

  I felt torn. I wanted to investigate the murder and find out what happened. I knew I didn't get to really talk to Madison that day in Pep Club, but she seemed really cool. She definitely didn't deserve to be murdered. I wanted to find out who did it and who took her life away like that. Maybe she would have become the first female president or something equally as cool and society changing amazing, but now it was never going to happen.

  I thought about my mom. If I could have prevented her death I would have done it in a heartbeat, but cancer was her killer. Madison's parents didn't even have that knowledge. She was just killed by some unnamed person in her high school girl's bathroom during a dance. It wasn't right. Madison deserved justice. And, besides, what if the killer didn't stop with Madison? What if he or she killed someone else? I couldn't let that happen knowing that maybe my investigation could have stopped it from happening.

  I ignored the little voice in my brain that was telling me that I had almost died the last time I had been involved in a murder investigation. The other part of my brain was telling me that there was no way Detective Dixon was going to solve this case without my help. Hey, it had been true the last time.

  I continued with my list of potential killers, throwing out names that didn't seem plausible at all. There were twenty-three names in all that I thought were possibilities from their comments on Madison's wall. They were all guesses, in the thought that Madison was killed by someone she knew, in the heat of the moment. Where did I start? The killer might not even be on my list. I didn't know Madison well enough to know if there were other people that could have found a motive. I didn't even know anyone on the inside, who knew Madison well, that I could easily talk to.

  An idea I didn't like occurred to me. I scanned through the Facebook posts on Madison's wall again. Ariel had quite a few posts on her wall and not just since Madison died. Madison wasn't one of Ariel's best friends like Sarah or Megan because I saw Ariel with those girls all the time, but Madison definitely seemed like a friend of sorts to Ariel, if the following wall banter counted for anything:

  Ariel: Can't wait to mall it up!

  Madison: Pizza!

  Ariel: Salad! You want to fit in the dress right?

  Madison: Only if I can have pizza.

  Ariel: Fine. No pepperoni. And we blot the cheese with a napkin.

  Sounded like they went Homecoming dress shopping together. That's a big deal for a girl, especially one as into looks, clothes, and popularity as Ariel. So, it looked like Ariel and Madison had grown decently close since the start of the school year. They even had some Pep Club pictures together, making posters. I hated to admit it, but Ariel actually looked happy in the photos and like she was having fun. Maybe I just hadn't seen that side of Ariel in a long time. At this point in our relationship when we were together, Ariel usually scowled at me or made fun of me. Neither was pleasant.

  I thought for a moment. Ariel would definitely be the easiest person for me to talk to about Madison, in that I probably could get her to talk to me, if I tried. She did owe me one for roundaboutly introducing her to Troy. I looked through some of the other people who looked to be friends with Madison. Even with going to the dance with Ethan, I was doubtful that they'd open up and talk to me about their friend. I was still the weird girl even if I was dating one of the most popular guys in
school. We were technically dating right? I stopped my brain right there and went back to my original train of thought. Yeah, they'd probably think I was obsessing about their friend because she died or something creepy and weird like that and then they probably wouldn't talk to me about anything significant. It could ruin my investigation entirely if people didn't talk to me at all and the graveyard girl rumors spread like fire again.

  Yeah, Ariel was the lead I'd have to take. Surely, my ex-best friend would take a moment out of her day to talk to me if...if I made her. The question was, would I be able to survive the conversation?

  Chapter 5: Reconnecting

  I suppose I should have called. At the time just showing up at Ariel's house on a Sunday in the late afternoon seemed like a better idea. Ariel wouldn't be able to say no to talking to me (followed by hanging up on me or calling me names and then hanging up on me) and that was right, but what I didn't consider was Ariel's mom answering the front door.

  "Kait? Kait Lenox?" Mrs. Walker said in surprise.

  Mrs. Walker looked the same. I nodded, feeling suddenly nervous. I hadn't considered Ariel's parents. I hadn't seen them in eons and there had never been an official goodbye to them, even though for a period of time, both sets of parents were like my own since Ariel and I spent so much of our time together. What did Mrs. Walker even think of the whole situation? She had to take Ariel's side. Ariel was her daughter.

  So, I was a little shocked when Mrs. Walker's surprise quickly turned to excitement. She was happy to see me. That was actually sort of nice. I found that I was glad to see her too. It really had been too long. Too bad I wasn't sure that Ariel was going to be having the same aw-this-is-a-nice-visit reaction.

  "How are you? What have you been up to? How are your classes? Have you thought about colleges?" Mrs. Walker asked in a breathless rush, like she knew I'd have to leave once Ariel came into the picture and she wanted to get all the questions out in time before then, "I haven't seen you in such a long time. Are you here to see Ariel?"