The Secrets of Lily Graves Page 2

  “You want to know how much to burn a body?” she repeated for our benefit.

  Bob made a face.

  “Um,” Mom continued, “when did your loved one pass?”

  We watched Mom’s expression transform from mild annoyance to downright shock.

  “So, your grandfather hasn’t died yet, but you’re in the ICU and the doctors assure you it will be any time now.” She scribbled doodles on the Post-it. “You’re from out of town and just doing some comparison shopping while you’re here.”

  To Bob’s credit, he flipped the caller the bird.

  “I see,” Mom said, her brown ponytail bobbing with outrage. “Well, then, I suggest you go with Riccoli and Sons. They’re a very reputable funeral home that excels in speedy and affordable cremation.”

  If by “reputable” you mean a twenty-percent markup on everything from obituaries to caskets, I thought, admiring my mother’s ability to sound so gracious when she was actually applying the screw.

  Mom slammed down the phone and fumed. “I know with business slowing I should have taken that, but . . .”

  “You have your ethics,” Bob said, going over to her. “And that’s why I love you, Ruth.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  Normally, Mom and Bob’s PDAs left me mildly nauseous, but I was so grateful the attention had been directed away from Erin and me that I took advantage of the situation to slip away. I figured that as long as I was careful to keep my cuts out of sight, out of mind, the cemetery claw fest would become a nonissue.

  But by then, of course, I’d already dug my grave.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  THREE

  The call that changed everything came the following afternoon while I was crammed into a casket, up to my eyeballs in white eyelet.

  It was one of our more expensive models, solid walnut from the pricey Perpetual line. Oma pronounced it a “real beaut,” with intricate inlay and artistic detailing, all of which was about to be completely undone by a mouse that my grandmother claimed to have seen hiding in one of its padded corners.

  “Lure it out with cheese,” Boo urged, slipping a slim piece of cheddar into my outstretched hand, “and I’ll put a bag over it and take it outside.”

  Boo was a softie when it came to both the dead and the living and rarely left a movie without dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose, even comedies with sappy romantic endings. Upon seeing my cuts, for example, she’d wrapped me in a bear hug and murmured, “Tell me who did this, sweetie, and I’ll get a guy I know to break both his legs.”

  It was strangely comforting, in a mildly violent way.

  Oma found an empty urn and held it over her head. “Well, I for one am not about to stand around waiting for it to crawl up my dress,” she announced. “I’m going on the offensive.” At that very moment, the tiny critter reemerged and scrambled over the toes of her new Anne Klein shoes. Oma didn’t even notice.

  “There it is!” Mom shrieked, hopping onto a stool and pointing hysterically.

  The mouse went for it, dashing across the carpet toward the sanctuary of the curtains.

  “Die! Die! Die!” My tiny grandmother, who was in her seventies and about the size and height of an Oompa Loompa, brought the silver urn down from over her head and tried to smash the mouse. Boo stepped in for the block, the urn bouncing on the carpet and missing the rodent by a mousy gray hair.

  “That was cruel,” Boo said. “It has a right to live, just like everything else.”

  “Eeep! There it is again!” Mom screeched as the creature scuttled out from under our prize blue Potomac coffin, the one no one ever bought because it cost more than $5,000.

  The funeral home phone rang. Mom gingerly stepped off the stool and ran on her tiptoes to her office to get it.

  Oma retrieved the urn and chucked it bowling ball–style. I could have sworn the mouse was a goner.

  “No!” Boo gasped, rushing to scoot the terrified little thing into a paper bag. She finally caught it and went outside to let it free in the garden, while I got out of the casket so Oma could inspect it for mouse poop.

  “Normalcy,” she said, “is far too underrated by you people.”

  I didn’t know if by “you people” she meant teenagers, or Boo and me. I suspected the latter.

  Something made us stop, and we both turned to see Mom, her lips set in a firm line, clutching the phone.

  “Pickup at the Donohues’,” she said flatly.

  Oma covered her mouth. “The father?”

  Mom shook her head slightly. “The girl who’s in Lily’s class.” And then, with a look I’d never seen before, one with so much pain it almost made me afraid, Mom whispered, “I’m sorry, Lily. It’s Erin.”

  “Huh?” I said, my muddled brain assuming Erin was the one who’d called it in.

  “About an hour ago,” Mom said, “her parents came home and found her dead upstairs.”

  My peripheral vision went black as though I’d stepped into a tunnel. Time slowed. My ears rang. Nothing made sense.

  “Not Erin,” I said, feeling confused. Surely, she meant some other Donohue. A different Erin. Obviously, Mom had gotten it wrong.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Mom said again. “This is absolutely horrible.”

  The floor rose up and I teetered. Thinking quickly, my mother scooped me up with one arm and kept me steady. My breathing was heavy and I realized I was disassociating. It was as if my soul had left my body and was now watching from above, totally detached.

  I’ve heard that when you die you see your life replayed like a movie. In this case, I saw Erin’s, starting with when she’d appeared in the cemetery Saturday and going backward. There she was climbing the steps of our high school’s stage to receive yet another award junior year. At the junior prom being crowned queen by Matt. Introducing an assembly about the dangers of underage drinking. Leading a prayer group after the school shootings in Virginia. Delivering a vicious spike in volleyball. Whispering behind her hands when Sara and I passed by her in the middle school cafeteria. Slipping a nasty anonymous Valentine into my decorated shoebox in fourth grade. Pushing me off the swing in second grade.

  Erin Donohue had been a thorn in my side for thirteen years. That she was gone was simply impossible. It had to be a mistake.

  “Accident?” Oma asked.

  “Nooo,” Mom said carefully. “Appears to have been a suicide.”

  Suicide.

  A wave of guilt hit me broadside. Erin had taken her own life because she’d gotten it into her head that Matt had dumped her for me. It was crazy, because Erin had everything—looks, smarts, drive, friends, even money—but you never knew, did you? More often than not it was the little things that brought you down.

  Oh God, I was going crazy myself.

  “Lily?” Oma asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I think she’s hyperventilating,” Mom said. “We need to . . .”

  My knees gave out then. My mother’s arm kept me upright, and for once I appreciated her rock-solid stability. “This is all my fault,” I said. “She killed herself because of me.”

  “Nonsense,” Oma commanded. I tried to focus, but my grandmother came in blurry. “Clearly, the child was plagued with demons. First she attacks you, then she takes her own life. If there’s anything to blame, it’s some underlying mental illness.”

  “Oma is right,” Mom said, lifting my chin with her slim finger. “This is a devastating tragedy, and it’s only natural to want point the finger, even at yourself, but please don’t go there. That doesn’t help anyone.”

  Their words, while well-intentioned, began to lose their meaning. Whatever Mom and Oma were saying didn’t matter. At the core was the truth. That’s what I needed to discover.

  The truth.

  “Lily?”

  Mom was peering at me earnestly. Oma was nowhere around and I was on the
pastel floral couch in our front office. I didn’t even remember how I got there.

  She handed me a glass of water, which seemed like such a cliché.

  “I’m not thirsty,” I said, pushing it away.

  “Yes, you are. Drink it. Just a sip.”

  I did so to indulge her, and suddenly I couldn’t get enough. I was as dry as a desert inside. Three glasses of water later, I was sitting up and beginning to gather my wits.

  Erin Donohue was dead. She’d killed herself.

  I needed Sara. Stat.

  “I know this is difficult,” Mom said, “but if you’re okay by yourself, I wonder if you could answer the phones while Boo and I retrieve Erin’s body. Oma has gone over to the Donohues’ ahead of us to help them fill out paperwork.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, trying to rise to the occasion. This was a huge client for our business, and already I’d caused a delay by fainting in the casket room and keeping Mom from doing her job.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked.

  “Sure. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Only the worst thing possible. Don’t expect to recover from this anytime soon.”

  Mom knew from experience how bad this was, having dealt with death on a personal as well as professional level for eons.

  “By the way,” she added, “it’s probably best if we keep this quiet for now. It won’t help the Donohues if our funeral home becomes gossip central, which it will be if Sara hears about this, especially since Erin interned for her father last summer.” She gave me one last knowing look and left.

  I waited two whole minutes before I got out my phone and called my best friend.

  “It doesn’t seem real,” Sara said, sounding close to tears. “Okay, so Erin and I were never what you’d call buddy-buddy, but this? This is the worst thing ever!”

  I mumbled in begrudging agreement.

  “Erin was in our living room just the other day, sitting on the kitchen stool talking to Mom and Dad, reminiscing about all the silly mistakes she’d made when she started interning.”

  “Did anything seem off?” I asked.

  “Aside from her hypercheerfulness? No. But by then she’d already decided to do herself in. They say that’s the way it is with suicides.”

  Erin’s family lived around the corner from Sara in the same cookie-cutter development of oversize houses with humongous garages and kitchens built for hosting small conventions. Because their families were so friendly, Sara’s dad, Dr. Ken, offered Erin an unpaid job in his pediatric practice at the hospital, babysitting kids in the waiting room while the parents were in appointments with their other children.

  The idea had been Erin’s, since she was thinking of majoring in pre-med at Villanova and also, again, because of that college résumé she was forever building. All that hard work, all those great grades and spectacular extracurriculars . . . for slit wrists in a bathtub?

  None of this felt right.

  “She wasn’t that hypercheerful when I saw her Saturday afternoon,” I said. “She went berserk and attacked me for no reason.”

  “Well, like you said yourself, Lil, she probably got the wrong idea about you and Matt.”

  Sara had never been a big fan of Matt Houser because he was one of those cute jocks with, as she put it, “a third bicep for a brain.” However, I’d always suspected there was more to it than that. Sara resented Matt because ever since he’d asked me to tutor him in US History last summer, she and I hadn’t hung out as much. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when I normally would have been over at her house lounging by her family’s sweet inground pool, Matt and I had been in the (air-conditioned) public library downtown or in the cool shade of the cemetery studying. It was definitely a wedge in our friendship.

  “My relationship with Matt is purely platonic,” I said, repeating what I’d told her a zillion times before.

  “I’ve got news for you. Members of the opposite sex who call each other every night before they go to sleep while they’re in bed are more than just friends.”

  I felt myself go hot. “It’s nothing—he just razzes me about being such a morbid nerd.”

  “His teasing is adorable and you know it. And so did Erin. Not that you should blame yourself for her suicide,” Sara was quick to add. “I’m just stating facts.”

  Sometimes Sara’s love of “facts” got on my nerves, but then I’d remember that she couldn’t help herself, because her whole goal in life was to become a famous criminal prosecutor. The only television she watched were back-to-back true-crime shows on Investigation Discovery about deadly women and Southern murderers and serial killers—necessary preparation, she claimed, for Harvard Law.

  “Okay,” I said, “but those ‘facts’ are wrong.”

  “Possibly,” she conceded. “But Matt did come to you first about whether he and Erin should split. So even if you didn’t want to be roped into their drama, you were.”

  I would never forget that night, how Matt scaled the wall of our garden and tapped on my bedroom window, scaring me out of my wits. I’d climbed out and both of us stood there in the warm September air, what we didn’t say more important than what we did. He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned close. I had stayed still. As much as my body was dying to kiss him, I refused to be “that” girl.

  A no-win situation.

  “I never told him to break up with Erin,” I said. “I remained totally neutral, the same way I was toward you when you were breaking up with Ty.”

  “If I recall, your exact words were ‘Dump that idiot, Sara, before he dumps you.’”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Yup. But a monkey could have called that.” She paused. “How’s Matt dealing, anyway?”

  I checked my phone to see if any messages had come in while we’d been talking. “I don’t know. He’s hasn’t replied to any of my texts.”

  “When was the last you heard from him?”

  “Friday, when he wrote that on a scale of one to ten in movies, one being anything with subtitles and ten being any movie with Seth Rogen, Ted was a twenty.” That seemed so long ago.

  “I thought you told him about Erin’s attack.”

  “I did. I even sent him a photo of my cuts and wrote, ‘You won’t believe what happened.’ You’d think that’d be intriguing enough for him to text right back, but I guess not.”

  Sara went silent for a bit. “And you never heard from him again?”

  “No.”

  “Fascinating.”

  I didn’t like the way Sara said that, as if she were concluding a cross-examination before a rapt jury.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  But I knew.

  I think a part of me always had.

  That night, after Mom and Boo had come home and gone to bed, I tiptoed upstairs to Mom’s office to conduct a search. Since the cardinal sin of morticians was gossip, Mom wouldn’t be forthcoming with info now that she had a professional obligation to keep her client’s confidentiality. So if I wanted learn anything about Erin’s suicide, I would have to break a few rules.

  Fortunately, rule-breaking was one of my better honed-skills.

  Erin’s file was the top entry in Mom’s Word documents and thoroughly disappointing in its ordinariness. There would be calling hours on Thursday at the funeral home, followed by a funeral on Saturday at St. Anne’s. The Donohues had filled in the standard form Oma used to assemble an obituary for the local paper. It listed Erin’s awards and achievements, survivors, and places to submit donations (ASPCA) instead of flowers. Of course, people would send them anyway.

  I closed out, logged off, and was pushing back Mom’s chair when I spied the thin white sheets of paper curling out of the fax machine. I turned them over and smoothed them flat. The letterhead of the Potsdam Police Department was stamped on top.

  TO: Robert R. Amidon, Chief of Police

  FROM: Detective Joe He
nderson

  RE: REQUEST FOR THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE CRIME LAB

  DEPARTMENT USE ONLY—CONFIDENTIAL

  It appeared to be an internal police memo. It was so unlike Perfect Bob to release something this top secret, much less fax it to Mom. Had to be bad.

  At approximately 1420 hours on Sunday, October 28, Potsdam Police Department dispatch received a 911 call from a female identifying herself as Elaine Donohue, reporting a nonresponsive female, age 17, in the upstairs bathroom of their house at 322 Maple Drive. Ambulance and rescue personnel were sent to the scene, along with Officer Crowley and myself.

  Upon arrival, I observed the body of a teenage girl lying face up in a bathtub, several lacerations on both wrists, naked aside from a pink towel. Both the edges of the towel and the water in the bath appeared to be red with blood. Emergency personnel confirmed that the female was indeed deceased.

  The Medical Examiner was immediately notified and the area secured at 1448 hours.

  Preliminary observations revealed that on the tile floor by the bathtub there was an ordinary 8 oz. drinking glass containing clear fluid, which I marked for analysis. There was no obvious evidence of razors, knives, or other sharp objects that might have been used to inflict the lacerations. Nor could any blood be superficially observed outside of the immediate bathtub vicinity.

  Riley and Elaine Donohue, owners of the house, identified the female as their daughter, Erin Anne Donohue, age 17. Riley Donohue advised that he and his wife had returned to their home at approximately 1400 hours after spending the weekend closing up their summer cabin in the Poconos. Their daughter had remained at home, as she frequently had done in the past.

  Mr. Donohue advised that the screen door to the back patio was open and the other doors locked when he and his wife returned. Erin’s car, a 2012 Mini Cooper, was in the garage. The family dog, Sparkle, had defecated on the living room rug, indicating it had not been let outside that morning.

  Mrs. Donohue went upstairs and located her daughter in the master bath. She called for her husband, a former volunteer firefighter, who attempted first aid, including a heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while Mrs. Donohue called 911. Officer Crowley and I arrived five minutes later, along with the Center Valley Regional Rescue.