The Secrets of Lily Graves (15 page)

From the ambient light of the city below, I could make out jeans, and he was definitely wearing a Potsdam Panthers jacket plus—oh, come on—
a white hockey mask
.

So not funny.

“Jason Vorhees?” I said. “A little eighties, don't you think?”

“I'm glad you came, Lily,” he drawled. “I missed you.”

Drunk or drugged, I decided, backing up, chills tingling my spine. Either way, he wasn't Matt, and it crossed my mind that maybe the note I'd found taped to my window the night before had been placed by someone else. Like the stalker who'd been following Sara and me.

“Stay back!” I ordered, holding out the spray. “Don't make me use this.”

“What's wrong, baby? It's me,” he slurred, stepping closer. “It's Matt.”

Over his shoulder, the hazy form of someone else emerged. There were two of them. I needed to get out of here. Fast.

“Look. I don't know who you are or what you want, but this is totally creeping me out. So I'm going to go,” I said, my voice trembling. “Also, my mother's waiting at the corner in a car that happens to be driven by the chief of police so, you know, there are complications.”

“Yeah, right.” Jason Vorhees grunted. “You're alone. I know it. You know it. Let's just admit it.”

Not quite yet. The other figure had started running, fast and silent like a true panther. Soon, the rest of him came into view—the short brown hair, the Panthers jacket, open and flying behind him—and I was filled with relief. This was the sprint of the fastest in Pennsylvania high school football.

With one swift move, I gripped my aneurysm hook and drove it into Jason's eyehole. He clutched at it, swearing and flailing about, confused and alarmed—as he should have been because, hey, there was an aneurysm hook in his eye.

“Ow!” he yelled, ripping off the hook and flinging
it into the bushes. He slid a hand under his mask and covered his eye. “I'm bleeding.”

“Maybe this will help,” I said, spritzing him with the flesh preserver for good measure.

That was the final straw. He reeled backward, gripping his throat. “What the . . .” He coughed, pounding his chest in a futile effort to eliminate the gas.

“Lily!” Matt yelled. “I'm here.”

At the sound of Matt, Jason took off, hacking and coughing down the row of tombstones with Matt on his heels. I figured there was no way Jason would outrun him with Matt's speed, but I forgot that most football fields weren't booby-trapped with veterans' markers, one of which unfortunately caught Matt's ankle.

He took a flying leap, arms outstretched, and landed face-first on the grass, his head narrowly missing a stone by inches.

While Jason made his escape.

I rushed to Matt and fell on my knees. “Oh my God! Are you okay?” I said, trying with all my might to roll him over.

He opened and closed his jaw like a fish and gave up, the wind knocked out of him.

“Did you leave that note on my window last night?”

He nodded.

“Then who was that guy?”

He shook his head.

“Whoever he was, he knew I was meeting you. He used your name,” I said, pushing Matt's jacket off his shoulders to give him air.

He pulled himself onto his elbows. “Sorry. I almost had him.”

“It's okay.” I squinted toward the woods where he'd disappeared. “Guy seemed pretty wasted, so he was probably a friend of yours.” I tried smiling. “Where were you when I needed you?”

“Waiting in the tomb for about an hour. I went to go look for you at the bottom of the hill, thinking maybe you were too frightened to come here alone, when . . .”

“As if I've ever been anything but at home in a graveyard,” I joked.

He stood and brushed himself off. I'd never realized how tall he was before. And how good he smelled. Pure, unadulterated boy.

I stood too, suddenly feeling awkward. So many things I'd wanted to say, questions to ask, and I was speechless.

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “For everything. For what Erin did to you and how you've gotten roped into this. For the shitty way my dad—”

I reached over and covered his mouth to make him shut up. “Don't.”

He licked my palm, like old times. Then he took my hand in his warm one, gave it a squeeze, and said, with such earnest seriousness that I quit smiling, “All I've been able to think about is you and how I'm going to get you out of this.”

“We'll get out of this together,” I said, squeezing him back. “But first, I need some answers.”

“I thought so.” He casually slung an arm over my shoulder and said, “Let's go to the Mason's tomb. I don't know about you, but I'm not really in the mood to be dealing with any more wasted trick-or-treaters.”

The Mason's tomb had been Matt's brilliant find. When Erin was at her nuttiest around the beginning of August, crashing our study sessions at the library and then the graveyard, he'd found a place where we could meet virtually undetected.

It was the abandoned Hardwick family mausoleum, a squat, crumbling stone building flanked by Greek columns and empty urns. We nicknamed it the Mason's tomb because a Mason's symbol was chiseled above the heavy bronze door.

I wasn't a fan of cemetery vandalism, having grown up listening to Mom's rants about the callousness of juvenile delinquents who smashed locks and thoughtlessly destroyed stained glass windows with little regard for the deceased. But Matt hadn't
been the first to break into the Mason's tomb, and he likely wouldn't be the last. Besides, it wasn't as though we'd be desecrating the graves.

Matt pushed open the tomb door and turned on a Coleman lamp. Immediately, a golden glow spread over a space not much bigger than my closet at home, except my closet wasn't made of stone and covered with cobwebs.

He closed the door, and I took my usual seat on a bedroll he kept so our asses wouldn't freeze. Being here brought back memories of last summer, when we were young and naïve and sweet.

Death ages a person, fast. Murder, even faster.

Matt plunked himself down next to me, our legs touching. “Okay, shoot. I'm ready.”

“Before I say anything, I want to tell you how sorry I am about Erin. This must be awful for you.”

He draped his arms on his knees and nodded. “Not half as bad as for her parents. She's their only child.”

Was, I thought. “Have you seen them?”

“Been to their house every day. They want me to stand in the receiving line with them at the wake tomorrow.”

That was going to be awkward. “So they don't think you . . .”

He shook his head, looking not at me but at a spot
on the floor between his knees. “I don't know if they're in denial or what. But they're treating me like the son they never had and they keep saying how I'll be part of the Donohue family forever.”

Yup. Denial. “Can I ask,” I said gently, “if they know about Erin's . . .
condition
?”

He snapped his head up, his brown eyes afire. “What do you mean, ‘condition'?”

This was going to be harder than I'd expected. “Brace yourself, but Erin was pregnant.”

His shoulders slumped. “Oh, that's what you mean. Yeah, they know.”

“And you?”

“I found out on Friday. Kate called me and said I needed to get over to Erin's house because she had big news and wasn't taking it well.”

My lungs tightened. “Hold on. It was
Kate
who told you?”

“You know how girls are. They tell each other everything.”

Before the father? “Um, not sure I remember reading that in the handbook.”

Matt looked puzzled, and then it dawned on him. “Oh, no. I know what you're thinking.” Bringing his hands up defensively, he said, “It wasn't my baby.”

I wanted to believe him so much. But I also was
tired of playing the fool. “Come on, Matt. You and I both know that Purity Pact crap was just to please her parents. You and Erin have been together forever. Of course you were hooking up.”

He blushed to the tips of his ears. “Depends on how you define hooking up.”

Now, it was my turn to blush. “Right.”

“I mean we
did
stuff, just not
that
.”

“Enough to keep her membership active in the Purity Pact.”

“Kind of. I guess.” He rolled his eyes. “The stupid Purity Pact. Her father actually gave her a diamond, like an engagement ring, for being a virgin and ‘wed to him.' How sick is that?”

I assumed Matt meant that not in a good way. “So, if it wasn't your baby, then whose was it?”

“That's the question, isn't it?” he said. “When I got over my shock, I told her I was there for her, and she told me it was not my baby and therefore none of my business. I'll admit, the whole thing had me pretty messed up.”

I leaned into him. “Don't take it personally. Just think what it must have been like to have been in her position. Founder of the Purity Pact gets knocked up? Reason enough right there to commit suicide.”

“Except everyone assumed she killed herself because I'd broken up with her.” He stood and thrust his hands
in his pockets. “It just made everything so much worse. Erin's dead. I have to deal with that. Then I have to wonder if somehow I was responsible.”

I said, “How badly did she take the breakup?”

“Not bad at all. There she was, pregnant by some other guy and telling me that I wasn't as mature and responsible as he was and that he was going to do the right thing. So I said, sort of angrily, ‘Then I guess you don't need me.' And she said . . .”

Matt stopped.

“What? What did she say?”

“I don't want you to feel guilty.”

“Please. I'm the daughter of Ruth Graves. I was born feeling guilty. What did she say?”

He sat down again. “She said, ‘It's okay, because you don't need me, now that you have Lily.' I was so pissed, I just left.”

“Oh.” It was kind of him to omit the expletives and the word
freak
, which Erin had undoubtedly used instead of my real name. “And that was it?”

He bowed his head. “Pretty much.”

“It wasn't your fault,” I said, sliding an arm around the back of his neck. “James didn't die because of you, and neither did Erin.”

He exhaled heavily. “I've been telling myself that, but it's not sinking in.”

“You know what I think?” I said. “I think whoever killed Erin knew about you and me and her.” I carefully sidestepped the term
love triangle
, since I didn't want to go there. “And they timed the crime so that the police would naturally assume you and I committed the murder.”

He frowned. “A setup? That is both very weird and very disturbing.”

“And very frightening.”

“No shit. If you get charged for this, I will never forgive myself. It just doubles the pain.”

“We will not let that happen.” I removed my arm and hopped up, my mind churning. “Let's start with the facts. Where were you on Saturday night?”

“In my room, on my bed, staring at my ceiling, feeling shitty about Erin.”

“That's healthy. Any witnesses?”

He shook his head. “The cops are all over that.”

Of course they were. “Next question. Who do you think is the father?”

Matt said, “No clue.”

“Really? How about Alex Bone?”

“That wimp?” Matt scoffed. “Erin told me about him. All they did was talk about writing and poetry. That day we saw them at the library, he gave her a book of poems by some dude named Ginsburg. I read a few.
They sucked.”

“He's a little alternative.”

“So's Stone Bone. He's such a loser, working at the coffee shop, living at home with his mom. I mean, the guy's in his twenties. Be a man.”

“Some girls get tremendous pleasure from turning frogs into princes.”

“That's Erin. She was always pushing me to dress better and take harder classes. That's how I ended up in US History, because she said I should challenge myself.”

That explained a lot. I started pacing and counting my steps . . . one . . . two . . . three. That was all the length of the tomb would allow. “Okay, so the first thing we have to do is find out what Alex Bone was up to on Saturday night. I have reason to believe he was at a pity party Kate threw for Erin.”

Matt cocked an eyebrow. “How did you hear about that?”

“I have my sources. Secondly, we have to find out what they were doing at the party.”

“
Doing?
”

“Drugs. Alcohol. According to the preliminary death certificate I just saw, the cops are running toxicology tests, and they don't do that unless they have probable cause.”

He looked utterly stunned. “It's like she was two different people. The good Erin and the bad Erin. I'm looking back on our three years together and asking which part of her was real and which part of her was a lie.”

That rang a bell. I quit pacing and crossed my arms. “Speaking of which, do you mind telling me why you lied about failing US History and why you spent two hundred dollars being tutored for a test you didn't have to take?”

“Don't get mad.”

“Why would I get mad? I made two hundred bucks.”

“I did it because . . .” Matt rose and came close, which put me at a distinct disadvantage, rhetorically. It was much harder to win points against someone whose tanned abs I cherished as a precious memory. “. . . because I wanted to get to know you, and I was too stupid to think of any other way.”

Surprised and secretly pleased by his answer, I played with a strand of hair that had been tickling my neck. “You could have just called. Or faked your death. It worked for Romeo and Juliet. Oh . . . wait. Scratch that.”

He cracked a smile. “See, it's that kind of twisted of humor that makes me . . .”