The buccal smear turned out to be fairly tolerable. A female officer brought me into a back room, where they scanned fingerprints and made me sign a bunch of forms saying I was doing this willingly. Then she ripped open a sealed plastic bag and, with latex gloves, removed a long-handled Q-tip that was swiped along the inside of my cheek. She did that three more times, deposited the swabs in tubes, and we were done.
Mom was there to cosign the paperwork since I was a minor. And Perfect Bob tried to put me at ease in his dorky Boy Scout way by praising me for being a “good girl” and saying how the police department’s work would be cut in half if everyone were so cooperative.
“Don’t forget that Lily and Erin were friends,” Mom said, which the three of us knew was a lie. Bob had been there the night I got back from the graveyard. He saw.
And he didn’t forget.
“Would you be willing to give a statement about what happened that evening?” Bob asked, handing me a stick of Trident to remove the cotton-mouth sensation. “We sure could use any assistance you could provide.”
I was tempted to ask what the consequences would be if I refused, but there was Mom wringing her hands anxiously, so I said, “Okay.”
We were ushered into another room, this one obviously reserved for questioning. It wasn’t cinderblock like on Sara’s Investigation Discovery reenactments, but the floor was concrete and the heavy wooden chairs were worn. It smelled of ground-in coffee and stale cigarettes from back in the day when smoking was allowed. To add to its whimsical charm, the walls had been painted a bilious yellow with pictures of the governor and the president above the state seal of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
On the other wall was the two-way mirror.
Due to a glaring conflict of interest, Bob couldn’t take my statement. That was the duty of one Detective Joseph Henderson. As in Henderson from the fax I shouldn’t have seen. I practically blushed when he entered the room, as if I’d been caught snooping in his underwear drawer.
Bob said, “Take it easy on her, Joe. She’s a friend.”
Mom couldn’t help smiling a little when Bob left on some pretense of having to prepare for a press conference, though I’d have bet my last dollar on him observing from the two-way.
Henderson was a short, squat, potbellied man who made an admirable effort of upholding the poor fashion sense of plainclothes cops. The brown polyester tie with blue dots didn’t even make sense with his red-and-blue-striped shirt or the tweed jacket. It was probably a tie he kept in a permanent knot and hung on his office door for fieldwork and office parties.
The three of us took our places, with me at the head of the table and Henderson across from Mom. He asked how the smear went and said that it would drive him nuts to have cotton in his mouth. He could barely stand getting that dry-air spritz at the dentist’s.
Mom put her purse in her lap and clutched it, her complexion paler than usual against the black suit she always wore. “This won’t take long, I hope,” she said, eyeing the fresh set of forms Henderson had produced from a manila folder. “Lily has homework.”
“Oh, no. Nothing major,” he said, shuffling the papers. “We’re just gathering statements.” Turning on his digital recorder, he said, “Lily, you are free to leave at any time. Do you understand?”
Meaning, I wasn’t under arrest. Yet.
The pretense for this meeting was that Henderson simply wanted a statement about what went down with Erin on Saturday evening in the graveyard. And that was how the interview started, but soon he was nosing into my relationship with Erin (“We’ve had our ups and downs”), and then my observations of Erin’s relationship with Matt (“They had their ups and downs”), and finally my relationship with Matt.
Mom let out a sigh. “I knew this was where we were headed,” she said, dismayed. We’d been there for over an hour already.
“Like I stated at the outset, Mrs. Graves, we can stop the questioning at any point,” Henderson said. “You give me the word and we’re through.”
If we stopped the questioning, it would look fishy. It would appear that Matt and I had something to hide when we didn’t.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I just don’t want to get Matt into trouble by accidentally saying something that’ll be misinterpreted.”
“You don’t want to get Matt Houser into trouble, huh?” Henderson’s mouth curled cynically. “Yeah, I can see how you wouldn’t want nothing bad to happen to him.”
From beneath his yellow tablet, he removed another manila file. “Mrs. Graves, what I’m about to show your daughter are crime scene photos. You might want to look away.”
Mom had to bite her lower lip to keep from laughing.
“She was at the crime scene,” I said. “Hell, she did the retrieval.”
“Don’t swear, Lily!” Mom said sharply, but I could tell that she was pleased. Nothing yanked my mother’s chain like a man who dismissed her as a cupcake.
“My apologies. I forgot.” Henderson parted his lips to reveal brown cigar- and coffee-stained teeth. “How about you, Lily? These are very upsetting photos.”
I knew Mom didn’t want it revealed that I helped prep bodies, including Erin’s, because she could lose her license for that, so I played coy. “It might be difficult, but I’ll do my best.”
“Much appreciated.” Henderson opened the file with an overly dramatic arc of the arm and slid out the first photo. He was right. The picture was jarring, even for an experienced dead-person handler like myself.
At first, I couldn’t even make out Erin, there was so much white on white. It was the pink towel rimmed in red blood that served as the focal point, followed by her eyes. They were glassy and open, turned toward the viewer in an expression of pathetic helplessness. Her glorious copper hair was barely visible behind her face, which was alabaster white aside from two dark-red lines of blood streaming from her nostrils.
I swallowed hard and said, “Poor Erin.”
“That’s an understatement.” Henderson showed me the next, a close-up of her arms, each with its identical vertical incisions.
Whoever did this knew what he was doing. The cuts were right through the arteries, no running into bones or tendons. There was an almost surgical precision that would have been impossible to inflict if Erin had been struggling even slightly.
Could someone else have been holding her down? Maybe two other people?
I studied the first photo of the scene. That was another thing. There should have been more blood. But there wasn’t. None on the bathtub or walls. Only in the water, on the towel, and on her upper lip. It took at least fifteen minutes to die from slitting your wrists—an unpleasant, extremely painful way to go—and Erin would have certainly been thrashing.
The human heart is capable of pumping one hundred pounds of blood one mile high, and if there are open vessels around, that blood is going to spray everywhere. The only logical explanation for the pristine white tile walls, therefore, was that Erin’s heart hadn’t been beating when she was cut. Whoever did this to her had killed her first and staged it to make it look like a suicide. Now I understood Henderson’s fax and why he requested the crime lab.
We were dealing with a psychopath.
My gaze fell on the glass of clear liquid upright on the bathroom floor, probably the same one I read about in the police report faxed to Mom. Might be a clue.
“Are these pictures really necessary?” Mom asked. “I mean, honestly, Lily has already been traumatized as it is.”
“Erin was traumatized, too,” Henderson said, tapping the photos. “So how do you feel about Mr. Houser now?”
I sat back. “Matt had nothing to do with this. He wouldn’t know how to slice through someone’s arms without making a mess. The killer here knew exactly where the radial arteries were in relation to the bone and he wasn’t a millimeter off.”
Henderson raised an eyebrow. “And you do?”
“I’ve read a lot of books on anatomy and embalming. We have them around the house from when Mom was getting her mortuary science degree.”
“Lily’s planning to take over the family business some day,” my mother said proudly.
“Really?” Henderson said. “Okay, Lily, then how about you tell me what you were doing in the early morning hours of October twenty-eighth?”
Mom jumped up. “You promised this wouldn’t be an interrogation.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Henderson was merely wasting my time and taxpayers’ dollars, stupidly targeting Matt and me. But if that was the way he wanted to roll, so be it.
Returning Henderson’s bloodshot gaze with my clear one, I said, “I was in my bedroom watching Netflix on my laptop. Around 1:00 a.m., Mom knocked on my door and told me to go to bed.”
“That’s true,” Mom said, lowering herself into the chair. “I woke up and heard her laughing. The girl keeps the hours of a vampire.”
Henderson checked his digital recorder and jotted a note. “When did you last hear from Matt Houser, Lily?”
“Friday night. By text.”
He nodded to my iPhone resting on the table, muted. “Mind if I take a look?”
I scrolled through my phone messages and let him read Matt’s own words in response to my suggestion that he watch my favorite movie, Local Hero.
Ur films suck nothing ever happens in them
I responded:
b/c u r a moron, try expanding your brain. the dude from animal house is cute and he has a little bunny.
He wrote:
that he ate. nice.
We exchanged a couple of messages about how he loved any movie with Seth Rogen and then I went to bed.
The following day, I texted this: You won’t believe what happened. Next to it was the photo of my brutalized arm.
Henderson cringed. “You sent that to him?”
“Yes. Around six on Saturday night.”
“And what was his reply?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you call him again?” Henderson asked. “Or text?”
“Both. But, like I said . . . nothing.”
Mom sniffed triumphantly. “There. Are we through?”
Henderson ignored her. “No personal visits? No rendezvous in the cemetery, perhaps, in your special love-nest tomb?”
How did he know about that? I shot a look at Mom.
“I need your answer verbally,” Henderson prodded. “Tape recorder can’t pick up a reaction.”
“No,” I barked.
“All right. No need to shout.”
Henderson repeated the order of events twice more and then he closed his tablet. Finally.
But as I pushed back my chair, he said, “Just want to be clear on one thing. You’ve known Matt since elementary school, but you didn’t become close until this summer. Why?”
We’d already been over this. “Because I had to tutor him in US History so he could pass the course and play football, remember?”
“Memory’s not what it used to be. I’ll get my prompter.” He signaled to the two-way mirror, and almost immediately the door flew open and in walked a trim, bald man about my mother’s age. Henderson introduced him as Detective Zabriskie from the Pennsylvania State Police, homicide division.
Ah, yes, the PSP backup Henderson had requested in his fax.
With a courteous bow to Mom, Zabriskie whipped around a chair and straddled it, regarding me from behind a pair of steel-framed glasses.
“Nice to meet you, Miss Graves,” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for your time.” He clicked a pen and scanned the notes Henderson had just taken on our conversation, riffling through the yellow pages noisily. “We’ll try not to keep you much longer. Detective Henderson has done an excellent job, but I need to refresh his memory.”
“And we need to get going,” Mom said.
Zabriskie tapped the tablet. “This will take only a minute, ma’am. Just to make sure I have the facts right, Miss Graves, starting in July you began tutoring Matt Houser twice a week in US History. Is that correct?”
I understood that a girl had died and they had to be thorough, but this was like beating a dead horse. “That’s right.”
“What day did Mr. Houser call to request your services, exactly?”
“I don’t remember.”
Zabriskie waved this away. “No problem. If necessary we can subpoena your phone records. We’ve already got a court order to get Mr. Houser’s.”
“Subpoena!” Mom exclaimed. “I’m not very comfortable with how this is going.”
Neither was I. If there was a court order to get Matt’s phone records, then that meant the cops might already have received a warrant to search his house and car and locker. It meant . . .
“You seriously believe Matt’s a suspect,” I said, “don’t you?”
Zabriskie adjusted his frames. “And you have some objection?”
“You’re after the wrong guy. Matt didn’t kill anyone and neither did I. All I did was tutor him so he could pass a makeup test and play football. All Matt did was stick with Erin because he was concerned about her mental state. That doesn’t exactly sound like a killer to me.”
“Uh huh.” Zabriskie was unmoved. “By the way, why did Mr. Houser ask you to tutor him when his girlfriend got an A in that class too?”
“His parents thought Erin might be too much of a distraction.”
Zabriskie sucked his teeth. “And this is what his parents said to you directly.”
“No. I’ve never even met the Housers.”
“So you don’t know if they were aware that their son was being tutored to take a makeup exam in history.”
This reminded me of how I felt at camp when we played a game where the name of a famous person was taped to my back and I was supposed to guess who it was based on a series of questions. Except I couldn’t figure out who I was (Marie Curie) and people started laughing.
“Well, they had to have known,” I said dully, “because Matt’s father is the assistant football coach and he wouldn’t have let Matt play if he hadn’t passed history.”
The cops exchanged knowing glances. “What if I told you, Miss Graves,” Zabriskie continued with a touch of glee, “that there wasn’t a chance that Matt Houser would have been benched this season?”
Goosebumps rose on my arms. “Why?”
“Because he finished the class with a B.”
That didn’t make sense. “He didn’t get a B. He failed.”
Zabriskie reached into the folder and removed a piece of white paper with the instantly recognizable Potsdam High Panthers logo on top and, below, Matt’s grades for junior year. The line for US History was highlighted in bright yellow, ending in a big, bold B.
The floor wobbled. I gripped the table edge to remain steady.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered, searching for a logical explanation. All those summer evenings, all that reading. Him out the door at eight sharp as if he couldn’t stand one more minute. “He paid,” I said. “Twenty dollars a session.”
Zabriskie let out a loud, low whistle. “Wow. He must really like history to lay down two hundred bucks for no reason. Unless . . .” He paused, stroking his chin. “. . . the money was a down payment for something else. Some service you promised to provide in the near future, a way for you to apply your expertise in anatomy.”
I was stunned. Had Zabriskie just implied I was an accomplice to murder?
“That’s it,” Mom declared, leaping out of her chair so fast it fell backward and hit the floor. “We are done. I am sick of watching you harass and intimidate my daughter, who, by the way, was only trying to do the right thing. Come on, Lily. Bob is going to hear about this.”
She reached over to grab my hand when something else caught my attention. Zabriskie was dangling a ziplock bag, inside of which was the treasured Persephone necklace I’d lost last summer. Just that morning I’d been searching my dresser and under my bed for it, on the off chance it wasn’t at the bottom of the quarry.
“That’s Lily’s,” Mom said. “Where’d you get it?”
Zabriskie rose from his chair. He towered over both of us. “I’m afraid to say, ma’am, that our search team came across it on Sunday. They found it snagged on a branch in the woods on the day after Erin was murdered, not twenty feet behind her house.”