The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (10 page)

On Monday morning, Albert found out that breaking into Lily’s house was just as easy as he had imagined. And once he was actually keying open the door and no guard dogs attacked him, and no alarm sounded and no cops jumped out of the bushes led by his new best friend Detective Andersen, Albert let out a relieved sigh.

After Andersen had dropped him off at school on Friday morning, the rest of the day had been painfully slow. At lunch, which Albert had been eating alone as usual, a senior came up to his empty table and rested his hands on the back of a chair. The guy didn’t sit, just looked at Albert. Albert recognized him as one of the guys who’d laughed while his lunch tray went flying to the floor in front of the whole school. Patrick MacLennan, that was his name.

“You want to throw my lunch on the floor again?” Albert asked, holding up what was left of his square of pizza.

“Depends,” MacLennan said.

It wasn’t the answer he’d expected. And the guy was acting like he had some reason to be pissed at Albert instead of the other way around.

“On what?” Albert asked.

“On if you had anything to do with whatever happened to Lily Odilon,” MacLennan said, squeezing the chair to make his muscles flex.

“Aren’t you the guy who left her to die on the floor of a dental clinic?”

Albert didn’t get MacLennan. They’d had a gym period together last fall, and he remembered thinking the guy was actually okay for a jock. MacLennan was good at everything the coach made them do, of course, but he did it without any of the flack some of the other guys threw at their less-than-athletic classmates, those guys who yelled at fat girls for striking out at softball or at clumsy nerds for tripping over their feet in soccer. But then there was the other thing—the vivid mental picture Albert had of MacLennan laughing with his buddies while Albert’s food tray clattered to the lunchroom floor. And then he’d found out that MacLennan was one of the friends who left Lily behind the night of her accident.

“You don’t know—” MacLennan began.

“I don’t care, either,” Albert said. He stood, grabbing his backpack and his tray. “
You
don’t know anything about me, or Lily. The last thing she needs is help from an asshole like you.” Then he hurried away, hoping MacLennan wouldn’t punch him in the back of his head as he went.

The weekend that followed had been endless. Albert felt trapped in his house, like a big animal in a small cage. He wanted to escape so he could follow his new hunch about where Lily had run away to … where, if still not
why
she had gone to that summer cabin they visited every year until their mother remarried and those trips were over.

If he’d known exactly where the cabin and the lake were located, he would’ve left town immediately to chase after Lily. Though the word that came to his mind first wasn’t “chase” but “hunt.” It disturbed Albert to think of Lily as some kind of game and himself as her hunter. More exactly, if he was honest with himself, what was disturbing was that he
could
think about her that way. His uneasiness only made him more restless.

While Albert tried to put Lily out of his mind and think about anything besides what he planned to do, something deep in his brain was still busy working things out.

Leave it until Monday
, he kept telling himself. There was nothing he could do until after the weekend, when the rest of the world would be back to work and school and he could search Lily’s bedroom for a way to help them both.

In the meantime, as the hours crawled by, Albert made sure the word “Lily” never crossed his lips. His parents really didn’t want to hear her name and he didn’t want to rile them up.

The one bit of good luck Albert could see was that for some reason, Detective Andersen hadn’t followed through on the threat to call his parents about catching him skipping school. All weekend, Albert’s nerves were tensed for a phone call—and the parental nuclear fallout—that never came.

At first he couldn’t understand this bit of luck, but gradually, as he obsessed over it, the cop’s discretion began to make a kind of sense. If Albert’s parents found out he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, Andersen would expect them to pull Albert’s leash even tighter, to punish him. And if they did that, the cops would have even less chance of catching Albert in whatever criminal involvement they thought was related to Lily’s missing persons case. Andersen was obviously following him, and he wanted Albert to have plenty of rope with which to hang himself. Albert was supposed to lead them to the sex cult where she was being held, or maybe to where he’d hidden her body.

Picturing the envelope hidden in the back of his bookcase, Albert figured the cops and his parents would be pretty pissed off if they knew he had it but hadn’t told anyone. It definitely made things more complicated, but he was pretty sure he was better off knowing the little bit Lily had written to him than knowing nothing. Mostly sure.

When Monday morning finally rolled around, Albert found that now that the day had come, he almost wished it hadn’t. He really didn’t know how carefully the local cops were watching him or how much was just Andersen trying to frighten him on behalf of the cop’s great personal friends, Lily’s parents. Not to mention the risk he was taking if his own parents found out. Whichever way he looked at it, Albert knew he was pushing his luck by again not heading straight to school.

He also knew that as much as he didn’t understand Lily’s reasoning, he had caught her urgency like a sickness. She thought her stepfather was out to get her—fine. She thought she couldn’t take her problems to the authorities—fine. The question he had to ask himself was, should he believe her take on things? He knew he had a choice; he hadn’t done anything yet. He could reject Lily’s trust in him and unload the decision and the responsibility for what to do next. He didn’t have to go through with what he was planning—all he had to do was take her letter to the police station and let
them
figure it out.

And hope that she was wrong about whose side they would be on.

Except, because he did believe her and because he wanted desperately to help her, the idea of choice was only an illusion. He would do what he could to find her, by himself, with no one to help or share the responsibility for however the rest unraveled.

He’d been the only person she’d felt she could confide in, and fair or not, she was relying on him. For something. Not yet identified.

So he took the second option, which was really the only one, telling himself it was probably the stupid choice but not quite believing it.

When Albert cut school this time, he was a lot more careful. As he skimmed alleys and willed himself to disappear, he kept a constant eye ahead and behind for what detective novels called a tail. And what the hell, he thought, feeling like he might vomit from nerves—it was still better than geometry.

Now he was inside Lily’s house. After shutting the door softly behind him, Albert shoved the key into his pocket without really thinking about it. He found himself standing in a darkened laundry room. He’d only been in this part of the house a couple of times, and the last time he’d been very distracted. He stopped to remember where he was in relation to the rest of the house, specifically Lily’s bedroom. After a moment he took a cautious step out of the laundry room, his sneaker squeaking as he lifted it from the linoleum and placed it on the thick beige carpet of the hallway.

He made his way carefully down the short hall and into the dining area, which was between the kitchen on one side and a sunken living room on the other. The formal living room was more toward the front of the house. Across from him was the hall that led to three bedrooms: Lily’s sister’s room, then the spare room that was the den, then, at the end, the master suite. Though the sun had risen, everything around him was gloomy and dark. All the shades were drawn. Even in the half-light, Albert could see that everything was white: the walls, the tiles around the gas fireplace, the furniture, the vase on the table, and the pillows on the low sofa that lined the edge of the sunken room Lily called “the pit.” There weren’t any family pictures on the walls, but instead a couple of largish abstract canvases in the dining room and hanging above the fireplace—paintings belonging to Lily’s stepfather, paintings she’d told Albert she thought looked like smeared bloody nose. The house had a lifeless smell to match its colors. To Albert it was a mix of school glue and watered-down lemons.

Lily’s room was apart from the other three bedrooms, through the kitchen and on the other side, a storage room that hadn’t originally been a bedroom. Lily had wanted it anyway, she’d told him once, because it was the farthest bedroom from her parents’. Albert hurried through the dead house to this familiar place. He hesitated in front of her closed door for a moment, wondering if it was really all right if he went in.

Of course anyone who found him here would obviously say it was
not
at all okay that he was in this house. Technically, it was a crime.

On the other hand … he figured that Lily would trust him to enter her bedroom uninvited. Chances were that her privacy here had already been ignored by her parents and the police.

So he opened the door and stepped inside.

Lily’s room always seemed to have been ripped from another house and reattached here by accident. The walls—what was visible beneath the posters and pictures Lily had papered up everywhere—were a deep purplish pink. Every bit of space was filled with mismatched furniture, and, between the bed and the tall dresser and the desk and the bookshelves and Lily’s prized vintage steamer trunk, very little of the scuffed hardwood floor was visible. The last time Albert had been here, the room had been in a state of restrained chaos—there was stuff everywhere with no obvious organizing system except for a bunch of neat piles. Lily was a fan of tidy random piles for her stuff. Now what Albert was seeing was merely a mess. One that had been made in an impatient hurry and then left that way. He bent over and picked up an orange scarf from the floor, the one that had been draped over the bedside lamp on the night Lily’d gone.

Another word from detective-story jargon popped into his head: this room had been tossed. Of course the police had been through it, more than once probably, looking for anything that would tell them what had happened to Lily. The shades were drawn in here, too. Lily’s desk and dresser drawers were open, her clothes still hanging out like they’d been frozen in the act of crawling away; papers and notebooks were dropped wherever. The closet door was barely ajar and a small box, flaps open, blocked the opening. Stepping farther into the room, Albert saw a mountain on the bed, as if someone had dumped several boxes of random stuff there to sift through. The bedding was all gone, the pretty coverlet and the fresh sheets that Lily had left him dozing in; the bare mattress that stared back at him seemed to have a crude, violated look. Albert didn’t like to think why the sheets and blankets had been removed.

He dropped to his knees and looked under the bed—the stuff under there had been raked out and left where it ended up.

Albert’s stomach sank, and he knew: he wasn’t going to find anything that the police hadn’t already found. Which meant he wasn’t going to find anything helpful at all. He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress springs squealing under his weight, and cursed himself for not focusing better on what she’d told him about her Last Good Place. He didn’t even know where the house was on the lake, or if the lake was even in this
state
. He couldn’t quite remember its name—something about trees, maybe—not even enough for an Internet search. And if he could absolve himself with the knowledge that there was no way he could’ve known there’d be an important test on it later … well, that wasn’t much comfort, was it?

“Damn,” he whispered, the words hanging in the stillness.

He hadn’t come here expecting to find a nice map laid out on the bed with a big red X Marks The Spot, but what
had
he been expecting? If she’d had a diary, that would have been the first thing they’d take. She’d flipped through her photo album with him once, and while he didn’t remember any pictures from the lake cabin, he wasn’t sure. Even if there had been pictures, there was no reason they’d hold any useful information. He didn’t see the album anywhere, anyway.

At the rate he was going, he was going to have to get maps of this and every neighboring state and search them all until the name of a body of water sparked his memory. Not a very promising scheme.