The Last Good Place of Lily Odilon (13 page)

“Yeah, it’s just hilarious. I feel like I’m trapped in a nightmare and if I could just wake up …” Olivia trailed off. “But I can’t, and I don’t know what to
do
.”

“Like you said, we take it to the police. If we can make them understand, make them believe Lily’s story, he’ll go to jail. And then she’ll be able to come home. Simple.” He hoped.

“I’m thinking that maybe we—”

But she never finished the sentence, this time because just then a voice called from the front of the house, “Olivia? Are you home?” There was a pause, then louder and closer: “Olivia?”

Olivia and Albert exchanged a terrified glance, and then Olivia was shoving him into Lily’s closet and closing the door on him.

“Hide the journal,” she breathed intensely, almost too soft to qualify as a whisper, before the closet door latched with a tiny click.

Not knowing what else to do, he tucked the book down the back of his pants and held his breath.

He heard her scramble away from the door, but before she could get out of Lily’s room, Perry Kogen must have walked in through the open door. Even with the closet door closed, Albert could hear everything clearly.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Oh, you know,” Olivia said. “Just thinking.”

Albert heard a step. “Honey, have you been crying?” The concern in Kogen’s voice sounded genuine, and Albert wanted to pinch the bastard’s windpipe shut. He had no right to care. “Come here.”

“No!” she said, too sharp. “I mean, I just kind of want to be alone, you know?”

“Sure,” her stepfather replied after a moment. “I just came in because I thought I heard talking. I thought maybe Lily—”

Albert was suddenly sure both Olivia and Kogen could hear the rabbit-kicking of his heart.

“—No,” she interrupted, “it’s just me. You caught me talking to myself.” Nervous chuckle. Albert winced. “What are you doing home, anyway? It’s barely three o’clock.”

There was a sound like someone fiddling with a drawer, then Perry said, “Phil called asked me to play some racquetball. My last appointment was at two, so I thought I’d squeeze a game or two in before dinner. I was just coming home to change my clothes. Hey, you want to come down to the club with me? Swim some laps or something?”

“No,” Olivia said again. “But thanks. I just want to be alone. You understand, right?”

“Fine, honey. I’ll see you in a couple of hours then, all right?”

“Sure.”

Albert heard footsteps and the door shutting. Seconds later, Olivia’s face appeared in the crack in the closet doorway.
Stay there
, she mouthed to him. Albert shot her a thumbs-up to indicate he understood he should stay in the closet until Kogen left the house again. He heard the bedsprings creak as Olivia sat on her sister’s bed.

After a few long minutes, Albert heard Olivia get up and go to the bedroom door, closing it. Then the closet light went on and she was looking up at Albert.

“Is he gone?” Albert whispered.

“I think so. I heard the front door close.” Olivia was whispering, too. “You have to get out of here. Go out the window and cut through the back yard.” She had him by the arm and was pulling him from the closet toward the window.

“But—”

She stopped trying to hustle him out of the room and whirled on him, her eyes snapping more than ever. “Look, do you want him to come back and find you here? To find her
journal
? It’s the only proof we have—and the best chance we have to help my sister.”

“Fine,” he said after a moment.

She opened the window blinds with an abrupt jerk. As she was struggling to open the latch, she said, “I’ll call you tonight after dinner when Mom and Perry aren’t around. Maybe we can ditch tomorrow morning and turn the journal over to the police then.”

Albert shouldered her aside and lifted the sash. He wasn’t sure about Olivia’s plan, and even now the weight of Lily’s journal was almost more responsibility than he could bear. He wasn’t eager to argue with her, either. Suddenly it was all too much, and he was afraid that if he pushed her, even just a little, they might both break. All he could say was, “I guess I can’t think of anything better.”

“You really are an idiot, you know that? You do know who Phil, is, right?”

Albert was confused. “What?”

“Phil
Andersen
. Perry’s workout buddy and best friend. As in,
Detective
Andersen, the guy who is investigating Lily’s case.”

A light was beginning to dawn. “Ah.”

“So we have to be careful and do this right, because Perry has Andersen’s ear.”

Albert swung one leg out the window, bending awkwardly at the middle. “You have my number?”

Olivia gestured toward a small, silver feather-rimmed bulletin board hanging next to the mirror. Her voice was too calm, too steady. “It’s tacked up over there. Cell phone?”

Embarrassed, he shook his head. “Nah. My parents won’t let me get one. But don’t worry—when the phone rings, I’ll pick it up. Just don’t forget to call.”

“I won’t,” she said, and pushed him the rest of the way out the window. As he darted around the side of the house toward the back he thought he heard the wet rasp of a sob, right before the window sash thudded shut behind him.

The sound of that lonely, angry cry echoing in his ears was like a sharp kick. He could hardly stand the sound of it.

Now he was across the back yard and in the alley, where he could cut across to the road and then home. Albert picked up his pace, his long legs covering the ground at not quite a run.

Olivia’s sob still rattled in his head—a surprise from a girl he’d already come to view as brittle, sarcastic, and tough. Though he’d formed this impression in a very short time, he’d thought he had her pegged. Then it occurred to him that in the few months he’d known Lily, he hadn’t seen her cry, not really. She was quick to laugh, loud, energetic … and tough.

When Lily cried—as the droplet stains on the pages of her journal told him she had—had it been anything, Albert wondered, like that angry, reluctant sound her sister made?

How long had these memories been threatening to surface? How long had the situation with Kogen been simmering before whatever happened between them, on the night Lily left, sent her running? And why, Albert asked himself, hadn’t he noticed anything
wrong
? He really couldn’t remember anything that seemed strange. Either Lily was very good at hiding it, or he had been unforgivably blind. He suspected there was something he should have seen, and this made him really pathetic as a boyfriend.

The only thing he could do about it was stop being a dumbass and try to help her now that he
did
know.

Even as he promised himself he would be a man of action instead of a boy of angst, a picture of Lily crept into his head and refused to be pushed away. He saw her crying in her sleep, half-buried memories surfacing as nightmares, not knowing exactly what had happened to her but knowing it was bad; he saw her paralyzed with guilt and fear, retreating, wounded, from the memory her brain was trying to recover.

But he was done being lost and powerless and stupid. Now, he had what the adults—his parents, Lily’s parents, their teachers, the cops—didn’t have: the key to the puzzle. He only had to deliver it safely, and Olivia Odilon would help him make that happen. Then Kogen would be locked up and Lily could safely come home.

It was funny how both devastation and hope could come at the same time in the same afternoon. When Lily had first slipped away, it had been impossible for Albert to understand
why
, but now he had more of the story, including the identity of the villain, and he planned to take a hangman’s pleasure in bringing Kogen down before he could hurt Lily again. Cook the bastard’s goose.

It was a phrase Albert’s mother used—usually a gleeful “his goose is cooked!” as the family car passed another car getting pulled over, or when a contestant hit “bankrupt” on
Wheel of Fortune
. As when watching the
Wheel
, Albert found the phrase totally square. Yet it was a phrase stuck in his vocabulary, maybe because he’d heard it a million times over the last seventeen years. When it popped into his head, it was in his mother’s voice. Square or not, the mental picture was a satisfying one: Kogen’s face turning tomato-red, popping beads of sweat and then big, wet blisters, as he sat stewing, cartoon-style, in a big pot of boiling water.

“Hello there, Albert.” A pleasant voice got Albert’s attention. “Got a minute?”

By now Albert was a few blocks from Lily’s house. He was so intent on picturing Kogen’s slow, torturous death as he walked along the curb, teetering between people’s lawns and the gutter, that he didn’t hear the low hum of the expensive import car that pulled up alongside him.

Startled, he looked up to see Kogen, steering his car at about three miles per hour and leaning on his elbow out the open window. It was as if just thinking about the guy had brought him forth, like Satan. Looking at him smiling from the window, Albert found it extra offensive that this creep looked so …
harmless
. Friendly, even. He was like some handsome, middle-aged catalog model.

“Did I startle you?” The guy laughed, as if reading Albert’s mind.

“Yeah, actually,” Albert replied, possibly a bit sharper than was wise. Trying to dial back the hostility, he added, “What’s up, Dr. Kogen?”

The smile stayed on Kogen’s lips. “Give you a ride somewhere?”

“No thank you. But thanks.” Albert walked a little faster.

Kogen steered closer to the curb, forcing Albert into someone’s juniper bush. He stopped the car. “Come over here, then, and let’s chat a minute.”

Albert picked himself out of the bush and stood at Kogen’s open window. The journal—Lily’s journal—was still nestled awkwardly in his waistband, its spine poking into his spine right at the small of his back. It felt like a little dagger back there. As he began to sweat, Albert was sure the journal was sending out some sonar or radar or magnetic resonance that Kogen would pick up on.

“You seem like a stand-up fella, Albert, despite rumors around town to the contrary. But I’m curious: what were you doing this afternoon in my daughter’s room with my other daughter?”

Albert gaped at him, surprised. He spluttered for some appropriate response.

“I only ask because she seemed upset. What did you do to her?”

“I didn’t do anything to her! And we weren’t doing anything, either. We were just talking.”

“Talking.” Kogen repeated the word as if it tasted sour. By now the smile was gone from his mouth, too, and suddenly he was the catalog guy no more; now he was getting down to some business.

“We’re friends,” Albert said. It wasn’t really true, but the truth—the real nature of their (non)relationship—was nothing he could tell this guy. He almost added,
Got any more dumb questions?
but instead managed to spit out a terse, “Anything else?”

“There is, actually,” Kogen said. He opened his car door and got out, a trail of leather upholstery smell coming with him. He stood very close to Albert. Though Albert was taller, Kogen had presence.

Now Albert was seriously alarmed. He was losing his sense of the situation and wondered if perhaps they’d at last arrived at the place where Kogen had been directing this conversation all along. Albert refused to prompt him, determined to wait for Kogen to say whatever he had to say on his own.

“I don’t think you’re being quite truthful with me. I’d really like to know what you were doing in my house.
My
house. Invited, were you?”

“What?”

“Did your friend Olivia invite you over?” Kogen studied Albert’s face, and whatever he saw made him smirk. “Don’t bother lying. I heard part of your conversation, and I’m pretty sure you know something about where Lily might be.”

“You’re wrong,” Albert told him, wondering exactly what Kogen had heard or if he was bluffing.

Kogen went on as if Albert hadn’t spoken. “So, I followed you. And here we are.” He spread his hands.

“Guess you wasted your time, then,” Albert said. He wondered if the man was going to hit him or something. “I have nothing to tell you. I don’t know anything.”

Kogen stepped closer. They were now nose-to-nose. Albert rocked his body forward just barely, determined not to give any ground.

“Don’t you?” Kogen asked. Albert could smell the mint he’d probably just eaten.

“Well,” Albert said, dropping his voice and forcing Lily’s stepfather to strain to catch his words, “I do know
one
thing. And there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about
that
, is there? You see, I
know
, you got it? And soon, so will
everyone
.”

Kogen’s eyes were dead. Albert really expected the guy to take a swing at him now. But Kogen’s fists stayed down, even though they were white-knuckled. “Tell me what you
think
you know, and tell me where my goddamn daughter is.”