Almost, but not quite. I took his hand off my hip and guided it down to where our bodies were joined. Nick made a strangling noise, and his hips jerked as he pushed deep inside me, and as I put his fingers where I needed to feel them.
“Oh!” I cried, as I felt it begin. He held me tight, angling his hips and thrusting hard and fast, and I threw my head back, feeling my climax ripple through me, crying my pleasure into the wide, dark sky.
* * *
I woke up at just after five in the morning, as the early-morning light was starting to spill through the floor-to-ceiling window. I’d forgotten to pull the shades down. I’d forgotten to text Darshi. My phone, which I’d forgotten to charge, was on the bedside table, flashing urgently.
I yawned, smoothing the tangled, stiff nest of my hair, smiling at how good I felt. Round One had been in the hot tub, and Round Three had been on the bed, and in between, we’d been kissing by the windows, and Nick had pushed me until my back was flattened against the cool panes.
“Nick, we can’t,” I’d whispered, because there were people out on the deck. I could hear them and could smell their cigars.
“Shh,” he’d whispered, nuzzling the nape of my neck, then kissing his way down my body. “We can if you’re quiet.” I’d set my teeth into the inside of my lip to keep from moaning as he’d licked me, his tongue teasing and flickering, so gently and gradually that I’d wanted to scream. I’d never thought I’d had an exhibitionist streak, but the idea that there were people, right there, with only a few inches of glass between the wedding guests and our naked bodies, had made me wild, and more than happy to return the favor as soon as I trusted my legs to hold me again.
I stretched my arms above my head and gave a happy sigh. God, I’d missed sex! Not just the way it made you feel completely connected to another person, but the way it made you feel completely at home in your own body. And, as good as the sex had been, the best part of the night was the moment when we’d both woken up together, after the second time, before the third. Nick had pressed his forehead to mine, looking right into my eyes.
“Hi,” he whispered, in his low, sleep-scratchy voice.
“Hi,” I whispered back. He’d stroked my cheek with his thumb, looking at me. It hadn’t lasted long, just long enough for me to construct our entire life together in my head, from our marriage (a much-smaller wedding in Cape Cod) to our lives running a charter fishing business/Etsy store. I’d make memory boxes and birdhouses; he’d take families fishing, we’d spend every night together. “You’re such a sweetheart,” Nick had whispered. I’d tilted my head for a kiss, and he’d eased his fingers inside of me. “Is it okay?” he’d asked, seeing my tiny wince.
“I’m fine,” I’d told him. It had hurt, but in a wonderful, sweet way. “Don’t stop.”
I rolled over. The other side of the bed was empty. The pillowcase was smooth, the sheets and comforter pulled tight, as if no one had been there at all.
“Nick?” I called, keeping my voice low. No answer. I got up, wrapping the soft, fringed blanket from the foot of the bed around myself, and peeked into the bathroom. It was empty. There was literally no sign of him—no clothes, no shoes, no wet towels or man-size footprints, not even a condom wrapper by the side of the bed. Maybe last night didn’t happen. Maybe I’d made the whole thing up. Except I could see a purplish-red mark on the top of my breast, and between my legs, and in my lower belly and the insides of my thighs, I felt deliciously sore.
I slid open the glass door and stepped onto the deck, feeling the breeze against my bare shoulders. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sky was already streaked orange and rust, and I realized, with a guilty pang, that we hadn’t turned the hot tub off. Wisps of steam were rising in the air, and I could hear the motor chugging above the sound of the waves.
I looked through the door in the hedge. Something was in the water. A bird, was my first thought as I crossed the deck and got close enough to see.
It wasn’t a bird. It was Drue. She was facedown, in a bikini, with her blond hair tangled around her head, swaying in the water as the jets pumped. I screamed her name and grabbed at her body, and the stiff wrongness of it was immediate, gutting. It felt like I was moving a doll and not a person as I tried to yank her out of the water. “Help!” I screamed, and got her up and out and down to the deck, where I knelt, pressing my ear to her wet chest. No heartbeat. I touched my fingers to her neck. No pulse.
“Drue!”
I pounded her chest, then tilted her head back, opening her mouth, trying to remember the CPR class I’d taken a million years ago. “Help!” I shouted. “Someone help me!” But even as I heard doors open and people pounding across the deck, even as I pressed my lips to hers and started to breathe, I knew that Drue was dead. Everything that had ever been inside her, everything, good and bad, that had made my beautiful, terrible friend who she was, all of it was gone.
Part Two
The Summer Friend
Chapter Ten
“One more time,” he said. The man’s name was Ryan McMichaels, and he was a detective with the Truro Police Department. He was in his fifties, a white man with blue-gray eyes and a jowly face above a blocky body. His hair was iron gray, thick, almost bristly as it stood in spikes over his head. A fat and neatly clipped caterpillar of a mustache sat above his thin lips. His eyebrows were also thick, but unruly, full of wiry hairs poking out in every direction. His reddish skin looked angry at being exposed to the sun, or maybe he’d just given himself an especially aggressive shave before coming to the murder scene. He wore a red tie, knotted tight under his throat, a gold wedding band on his left hand that kept catching the light as he moved his arm around, asking me about this morning, asking me to tell him everything, from start to finish, the whole way through.
It was not quite eight in the morning, not quite three hours after I’d discovered Drue, and I was still shaky and terrified and heartbroken. What had happened? Where was Nick? And why hadn’t I heard anything when my best friend was presumably drowning just outside my door?
The hours after Drue’s death had been a jumbled blur. I’d remembered screaming, and people coming—Minerva, looking ghostly under a glistening layer of face cream, and a guy from the catering crew, with his apron flapping around his waist as he ran. Someone had pulled me away from the hot tub and led me back to my room. At some point, someone else had brought me a cup of hot coffee. I remembered sitting on the bed, my hands wrapped around the mug, shaking like I’d been thrown into a tub of ice. Through the window that faced the water, I saw Drue’s body being loaded onto a stretcher as cops photographed the scene; through the windows that faced the front of the house, I saw the woman with the silvery chignon from the night before help load Mrs. Cavanaugh into the back of an enormous Escalade, then climb in behind her.
I’d gotten dressed, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and finally noticed my phone, still lying on my unmade half of the bed. Dully, I picked it up and saw texts from last night scroll across the screen. Where are you, Darshi had written at eleven p.m. I need details. A line of question marks at midnight about an event that seemed like it had happened in another lifetime. And, at one o’clock in the morning, If Drue messed this up for you I will kill her. Followed by the emojis for a bride, a knife, and a skull.
I must have gasped. Then, quickly, I deleted the texts, knowing that it wouldn’t matter. Text messages existed in the cloud, in the ether, in perpetuity, like every single other thing on the Internet. My friend was dead, and my roommate had just unknowingly turned us both into suspects.
Eventually, Minerva had returned to my room. “The police want to talk to you.”
I stood up. “Hey,” I said, my voice steady, my tone casual, “did you happen to see a guy named Nick anywhere around?”
She looked at me, unblinking. Without answering, she’d gestured toward the stairs, where Detective McMichaels had been waiting. He’d led me through the empty living and dining room and into a small pantry just off the k
itchen, with a built-in desk and shelves full of canned food, boxes of pasta, and canisters of sugar and flour. A lobster pot, high as my knees, sat on the floor, next to a package of paper cocktail napkins printed with the announcement that at the beach, it was always Wine O’Clock. I’d sat and told him my story, then I’d gone through it all again, and now he was looking at me, eyebrows raised in expectation. Instead of starting my story for the third time, I asked, “Do they know what happened? How she…” I swallowed hard. “How she died?”
“It’s too early to tell,” McMichaels said. True, but I’d heard the whispers, before the cops had come and cordoned off the crime scene, when people were still out on the deck and I’d been able to hear them through my bedroom’s sliding doors. Maybe she was drunk, and she passed out and drowned Maybe she hit her head. Someone had remembered the story of an NFL player’s toddler who had drowned after her hair had somehow gotten stuck in a hot tub’s drain, and someone else had mentioned the bride who’d been paralyzed the night before her wedding, after a bridesmaid pushed her into a pool.
“If you don’t mind, I need you to walk me through the events one more time.”
My lips felt frozen when I said, “This wasn’t a… a suspicious death, was it?” I’d thought about saying unnatural, but wasn’t it unnatural anytime a healthy young person died?
“Please, miss. If you could just answer my question.”
“Of course,” I said. I told him how Drue and I had taken the ferry over from Boston the day before, how we had gotten ready for the rehearsal in the afternoon, and descended the stairs together as the party on the beach began. “Drue spent most of the night circulating. I had dinner with one of the other guests, an old friend of Drue’s, a guy named Nick Andros.”
“So you didn’t spend much time with Drue last night?”
I shook my head. “I only saw Drue for a few minutes, here and there. We took pictures.” I reached for my phone.
The detective said, “I can take a look later. Why don’t you keep going?”
Deep breath. “We’d just gotten up to get dessert when the fight started.”
“What fight was this?” he asked, his tone neutral.
“Drue’s parents were fighting,” I said. “Lily and Robert Cavanaugh. This was down on the beach, right by the stairs.”
“And the fight was about…?”
“The cost of the wedding. I mean, I think. That’s based on what I heard. Drue’s dad was yelling about how much the rugs cost—the rugs they’d put on the sand—and the houses they’d rented. Drue was trying to talk to her dad, and he started yelling at her. He said that she and her mother were like peas in a pod. He went up the stairs, and Drue went after him, and then I got some drinks and went after her.”
“What drinks?”
“Two shots of tequila. A glass of ice water. A bottle of wine.”
He raised his eyebrow. “I didn’t know what she’d want,” I said, hoping that I didn’t sound defensive.
“You went to Miss Cavanaugh’s bedroom?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you see Mr. Cavanaugh? Speak to him?”
“No,” I said, remembering how relieved I’d felt when I’d found Drue alone, how reluctant I’d been to confront her father. “Just Drue. She was very upset. She told me that she’d learned that her parents were getting divorced. They were fighting because her father thought the wedding was just a way for her mother to stick her dad with a huge bill.”
“Did Drue indicate when she’d learned that her parents were divorcing?”
“She just said that she’d found out recently,” I said. “She said she’d just found out. I’m not sure if she meant just then, down on the beach, or at some other point, but it had been recent.”
“So you came up from the beach to see her?”
I nodded.
“With the drinks?”
I nodded again.
“There was bottled water in all of the rooms, right?” When I nodded, he asked, “Why did you carry a glass of ice water all the way up the stairs when there was bottled water waiting?”
“I don’t know.” My voice was a whisper. “I thought, water with ice and lemon was nicer, you know? It was fancier. And I wanted her to have something nice. So she’d know I cared.”
For what felt like a long time, he looked at me, unspeaking, as if he was waiting for me to blurt out, I did it! “Go on,” he finally said. “What happened next?”
“I tried to get her to calm down. I sat with her for a while, on her bed. We talked.”
“About?”
“About the fight. Her parents. The wedding. I asked if she wanted to go through with it, and she said she did. I asked if she wanted me to stay with her. She said she didn’t. That I should go, that she’d be fine.” A lump swelled in my throat. “She told me I was a good friend.”
“This was about what time?”
“Right as they were serving dessert. So maybe nine o’clock, nine-thirty? It had finally gotten dark.”
“Was Miss Cavanaugh drinking?”
“At the party? I don’t really know. Like I said, she was circulating. Talking to her guests. I wasn’t with her much.”
“How about in her room, after the fight? Did she drink any of what you brought her?” Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought I could hear accusation in his tone.
“We both did the shots, and I made her drink the water. I don’t know about anything else.” I thought I remembered seeing a bottle of champagne on the dresser, along with a glass, but I hadn’t actually seen Drue drinking, so I decided not to mention it.
“What happened next?” The detective’s face was expressionless, but I could feel judgment, rolling off him in noxious waves as we returned to the post-Drue part of my night.
“I went outside, to go back to my room, and there was a guy there.”
“That would be our nameless stranger.”
I nodded, too weary and heartsick to protest at what sounded a lot like mockery. “He said he was a business associate of Mr. Cavanaugh’s, and that he was concerned about Drue. He’d brought her a glass of water, but then he said I’d beaten him to it.”
McMichaels’s forehead wrinkled. “Did he say how he knew Drue?”
“No. From work, I guess. I mean, Drue works—worked—with her father. So if this guy knew Mr. Cavanaugh, he might have known Drue, too. From work.”
Another nod. More tapping. “What then?”
“I went back to my room and found Nick waiting on my deck.”
“This would be Nick Andros?”
“Yes. Him. He and I were in the hot tub, talking for a while.”
“About?”
I opened my mouth to say that Nick had told me he’d seen the groom and his ex-girlfriend in a clinch on the beach, then stopped myself. It was a piece of information that I’d overheard, possibly not even true. Nick could tell them himself, provide them with an eyewitness account instead of secondhand information. Assuming someone could find him. “Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, the wedding. The dinner. How amazing everything was.”
“Amazing,” McMichaels repeated.
“That’s right.”
“And then what?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What happened after you concluded your conversation?”
Sex! I wanted to shout, feeling a blush creep up my chest. We did the sex! Three times! Oh, sure, my inner Nana whispered. Tell the nice detective that you had sex three times with a man you’d known for less than three hours and who was gone when you woke up. Then just stretch your arms out for the cuffs. Hopefully they’ll fit.
I cleared my throat. In a very small voice, I said, “We, um, spent the night together. In my room. We fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, he was gone.”
I wanted to keep talking, to explain, to tell Detective McMichaels that I’d never done anything like this before, not even close, that I’d only slept with four men in my entire life, and most of it hadn’t even
been good, but I pressed my lips together and made myself wait for follow-up questions.
“Tell me about your relationship with the deceased,” Detective McMichaels said.
The deceased. I’d had my arm around her waist less then twelve hours ago; I could still feel her last hug, could still smell hairspray and prosecco and feel her tremble against me, and now she was the deceased. She couldn’t be gone. It couldn’t be real.
I gripped my coffee cup, hard, with a hand that still felt shaky. “Drue is…” I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Drue was one of my oldest friends. We met back in sixth grade.”
He nodded. “What can you tell me about Miss Cavanaugh’s life in New York City?”
“I’m probably not the best source on that. Drue and I hadn’t been close for a while. Over the last few months, we’d been getting to know each other again, as adults.” I decided to give him the truth, figuring that if I didn’t, he’d hear it from someone else, and he’d think I’d been trying to mislead him. “I was surprised when Drue asked me to be part of her wedding. Surprised, but happy.”
“Why were you surprised?”
Big Summer Page 17