“People saw him on the beach last night. With another woman.”
If I was expecting shock, whispered pleas for my silence or heated denials, I’d have been disappointed. “He was with Corina,” Arden said calmly. “They’re friends, Daphne. Friends talk.”
“Someone saw them doing more than talking.”
“Who did you hear this from?” Arden’s voice had gotten higher.
I shrugged. She narrowed her eyes.
“But it’s secondhand?”
I nodded.
“Well. There you go.” She shook her head, flipping her ponytail from one shoulder to the other. “It’s just gossip. Nasty gossip. You probably don’t know this, but Corina just broke up with someone back in LA. Stuart was probably consoling her. If people saw anything, that’s probably what they saw.”
“Okay,” I said.
Arden looked at me for a long, silent moment. “Shit,” she finally said. She pulled out a chair, sat, put her elbows on the table, and cradled her head in her hands. “I told Stuart not to go through with this,” she said. “I told him Drue was bad news.” She looked up at me, as if she was waiting to be challenged. “Sorry. I know you were her friend.”
“We were close, years ago. In high school. But we haven’t spent a lot of time together since then.”
“Because, let me guess. She did something awful to you.” I pressed my lips together, not wanting to speak ill of the dead. Arden had no such compunctions. “I knew what she was the first time I met her. She was so fake with me.” Her nose crinkled. “Like she’d googled ‘how to make your boyfriend’s little sister like you’ five minutes before we met.” She sighed, smoothing her hair. “She was gorgeous. I’ll give her that. And Stuart was just head over heels in love. He thought he could ride the tiger.”
That didn’t seem like an especially generous way to discuss your brother’s newly deceased intended and your almost sister-in-law, I thought, as Arden kept talking.
“I was the one who tried to tell him about her. After they’d been dating for six months, the second time, he came home and asked Mom for Grandma Frances’s ring. I told him. I said, she’s going to screw you over the same way she did before. The same way she’s screwed over everyone, and it’s not like you haven’t seen her do it. He didn’t listen.” She shook her head, looking rueful. “Drue must have been amazing in bed. That’s the only explanation.”
“I wouldn’t know. And like I said, I barely knew her as an adult, but I hoped that she’d grown up and changed.”
“I guess Stuart hoped so, too. He said, ‘You can’t judge someone on the way they behaved in high school.’ ” Arden rolled her eyes. “I told him, a leopard doesn’t change its spots.”
“So what happened?” I asked, keeping my voice quiet and level, trying to sound like all the therapists I’d ever seen on TV. “I know what she did to me. Tell me what she did to your brother.”
Arden reached back with both hands, elbows pointing skyward as she yanked her ponytail tight. “I think that Stuart’s a catch,” she said. “That’s not me being his sister, that’s me being objective. He’s cute, he’s smart, he’s creative, and he works hard. He’s got a good heart. You’d think that would have been enough for Drue, right?” Arden didn’t wait for me to answer before shaking her head. “The first time they were dating, they went to a football game together. And Drue met another guy, a classmate’s older brother. Who was smart and good-looking, and also Michael Leavitt’s son.”
Michael Leavitt, I knew, was a tech billionaire, one of the wealthiest men in the world, which would make his son one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.
“And Drue went after him.”
“Like a dog after a rabbit.” Arden’s eyes were fixed on the water. “Stuart said you could hear the wheels turning the first time she saw him. Like, How am I going to get that?”
“What happened?”
“She got him. For a little while. They went out for a few months, and then Jeremy ended it. Said he couldn’t give her what she deserved. How’s that for a line?”
“Maybe she really loved him,” I ventured. Arden gave a cynical shrug that made her look a lot older than twenty-four.
“I’m not sure Drue ever loved anyone. I think some people just always want more. There’s no such thing as enough.” She shrugged again. “Who knows? If she’d married Jeremy, maybe she’d have dumped him to try for Prince Harry.”
Something was sticking in my mind, nagging at me like a splinter. I shut my eyes, trying to replay our conversation. “When did this happen? When did Drue dump Stuart so she could go after Jeremy Leavitt?”
“Oh, that was Round One,” said Arden. She unfurled herself from her tuck, stretching her arms up over her head. “That’s what my parents and I call it, the first time they got together.”
“In college, right?”
Arden shook her head, her ponytail swinging. “Nope. When they were in high school. At Croft.”
Croft? “Drue went to the Lathrop School,” I said. “In New York City. With me.”
“Through twelfth grade, sure. I’m talking about after. She met Stuart at Croft. It’s a boarding school. In California. Stuart had been there, the whole way through. Drue showed up there after she graduated from Lathrop to do a PG year.” At my blank look, Arden gave a cynical smirk. “Yeah, I know she made it look like she was doing a gap year. I saw her Instagram. All of those pictures of Australia, or doing Habitat for Humanity, or whatever. The truth was that she went to Croft, the year after Lathrop, trying to get her grades and her SATs up high enough for Harvard.”
“So, those trips…” I tried to remember the pictures I’d seen on the Lathrop School’s website, tried to square this revelation with what I’d previously believed. “She faked them?”
“No. She did all that stuff, she just did it on vacations. In between all the tutoring she needed to make it across the finish line and into Hah-vahd. There was even some scandal at Croft about her parents paying someone to take her SATs. The school hushed it up. And it worked. She got in. Happily ever after.”
I closed my mouth, which had fallen open in disbelief. I’d stayed away from Drue’s social-media presence as much as I could, so I wasn’t sure how much to trust my own memory. Had she ever explicitly said she was on a gap year, or had she just made it look that way and guessed, correctly, that it was what most people would think?
I shook my head. “Wow. I always figured she got into Harvard the old-fashioned way. Good grades, good test scores, and a big donation from Mom and Dad.”
Arden smirked. “Even with her dad handing over the big bucks, she still had to show Harvard that she was going to be able to do the work. I guess she needed an extra year to clear the bar.”
Interesting, I thought. Of course, it wasn’t surprising that Drue wouldn’t advertise how she’d needed extra help or extra time to get into college. Drue was smart—smart enough to be one of our class’s top students if she’d applied herself. But she hadn’t. She preferred to party, and to shop, and to hook up with guys. I’ll never be this young again, she’d say. Which meant that she’d slack off for the better part of a semester, then do all of the reading in a single all-night binge, fueled by gallons of coffee and her mother’s diet pills. She also had me as her secret weapon, ever available to help write her papers, type them, run spellcheck, and sometimes, when she was feeling especially lazy, take her idea and do the actual writing.
So the idea that she’d needed extra help and extra time wasn’t completely surprising. Nor was the idea that she’d gone out west to get it. Many of the top prep schools were in New England, but if Drue had gone to one of them she’d undoubtedly have run into people who knew her, or her family, and her secret would be out.
I decided to put aside the mystery of Drue’s post-Lathrop, pre-Harvard year and return to the topic of her love life. “So Drue and Stuart dated at Croft, and then again when they were in college?”
Arden stood up and bounced a few t
imes on the soles of her feet, like she was getting ready to run a fast five miles. “Yup. And the same thing happened there. Drue was happy with Stuart until some guy who’d dropped out after freshman year and invented some app that made a fortune came back to campus to give a talk.” Arden stroked her ponytail, sifting the fine brown strands through her fingers. “First Drue told Stuart that she wanted to take the guy out for coffee so she could network with him, get his business advice. Then they’re having dinner together to further their conversation. Then it’s ‘Oh sorry, Stuart, but Devon is my soulmate.’ ”
“Oof.”
“Yeah. So when she and Stuart hooked up again…” Arden’s voice took on a nasty edge. “None of us wanted to hear it. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice… Well, you know. My mom and dad and I didn’t want to see him go through it again with her, but he wouldn’t listen. She could always get him back. Whistle, and he’d come running.” Her voice tightened on the last few words. Looking down, I could see her hands curling into fists. “We never understood it. And he didn’t even try to explain it to us. Drue is special, he’d tell us. We have fun.”
I nodded, feeling complete and total empathy for Stuart Lowe. I couldn’t have explained it, either, but I knew what it was like to be the center of Drue Cavanaugh’s universe, how her regard could make you feel like the brightest, shiniest, sharpest, most perfect version of yourself, and how she could turn an ordinary day into an adventure. I thought of a line from a Joe Henry song: And I don’t miss you half as much / As who you made me think I was. That had been Drue’s magic, the part I’d never been able to quite explain to Darshi: the way Dru would treat you like you were amazing, and how you’d actually start to think that she was right.
“And what about Corina?”
“Corina was great.” Arden sounded wistful. “Maybe not the sharpest crayon in the box, but sweet. Easy to be with. She loved him, and we all loved her. We would’ve been happy if they’d stayed together.”
I have to tell McMichaels, I thought as Arden turned to go. But although the revelation had rocked my world, informing the detective that Drue had secretly attended an extra year of prep school and that she’d dated Stuart twice before was hardly a game-changer. And if I told him what I’d learned about the will, I’d also have to disclose that I’d been eavesdropping on the mourners for my intel.
I’d keep quiet, I decided. At least until I learned more.
“Hey,” I said. Arden had her hand on the gate that enclosed the pool. I heard her sigh as she turned. “Do you know anything about Stuart and Drue doing any social media brand outreach around the wedding?”
Her forehead furrowed. “Huh?”
“Like, putting together a pitch deck?” Her blank expression told me she had no idea what that was. “Were they asking businesses if they wanted to partner with them and sponsor the wedding or the honeymoon?”
Arden stared at me. “You mean like selling ads?”
“No, not ads… well, sort of. More like a trade. Going to American Airlines and saying Give us tickets for our honeymoon and we’ll do an Instagram post that mentions you. Or promising to post a shot of yourself on the plane, with the logo visible.”
Arden seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why would they need to do that? Didn’t Drue have more money than God?”
“As far as I knew.”
“That was the only part of Drue and Stuart that made sense to me,” Arden said. “My guess is that she promised to use some of the family fortune to help my brother with his start-up.”
“Do you think they loved each other?” I asked.
The question seemed to catch her off guard. “He was going to marry her,” she said.
Which wasn’t exactly an answer. I waited, watching her face, wondering if she’d fidget, or start playing with her ponytail again. Arden said, “Look. Stuart’s older than I am, and he’d left for boarding school by the time I was eight. We weren’t close. If you want my opinion, I think it was Drue’s whole world that he found attractive. That, and the way she made him feel.” She shrugged. “And from what I saw, they wanted a lot of the same things. Money and power. People build lives together on a whole lot less than that.”
I was trying to think about what else I could ask her when I heard the sound of a car’s tires crunching over the shells. A nondescript Toyota stopped in front of the garage. The front door opened, and Darshini Shah emerged. In black dress pants and a matching blazer, with her laptop bag slung across her chest, she was the most beautiful sight I could imagine.
Chapter Thirteen
“Tell me everything you’ve learned so far.” Darshi took a seat on the bench at the bottom of my bed, and I was collapsed against the headboard. I’d opened the glass doors to catch the breeze, and we could hear the waves as they advanced and retreated on the beach below us. Occasionally, some kind of seabird would squawk, and we’d see it, aloft and almost motionless outside the windows, hovering on an air current. Darshi had walked into the room, looked through the windows at the deck (now festooned with crime scene tape) and the ocean beyond it, and given a single “Nice.” Not much for aesthetics was my roommate, even under the best of circumstances, but her presence, the sound of her voice, her scent of coconut conditioner and sandalwood perfume, all of it calmed me.
“First of all,” I began, “did you know that Drue did a thirteenth year at the Croft School in California before she went to Harvard?”
I was gratified when Darshi’s eyes widened. “Whoa,” she said.
“I know, right! I mean, did you have any idea that she had problems getting into college?”
Darshi shook her head again. She rolled up the cuffs of her jacket, then rolled them down again. In addition to coconuts and sandalwood, I could catch a whiff of an unfamiliar perfume, and wondered if Carmen had been at the conference, too, and if Darshi had sent her home to come help me. “I figured her parents just gave the school money,” she said.
“I know! Me too!” My voice sounded a little screechy. I made myself take a breath. “And also, I heard Drue’s grandmother discussing her will. Drue’s will, not the grandmother’s. And it turns out Drue left a high school chum some money.”
Darshi stared. “You?”
“I don’t know.” The idea that I could somehow end up with a giant chunk of cash at the end of this left me feeling shivery, hot and then cold, like I was coming down with the flu.
“What about your mystery man?” Darshi asked.
I told Darshi that no one had answered the Lady Lu’s phone, that the woman who’d answered had hung up on me as soon as I’d said Drue’s name, and that Google was giving me hot yoga instructors, not the guy I’d met the night before. “I wrote down every single thing I could remember about him,” I said, showing her my notebook. Darshi’s eyebrows lifted incrementally.
“Amazing at sex? Seriously?” She shut the book, looking dubious. “Well, good for you, I guess.”
“Yeah. If it turns out Drue was murdered and I end up in jail, at least I’ll have some nice memories.” I sighed, then looked at her. “If you want to say ‘I told you so,’ now would be the time.”
Darshi shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was quiet, and her tone was hard to read. “I am. I didn’t like Drue very much, but I’m sorry for her. For her family. And I’m sorry for you.”
I nodded, with tears stinging my eyes. “Thank you for coming.”
Darshi nodded and reached for the notebook again. “Your gentleman caller mentioned his aunt and uncle and cousins, but not parents or siblings. Scar on ankle. No tattoos.” She shook her head, with a combination of bemusement and exasperation on her face. “Very thorough. Okay, get your purse.”
“What?”
“We’re going for a ride.”
I looked around, as if someone had overheard her. “I’m not supposed to leave!”
“I didn’t see a guard at your door.”
I grabbed my purse and kept my head down as I skittered out the door, down
the stairs, and across the crunchy shell driveway to the car Darshi had rented. It wasn’t until she’d pulled onto Route 6 that I was able to relax slightly, convinced that no one was following us, and that I wasn’t about to get arrested for leaving the scene of the crime.
“Where are we going?”
“The sailing school. Maybe if we ask whoever you spoke to in person, she’ll be more inclined to help.”
* * *
The Provincetown Yacht Club was just as Nick had described it—a hole-in-the-wall on the west end of Commercial Street, which was Provincetown’s main drag. The club was small, occupying what looked like a modest clapboard house, next door to a fancy-looking deli called Relish. An old debossed wood plaque above the doorway read YACHT RACING CLUB; a hand-lettered square of construction paper underneath said “Raffle Tix and T-Shirts for Sale. Please Knock!” Darshi stood behind me as I knocked on the front door. When no one answered, we followed the sounds of voices around back. The house was much longer than it was wide, with its back side open to the water, and two big garage doors rolled up to expose two deep bays. I saw high, shadowy ceilings, a concrete floor, and rows of wooden racks that held the bodies of sailboats and kayaks. Above and between the boats, dozens of colorful life jackets hung drying over clotheslines that stretched from one end of the room to the other. The sails were furled in stacks along the walls.
There was a metal showerhead screwed into the corner of the house. Just past it, a flight of outdoor stairs led to the second floor. Beyond the house, a short, sandy slope led down to a small crescent of beach and a dock. The water glittered in the sunlight, and a dozen sailboats zigged and zagged back and forth between the shore and a sandbar. The kids on the boats laughed and shouted as they made their turns, calling “Boom coming over” or “Coming about!”
“H’lo?”
I looked up. An older woman was standing on the second-floor landing, leaning over the railing, looking at us. I thought that I recognized the gruff female voice from my phone call that morning. She had pale white skin and thick gray hair falling out of a bun and framing her face in wisps. A pair of reading glasses hung from a seed-pearl chain and rested on her capacious bosom.
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