Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why’d you lie? Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”

  “Because…” Nick began, but Darshi interrupted.

  “Because it’s not his name anymore.” She jerked her chin at Nick. “You probably changed it. After. Isn’t that right?”

  He nodded again. “Nicholas is my middle name. It’s what my aunt and uncle started calling me after…” He swallowed again. “After I came to live with them. Carvalho is their last name. They changed my name after they adopted me.” He rubbed his hands against his shorts and looked up, his eyes finding mine. “After my mother was murdered.”

  The memory arrived in my brain all at once. I heard myself gasp, felt my skin bristling with goose bumps as I remembered the story. As I stood, frozen, Nick found two white wicker armchairs with pink and green cushions—banished, I supposed, because they hadn’t matched Drue’s nuptial color scheme—and pulled them toward the center of the room. “Please,” he said. Darshi and I exchanged a glance. When I shrugged and sat down, she did, too, and Nick started talking, rubbing his face, and running his hands through his hair.

  “My mom grew up in Boston, and she spent her summers here. She was the youngest girl in her family. She was thirty-eight when she had me. She never told anyone who the father was. She just said that it—that I—was going to be her baby. Her family had a couple of houses up here, and she got her father to let her live in the smallest one. This place.” He gave me his crooked smile. “I know it’s hard to believe, but a few million dollars ago, it was just a four-room cottage.”

  “So you lived here with your mother,” I said.

  He nodded. “She was a freelance writer. Before she had me, she lived in New York City and wrote about art and fashion. She did some of that from here, after I came along.”

  More memories were starting to surface: Drue arriving at school one Monday morning bursting with the news, saying, “You guys won’t even believe what happened! They just arrested the man who killed a woman in the same town where I go in the summer.” Over lunch, she’d told me and Ainsley and Avery all the juicy details of the formerly cold case: how, ten years ago, a young single mother had been found dead in her kitchen, with her little boy curled up around her. “He’d brought a pillow and a blanket from the bedroom and tucked her in, like she was asleep,” Drue had said, leaning so close that I could smell Frosted Flakes on her breath. I remembered how she looked, her face alight with the prurient glee of repeating something shocking. “They don’t even know how long her body was there. It could have been days.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I could almost hear the sound of Drue’s voice, bubbling with excitement as she’d told us that the scene of the crime was on the same dune where her grandparents lived, picturing the story she’d shown us about the trial in the New York Times. “I’ll bet I’ve walked right by that house a million times,” she’d said with a dramatic shudder. “Maybe I even walked by the killer.”

  Nick swallowed hard. “It took the cops ten years to finally figure out who did it. And that was only after they interrogated every man my mom had ever dated, or was friends with, or said hello to in the post office.” He winced. “Before they found the killer, someone wrote a book about it, and the book got turned into a movie on Lifetime.”

  I remembered the movie. Drue had invited me and Ainsley and Avery over to watch it. Abigay had made us popcorn, topped with brewer’s yeast instead of butter, because Drue was dieting. A soap-opera star had played the murdered woman, a pop singer turned actor was her boyfriend, who’d become the chief suspect, and they’d shot parts of it on the Cape. “That’s our house!” Drue had said when her grandparents’ mansion made an appearance. “That’s the post office! That’s the beach!”

  Nick’s voice was soft. “After all that, it turned out that the man who’d killed my mother had never even met her before. He worked for the company my mom had hired to clean out her gutters. He came here, and he saw her, and…” Nick rubbed his face with his hands. “Her death had nothing at all to do with her personal life. She wasn’t killed by someone she knew. It was just a random, terrible thing.” He shook his head, breathing in slowly. “So. After my mother died, her sister and her brother-in-law adopted me. I took their last name and started going by my middle name.” Looking right at my face, he said, “I’m sorry that I lied to you. And, for what it’s worth, everything else I told you was true. I do work with kids in Boston during the school year, and I am working on a charter fishing boat for the summer.” He grimaced. “At least, I was. I’m not sure I’ve still got a job after blowing off work today, but I couldn’t leave.” He sighed. “And I did know Drue. At least for one summer.”

  “So why give me a fake last name? I wouldn’t have known you weren’t on the guest list.”

  He looked down, his expression unhappy. “Because people here know my aunt and uncle, and they know the story. They might not have recognized me, but they’d recognize my last name. It was more than twenty years ago, but out here, that’s like yesterday. The Outer Cape’s like a small town. People talk.”

  “So what about last night?” Darshi prompted. “Why’d you take off?”

  Nick raked one hand through his hair. From the way it was standing up, I guessed he’d been tugging at it all morning. “Okay. After we…” He looked at me and rubbed his face again. “Um.”

  “I know you guys hooked up,” Darshi said. “Cut to the chase.”

  He nodded. “After you fell asleep—I wanted to look around, to see if anything was the way I remembered it. I got dressed, and I went upstairs, and I heard a man and a woman in the living room, on the sofa all the way by the far wall, having an argument.”

  “What about?” Darshi asked.

  “The man was saying stuff like, Just be patient. Stick to the plan, and the woman said, I’m done waiting. I’ve waited long enough.”

  I shuddered and wrapped my arms around my shoulders. “Who were they?”

  “I think the man was Drue’s father. I didn’t get a good look at him during the party, but I heard his voice, and I looked him up later.” He nodded toward his phone, plugged into an outlet at the baseboard. “The woman, I’m not sure.”

  “Not Drue?” I asked. Nick shook his head.

  “Not Drue’s mom?” asked Darshi.

  He shook his head again. “She sounded younger.”

  I thought it over. Maybe the mystery lady was Mr. Cavanaugh’s mistress, some side piece who’d shown up at the wedding to claim her place or make trouble. I’m done waiting. I’ve waited long enough.

  “So then what?” I asked.

  “I was standing there in the dark, holding my breath, trying to figure out how I could sneak back downstairs, and they heard me.”

  I tried to picture it—Nick in his Nantucket Reds and white shirt. The shadowy figures, tucked into the deep couch by the windows that looked out over the bay. The man narrowing his eyes, calling, Who’s there?

  “Mr. Cavanaugh stood up. He didn’t come toward me, he just stood there, and said, ‘Get out.’ ” Nick gave me a look somewhere between defiant and pleading. “And, you know, I thought, if he caught a random guy in the house…”

  “Got it. So then what?” I asked.

  “So I ran.” Nick sounded disgusted at himself. “I went down the stairs, and out the door. I had to circle around to get my shoes, because they were still on your deck. Then I went back down to the beach, and I just started walking.” He dragged both hands through his hair and gave a brief chuckle. “Running, actually. I was almost to the top of the hill when I figured, even if I ran for the next three hours, I’d be somewhere on Route 6 when the sun came up. Not anywhere near where I had to be for work, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So I just figured. Well.” He nodded at the inflated bed, and his phone, and the book. “I remembered this room. Sometimes I’d hide here when I was a kid. I figured, if someone had recognized me and was trying to track me down, they wouldn’t look for me inside the
house. I thought I’d just stay here, wait until the house emptied out, and then try to find you and explain. At least leave a note.”

  Darshi made a scoffing noise. I rolled my eyes. Nick must have seen me do it, because he bent down and found a scrap of paper that seemed to have been torn from the paperback. He handed it to me. I moved until I was directly under the bare bulb, which gave me enough light to read what he’d written.

  Dear Daphne, I had a wonderful time with you last night, and I’m very glad we met. I am sorry for running out on you, and I am even more sorry to say that I misled you. I told you that I was an acquaintance of Drue’s from sailing camp, which is true. However, I also let you believe I was a wedding guest, which is not true. I would like to tell you the whole story, and explain myself, if you’d be willing to listen. I know this isn’t the most auspicious beginning, but I’d like to see you again. If not, I understand, and I thank you for a memorable evening.

  He’d signed his name simply Nick, and written down a phone number.

  I read it through twice, flushed with pleasure, even in the midst of my fear. A wonderful time. I’m glad we met. I’d like to see you again.

  “Does your family still have a house here?” It was far from the most essential question, but it was all that occurred to me to ask.

  He shook his head. “My grandparents sold this place, and the big house, after my mother died. My aunt and uncle sold their place years ago. They made a kil—a fortune,” he said, cutting himself off before he could say killing. “I’ve got an apartment in Wellfleet that I’m sharing with three other guys for the summer.”

  “How long were you planning this?” asked Darshi. Her voice was crisp, not unpleasant, but not especially friendly, either.

  “I didn’t plan it at all, I swear. The whole thing was a… a whim.”

  “I don’t think I believe you,” Darshi said.

  Nick shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “So at what point did you realize that you’d left me alone with a corpse in the hot tub?”

  Nick sighed. “When I went back to the deck to get my shoes, there wasn’t anyone there. After I came down here, I must’ve fallen asleep. The sirens woke me up. I could hear there was something happening.” He looked chagrined as he said, “I could hear you screaming. I figured that would be a bad time to try to slip out, with cops crawling all over the house. Then I heard people saying that Drue was dead.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You have to understand how badly the cops fu—how badly they screwed up investigating my mother’s murder,” he said. “They brought every boyfriend she’d ever had in for questioning, every man she’d ever dated. Every man she’d ever met. Their names got dragged through the mud. All those guys ended up under suspicion for years, because the cops were stuck on the idea that it had to be some man she’d, you know, been with.” This time, after he raked his hands through his hair, he gave the roots a tug before he let go. “Imagine if I popped out of the storage room and said, ‘Oh, hey, I’m the son of the woman who was murdered in this house twenty-one years ago, just letting you know that I crashed the party last night and lied about my name and spent the whole night hiding down here, but I absolutely didn’t have anything to do with Drue’s death.’ How do you think that would have gone over?”

  “We don’t even know how Drue died yet. And you’ve got an alibi,” I said.

  “Not for the entire night,” he replied. He looked at Darshi, then at me. “If I go up there, they are going to arrest me,” he said. “They won’t care that I was, um, occupied for most of the night. The cops ended up looking incompetent the last time someone died. For them, it’s all about the path of least resistance. If someone looks obvious, that’s who they’re going to arrest, just so they can arrest someone, and not be accused of screwing the pooch again.”

  I turned to Darshi, wondering what we were supposed to do now, when I heard the sounds of shouting and feet pounding down the stairs. Darshi cracked the storage room door open. I stood behind her, looking out into the foyer, and Nick stood behind me. Two police cruisers sped down the driveway. Behind us, a phalanx of uniformed cops, with McMichaels at their head, was pounding down the stairs, marching a handcuffed young woman toward the door.

  “I didn’t do it,” the young woman said, her voice low and carrying. She looked like a teenager, with short dark hair, arched brows, and a fine-boned frame. I had a quick glimpse of a pressed white shirt, black pants, and a black apron. “I didn’t do anything!” There was something familiar about her, I thought, but the cops had her out the door and into the back seat of one of the police cars before I could figure out what.

  “Oh my God,” I said. The wedding guests were surging down the stairs, crowding into the foyer or lined up on the staircase, hanging over the railings to watch. I stepped into the foyer, looking for someone who could fill me in. “What happened?”

  “They arrested someone,” said Arden Lowe. She had none of Drue’s beauty, but her face was lit with the same kind of witchy glee that I remember animating my friend’s features all those years ago. “Or at least they’re bringing someone in for questioning.”

  “Who?”

  “One of the caterers. They found a gun in her glove compartment. And a bunch of pictures of Drue, and printouts of stories about the wedding, and maps to the house.”

  “A gun?” I said. “Drue wasn’t shot.” I would have noticed a gunshot wound, if there had been one to notice.

  Arden shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”

  The police cruisers, with their lights flashing, were backing out of the driveway. McMichaels had hung back and was standing on the concrete lip of the garage, talking to a man in chef’s whites, who was gesticulating, waving his hands at his sides, then lifting them past his head and spreading them wide, palms up; the universal posture of How was I supposed to know?

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, Nick took my hand and pulled me back into the darkness of the storage closet. “That was her,” he said, his voice low, close to my ear. My body gave a pleasurable tremble, even as my brain pointed out that, for all I knew, he might be the killer.

  “What?” I asked. “Who?”

  “The girl from last night. The one talking with Mr. Cavanaugh. That was her.”

  Part Three

  So Grows the Tree

  Chapter Fourteen

  Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh had been, as far as I knew, a Christian, but it turned out that someone on her father’s side was Jewish—at least, Jewish enough that they’d requested the services of one Rabbi Howard Medloff, as one of three members of the clergy who’d been scheduled to perform the marriage. Rabbi Medloff was now, it emerged, in charge of Drue’s funeral.

  “I am at the hospital with the family,” he’d pronounced, in the plummy tones of a man who made his living speaking in public and enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Darshi and I had been up in my room when the phone rang. I’d taken the call, and Darshi had gone outside to stand in the fresh-smelling breeze, making phone calls as she glared suspiciously at the ocean. Nick was outside, too. He’d taken off his shoes and was pacing barefoot, back and forth along the deck, avoiding the hedge that concealed the hot tub and was now cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. A man in a suit and a young woman in a police officer’s uniform were standing behind the tape, heads bent in quiet conversation.

  “I’m sure you’re on your way home, but would you have time to make a stop?” the rabbi asked. “I am trying to learn as much as I can about Drue. For the eulogy.”

  Eulogy. The word tolled in my brain. “Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said. Darshi came inside and sat down beside me.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “As okay as I can be.”

  “And you’re sure about Nick?” When I didn’t answer, Darshi smoothed her curls back over her shoulders. She said, “Look, I don’t want to rain on your love parade or whatever.
But this guy lied to you about his name, and he lied about being invited to the wedding, and he ditched you with a body in your bathtub…”

  “Hot tub,” I corrected. “And in his defense, there wasn’t a body in there when he left.”

  “Says him,” Darshi said. In a gentler tone, she asked, “Do you believe that he was going to come back?”

  I grimaced. Darshi had just voiced my fear: that I’d been the victim of a classic case of fuck and run. Maybe Nick had woken beside me, considerably more sober than he’d been when he’d fallen asleep. Maybe he’d looked me over and thought, I had sex with that? Maybe his abrupt departure hadn’t had anything to do with a desire to see the house where he’d once lived. Maybe he’d just wanted to get away from me, as fast as he could.

  I straightened my shoulders and gathered my self-confidence. “You know what? I’m going to choose to believe that he actually wanted to be with me.”

  Darshi’s brows drew down. “I didn’t mean—”

  “And that he actually did intend to come back.” My voice was getting loud.

  “I wasn’t implying anything about you,” said Darshi. “I’m just not sure I trust him.”

  I shut my eyes and nodded, trying to pull myself together, feeling the stress and the sleeplessness of the previous night starting to drag at me.

  Darshi gave me a probing look. “Do you believe that he had nothing to do with this?”

  “The police are questioning someone.”

  “The police, according to this guy, are completely incompetent.”

  “Oh, so now you trust him?”

  Instead of answering, Darshi thumbed her phone’s screen into life and handed it to me. “While you were on the phone, I googled everything I could find about Christina Killian’s murder. I remembered reading about it—that’s why I almost had it, back in Provincetown. Nick wasn’t wrong about the cops questioning every man his mother had ever met.” She scrolled through the stories, headlines and phrases jumping out at me: “Local Fisherman Fell for Murdered Woman ‘Hook, Line, and Sinker.’ ” “Neighbors: ‘She Was a Flirt.’ ” “The Single Mom Murder: When a fashion writer left the fast lane to raise her out-of-wedlock baby, was she chasing her own destruction?” Words like “turbulent” and “dramatic” and “party girl” appeared, as tabloid stories and blog post suppositions constructed the narrative of a bored rich woman on the Cape taking her pleasure with the locals until one of them snapped. The implication was that if Christina Killian hadn’t been exactly courting her own death, she bore at least some of the responsibility for her own sad end.