Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Slut-shaming city,” I murmured.

  “I agree,” Darshi said. “And I don’t doubt that Nick suffered because of it. But don’t you think it’s weird that he just decided on a whim to come back to this house, for the first time since his mom was killed, the night Drue was getting married, and now Drue’s dead, too?”

  “Why would he want to hurt Drue?” I asked. “How was she part of this?”

  Darshi touched her hair again. “I don’t know. Maybe because Drue treated him the way she treated 99.9 percent of the people she met? Maybe she did something awful to him, and he’s just been waiting all these years to take his revenge.”

  “That’s crazy.” But even as I spoke, I thought of all the nights I’d lain awake, my head filled with fantasies of getting back at Drue.

  “And why isn’t he online?” she asked. “What’s that about?”

  I sighed, realizing what she’d been doing out on the deck: taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to google Nick’s particulars. “Darshi, you’re barely online.”

  “ ‘Barely’ isn’t ‘not at all.’ I’m on LinkedIn, and I’ve got a Facebook page so my students can ask if whatever I covered in my lecture is going to be on the exam—which, by the way, yes, it is. And I’m on Instagram so I can follow you.”

  “And Bingo,” I muttered. It had not escaped my attention that, between me and my dog, Darshi left most of her comments and likes on Bingo’s page.

  “Even if I don’t post anything, I’m there. And I think it’s weird,” she said stubbornly. “It’s like he’s got something to hide.”

  I thought about telling her that even people with something to hide were online; maybe especially people with something to hide. I considered pointing out that Darshini herself had, in college, posted dozens of pictures of herself at the South Asian Student Association’s various events and not a single one from the Gay-Straight Alliance, of which she’d been vice president; or how she’d posted a beautifully composed shot of the roti and dal and coconut chutney, without mentioning that I’d been the one who’d prepared it all (“Beti, you cooked!” I’d heard Dr. Shah exclaiming on speakerphone, and Darshi had said “It came out perfectly” before giving me a guilty look and closing her bedroom door.)

  I decided to stay focused on Nick. “I completely understand why he wouldn’t want to be online. His mother was murdered. Maybe he doesn’t want creepers and conspiracy theory nuts bothering him.” Except he could have used a fake name, or opened accounts that gave no indication of his connection to the Cape. There were lots of things Nick could have done to have an online presence, and he hadn’t done any of them, as far as the two of us knew.

  Darshi’s expression was pained. There was a vertical line between her eyebrows, her forehead was furrowed, and the left side of the plum-colored silk shell she had on underneath her jacket was incrementally less tucked in on the right side. For Darshi, that was hurricane-level dishevelment. “Being in a house while your own mother gets murdered… being left alone with her corpse for days… then reading every crazy person’s theories about how being single and sexually active was what killed her… Don’t you think that could have an impact on a person? Affect them?”

  “Absolutely. Hundred percent. I’m just not sure it would turn a person into a homicidal maniac who’d wait twenty-five years and then kill a bride on her wedding day.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to kill the bride.” Darshi’s voice was steady. It took me a second to figure out what she meant, and when I finally got it, I shuddered uncontrollably.

  “You think he wanted to kill me?” I said. I tried to sound indignant. Instead, my voice was so high that I sounded like one of Bingo’s squeaky toys. “Why? Do you think I’m that bad in bed?”

  “Hashtag self-esteem,” Darshi murmured. “What if it turns out that Drue was poisoned?” she asked. “What if it turns out whoever killed her just put poison in a drink, and left the drink by the hot tub? Who had access to that hot tub, besides Drue? Who was it for?” Darshi barely paused before she answered her own question. “You. Just you.”

  I cringed, my skin bristling with goose bumps, hearing the echo of Drue’s voice as she showed me my room. I want you to be happy. I’m so grateful that you’re here.

  “Okay, but what about a motive? If Nick’s the killer, would he want to kill me?” I asked. I made a face, trying to keep my tone light. “I’m nobody.”

  Darshi wasn’t laughing. She reached for my phone, opened up the photo app, and scrolled through the pictures that Nick had taken of me and Drue the night before. “Look,” she said, and angled the screen to show me.

  Even after all these years, all the internal pep talks, all the articles I’d read and all the pictures I’d posted online, I still found it hard, sometimes, to look at pictures of myself. Now I forced myself to look, and see what Darshi wanted me to see. Nick had placed me, not Drue, in the center of all of the pictures. A few of them showed Drue with her eyes oddly squinched shut or her mouth half-open, but not me. Not once. I was smiling in one shot, laughing in another; backed by a corona of glowing light, as if I’d been dusted in golden pollen. I looked pretty.

  “I think he likes you,” Darshi said.

  I waved her words away, pleased and unsettled. “So which is it? He’s into me, or he wants me dead?”

  “Maybe he’s confused.” She got off the bed and tucked her shirt back in. “Maybe sleeping with a woman in the house where his mother was murdered set him off somehow. Maybe he’s got some kind of wires crossed, with sex and death.”

  “Darshi,” I said, “Nick isn’t a psychopath. No one wants to kill me. And we’re not even sure anyone wanted to kill Drue. I’m sure this is all a big… misunderstanding.” At least, I hoped it was all a big misunderstanding. I couldn’t think of anyone who would want to hurt me, unless that guy from the bar had held a grudge for four years and had come after me. “And again, the police have already arrested someone.”

  “Speaking of which.” Darshi held her hand out for her phone. “The woman the cops brought in is Emma Vincent, of Eastham, Massachusetts, which is about fifteen miles from here. She’s twenty-six years old, a part-time community-college student. She waitresses, caters, works at the Chatham Bars Inn. No criminal record that I can find and not much of an online presence.” Darshi’s audible sniff conveyed her frustration. “People upstairs are saying that Drue’s mom is still in the hospital in Hyannis.” She lowered her voice. “They’re also saying that Drue’s dad is MIA.”

  I lowered my voice and told her what I’d heard from the Lathrop side of the family, and from my own father, about Mr. Cavanaugh’s finances and infidelities.

  “Maybe that’s it,” said Darshi. “Maybe Emma’s a girlfriend.”

  I was shocked. “She’s Drue’s age!”

  Darshi gave me a pitying look. “Right. Shocking. Because no wealthy, powerful man has ever hooked up with a woman young enough to be his daughter.”

  I shook my head, got to my feet, and went back to filling my suitcase with the clothes I’d unpacked just the day before. Darshi gave me one last look, then slipped out the door. I checked the closet to make sure I’d gotten all of my dresses, sat down on the bed, and opened the Instagram app. The picture I’d posted, the one of me and Drue, with all of the wedding hashtags, had gotten thousands of likes and hundreds of comments that I couldn’t bring myself to read. Instead, I hit the “edit” feature and started to write. I typed, By now, some of you might have heard the news… Then I erased it. I typed, I am sitting here, stunned. I still can’t believe that such a beautiful night ended in tragedy. Then I erased it. I slumped back against the headboard, biting my lip. Anyone who’d spent ten minutes on Instagram could tell you that authenticity was the name of the game, that people wanted honest, unfiltered connection; they wanted to feel like the men and women they saw on their phones were living, breathing people, just like they were; they wanted us to be real. But what could I honestly, authentically say about my friend, and what had hap
pened, and how scared I was that the police would decide that I, or the man I’d slept with, had something to do with her death?

  I stared at the screen for a long moment, trying to figure out how to be real. Rest in peace, beautiful girl, I finally typed. I’d just hit “Post” when Nick stuck his head into the room. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure.” I got to my feet and followed him upstairs.

  On the third floor, the living room and kitchen were both almost empty. A few caterers were straightening stacks of napkins and refilling pitchers of water. They’d set out a spread of two-bite sandwiches, meatball subs, and sliders, along with an assortment of miniature desserts. There were fresh doughnuts and tiny éclairs, and little paper cones of frites, glistening with oil, lined up in a metal rack.

  “This was the midnight snack.” I tried to remember the line from Hamlet about funeral-baked meats furnishing the wedding table. Only this was the other way around, a wedding feast served to mourners. “I helped Drue pick the menu.” Drue had nixed things like ceviche and brie en croute in favor of diner food. “Carbs and fat. That’s what people are going to want to eat when they’re drunk and happy at two in the morning.” It hit me again as I stood there, smelling grease and salt and meatballs. Drue would never gorge herself on French fries in the wee small hours. Drue would never be drunk, or happy, ever again.

  Nick led me to a couch in the corner, beside windows that looked out over the bay. “So that girl is your roommate?”

  I nodded. “Darshini. She’s one of my best friends.”

  “Was she a friend of Drue’s, too?”

  “Ha!”

  Nick stared at me, his face expectant.

  I took a deep breath. Get it together, I told myself sternly. “I mean, no. Darshi…” Hated her was on the tip of my tongue. I pulled it back to “Darshi wasn’t a fan.”

  “What was she doing in Boston?”

  “A conference. She’s getting her PhD in economics, and there was some big supply-side guy speaking at Harvard.”

  His eyebrows drew down as he looked at me. “You don’t think the timing’s a little strange?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That someone who hated Drue and lives in New York City just happened to be in Boston when she died?”

  I looked at him. Then I pictured Darshini, all five feet, two inches of her; Darshi, whose parents were still quietly disappointed that she’d chosen to get a PhD at Columbia and would never be what they considered a “real” doctor. “There is no way she’s involved with any of this.”

  Nick’s shoulders were hunched; his voice was tight. “She got here fast. And she was close.”

  I stared at him. “So you think Darshi came to Boston, drove up here and killed Drue last night, drove back to Boston so people could see her at breakfast this morning, then came back here to comfort me?”

  “I’ve heard of stranger things.” Nick looked, for an instant, like he was going to take my hand. Instead, he leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs. “One of my mother’s friends was this guy named Lars. He was an artist. A children’s book illustrator. I remember that he’d bring me balloons, and he’d blow them up like swords. Or hats. Or animals.” He shook his head very slightly. “He was the one they thought did it for a while. Because he’d been at the house the night before. And because he and my mom had dated. People thought that maybe he was my dad.”

  I made sympathetic noises and wondered if, in the years since his mother’s death, he’d ever found out his father’s identity. “They never arrested him,” Nick said. “They brought him in for questioning, over and over again. For years, he had to live under this cloud of suspicion. Everyone thought he’d killed my mother.” The faint lines I’d noticed around Nick’s eyes seemed to have deepened overnight, and his tan seemed to have faded. “I want them to get this right. Because, if they don’t, it’s going to really screw with people’s lives.”

  “I understand,” I told him. “But Darshini…” I paused, searching for the detail that would convey how impossible it was for me to imagine her killing someone. “Darshi’s a vegetarian.” Which, of course, didn’t mean she was incapable of murder, but it was the most disproving thing I could come up with. And even as I said it, I was remembering the texts she’d sent, and remembered Darshi crowing as she’d told me about the conference, and how lucky it was that it coincided so perfectly with Drue’s wedding. “Why are you saying this?” I asked. “Does Darshi look guilty to you?”

  “I’m just saying that it’s convenient. Convenient that she’d be in Boston for the weekend. And she didn’t like Drue. You said so yourself.”

  “A lot of people didn’t like Drue. That doesn’t mean all of them are suspects.”

  “I just want us to be careful.”

  I nodded. Then I took in what he’d said. “Us?”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.” The with her was left unspoken. And, just as Nick didn’t want me alone with Darshi, I was positive that Darshi wouldn’t leave me alone with Nick. Which left me as one leg of the world’s weirdest triangle.

  “I can go with you guys to the hospital,” Nick said. “I’ll catch a bus from Hyannis back to Wellfleet when we’re done.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know. But…” He paused, then got to his feet and started pacing again. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”

  “I’ve known Darshi since high school!”

  “You knew Drue, too.”

  I looked at him, his worried eyes, his wind-burned cheeks, and wondered how much he wanted to protect me, and how much he just wanted to make sure the crime really had been solved, to ensure that Drue got the justice his own mother hadn’t. I knew better than to go off alone with a guy I’d just met—even one I’d also just slept with—but was there a world where Darshi really had done something to Drue Cavanaugh?

  I shook my head and went back down to my room. Five minutes later, I was towing my suitcase over the shells, thinking it through. Nick suspected Darshi. Darshi had suspicions about Nick. For all I knew, both of them might be secretly thinking that I’d had something to do with Drue’s death, that I’d been overcome with envy or sublimated attraction, or something. This is going to be the most awkward car trip ever, I thought, and as soon as we’d made it out of the driveway, my suppositions were confirmed.

  “Tell me about how you met Drue,” Nick said. Darshi was driving, clutching the wheel with her back hunched and her eyes intent on the road. I was sitting next to her—I’d offered Nick the passenger’s seat, but he’d politely declined.

  “Yes, Daphne,” Darshi said, her voice soft in a way that only someone who knew her very well would recognize as dangerous. “Tell him all about it.”

  “There isn’t much to tell.” I could still remember standing in front of the class, holding my breath, hoping the kids who were staring would decide that I was okay, that they liked me, that they’d be my friends. “We met in sixth grade, when I started at the Lathrop School. We were friends all through high school. And then we weren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  A cold finger pressed against my heart.

  “It was stupid,” I mumbled. “Teenage-girl drama.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Yes, Daphne.” Darshi’s voice was poisonously sweet. “Tell him.”

  I sighed, remembering how I’d already told him about starring in a slightly viral video. Time to come clean and tell him the whole sad tale.

  “When I was home from college my sophomore year, for spring break, I went out to a bar with Drue,” I began. I sketched the contours of the story as briefly as I could—a guy I hadn’t realized I’d been set up with, how I’d overheard his objections, our eventual face-off on the dance floor. “Drue was angry. She thought that I should have been grateful.”

  “Seriously?” Nick’s voice was incredulous.

  “Seriously,” said Darshi, before I could speak. “Believing that other people should be gratef
ul for her largesse was Drue’s default mode.”

  I opened my mouth to object, to say that maybe Drue had been trying to help, in her clumsy, condescending way, but before the words could come, I heard an echo of what she’d shouted at me that night: We all just felt sorry for you!

  “It was a long time ago,” I finally said. My voice was raspy and my head throbbed with pain. “And I thought, by the time Drue showed up in my life again, that we’d both grown up.” Trying to smile, I said, “I think Drue could appreciate my many fine qualities. And I could see her for what she was.”

  Darshi’s voice was cool. “Which was what?”

  I thought for a minute before I answered. “Someone who wasn’t invincible,” I said. “Someone who had flaws, and things she wanted. In high school, I couldn’t even imagine Drue wanting anything, or being jealous of what I had.” I thought of the party, of the way her father had shouted at her, how her mother had been more concerned with appearances than with her daughter, how her fiancé hadn’t come to comfort her.

  “And now?” Nick asked.

  “Now,” I repeated. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rabbi Medloff was waiting for me in a conference room on the third floor of the hospital, just down the hall from Lily Lathrop Cavanaugh’s room. “Thank you for making the time,” he said, pouring me a plastic cup of water from the plastic pitcher at the center of the table.