Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  He gave a curt nod. “Do you know that Drue had a trust fund?”

  “I—yes, I’d heard about that, too.”

  “Twenty million dollars,” Detective McMichaels said. His tone was dry, almost expressionless. He could have been telling me Drue was set to inherit a piece of furniture, or a vintage fur coat, instead of an eight-figure payday. “This was from her mother’s side of the family, the Lathrops. According to the terms of the trust, she got the first ten million upon marriage or turning thirty; the balance after the birth of her first child, or her thirty-fifth birthday, whichever came first.” He touched his earlobe, rubbing the dimpled scar where an earring had once been.

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It is that.” Pushing himself away from the desk, he took a slow stroll around the room, stopping to examine a “Visit Paris” poster that featured a stylized drawing of the Eiffel Tower beneath a full moon.

  “So who benefits?” he asked, with his back to me. “Her husband looked like an obvious choice. If she died after they were married, without a will, he’d get it all. Except Drue had already transferred two million dollars into his corporate account. Why would he kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  “Her father was another possibility,” he continued. “He was shouting at her the night of her death. Multiple witnesses heard him yelling, accusing her and her mom of trying to bankrupt him. Only Drue had moved five million bucks into the family business’s coffers the month before. Just enough to cover the interest on their loans for the next month.” He left the Eiffel Tower poster and began to examine one that showed the cathedral of Notre Dame. “Dad’s out. Husband’s out. Who does that leave me with?” he asked.

  I kept quiet, wondering if he expected me to raise my hand.

  “I mentioned that Stuart Lowe would inherit everything if she didn’t have a will. But she did. Turns out, her lawyers insisted. Before she got all that trust-fund money, she had to make arrangements for where it would go, in the unlikely event that something happened to her. Good thing, too. Because, six months later, something did. And here we are.”

  “Here we are,” I echoed.

  McMichaels tilted his head. “Any guesses for me?”

  “No.”

  He curved his lips into a joyless, unpleasant smile. “Aw, c’mon! Give me a guess. People tell me that you’re a smart girl. And you knew her. Maybe better than anyone.” He walked toward me until he was close enough for me to smell his aftershave, all citrus and musk. “Take a guess.” I could smell coffee on his breath, could see threads of red in the whites of his eyes. “Tell me what you think the will said. Tell me who benefits.”

  “Maybe some other boyfriend?”

  He shook his head. I tried to remember what I’d overheard back on the Cape.

  “Or a charity?”

  That didn’t even merit a response.

  “Her mother? Her brother?”

  He shook his head. “She left her jewelry to her mother. The brother’s got a trust of his own. So who got money?”

  I tried to make myself look surprised. “Me?”

  “Ding ding ding!” He pointed. “Give the lady a prize! Better yet, give her half a million dollars.”

  I felt dizzy. “I didn’t know,” I said, which was most of a lie. “Drue never told me.” That, at least, was true.

  “I wonder,” McMichaels said in a musing voice. “I do wonder about that. And here’s another headline.” He pulled out his phone, looked down at the screen, and read, “I, Drummond Cavanaugh Lowe, do devise and bequeath to any person past the age of majority confirmed as the child of Robert John Cavanaugh by Quest Diagnostics or its equivalent in DNA testing, one-tenth of my estate entire.” He pocketed his phone and looked at me. “Did you know that Emma Vincent was Robert Cavanaugh’s natural child?”

  “I… I… her mother may have mentioned something about that,” I stammered.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The real question is, did Emma know? Not about her father—she knew about him, for sure—but about the money.”

  “How could she? Unless Drue told her. And I don’t think they ever met.” I wasn’t thinking about Emma; I was thinking about Nick. According to Barbara Vincent, Nick’s mother had never told anyone who the father of her baby was. But how many secrets stayed secret forever? The Outer Cape’s like a small town, I remembered Nick saying. People talk.

  “By the way,” said the detective, his voice very casual, “did you ever find that fellow you met the night of the party?” He looked at me, pinning me with his gaze.

  I felt sure he already knew the answer, but I spoke up anyhow. “His name is Nick, but not Andros. Nick Carvalho.” I decided not to complicate things by mentioning that Nick was also Robert Cavanaugh’s child. Or that his mother was Christina Killian, who had been murdered in the house where Drue had died. Or that Nick was also in New York, probably just down the hall from our classroom.

  The detective gave a single, slow nod. “Christina Killian’s boy.” When he turned around to look at another poster, I could see the back of his neck flushed a dark, angry red. “I swear, that woman is haunting me from beyond the grave.” He paced to the front of the room and back again. “You know, the police back then interviewed all the men she’d been with. They never found out who her baby-daddy was.” He turned to me. “I’ve got a pretty good guess now. Trouble is, I’ve got another dead girl on my hands. And here I am, paying three hundred dollars a night for a hotel room the size of my closet where the bed’s a futon on the floor.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “Nick didn’t do it,” I said. “He had no reason to kill Drue.”

  “If it turns out he’s her half brother, he had five hundred thousand reasons,” McMichaels said. “And unless you were wide awake, with your eyes on him, every minute of the night, you don’t know where he was or what he could have gotten up to.”

  “He didn’t kill Drue!”

  Detective McMichaels set his hands on the desk. “You don’t know what he did. You don’t know what he knew. And if I find out that you had anything to do with this…” Moving with slow deliberation, he came around the desk to stand in front of me, so close that his lapels brushed my chest, and when he spoke, his voice was almost a growl. “I promise, you will not like the consequences.”

  Chapter Twenty

  As soon as my legs stopped shaking and I felt more or less certain that I wasn’t going to throw up, I went outside into the perfect, sunny, early-summer day. The sky was robin’s-egg blue, the sunshine was warm but not oppressive, and a light breeze stirred the air. On the sidewalk outside, mourners were piling into cars, or walking east, toward the subway stop two blocks away. Darshi and Nick were standing at the base of the stairs, waiting for me.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said, and set off down the street.

  “What happened?” asked Darshi as I walked and pawed through my purse, trying to find my sunglasses. “What’d he want?” My hands were shaking so hard that I ended up dropping the bag. Nick picked it up and handed it to me. He was wearing black jeans with a heathery tweed sports coat, a button-down shirt, and a red and gold tie, and he had a black backpack and a laptop case at his feet. I licked my dry lips and tried to get my thoughts in order.

  “Drue was poisoned,” I began. “That’s how she died. Someone put cyanide in her food or drink. That’s the first thing.”

  “What’s next?” asked Darshi.

  “They let Emma Vincent go,” I said. “She had an alibi. So now they’re back looking for suspects.” I gulped, and went on. “Drue inherited half of her trust fund when she married Stuart. Ten million dollars. She’d already given seven million of it away. Some to Stuart, most of it to her dad.”

  “So are they suspects now?” Darshi asked.

  I shook my head. “McMichaels said they wouldn’t want to kill Drue. That she was the goose laying the golden eggs.”

  “So who woul
d?” asked Nick.

  I turned to him, knowing that I looked as miserable as I felt. “She left me half a million dollars. And she left you half a million dollars, too.”

  “Me?” Nick asked. His voice cracked. “Why? She didn’t even know me!”

  “She left it to anyone who could take a DNA test and prove that Robert Cavanaugh was their father. Which I’m assuming is you.” I licked my lips. “I guess she knew that there were other children, and she wanted to share the wealth.” I finally remembered that my sunglasses were in my pocket. I pulled them out and fumbled them onto my face. “And I saw the guy from outside her room, the night she died. The one who ran away. He was there, but he took off when he saw me.”

  Darshi put a hand on my wrist and held me still. “Daphne. Listen. It’s great about the money. I’m happy for you. But maybe we all need to step back from this.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself, before shaking my head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Drue’s dead. And whatever you thought about her, she deserves justice.” I breathed slowly. “Also, if the cops can’t figure out who actually did it, maybe they’ll try to make a circumstantial case. Prove it was someone with motive and opportunity. Like me.”

  Nick’s voice was bleak. “Or me, I guess.”

  Darshi turned to look at him. “Why are you here?”

  “Part of it was I wanted to get a look at my father. But Drue was my… my half sister,” he said, stammering over the word “sister.” “I wanted to be here for the service.” He shifted his weight from left to right and back again. “I want Drue to have justice. I want to help. I found an Airbnb.” He pulled out his phone and squinted at its screen. “It’s in, um, Bushwick? In Brooklyn. I hope that’s not too far.”

  “Oh, boy,” Darshi muttered.

  “It’s not near,” I said. “But, on the plus side, it’s very trendy.”

  Nick shrugged. “Hopefully, I won’t be there too much. Or for very long.”

  “Let’s go to my parents’ place,” I said, thinking that I wanted to be around my mom and dad. I needed my father’s steadiness, his calm voice and reassuring presence. Even if my mom was flipping out—maybe especially if she was flipping out—she’d be glad to see me. And there would be snacks. “We can set up a war room there.”

  Darshi checked the time on her phone. “Give me a few hours. I need to finish some stuff on campus. I can meet you there later.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Nick said to me.

  “Are you okay walking? It’s about two miles.” I wasn’t dressed for walking, but I needed to move, needed to burn off some of the anxiety that came from learning that I was both newly wealthy and a murder suspect.

  He slung his laptop bag across his chest and put his backpack over his shoulders. “Lead on.”

  We dropped Darshi at the subway and kept going, heading up Fifth Avenue. “We can cut across the park by the reservoir at Ninety-Sixth Street,” I told him.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “It feels good to walk. It was a long bus ride.” After a minute, he said, “You’re fast.”

  “Jeez, don’t sound so surprised,” I muttered, flashing back to a guy I’d met at a party in college, who’d said, You’re very light on your feet. Which I thought was code for You move well for a fat girl. But maybe that wasn’t what Nick had meant. “I’m sorry. That was rude.” I gestured at the rest of the pedestrians, hustling across the intersection to beat the red light. “You kind of have to be fast if you live here.”

  Nick sounded a little doleful as he said, “I guess everyone here’s in a hurry.”

  “Have you been to New York City before?” I asked.

  Nick’s mouth was tight, like he’d tasted something bad. “Once,” he said. “In high school. Class field trip. We saw Cats.”

  “You did not.”

  “I swear!” He raised his right hand. “Now and forever.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “We saw the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. We rode the subway. That was a big deal. But what struck me most was how crowded it was.” He looked around, at the verdant park, the well-kept apartment buildings, the benches that stood at regular intervals along the sidewalk. “My mother loved it here. At least, that’s what my grandparents told me. But I remember thinking that if I had to take the subway to and from work every day, I’d die.”

  “The subway can be challenging.” I was remembering one December, when my mom and I had gone to the big department stores, to look at their windows and do some holiday shopping. My father was Jewish, and my mom had been raised as a Unitarian. Neither one of them was terribly religious, but my mom loved Christmas. She collected glass ornaments and saved snippets of wrapping paper, wallpaper samples, and discarded calendars all year long to repurpose as colorful garlands and wreaths and cards. Our gifts would be so beautifully wrapped that my father and I almost hated to open them.

  After a day of shopping in Manhattan, footsore and weary and laden with bags, my mom and I had boarded a packed train at Forty-Second Street. The only vacant spot was between two teenage boys, each one sitting with his legs spread wide. My mother slowed down, considering the space. The boys had looked up. One of them stared at my mother’s body, his eyes crawling from her thighs to her hips to her bosom, before he looked her full in the face, and said, “Aw, hell nah!” He and his companion had started cackling. I saw my mother’s face fall. I could feel how ashamed she was as she led me to the end of the car and stood there, wordlessly clutching the pole until we reached our stop. Like she, and not these boys, had done something wrong.

  Nick must have seen something on my face. He touched my arm. “You okay?” he asked. “Want to stop for a minute?”

  “Sure.” He led me to a bench. We watched the runners on the track that encircled the reservoir, the slower ones trying not to get run down by the sprinters. The wind ruffled the dark surface of the water. I saw a family go by, speaking what sounded like Dutch, followed by a line of preschool-aged kids, holding a rope, with teachers at each end. I sat and, automatically, I reached for my phone.

  Nick put his hand on my forearm. “Hey,” he said. His touch was gentle, but his voice was sharp. “Could you not?”

  I looked at him, startled.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s part of your job.” Before I could apologize, he blurted, “I just hate when people do that.”

  “Do what? Look at their phones?”

  “Live on their phones,” he said, and sighed. “I know it’s a cliché. You know, that Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving picture, only Mom and Dad and Bobby and Sally are all on their phones or their iPads and not even looking at each other. But it really does bother me. I think about it a lot, especially with the kids. How are they going to learn to have real relationships when most of their interactions are online? How are they going to tolerate distress if they can just distract themselves with their phones?”

  “Well, welcome to the twenty-first century,” I said. My own voice was a little waspish. “And you’re right. This is part of my job. If I don’t interact, I don’t get seen, and if my posts don’t get seen, I can’t make money.”

  “I know.” Nick’s voice was low, and he was staring at the ground, not meeting my eyes. “It’s just not my thing.”

  “Why not?” When he didn’t answer, I asked, “Is it the Internet in general? Or social media specifically? Or just Instagram?”

  “All of it.” His shoulders were hunched, and his hands were curled into fists. “When I was twelve, I went online and looked at what people said about my mom, after she died. People who didn’t even know her, calling her a slut. Saying she slept around and she got what she deserved. All of these people, taking bites out of what was left of her, after she couldn’t defend herself. Like a bunch of zombies, eating her corpse.”

  I thought of a twelve-year-old Nick, going online and seeing all of that spite and vitriol; all that hate, preserved and waiting for him to
find it, because the Internet was forever. I remembered something my father had told me, about the comments I’d gotten after my bar-fight video had come out: When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they’re all online.

  “Those people didn’t know your mother,” I said. “You know that, right? They weren’t going after her. And I’m sure they weren’t thinking about her child ever seeing what they said. They were going after the idea of her, or whatever that meant to them. Single mothers, or their ex-wives, or some girl who turned them down when they asked her out.”

  “I know,” he said, still looking glum.

  “And it’s not all bad.” I tried to remember my talking points, the ones I’d used on my own skeptical parents. “Social media means we’re listening to different voices. It’s not just the same old powerful white men who all went to the same places for college. It means everyone gets a soapbox. And if you’ve got something important to say, you can get people to listen.”

  He didn’t look at me. “How does it feel,” he asked, ”when people go after you?”

  For a minute, I didn’t speak as I wondered how deep of a dive into my social media he might have done over the last few days, how much he’d seen. “Honestly, I try not to look.” I gave what I hoped was a casual shrug. “I tell myself that a click is a click is a click, and even the people showing up to be horrible are engaging with my content.”

  “Tough way to live.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But it’s not all bad—”

  “I know it’s not.”

  “I have a community.”

  “I understand.” He looked sincere, but he sounded the tiniest bit patronizing. “It’s just—in my opinion—the Internet is a place where people end up making themselves feel awful, or hurting other people. And everyone pretends.” His throat jerked as he swallowed. “Everyone tries to put the best versions of themselves across. To fake it. And when they’re not doing that, they’re sitting behind their screens, passing judgment and feeling superior to whoever they think’s being sexist or racist that day.”