Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  I cleared my throat. “From what I saw, she wasn’t very nice to you.”

  Abigay tapped her tongue on the roof of her mouth, considering. “Well. It wasn’t a question of nice or not nice. Miss Drue wasn’t very anything to me. Or to Flor, who cleaned, or Delia and Helen, who came to do the flowers, or to Ernesto and Carl down in the lobby. She didn’t see us.” Abigay clasped her hands on the table. “Which was to be expected. As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined. Drue and her brother saw the way their parents treated the help, and they treated us the same.”

  “I remember her asking you for ridiculous snacks.”

  A brief smile flickered across Abigay’s face. “That used to be a game. When Drue was little. She’d say, ‘Abigay, make me a castle,’ and I’d make her one, with pineapple cubes and marshmallows. Or, ‘Make me a tree with snow on top,’ and I’d give her broccoli with parmesan cheese.” She sighed, then nibbled the miniature biscotti that came with her drink. “She was a sweet little girl. A long time ago.” She took another sip. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t fuss me, her asking me for ridiculous foods. I could still see that little girl inside her.”

  “What happened?”

  “She grew up. Grew up and got beautiful and discovered that she was rich. That, and she saw how her folks behaved.”

  I stirred sugar into my tea and held the cup, letting it warm my hands. “Do you have any idea who could have wanted to hurt her?”

  Abigay shook her head. “Probably a long list of people she wronged.”

  “Could it have had to do with the Cavanaugh Corporation? We’ve heard stories that the company’s in trouble.”

  She nodded. “I’ve heard the same. But to kill a young woman on her wedding day? That doesn’t feel like business to me. That feels personal.”

  I said, “We’re also hearing that her father may have been unfaithful. And that he might have had other children.”

  Abigay sighed unhappily. In a low voice, she said, “He brought a few of them home. When the missus was away, at that yoga place in the Berkshires.” She smoothed her paper napkin with her fingers. “Now, if someone had killed the mister, I’d be looking at a wronged woman. But why would one of them kill Drue?”

  “Did you meet any of Drue’s boyfriends?” asked Nick.

  Abigay looked at him, widening her eyes. “Ooh! He talks!”

  Nick smiled. “He even sings, if he’s got enough beer in him.”

  “Hmm,” she said, folding and refolding her napkin. I expected an immediate denial. It didn’t come. Instead, Abigay said, “You understand, this is going back a few years. I came in on a Saturday when I wasn’t scheduled to work because I needed my good cast-iron pan, and I’d left it at the Cavanaughs’. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. The mister was traveling, the missus was doing her yoga, Trip was married by then, and Drue should have been at school. So up I go, and there’s Miss Drue with a fellow.”

  “Not Stuart Lowe,” I said.

  “No, not him,” Abigay confirmed. “I never met him. This was a foreign-looking fellow. Dark skin, dark hair. A few years older than Drue. I walked into the kitchen, and there they were. Cooking.” She sounded amused at the memory. “Or, at least, he was cooking. And she was helping.”

  “So he was a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “She introduced him to me as her friend. But, from the way they were looking at each other, I would say boyfriend, mm-hmm. Boyfriend, for sure. Don’t ask me his name,” she said, holding up one smooth palm in warning before I could do just that. “I don’t remember. And I’ve tried.” She sipped her latte, then made her I can do better face again. “What I remember is that she looked happy with him. She was glowing. All smiles. ‘Abigay, this is my friend!’ ” Abigay shook her head. “She helped me find my pan. Put it in a bag for me and everything.”

  “How did she seem with him?” I asked.

  “Comfortable,” Abigay answered after a brief silence. “I remember that I felt like she was finally starting to grow up. Like I could see the outlines of who she was going to be. If everything went right. Sometimes a twig can unbend itself, right? It’s never too late.”

  Until it is, I thought.

  Abigay patted her lips with a paper napkin and got to her feet. “I should get on the good foot.”

  “Thank you for your help.”

  “Did I help?” She cocked her head and looked at me. “I hope so.” I asked her to promise to call if she remembered anything else. She said that she would, and hugged me, whispering, “You be careful now.” When I pulled back, she was looking at me. “I should let you know, the police were asking me about you, too.”

  I felt my stomach sink and my knees start to quiver.

  “What did they ask?”

  “Did you and Drue fight. Had you ever been angry at her. How did she treat her classmates at Lathrop.” Abigay shook her head. “I told them that Drue wasn’t very kind, but that I couldn’t imagine any of the girls I’d met ever hurting her that way.” She brushed a crumb off her skirt. “I can’t imagine it,” she said softly. “But someone did.”

  The door’s bell jingled as she left. Nick and I sat, thinking. Or at least, I assume he was thinking. I was trying not to start screaming as I sat there, terrified, imagining myself in jail for a crime I didn’t commit.

  “Here.” Nick pushed my cup toward me. “Drink. Stay hydrated.” I nodded glumly and took a bite of a kouign-amann filled with raspberry jam, thinking that they probably didn’t have pastry like this in jail.

  “We need to find this guy,” I said. “The mystery chef.”

  “Right,” said Nick. “Any ideas?”

  “No,” I said, and got to my feet. “But don’t give up on me yet.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Back at my parents’ place, my mother had gone to work—she taught an afternoon sculpting class three days a week—and my father had made a quick trip to the fish market and was in the kitchen, assembling his famous cioppino. “Fish is brain food!” he called as he zested a lemon, filling the rooms with the citrus tang. In the living room, Darshi had borrowed one of my mom’s easels, and had propped a piece of white cardboard up for us to see. On the top, in large purple letters, she’d written OPERATION FIND DRUE’S SECRET BOYFRIEND.

  “Nick filled me in,” she said. “So how are we going to find this guy? Do we just keep going through Drue’s social?”

  “The problem is, if this guy is an ex-boyfriend, they might not be friends anymore.”

  “If she was never really going to stay married to Stuart, she never had to really break up with the Mystery Man,” said Nick.

  “Except she’d want to cover her tracks. To make it look authentic.” I looked around, wondering where my dad had moved the snacks. “I wish there was a way to look at Drue’s social media and see who she was friends with five years ago.”

  “There is,” said Nick. He unzipped his laptop case, opened up his computer, and started to type. “Okay,” he said, turning the laptop around and tilting the screen. “God bless the Wayback machine. This is a picture of Drue’s Facebook page three years ago.”

  “How many friends did she have?” I asked, scooching up next to Nick. He smelled nice, and his warmth was a comfort.

  Tap tap tap. “Twelve hundred and sixty-seven.”

  “Okay, but we can eliminate the women,” I said. “Hang on.” I carried his laptop to the tiny, cluttered office where, for the last twenty years, my father had been trying to write a novel. I printed off the six-page list of Drue’s e-friends and grabbed three black markers on my way out. Passing them markers, I handed Darshi and Nick two pages apiece and kept two for myself. “Cross off the women,” I said. “And anyone whose last name is Cavanaugh or Lathrop.” That left ninety-six men unaccounted for.

  “Abigay said he was foreign. Darker skinned,” I said. “Cross off anyone who’s got a number after his name. Or anyone who’s visibly white. And anyone who’s over fifty.”

  We each used our laptops to
look up profiles. In the end, we had just four names to research. The first candidate was Stephen Chen, who worked at the Cavanaugh Corporation. When I pulled up his profile on my laptop, we saw a sedentary-looking forty-seven-year-old who lived in a suburb in New Jersey and had a wife and three kids.

  “Maybe Drue liked older guys,” Darshi said. Her voice was dubious.

  I shook my head and drew an X through the guy’s name on the easel. “Next,” I said.

  Next was Cesar Acosta, twenty-nine and handsome, a Lathrop classmate, one of the soccer boys. Nick found him first.

  “He looks like a possibility,” he said. Then we discovered that, per Facebook, Cesar worked as a currency trader and was living in Singapore. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” I argued. “Just because he lives in Singapore doesn’t mean he didn’t visit the States. Or he could’ve hired someone to poison Drue’s drink.”

  “True,” said Nick, “but if he’s there now, which it looks like he is, he’ll be hard to talk to in person.” We agreed to put a pin in Cesar and continue the search.

  The third man, Danilo Bayani, was Drue’s age, a Harvard classmate. He was almost startlingly good-looking, with a thick shock of glossy black hair and a wide, gleaming smile. But in his profile picture he had his arms around another handsome man, a fellow with close-cropped black curls and full lips. “Three Years Today!” read the text above a second picture of the two men in tuxedoes, holding hands as they stood in front of a minister.

  “Maybe he’s bi,” I said, staring at his pictures on my screen. “And unfaithful.”

  Darshi looked over my shoulder, sniffed, and said, “He seems pretty happy. Not like a guy with murder on his mind.”

  Which left the final candidate. “No,” said Darshi as soon as his picture appeared on her laptop. Nick took a look.

  “I… am not seeing it,” he said.

  Darshi slid her laptop toward me. I glanced at it, then screamed, “Oh my God, that’s him!”

  “Him who?” Darshi asked.

  “The guy! The guy from the funeral! The one outside her room in Cape Cod! That’s him! What’s his name? Where’s he live? Tell me everything!”

  We learned that the guy’s name was Aditya Acharya. Per the pictures, he had thinning hair, sloping shoulders, and a paunchy middle. His glasses were thick, the frames unfashionable. Instead of a Rolex or a Patek Philippe he wore an inexpensive-looking Timex on a stretchy gold-plated band. One side of his polo shirt’s collar curled limply toward his chin. He looked like the kind of guy Drue would have targeted in high school, a guy she would have filmed and photographed and mocked, not one she’d have been secretly in love with.

  “Seriously?” Darshi asked.

  “Well. Hey, Dad, what’s that thing Sherlock Holmes said?” I called into the kitchen, where my father had moved on from his lemons and had started cleaning the squid.

  “When you have excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” my father called back.

  Darshi looked at Aditya’s picture for a long moment before shaking her head. “I think we should go back to the gay guy.”

  Nick snapped a screenshot and resumed tapping at his phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Texting Abigay. I’m asking if this is the guy she met.”

  “You got her number? When did you get her number?”

  “I have my ways,” said Nick. An instant later, his phone buzzed. He looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up. “Abigay says she’s not positive, but she thinks this could have been him.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  Darshi, meanwhile, was staring at Aditya’s picture, tilting the phone from side to side with the idea. “I’m trying to imagine more hair,” she said. “Or better clothes.”

  “Maybe he has secret talents,” I suggested.

  “Or a secret fortune,” said Nick.

  “Nah,” I said. “If he’d had money, she would have married him.”

  “No.” Darshi’s voice was flat. “Not if he looked like Hrithik Roshan and was richer than Jeff Bezos.” She shook her head. “Drue would never have married a brown guy.”

  “So what now?” I looked at Nick. “Can you find his phone number?”

  Nick nodded. “I’ve got it already. And his address. He lives in New Haven. But I don’t think we should call.”

  “Why not?”

  “New Haven’s, what, two hours away? I think we should go there. Same as we did with Emma’s mom.”

  “Beard him in his den,” said Darshi.

  “Surprise him,” said Nick. “So he doesn’t have any warning. Or any time to run or come up with a story.”

  “Makes sense,” Darshi said. Nick stretched out his hand to help me up off the floor. Not only did I let him, but I forgot to do my usual trick of taking as much of my weight as I could. “Heave me erect!” I instructed, and Nick actually laughed, and didn’t seem to struggle as he pulled me to my feet. I felt good knowing that even in the depths of this misery, even though my friend had died and I was still probably a murder suspect, I could still make someone, briefly, happy.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  We took my parents’ Camry. Nick drove confidently, not blowing down the highway at ninety miles an hour, but not poking along in the slow lane, either. Darshi and I worked our phones, scouring the Internet for information about the man we hoped to meet. According to his Facebook profile, which Aditya had illustrated with a picture of a friendly looking black Lab, he was a graduate student at Yale’s department of statistics and data science. He was the oldest of three children, a native of Edison, New Jersey, who’d gone to Rutgers as an undergraduate, then to Harvard for a master’s degree, then on to Yale for his PhD. On Twitter, he retweeted left-leaning political commentators and comments about the Manchester United football team. On Reddit, he followed a subreddit called Dogs Being Derps, where people posted videos of their pets doing silly things, and another one on vegetarian cooking, where he asked politely worded, correctly punctuated questions about chana dal and fondue and whether Impossible Burgers were any good.

  “Drue’s true love.” Darshi’s voice was skeptical. “What do you think he’ll be like?” All the way up I-95, the three of us traded theories. I was betting that Aditya’s grad-student life was a cover, and that he was really a James Bond–style villain, all expensive suits and dark intent, that his social-media presence was just an elaborate front. “I’ll bet he’s got an accent,” I said, pretending to swoon.

  “I find it hard to believe, but maybe Drue was secretly into nerds,” Darshi said. “People don’t always play to type, right? Her father wasn’t dating models. Barbara Vincent wasn’t a glamourpuss.”

  Nick’s voice was quiet. “My mother was.”

  “Let’s review,” I said, before Darshi got snippy and Nick started brooding again. “What do we know about this man? He enjoys videos of dogs falling down stairs,” I said, answering my own question.

  “And videos of dogs trying to drink from hoses,” Darshi added. “Let’s not sell Aditya short.”

  “He loves his family,” said Nick.

  “Or at least he posts pictures of them,” I added, even though I think the pictures looked pretty convincing. I’d seen Aditya beaming at his niece’s first birthday party, cradling the birthday girl in his arms with an ease that suggested comfort around babies and toddlers. I’d seen Aditya in a cap and gown and hood at Harvard. He’d used duct tape to spell out LOVE YOU MOM AND DAD on his mortarboard. “I think he really loves them. I wonder if he’s our guy.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” said Nick.

  * * *

  Aditya lived on the second floor of an old Victorian-style brick house on Bradley Street on the edge of the Yale campus. The exterior paint was peeling. The entryway, inside a heavy, scarred oak door, had an unpleasantly musty smell, and the brown carpet on the staircase was ugly in the places it wasn’t worn away. “Starving grad student,” Darshi murmured as we made the clim
b. I knocked on the door with a brass number 2 hanging crookedly from a single nail. A minute later, the door opened. “Yes?” asked a man as he wiped his hands on a dishcloth tucked into his waistband. The smell of something simmering billowed out behind him, a cloud of ginger and coconut. When he looked at me, his narrow shoulders drooped.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hello.”

  I stared, mute and stunned, as I got my first good look at the guy from the party. The guy from the service. The guy who’d run away. He’d grown a few days’ worth of scruff since the rehearsal dinner party, and if you added more beard and discounted the skin tone, he could have been my father at age thirty. He had the same thoughtful expression, the same mournful brown eyes behind glasses. His belly pushed against his shirt, swelling the fabric in a gentle curve. He wore a plain blue T-shirt, untucked over loose nylon track pants, and a pair of leather sandals on his feet. Mandals, I heard Drue mocking in my head. I breathed in deeply, smelling whatever he was cooking, and tried to reconcile the girl I’d known, headstrong, judgmental Drue, with this quiet, seemingly humble, un-handsome man.

  “Mr. Acharya? I’m Darshini Shah,” I heard Darshi say. “This is Nick Carvalho, and this is Daphne Berg. We’re friends of Drue’s.”

  “Of course.” Up close, I could see that his eyes were red-rimmed behind his glasses, and that he was twisting a dish towel in his hands, like he didn’t know what else to do with them and he had to hold on to something. His gaze traveled from me to Nick to Darshi, and he seemed to relax a little as he took her in. “Please, come inside.”

  In his living room, he had a battered-looking leather couch, armchairs that didn’t match (one of them, I saw, had been patched with duct tape), a Persian rug of startling beauty, a desk piled high with textbooks, with a blue Medicine Buddha statue on a shelf above it. “Please, please,” he said, ushering us inside. I saw, on his wrist, the cheap-looking gold watch that I recognized from the pictures, and a gaudy class ring was on his right hand. He was a fashion disaster, the kind of guy Drue would have laughed at back at Lathrop, and his expression, his slumped shoulders and mournful eyes, said that he knew it; that he was not unfamiliar with being the object of mockery.