Big Summer(101)

I swallowed hard. Nick put his hand on my shoulder.

“And she felt guilty about what she’d done in her life, the damage she’d caused. She gave money away, to places where it made a difference. And gave her time. That was why she was at the tutoring center. She told me that in high school she’d gotten a girl to take the SATs for her, and when it was discovered, the other girl was the only one to experience any consequences.”

I remembered Stuart’s sister telling me about a scandal at Croft. This had to be it. “I heard that the school hushed it up.”

“Do you know if the girl who took the test was a Croft student?” I asked. “Was she a classmate of Drue’s?”

He shook his head. “Drue didn’t like to talk about it. She only told me the story once, in the middle of the night, in the dark. I wanted to turn on a light, but she wouldn’t let me. She said…” He sighed. “She wanted to tell me, but she couldn’t stand for me to look at her while she did. She was very ashamed. The other girl had been a scholarship student, and Croft had been her big chance. After what happened, Drue wasn’t sure if she’d ever gone to college at all.”

Darshi was already googling, but searching for Drue’s name plus “Croft School” and “SAT” and “cheating” and “expulsion” yielded no results. Which was no surprise. “Those prep schools know how to clean up their messes,” Darshi said.

“Let me see if I can find a list of girls in her graduating class,” said Nick. A moment later, he was reading off a short list of names. “Any of them sound familiar?”

I shook my head. So did Darshi and Aditya. We divided up the list, and searched for the next twenty minutes, scrutinizing one social-media profile after another. The Croft girls were graduate students and medical students and law students. A few of them had already been brides, two were already mothers. On Facebook and Instagram, in shot after shot, I saw college graduations and beach vacations and Christmas trees, Tough Mudder races and rugby games, baby showers and christenings and first-birthday parties and happy couples beaming, holding SOLD signs next to new homes. One girl posted Paleo diet recipes; another, nothing but right-wing political screeds. One girl, Kamon Charoenthammawat, had no social-media profile at all. “Aggravating,” I heard Darshi murmur.

“Okay. We’ll keep looking for the test-taker,” I said.

Aditya nodded. “My best guess is that it will turn out to be someone like that. Someone she hurt, inadvertently or not. Someone she knew from Harvard, or someone from your high school, or from the one she attended after. Someone from her travels; someone from her sorority, or her job.”

A lot of someones, I thought. My heart sank.

He left us with a list of eight women; names where he had them, descriptions when he didn’t. Sorority sisters whose money or term papers or boyfriends Drue had borrowed in college; a classmate whose car she’d crashed. There was a former friend whose brother Drue had slept with; another former friend whose father she’d seduced.

None of the names or the descriptions sounded familiar, or lined up with anyone I remembered meeting at the wedding. A cursory google with words like “Drue Cavanaugh” and “car accident” and “Cambridge” and “2012” didn’t help, and of course, looking for “Drue Cavanaugh” and “stolen boyfriend” wouldn’t help.

Darshi went to use the bathroom. Nick rocked forward, then back as he worked his phone, with the couch squeaking beneath him. Aditya gave another belly-shifting sigh. “I should have pushed her to make more amends, I suppose, if only because it would have given her some relief.”

“She apologized to me,” I said. “And she left money to your charity, and to her father’s other children. I’m sure she planned on doing more.”

Aditya gave me a sad smile and no answer. I bent back over my phone. My temples were throbbing; my stomach was in knots. I was wondering if Detective McMichaels had decided to return his focus to me, or to Nick; if he’d be waiting for us when we got back to the city.

Aditya reached across the coffee table to take my hand. Gently, he said, “She loved you, you know.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“She told me about a day she spent with you and your father. I wanted to impress her, so I asked what a perfect day for her would look like. I was so sure she’d say hearing her favorite opera in Vienna, or taking a private plane to Paris, but she told me about how you’d eaten dumplings and ridden the subway, and you’d gone to a coffee shop to read. She said it was more time than her father had ever spent alone with her, and how jealous she was that you got that every Sunday. She said it was one of the best days she’d ever had.”

I nodded. Oh, Drue, I thought, and started to cry.





Chapter Twenty-Three


“What now?” asked Nick. After an hour and a half on I-95, we’d finally hit the West Side Highway. Nick was at the wheel. I was beside him, and Darshi had ridden in the back seat without saying a word. Between her silence and the disgusted expression she’d worn since we’d left New Haven, I hadn’t had too much trouble reading her mood.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have office hours.”

“Daphne, how about you?” Nick asked.

“I’m thinking,” I answered. Actually, I was trying not to think. I was keeping my mind blank. “I’m hoping an answer’s going to swim up to the surface of my brain, like one of those blind cave fish.”