Big Summer(55)

“I don’t know.” My voice was a whisper. “I thought, water with ice and lemon was nicer, you know? It was fancier. And I wanted her to have something nice. So she’d know I cared.”

For what felt like a long time, he looked at me, unspeaking, as if he was waiting for me to blurt out, I did it! “Go on,” he finally said. “What happened next?”

“I tried to get her to calm down. I sat with her for a while, on her bed. We talked.”

“About?”

“About the fight. Her parents. The wedding. I asked if she wanted to go through with it, and she said she did. I asked if she wanted me to stay with her. She said she didn’t. That I should go, that she’d be fine.” A lump swelled in my throat. “She told me I was a good friend.”

“This was about what time?”

“Right as they were serving dessert. So maybe nine o’clock, nine-thirty? It had finally gotten dark.”

“Was Miss Cavanaugh drinking?”

“At the party? I don’t really know. Like I said, she was circulating. Talking to her guests. I wasn’t with her much.”

“How about in her room, after the fight? Did she drink any of what you brought her?” Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought I could hear accusation in his tone.

“We both did the shots, and I made her drink the water. I don’t know about anything else.” I thought I remembered seeing a bottle of champagne on the dresser, along with a glass, but I hadn’t actually seen Drue drinking, so I decided not to mention it.

“What happened next?” The detective’s face was expressionless, but I could feel judgment, rolling off him in noxious waves as we returned to the post-Drue part of my night.

“I went outside, to go back to my room, and there was a guy there.”

“That would be our nameless stranger.”

I nodded, too weary and heartsick to protest at what sounded a lot like mockery. “He said he was a business associate of Mr. Cavanaugh’s, and that he was concerned about Drue. He’d brought her a glass of water, but then he said I’d beaten him to it.”

McMichaels’s forehead wrinkled. “Did he say how he knew Drue?”

“No. From work, I guess. I mean, Drue works—worked—with her father. So if this guy knew Mr. Cavanaugh, he might have known Drue, too. From work.”

Another nod. More tapping. “What then?”

“I went back to my room and found Nick waiting on my deck.”

“This would be Nick Andros?”

“Yes. Him. He and I were in the hot tub, talking for a while.”

“About?”

I opened my mouth to say that Nick had told me he’d seen the groom and his ex-girlfriend in a clinch on the beach, then stopped myself. It was a piece of information that I’d overheard, possibly not even true. Nick could tell them himself, provide them with an eyewitness account instead of secondhand information. Assuming someone could find him. “Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, the wedding. The dinner. How amazing everything was.”

“Amazing,” McMichaels repeated.

“That’s right.”

“And then what?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What happened after you concluded your conversation?”

Sex! I wanted to shout, feeling a blush creep up my chest. We did the sex! Three times! Oh, sure, my inner Nana whispered. Tell the nice detective that you had sex three times with a man you’d known for less than three hours and who was gone when you woke up. Then just stretch your arms out for the cuffs. Hopefully they’ll fit.

I cleared my throat. In a very small voice, I said, “We, um, spent the night together. In my room. We fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, he was gone.”

I wanted to keep talking, to explain, to tell Detective McMichaels that I’d never done anything like this before, not even close, that I’d only slept with four men in my entire life, and most of it hadn’t even been good, but I pressed my lips together and made myself wait for follow-up questions.

“Tell me about your relationship with the deceased,” Detective McMichaels said.

The deceased. I’d had my arm around her waist less then twelve hours ago; I could still feel her last hug, could still smell hairspray and prosecco and feel her tremble against me, and now she was the deceased. She couldn’t be gone. It couldn’t be real.

I gripped my coffee cup, hard, with a hand that still felt shaky. “Drue is…” I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Drue was one of my oldest friends. We met back in sixth grade.”

He nodded. “What can you tell me about Miss Cavanaugh’s life in New York City?”

“I’m probably not the best source on that. Drue and I hadn’t been close for a while. Over the last few months, we’d been getting to know each other again, as adults.” I decided to give him the truth, figuring that if I didn’t, he’d hear it from someone else, and he’d think I’d been trying to mislead him. “I was surprised when Drue asked me to be part of her wedding. Surprised, but happy.”

“Why were you surprised?”

I felt my limbs go numb and my face grow cold. The detective knew—or would know soon—that Drue and I had been reunited for less than three months. He knew that her corpse had been found floating in a hot tub outside my bedroom. He knew that the guy who could have provided my alibi was gone. Maybe he even knew that there’d been texts on my phone about killing Drue.