Big Summer(69)

“Never mind who I am. How about you tell us your name?” Darshi said. “Your real one.”

“Nick Carvalho,” he said. No hesitation, no glance up and to the left, no tugging at his ears or fidgeting with his shirt or jamming his hands in his pockets. If he was lying, he was good at it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Darshi pull out her phone.

“I lived here with my mother until I was four years old,” Nick said. “I don’t have too many specific memories, but I remember…” He pulled in a breath and rubbed his eyes. “My mom used to mark my height against the wall down here,” he said, and pointed to the side of the doorway, where I could see a series of lines in faint pencil. “I wanted to see if the marks were still there.”

“Aidan,” said Darshi. Nick flinched. I turned to see her staring at him, with her phone glowing in her hand.

“You’re Aidan Killian, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re Christina Killian’s son.”

The names tickled something way at the back of my brain. They didn’t mean anything to me yet, but they obviously meant something to Nick. Or Aidan. Or whoever he was. His tanned skin seemed to go a little pale in the lightbulb’s glow, and his body seemed to shrink in on itself, with his chest sinking and his chin dipping down. He bent his head and gave a slow, defeated nod. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why’d you lie? Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”

“Because…” Nick began, but Darshi interrupted.

“Because it’s not his name anymore.” She jerked her chin at Nick. “You probably changed it. After. Isn’t that right?”

He nodded again. “Nicholas is my middle name. It’s what my aunt and uncle started calling me after…” He swallowed again. “After I came to live with them. Carvalho is their last name. They changed my name after they adopted me.” He rubbed his hands against his shorts and looked up, his eyes finding mine. “After my mother was murdered.”

The memory arrived in my brain all at once. I heard myself gasp, felt my skin bristling with goose bumps as I remembered the story. As I stood, frozen, Nick found two white wicker armchairs with pink and green cushions—banished, I supposed, because they hadn’t matched Drue’s nuptial color scheme—and pulled them toward the center of the room. “Please,” he said. Darshi and I exchanged a glance. When I shrugged and sat down, she did, too, and Nick started talking, rubbing his face, and running his hands through his hair.

“My mom grew up in Boston, and she spent her summers here. She was the youngest girl in her family. She was thirty-eight when she had me. She never told anyone who the father was. She just said that it—that I—was going to be her baby. Her family had a couple of houses up here, and she got her father to let her live in the smallest one. This place.” He gave me his crooked smile. “I know it’s hard to believe, but a few million dollars ago, it was just a four-room cottage.”

“So you lived here with your mother,” I said.

He nodded. “She was a freelance writer. Before she had me, she lived in New York City and wrote about art and fashion. She did some of that from here, after I came along.”

More memories were starting to surface: Drue arriving at school one Monday morning bursting with the news, saying, “You guys won’t even believe what happened! They just arrested the man who killed a woman in the same town where I go in the summer.” Over lunch, she’d told me and Ainsley and Avery all the juicy details of the formerly cold case: how, ten years ago, a young single mother had been found dead in her kitchen, with her little boy curled up around her. “He’d brought a pillow and a blanket from the bedroom and tucked her in, like she was asleep,” Drue had said, leaning so close that I could smell Frosted Flakes on her breath. I remembered how she looked, her face alight with the prurient glee of repeating something shocking. “They don’t even know how long her body was there. It could have been days.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I could almost hear the sound of Drue’s voice, bubbling with excitement as she’d told us that the scene of the crime was on the same dune where her grandparents lived, picturing the story she’d shown us about the trial in the New York Times. “I’ll bet I’ve walked right by that house a million times,” she’d said with a dramatic shudder. “Maybe I even walked by the killer.”

Nick swallowed hard. “It took the cops ten years to finally figure out who did it. And that was only after they interrogated every man my mom had ever dated, or was friends with, or said hello to in the post office.” He winced. “Before they found the killer, someone wrote a book about it, and the book got turned into a movie on Lifetime.”

I remembered the movie. Drue had invited me and Ainsley and Avery over to watch it. Abigay had made us popcorn, topped with brewer’s yeast instead of butter, because Drue was dieting. A soap-opera star had played the murdered woman, a pop singer turned actor was her boyfriend, who’d become the chief suspect, and they’d shot parts of it on the Cape. “That’s our house!” Drue had said when her grandparents’ mansion made an appearance. “That’s the post office! That’s the beach!”

Nick’s voice was soft. “After all that, it turned out that the man who’d killed my mother had never even met her before. He worked for the company my mom had hired to clean out her gutters. He came here, and he saw her, and…” Nick rubbed his face with his hands. “Her death had nothing at all to do with her personal life. She wasn’t killed by someone she knew. It was just a random, terrible thing.” He shook his head, breathing in slowly. “So. After my mother died, her sister and her brother-in-law adopted me. I took their last name and started going by my middle name.” Looking right at my face, he said, “I’m sorry that I lied to you. And, for what it’s worth, everything else I told you was true. I do work with kids in Boston during the school year, and I am working on a charter fishing boat for the summer.” He grimaced. “At least, I was. I’m not sure I’ve still got a job after blowing off work today, but I couldn’t leave.” He sighed. “And I did know Drue. At least for one summer.”