Big Summer(71)

Nick shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

I put my hands on my hips. “So at what point did you realize that you’d left me alone with a corpse in the hot tub?”

Nick sighed. “When I went back to the deck to get my shoes, there wasn’t anyone there. After I came down here, I must’ve fallen asleep. The sirens woke me up. I could hear there was something happening.” He looked chagrined as he said, “I could hear you screaming. I figured that would be a bad time to try to slip out, with cops crawling all over the house. Then I heard people saying that Drue was dead.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You have to understand how badly the cops fu—how badly they screwed up investigating my mother’s murder,” he said. “They brought every boyfriend she’d ever had in for questioning, every man she’d ever dated. Every man she’d ever met. Their names got dragged through the mud. All those guys ended up under suspicion for years, because the cops were stuck on the idea that it had to be some man she’d, you know, been with.” This time, after he raked his hands through his hair, he gave the roots a tug before he let go. “Imagine if I popped out of the storage room and said, ‘Oh, hey, I’m the son of the woman who was murdered in this house twenty-one years ago, just letting you know that I crashed the party last night and lied about my name and spent the whole night hiding down here, but I absolutely didn’t have anything to do with Drue’s death.’ How do you think that would have gone over?”

“We don’t even know how Drue died yet. And you’ve got an alibi,” I said.

“Not for the entire night,” he replied. He looked at Darshi, then at me. “If I go up there, they are going to arrest me,” he said. “They won’t care that I was, um, occupied for most of the night. The cops ended up looking incompetent the last time someone died. For them, it’s all about the path of least resistance. If someone looks obvious, that’s who they’re going to arrest, just so they can arrest someone, and not be accused of screwing the pooch again.”

I turned to Darshi, wondering what we were supposed to do now, when I heard the sounds of shouting and feet pounding down the stairs. Darshi cracked the storage room door open. I stood behind her, looking out into the foyer, and Nick stood behind me. Two police cruisers sped down the driveway. Behind us, a phalanx of uniformed cops, with McMichaels at their head, was pounding down the stairs, marching a handcuffed young woman toward the door.

“I didn’t do it,” the young woman said, her voice low and carrying. She looked like a teenager, with short dark hair, arched brows, and a fine-boned frame. I had a quick glimpse of a pressed white shirt, black pants, and a black apron. “I didn’t do anything!” There was something familiar about her, I thought, but the cops had her out the door and into the back seat of one of the police cars before I could figure out what.

“Oh my God,” I said. The wedding guests were surging down the stairs, crowding into the foyer or lined up on the staircase, hanging over the railings to watch. I stepped into the foyer, looking for someone who could fill me in. “What happened?”

“They arrested someone,” said Arden Lowe. She had none of Drue’s beauty, but her face was lit with the same kind of witchy glee that I remember animating my friend’s features all those years ago. “Or at least they’re bringing someone in for questioning.”

“Who?”

“One of the caterers. They found a gun in her glove compartment. And a bunch of pictures of Drue, and printouts of stories about the wedding, and maps to the house.”

“A gun?” I said. “Drue wasn’t shot.” I would have noticed a gunshot wound, if there had been one to notice.

Arden shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”

The police cruisers, with their lights flashing, were backing out of the driveway. McMichaels had hung back and was standing on the concrete lip of the garage, talking to a man in chef’s whites, who was gesticulating, waving his hands at his sides, then lifting them past his head and spreading them wide, palms up; the universal posture of How was I supposed to know?

I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, Nick took my hand and pulled me back into the darkness of the storage closet. “That was her,” he said, his voice low, close to my ear. My body gave a pleasurable tremble, even as my brain pointed out that, for all I knew, he might be the killer.

“What?” I asked. “Who?”

“The girl from last night. The one talking with Mr. Cavanaugh. That was her.”





Part Three





So Grows the Tree





Chapter Fourteen


Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh had been, as far as I knew, a Christian, but it turned out that someone on her father’s side was Jewish—at least, Jewish enough that they’d requested the services of one Rabbi Howard Medloff, as one of three members of the clergy who’d been scheduled to perform the marriage. Rabbi Medloff was now, it emerged, in charge of Drue’s funeral.

“I am at the hospital with the family,” he’d pronounced, in the plummy tones of a man who made his living speaking in public and enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Darshi and I had been up in my room when the phone rang. I’d taken the call, and Darshi had gone outside to stand in the fresh-smelling breeze, making phone calls as she glared suspiciously at the ocean. Nick was outside, too. He’d taken off his shoes and was pacing barefoot, back and forth along the deck, avoiding the hedge that concealed the hot tub and was now cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. A man in a suit and a young woman in a police officer’s uniform were standing behind the tape, heads bent in quiet conversation.