Big Summer(72)

“I’m sure you’re on your way home, but would you have time to make a stop?” the rabbi asked. “I am trying to learn as much as I can about Drue. For the eulogy.”

Eulogy. The word tolled in my brain. “Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said. Darshi came inside and sat down beside me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

I nodded. “As okay as I can be.”

“And you’re sure about Nick?” When I didn’t answer, Darshi smoothed her curls back over her shoulders. She said, “Look, I don’t want to rain on your love parade or whatever. But this guy lied to you about his name, and he lied about being invited to the wedding, and he ditched you with a body in your bathtub…”

“Hot tub,” I corrected. “And in his defense, there wasn’t a body in there when he left.”

“Says him,” Darshi said. In a gentler tone, she asked, “Do you believe that he was going to come back?”

I grimaced. Darshi had just voiced my fear: that I’d been the victim of a classic case of fuck and run. Maybe Nick had woken beside me, considerably more sober than he’d been when he’d fallen asleep. Maybe he’d looked me over and thought, I had sex with that? Maybe his abrupt departure hadn’t had anything to do with a desire to see the house where he’d once lived. Maybe he’d just wanted to get away from me, as fast as he could.

I straightened my shoulders and gathered my self-confidence. “You know what? I’m going to choose to believe that he actually wanted to be with me.”

Darshi’s brows drew down. “I didn’t mean—”

“And that he actually did intend to come back.” My voice was getting loud.

“I wasn’t implying anything about you,” said Darshi. “I’m just not sure I trust him.”

I shut my eyes and nodded, trying to pull myself together, feeling the stress and the sleeplessness of the previous night starting to drag at me.

Darshi gave me a probing look. “Do you believe that he had nothing to do with this?”

“The police are questioning someone.”

“The police, according to this guy, are completely incompetent.”

“Oh, so now you trust him?”

Instead of answering, Darshi thumbed her phone’s screen into life and handed it to me. “While you were on the phone, I googled everything I could find about Christina Killian’s murder. I remembered reading about it—that’s why I almost had it, back in Provincetown. Nick wasn’t wrong about the cops questioning every man his mother had ever met.” She scrolled through the stories, headlines and phrases jumping out at me: “Local Fisherman Fell for Murdered Woman ‘Hook, Line, and Sinker.’?” “Neighbors: ‘She Was a Flirt.’?” “The Single Mom Murder: When a fashion writer left the fast lane to raise her out-of-wedlock baby, was she chasing her own destruction?” Words like “turbulent” and “dramatic” and “party girl” appeared, as tabloid stories and blog post suppositions constructed the narrative of a bored rich woman on the Cape taking her pleasure with the locals until one of them snapped. The implication was that if Christina Killian hadn’t been exactly courting her own death, she bore at least some of the responsibility for her own sad end.

“Slut-shaming city,” I murmured.

“I agree,” Darshi said. “And I don’t doubt that Nick suffered because of it. But don’t you think it’s weird that he just decided on a whim to come back to this house, for the first time since his mom was killed, the night Drue was getting married, and now Drue’s dead, too?”

“Why would he want to hurt Drue?” I asked. “How was she part of this?”

Darshi touched her hair again. “I don’t know. Maybe because Drue treated him the way she treated 99.9 percent of the people she met? Maybe she did something awful to him, and he’s just been waiting all these years to take his revenge.”

“That’s crazy.” But even as I spoke, I thought of all the nights I’d lain awake, my head filled with fantasies of getting back at Drue.

“And why isn’t he online?” she asked. “What’s that about?”

I sighed, realizing what she’d been doing out on the deck: taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to google Nick’s particulars. “Darshi, you’re barely online.”

“?‘Barely’ isn’t ‘not at all.’ I’m on LinkedIn, and I’ve got a Facebook page so my students can ask if whatever I covered in my lecture is going to be on the exam—which, by the way, yes, it is. And I’m on Instagram so I can follow you.”

“And Bingo,” I muttered. It had not escaped my attention that, between me and my dog, Darshi left most of her comments and likes on Bingo’s page.

“Even if I don’t post anything, I’m there. And I think it’s weird,” she said stubbornly. “It’s like he’s got something to hide.”

I thought about telling her that even people with something to hide were online; maybe especially people with something to hide. I considered pointing out that Darshini herself had, in college, posted dozens of pictures of herself at the South Asian Student Association’s various events and not a single one from the Gay-Straight Alliance, of which she’d been vice president; or how she’d posted a beautifully composed shot of the roti and dal and coconut chutney, without mentioning that I’d been the one who’d prepared it all (“Beti, you cooked!” I’d heard Dr. Shah exclaiming on speakerphone, and Darshi had said “It came out perfectly” before giving me a guilty look and closing her bedroom door.)