Big Summer(74)

I stared at the screen for a long moment, trying to figure out how to be real. Rest in peace, beautiful girl, I finally typed. I’d just hit “Post” when Nick stuck his head into the room. “Can I talk to you?”

“Sure.” I got to my feet and followed him upstairs.

On the third floor, the living room and kitchen were both almost empty. A few caterers were straightening stacks of napkins and refilling pitchers of water. They’d set out a spread of two-bite sandwiches, meatball subs, and sliders, along with an assortment of miniature desserts. There were fresh doughnuts and tiny éclairs, and little paper cones of frites, glistening with oil, lined up in a metal rack.

“This was the midnight snack.” I tried to remember the line from Hamlet about funeral-baked meats furnishing the wedding table. Only this was the other way around, a wedding feast served to mourners. “I helped Drue pick the menu.” Drue had nixed things like ceviche and brie en croute in favor of diner food. “Carbs and fat. That’s what people are going to want to eat when they’re drunk and happy at two in the morning.” It hit me again as I stood there, smelling grease and salt and meatballs. Drue would never gorge herself on French fries in the wee small hours. Drue would never be drunk, or happy, ever again.

Nick led me to a couch in the corner, beside windows that looked out over the bay. “So that girl is your roommate?”

I nodded. “Darshini. She’s one of my best friends.”

“Was she a friend of Drue’s, too?”

“Ha!”

Nick stared at me, his face expectant.

I took a deep breath. Get it together, I told myself sternly. “I mean, no. Darshi…” Hated her was on the tip of my tongue. I pulled it back to “Darshi wasn’t a fan.”

“What was she doing in Boston?”

“A conference. She’s getting her PhD in economics, and there was some big supply-side guy speaking at Harvard.”

His eyebrows drew down as he looked at me. “You don’t think the timing’s a little strange?”

“What do you mean?”

“That someone who hated Drue and lives in New York City just happened to be in Boston when she died?”

I looked at him. Then I pictured Darshini, all five feet, two inches of her; Darshi, whose parents were still quietly disappointed that she’d chosen to get a PhD at Columbia and would never be what they considered a “real” doctor. “There is no way she’s involved with any of this.”

Nick’s shoulders were hunched; his voice was tight. “She got here fast. And she was close.”

I stared at him. “So you think Darshi came to Boston, drove up here and killed Drue last night, drove back to Boston so people could see her at breakfast this morning, then came back here to comfort me?”

“I’ve heard of stranger things.” Nick looked, for an instant, like he was going to take my hand. Instead, he leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs. “One of my mother’s friends was this guy named Lars. He was an artist. A children’s book illustrator. I remember that he’d bring me balloons, and he’d blow them up like swords. Or hats. Or animals.” He shook his head very slightly. “He was the one they thought did it for a while. Because he’d been at the house the night before. And because he and my mom had dated. People thought that maybe he was my dad.”

I made sympathetic noises and wondered if, in the years since his mother’s death, he’d ever found out his father’s identity. “They never arrested him,” Nick said. “They brought him in for questioning, over and over again. For years, he had to live under this cloud of suspicion. Everyone thought he’d killed my mother.” The faint lines I’d noticed around Nick’s eyes seemed to have deepened overnight, and his tan seemed to have faded. “I want them to get this right. Because, if they don’t, it’s going to really screw with people’s lives.”

“I understand,” I told him. “But Darshini…” I paused, searching for the detail that would convey how impossible it was for me to imagine her killing someone. “Darshi’s a vegetarian.” Which, of course, didn’t mean she was incapable of murder, but it was the most disproving thing I could come up with. And even as I said it, I was remembering the texts she’d sent, and remembered Darshi crowing as she’d told me about the conference, and how lucky it was that it coincided so perfectly with Drue’s wedding. “Why are you saying this?” I asked. “Does Darshi look guilty to you?”

“I’m just saying that it’s convenient. Convenient that she’d be in Boston for the weekend. And she didn’t like Drue. You said so yourself.”

“A lot of people didn’t like Drue. That doesn’t mean all of them are suspects.”

“I just want us to be careful.”

I nodded. Then I took in what he’d said. “Us?”

“I don’t want to leave you alone.” The with her was left unspoken. And, just as Nick didn’t want me alone with Darshi, I was positive that Darshi wouldn’t leave me alone with Nick. Which left me as one leg of the world’s weirdest triangle.

“I can go with you guys to the hospital,” Nick said. “I’ll catch a bus from Hyannis back to Wellfleet when we’re done.”