Big Summer(84)

“Would Emma try to hurt Drue?” Darshi asked.

“I guess that’s what the police thought,” Barbara said bitterly. “When they found the gun. But I swear, Emma only got it because she used to close up at Blackfish—that’s the restaurant where she worked for a while in Truro. She’d lock up and drop money off at the bank, all by herself in the middle of the night. She didn’t feel safe, and so her boss told her to get a gun. She took lessons and went to the shooting range, and she had a license to carry it, but I think she just kept it locked in her glove box. I’ll bet she didn’t give it a thought when she went to work at the wedding. I’ll bet she didn’t even remember it was there.” Barbara twisted her hands in her lap. She paused, then, looking me in the eye, she said, “Emma would have known that Drue was engaged, and that she was getting married on the Cape. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to find out the details. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to get close.” She sighed, shoulders slumping, leaning back into her chair like she wanted to disappear. “For all I know, she did have something planned. Maybe she’d been in touch with Robert. Maybe she was going to confront him. Demand that he acknowledge that she was his daughter, in front of his wife and all those people. I don’t know.”

I remembered the conversation that Nick had overheard, a young woman’s voice saying that she’d waited long enough, that she was tired of waiting. Barbara Vincent looked at me as though she could read my thoughts. She lifted her head, her cheeks flushing pink, and looked first at Darshi, then at me. “I don’t know if Emma had anything planned, but I do know my daughter. I know what she wanted. If she was angry, she was angry at her father, but she would never have hurt Drue.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Barbara. “If she wanted anything from Drue, it would have been acknowledgment. Maybe she wanted to be included in Drue’s life, but I know that she didn’t want to end it.” Her cheeks were tinged red, but her eyes were steady. “I know my daughter. I know this for sure.”



* * *




We adjourned to the kitchen for refills on tea, and for Barbara to check her messages. The dogs followed after us, the terriers scampering and darting, close on their mistress’s heels, the basset hound trailing behind at a magisterial pace. “May I use your bathroom?” Darshi asked, and was directed to the first left down the hall. Nick shuffled his feet, cleared his throat. Finally, he asked Barbara if she had any pictures of his mother.

Barbara looked thoughtful. “You know, I think I might. When you were babies, not every phone had a camera, so picture-taking wasn’t as common, but let’s go have a look.” She was leading us back to the living room when my phone vibrated. I looked at the screen and saw a text from Darshi: Walk down the hall like you’re going to the bathroom and check out the bedroom on the right.

I excused myself and followed Darshi’s directions, past the neat pale-blue powder room, and into a small bedroom. A twin-size bed was pushed up against one wall; a bookcase stood against the other; a desk was underneath a window. Instead of posters, the walls were papered with maps—a detailed one of Cape Cod; a larger one of the United States above the bed, a map of the world over the desk, with cities and countries marked with gold stars and red circles—Manhattan, Miami, El Paso, Albuquerque. Perth, Peru, Iceland, Copenhagen.

I’d been holding my breath, thinking that maybe I’d find a serial-killer wall, featuring dozens of pictures of Drue with red lines and arrows and her face in crosshairs. I was relieved to only see the maps and a bulletin board filled with thumbtacked pictures from photo booths or from parties—Emma holding a bottle of champagne, wearing a giant pair of novelty New Year’s Eve sunglasses that read “2016”; Emma in a hoodie with her arms around the neck of a grinning boy with short red hair at a bowling alley; Emma and her friends in their prom-night finery, lined up in pairs on the front lawn of her house. On the desk were neat stacks of college textbooks. Introduction to Principles of Economics, Magruder’s American Government, World Literature, a dogeared copy of Portrait of a Lady. On the bottom shelf of the bookcase were clues about her interest in Drue: a pile of Lathrop School yearbooks, and one from the Croft School; a glossy Cavanaugh Corporation prospectus (“Building the Future” read the headline on the cover, with a picture of Robert and Drue on the rooftop, smiling). In a frame, in the center of the desk, I found what Darshi must have wanted me to see. It was a framed snapshot of a little girl, her dark hair in pigtails, perched on a bare-chested man’s shoulders as he stood in the water, in the instant a wave broke around them. The man had broad, sloping shoulders and curly black hair on his chest. He wore a Red Sox cap, blue swim trunks, and an eat-the-world grin. It took me a moment to add some pounds, subtract some hair, and recognize Drue’s father, younger, and tanned, and happy. I lifted the picture, studying it. He and the little girl on his shoulders both looked so vivid, so vital, in the blue-green water with the blue sky stretched out behind them. I could smell the sunscreen Barbara Vincent would have rubbed on her daughter’s back and shoulders; I could imagine the shouts and laughter of the kids tossing a Frisbee or building sandcastles for the waves to devour. Emma’s eyes were squinting in the sunshine; her mouth was open, laughing, as her little hands gripped her father’s head.