Big Summer(94)

I hadn’t yet told my parents about Drue’s real marriage and sham engagement. “At the hospital, Stuart told me he thought that she might have had another boyfriend at some point. But I don’t know who.”

“And there was that guy,” Nick said. “The one waiting outside her room at the party. The one at the funeral. Do you think maybe…”

“No,” I said, remembering the guy’s unruly hair, his cheap, badly fitting clothes, his absolute lack of any resemblance to the kind of men I knew that Drue preferred. “He might have been a stalker, but he absolutely wasn’t a boyfriend.”

“So who would know?”

I sighed, shaking my head. “Even if we find this guy, he might just be another dead end.”

“What about Drue’s friends?” asked my mom.

The three of us looked at her. My mother fidgeted, but didn’t drop her gaze. “I’ll bet Drue hurt other people.” The phrase “the way she hurt you” was unspoken, but it still hung, audibly, in the air. “And, I don’t know, but if she was poisoned… well, to me that feels like a woman. Men use guns and knives. Poison feels like a woman’s weapon.”

Nick looked at me. I shrugged. “I don’t know much about Drue’s friends, or her life after Lathrop. Just that she did a gap year at a private school in California. Then Harvard. Then back here. And when she came to find me, she made it sound like there weren’t a lot of people she was close to.” I remembered what she’d said, in the Snitzers’ kitchen: I don’t have anyone else, and You were the only one who ever just liked me for me.

I reached for my phone; googling “Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh Harvard roommates” spat out a handful of names. Changing “Harvard” to “Croft” yielded a few more. I read them over, wondering if I could cold-call Madison Silver or Deepti Patel or Lily Crain and start asking questions about their dead roomie. If they were smart, they’d have turned off their phones and recruited friends to screen their social media to avoid the reporters, the same way I had. Out loud, I said, “We need someone who knew her back then. At Croft, or at Harvard. Preferably both.”

“Did anyone from Lathrop go to Harvard with her?” asked Nick.

“Tim Agrawal,” said Darshi. “They weren’t friends.”

“Does Tim know anyone she was friends with?” I asked.

Darshi shrugged. “I can ask him, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I think they were in different circles.” Which I knew meant that Drue had probably ignored Tim if their paths had ever crossed up in Cambridge.

“Who else knew her?” asked my mother. “Her mom? Her brother? Who else would have known her friends?”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Let’s start with the roommates. And then, maybe we can go back to Drue’s social media accounts,” I said. “We can divide them up and start calling her friends.”

“She had a lot of friends,” said Darshi.

“Well, obviously, we don’t try to call the five hundred thousand people who followed her. Maybe we just reach out to the people she followed. How many is that?”

Darshi checked. “Twelve hundred and ninety-six.” She brought the phone up closer to her glasses. “But some of them are celebrities. Unless she actually knows Chrissy Teigen?”

I shrugged as my heart sank. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s possible.”

“What about Abigay?” asked my mom.

When the three of us looked at her, my mom appeared startled, but she didn’t drop her gaze. “Daphne, you told me that Drue wasn’t very considerate to the people who worked for the family. If she got used to treating them like furniture, maybe Abigay saw something, or heard something, or knows something…” Her voice trailed off. My father deposited a kiss on her forehead, and hugged her, murmuring something too quietly for me to hear. Then he turned to me.

“Her number’s in the Lathrop directory.” Abigay, it turned out, was one of Drue’s emergency contacts and was listed in the school phone book.

She picked up after two rings. “Daphne, what a pleasure! I’m sorry I didn’t get to say hello to you this morning.” Her sunny, musical voice became somber. “Such a terrible thing.”

I told her what we needed.

“I don’t know that I can help, but I’ll surely try.” Abigay had to be at work in an hour, but she had a little time to spare. We agreed to meet at Ladurée on Madison, near her current employers on the Upper East Side.

“You two go,” Darshi said. “I’ll hang here and we can start calling Drue’s friends.”

I gave her a hug and summoned a car, which took Nick and me to Ladurée, which had celery-green walls accented with gold and a black-and-white-tiled floor, glass cases full of macarons in pink and lavender and raspberry, and cake stands piled with croissants and kouign-amann pastries. This place hadn’t been opened when Drue and I had been in high school, but it had the familiar feeling of every coffee shop where we would hang out, drinking lattes, crunching rock-hard biscotti between our teeth while we talked about tests and boys and colleges and what Drue would wear to her debut.

Nick looked at me. “You okay?” he asked.

“I feel like I’m moving backward in time,” I said. “First school. Now this place. I feel like, maybe by the end of the night, I’ll be back in preschool or something.”