Big Summer(97)

“Except she’d want to cover her tracks. To make it look authentic.” I looked around, wondering where my dad had moved the snacks. “I wish there was a way to look at Drue’s social media and see who she was friends with five years ago.”

“There is,” said Nick. He unzipped his laptop case, opened up his computer, and started to type. “Okay,” he said, turning the laptop around and tilting the screen. “God bless the Wayback machine. This is a picture of Drue’s Facebook page three years ago.”

“How many friends did she have?” I asked, scooching up next to Nick. He smelled nice, and his warmth was a comfort.

Tap tap tap. “Twelve hundred and sixty-seven.”

“Okay, but we can eliminate the women,” I said. “Hang on.” I carried his laptop to the tiny, cluttered office where, for the last twenty years, my father had been trying to write a novel. I printed off the six-page list of Drue’s e-friends and grabbed three black markers on my way out. Passing them markers, I handed Darshi and Nick two pages apiece and kept two for myself. “Cross off the women,” I said. “And anyone whose last name is Cavanaugh or Lathrop.” That left ninety-six men unaccounted for.

“Abigay said he was foreign. Darker skinned,” I said. “Cross off anyone who’s got a number after his name. Or anyone who’s visibly white. And anyone who’s over fifty.”

We each used our laptops to look up profiles. In the end, we had just four names to research. The first candidate was Stephen Chen, who worked at the Cavanaugh Corporation. When I pulled up his profile on my laptop, we saw a sedentary-looking forty-seven-year-old who lived in a suburb in New Jersey and had a wife and three kids.

“Maybe Drue liked older guys,” Darshi said. Her voice was dubious.

I shook my head and drew an X through the guy’s name on the easel. “Next,” I said.

Next was Cesar Acosta, twenty-nine and handsome, a Lathrop classmate, one of the soccer boys. Nick found him first.

“He looks like a possibility,” he said. Then we discovered that, per Facebook, Cesar worked as a currency trader and was living in Singapore. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” I argued. “Just because he lives in Singapore doesn’t mean he didn’t visit the States. Or he could’ve hired someone to poison Drue’s drink.”

“True,” said Nick, “but if he’s there now, which it looks like he is, he’ll be hard to talk to in person.” We agreed to put a pin in Cesar and continue the search.

The third man, Danilo Bayani, was Drue’s age, a Harvard classmate. He was almost startlingly good-looking, with a thick shock of glossy black hair and a wide, gleaming smile. But in his profile picture he had his arms around another handsome man, a fellow with close-cropped black curls and full lips. “Three Years Today!” read the text above a second picture of the two men in tuxedoes, holding hands as they stood in front of a minister.

“Maybe he’s bi,” I said, staring at his pictures on my screen. “And unfaithful.”

Darshi looked over my shoulder, sniffed, and said, “He seems pretty happy. Not like a guy with murder on his mind.”

Which left the final candidate. “No,” said Darshi as soon as his picture appeared on her laptop. Nick took a look.

“I… am not seeing it,” he said.

Darshi slid her laptop toward me. I glanced at it, then screamed, “Oh my God, that’s him!”

“Him who?” Darshi asked.

“The guy! The guy from the funeral! The one outside her room in Cape Cod! That’s him! What’s his name? Where’s he live? Tell me everything!”

We learned that the guy’s name was Aditya Acharya. Per the pictures, he had thinning hair, sloping shoulders, and a paunchy middle. His glasses were thick, the frames unfashionable. Instead of a Rolex or a Patek Philippe he wore an inexpensive-looking Timex on a stretchy gold-plated band. One side of his polo shirt’s collar curled limply toward his chin. He looked like the kind of guy Drue would have targeted in high school, a guy she would have filmed and photographed and mocked, not one she’d have been secretly in love with.

“Seriously?” Darshi asked.

“Well. Hey, Dad, what’s that thing Sherlock Holmes said?” I called into the kitchen, where my father had moved on from his lemons and had started cleaning the squid.

“When you have excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” my father called back.

Darshi looked at Aditya’s picture for a long moment before shaking her head. “I think we should go back to the gay guy.”

Nick snapped a screenshot and resumed tapping at his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting Abigay. I’m asking if this is the guy she met.”

“You got her number? When did you get her number?”

“I have my ways,” said Nick. An instant later, his phone buzzed. He looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up. “Abigay says she’s not positive, but she thinks this could have been him.”

“Well, there you go.”

Darshi, meanwhile, was staring at Aditya’s picture, tilting the phone from side to side with the idea. “I’m trying to imagine more hair,” she said. “Or better clothes.”