Big Summer(98)

“Maybe he has secret talents,” I suggested.

“Or a secret fortune,” said Nick.

“Nah,” I said. “If he’d had money, she would have married him.”

“No.” Darshi’s voice was flat. “Not if he looked like Hrithik Roshan and was richer than Jeff Bezos.” She shook her head. “Drue would never have married a brown guy.”

“So what now?” I looked at Nick. “Can you find his phone number?”

Nick nodded. “I’ve got it already. And his address. He lives in New Haven. But I don’t think we should call.”

“Why not?”

“New Haven’s, what, two hours away? I think we should go there. Same as we did with Emma’s mom.”

“Beard him in his den,” said Darshi.

“Surprise him,” said Nick. “So he doesn’t have any warning. Or any time to run or come up with a story.”

“Makes sense,” Darshi said. Nick stretched out his hand to help me up off the floor. Not only did I let him, but I forgot to do my usual trick of taking as much of my weight as I could. “Heave me erect!” I instructed, and Nick actually laughed, and didn’t seem to struggle as he pulled me to my feet. I felt good knowing that even in the depths of this misery, even though my friend had died and I was still probably a murder suspect, I could still make someone, briefly, happy.





Chapter Twenty-Two


We took my parents’ Camry. Nick drove confidently, not blowing down the highway at ninety miles an hour, but not poking along in the slow lane, either. Darshi and I worked our phones, scouring the Internet for information about the man we hoped to meet. According to his Facebook profile, which Aditya had illustrated with a picture of a friendly looking black Lab, he was a graduate student at Yale’s department of statistics and data science. He was the oldest of three children, a native of Edison, New Jersey, who’d gone to Rutgers as an undergraduate, then to Harvard for a master’s degree, then on to Yale for his PhD. On Twitter, he retweeted left-leaning political commentators and comments about the Manchester United football team. On Reddit, he followed a subreddit called Dogs Being Derps, where people posted videos of their pets doing silly things, and another one on vegetarian cooking, where he asked politely worded, correctly punctuated questions about chana dal and fondue and whether Impossible Burgers were any good.

“Drue’s true love.” Darshi’s voice was skeptical. “What do you think he’ll be like?” All the way up I-95, the three of us traded theories. I was betting that Aditya’s grad-student life was a cover, and that he was really a James Bond–style villain, all expensive suits and dark intent, that his social-media presence was just an elaborate front. “I’ll bet he’s got an accent,” I said, pretending to swoon.

“I find it hard to believe, but maybe Drue was secretly into nerds,” Darshi said. “People don’t always play to type, right? Her father wasn’t dating models. Barbara Vincent wasn’t a glamourpuss.”

Nick’s voice was quiet. “My mother was.”

“Let’s review,” I said, before Darshi got snippy and Nick started brooding again. “What do we know about this man? He enjoys videos of dogs falling down stairs,” I said, answering my own question.

“And videos of dogs trying to drink from hoses,” Darshi added. “Let’s not sell Aditya short.”

“He loves his family,” said Nick.

“Or at least he posts pictures of them,” I added, even though I think the pictures looked pretty convincing. I’d seen Aditya beaming at his niece’s first birthday party, cradling the birthday girl in his arms with an ease that suggested comfort around babies and toddlers. I’d seen Aditya in a cap and gown and hood at Harvard. He’d used duct tape to spell out LOVE YOU MOM AND DAD on his mortarboard. “I think he really loves them. I wonder if he’s our guy.”

“I guess we’ll see,” said Nick.



* * *




Aditya lived on the second floor of an old Victorian-style brick house on Bradley Street on the edge of the Yale campus. The exterior paint was peeling. The entryway, inside a heavy, scarred oak door, had an unpleasantly musty smell, and the brown carpet on the staircase was ugly in the places it wasn’t worn away. “Starving grad student,” Darshi murmured as we made the climb. I knocked on the door with a brass number 2 hanging crookedly from a single nail. A minute later, the door opened. “Yes?” asked a man as he wiped his hands on a dishcloth tucked into his waistband. The smell of something simmering billowed out behind him, a cloud of ginger and coconut. When he looked at me, his narrow shoulders drooped.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”

I stared, mute and stunned, as I got my first good look at the guy from the party. The guy from the service. The guy who’d run away. He’d grown a few days’ worth of scruff since the rehearsal dinner party, and if you added more beard and discounted the skin tone, he could have been my father at age thirty. He had the same thoughtful expression, the same mournful brown eyes behind glasses. His belly pushed against his shirt, swelling the fabric in a gentle curve. He wore a plain blue T-shirt, untucked over loose nylon track pants, and a pair of leather sandals on his feet. Mandals, I heard Drue mocking in my head. I breathed in deeply, smelling whatever he was cooking, and tried to reconcile the girl I’d known, headstrong, judgmental Drue, with this quiet, seemingly humble, un-handsome man.