Friends Like These
Kimberly McCreight
About the Book
Ten years after graduating college, a group of friends arrange a weekend in a remote house in upstate New York.
The reunion isn’t a bachelor party, as they’ve led one of their friends to believe, but instead a group intervention for his escalating drug addiction. The friends believe they have the best of intentions when it comes to their involvement, especially considering they lost one member of their friendship group, Alice, to suspected suicide in college.
But from the moment they arrive, something doesn’t feel right. The local community doesn’t like outsiders, and they’re especially hostile to this group. And with so much shared history between old friends, it’s inevitable that a secret or two will slip out over the course of the weekend. . .
. . . And one of them will lead to murder.
Praise for FRIENDS LIKE THESE:
‘Smart, propulsive and impossible to put down’ Laura Dave, author of The Last Thing He Told Me
‘Utterly unforgettable’ Sally Hepworth, author of The Good Sister
‘A shocking portrait of regret, grief and dark loyalty’ Julie Clark, author of The Last Flight
For the friends who saved me long ago.
For the ones who still do.
No friendship is an accident.
—O. Henry, Heart of the West
PROLOGUE
You were the one who started it. So, in a way, you’re responsible for how it ended. “That’s ridiculous,” you’d say. And maybe it is unfair to blame you, under the circumstances. But at this point, all I can do is tell the truth. Anyway, no one could have predicted the exact way things would unfold. Certainly not me. All the heartbreak, all those lives with so much potential, gone in a flash.
Too much loyalty— that’s the real problem. Best friends are supposed to stand by you, no matter what. They disregard your occasionally disagreeable nature and off-putting eccentricities and accept the whole of you. That’s the beauty of real friendship. But close friends can also let you get away with too much. And what feels like total acceptance, what masquerades as unconditional love, can turn toxic. Especially if what your friend really wants is a partner in crime, someone to excuse their own bad behavior. Because letting you be your worst self just so you can be terrible together is cruelty, not kindness. And it’s got nothing to do with love.
Not that I ever thought you were cruel. I thought you were funny and smart and so gorgeous that it made my chest ache. God, how I loved you. Not in a sexual way, I just worshipped you. And, let’s face it, you never did love me back in quite the same way. Maybe I decided I couldn’t accept that. Maybe I realized that it wasn’t actually love you were showing me, no matter how many times you called it that. Pity perhaps, but not love. And so I chose me over us. Because while the us felt good in the moment, I knew it would destroy me eventually.
But I am only one person. I won’t take the fall for everything that’s happened. And when you have a group of friends like these— beautiful and dynamic and smart and opinionated— things can get very complicated. Especially with the endless overlapping connections and all that history, there are so many ways that desire can go sideways.
It’s like gripping a tinderbox. Sooner or later, it’s bound to explode in your hands.
ALICE
It was that girl in my art history class who told me. The one with the stringy brown hair and the ironic princess T-shirts who’s really sweet. But also really annoying. Arielle. Or Erin. Or something. She started talking at me on our way out of class. She does that a lot. Always looking for an angle into my group of friends. We’re that way at Vassar: sought after. Of course, people only see our impeccable exterior— our beautiful faces and just-so clothes, the way we flow like floodwater into a room, claiming every inch as our own.
Did you hear? Her breath was hot and damp against my ear and smelled of spearmint gum and onions. They found a body. She sounded scared but a little excited, too. The corners of her mouth were twitching.
What are you talking about? I asked. Where?
Right in front of Main Building.
Who is it? I asked.
Her face brightened. She liked being the one who knew something. The person with the inside scoop. She probably thought it would be a foot in the door with the cool kids.
He doesn’t go to school here. They think maybe somebody killed him. A beat later she admitted she’d made that part up. Actually, they think he fell from the roof of Main Building. That he’s the burglar.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Of course he was by the time they found him. I tried to suck in a mouthful of air, but it was no use. This would be a thing we could never take back. Something that could not be fixed. Somebody was dead, and it was all our fault.
I already knew: it would haunt us forever.
TEN YEARS LATER
DETECTIVE JULIA SCUTT
SUNDAY, 4:27 A.M.
I pull my car to a stop behind the second cruiser parked at the top of the long, curved driveway. One still has its lights on, flickering against the trees. More cars are at the scene a couple miles down the road. All the cars we’ve got will be out on this one. That’s not a whole lot in Kaaterskill, a small Catskills town that’s a thirty-minute drive from its namesake waterfall.