Page 9

9

Thursday, 11/7/24

“It’s not that I’m jealous, ” I insisted on Thursday, slurping dejectedly at an iced coffee even though the temperature was close to freezing. “I mean, Hunter can barely walk upright. He thinks Audre Lorde is a flavor of Muscle Milk. I’m not intimidated by him. I just don’t get why Greer wouldn’t have mentioned it, you know? Like, if it’s really over, if it really wasn’t a big deal, then why wouldn’t she have just said— Are you listening?”

“Nope!” Holiday said brightly. It had taken almost the whole week to find a time we could meet, and we’d finally caught up at a coffee shop in Central, a hipster place with mismatched mugs and the kind of ratty, sagging couches that always made me worry I was going to pick up bedbugs. Holiday had no such qualms, apparently, dropping herself down onto the cushions with such abandon that her cup overflowed, its weedy-smelling contents sloshing down onto her arm and into the sleeve of her sweater. It looked hand-knit, gray with a bunch of tiny white pom-poms on it. “Although I can’t help but observe that for a person who was so anxious to get to crime-solvin’ he wanted me to give up my very expensive theater tickets last weekend, you seem to be having an awfully hard time focusing.”

“Fair enough,” I admitted, stuffing a bite of scone into my mouth. “Let’s get started.”

Holiday nodded briskly. “Let’s.” She bent down and pulled her notebook out of her bag, a thick, wide-ruled tome with her name embossed in gold on the cover. She’d had some variation on that notebook as long as I’d known her; she’d probably been the only elementary schooler in Cambridge with a monogrammed assignment pad from FranklinCovey. She always wrote in bright purple pen. “What do we know about Bri?”

“Not a ton,” I confessed, parroting back the stuff she’d told me in the living room of the lax house the night of the party, the slivers of knowledge I’d gleaned from Greer. I thought back to the last time Holiday and I had done this, sitting across from each other in a coffee shop on Martha’s Vineyard. Our suspect list then had been enormous—our victim had gone through life as if he was trying specifically to piss people off whenever possible. But Bri hadn’t been like that. Judging from the remembrances of her in the Crimson —to hear Greer and Dagny talk about it, you’d have thought it was a total hit job, but actually most of it was quite nice and sincere—most people had liked her a lot. “I think we should probably start by trying to find her dealer,” I concluded finally. “Somebody in the suite will know who it was, I’m pretty sure. All six of them were like, super close.”

“Are you sure?” Holiday asked. “How much time have you spent in that suite?”

“A good amount,” I defended myself. “And it isn’t some, like, Mean Girls thing. They’re all best friends.”

“I’m not saying they’re mean girls,” Holiday countered, in a voice like she was making fun of me a little but hoping I wouldn’t notice. “But everyone has enemies.”

“Even you?”

“Well, no, not me, ” Holiday admitted, batting her eyelashes across the coffee table. “Everybody likes me. But I’m a special case.”

“You’re something,” I muttered. “I will give you that much.”

Holiday had me pull up Bri’s social media accounts, which had already turned into morbid digital memorials, and we scrolled back as far as we could before working our way forward again: Bri in high school with her softball team, Bri experimenting with blond highlights at the prom. Most of the pictures from the last year or so were of her with the girls from the suite: Bri and Dagny apple picking, Bri and Keiko and Celine dressed up for freshman formal. All six of them mugging in front of Hemlock House on move-in day this past August.

“They look like sisters,” Holiday observed, peering over my shoulder. She’d settled herself onto the couch beside me so we could look at the phone together, a lock of her hair brushing the side of my cheek. “Bri and Greer, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “They kind of do.” I hadn’t paid that much attention to it before, but all at once I couldn’t unsee it: the hair and eyes, sure, but also the way they held themselves. Even their bone structure was kind of similar.

“Hang on,” Holiday said, batting my hand out of the way to look at the picture more closely, then straightening up and turning to face me. “You said Bri was in Greer’s bed when you found her, right?”

“Yeah.” I frowned. “Why?”

“And she was wearing Greer’s clothes.” She took the phone from my hand and scrolled back to the last photo in Bri’s feed—maybe the last photo of her, period. “That green tank top, right? You said it was Greer’s?”

“Yeah,” I said again. “I mean, they shared clothes a lot, I think.”

“And the note—” She reached for it, pulling it across the table to look at it one more time. “It doesn’t have Bri’s name on it specifically.”

“No,” I said, beginning to understand what Holiday was driving at. “Oh, shit, Holiday.”

Holiday nodded, her dark eyes shining. “They look sort of similar, right? Like, if, say, Bri got drunk at that party, came home, and passed out in the bed that was closer to the door. And then someone came in looking for Greer, saw a brunette passed out in her bed?”

“Yeah,” I said. It felt like I was looking through a kaleidoscope, turning it so that all the colored glass shifted inside and made an entirely new picture. “It’s definitely possible.”

“Okay.” Holiday flipped to a new page in her notebook as I reached absently for the last of the scone. “In that case: Who would want to hurt Greer ?”

I thought again of Greer’s trashed bedroom. I thought of Hunter getting suspended from the team.

“Holiday,” I said, the last of the scone sticking in my throat as I swallowed. “Hear me out.”

We ordered another round of drinks and I laid it all out for her as coherently as I could manage, Greer’s missing watch and Hunter’s nasty Instagram comments and Oliver Beckett’s broken tooth. “I don’t know,” Holiday said slowly. “If Greer and Hunter dated, what are the odds of him mistaking Bri for Greer?”

“If he was shit-faced and pissed off and nursing a grudge?” I countered. “And she was already asleep in Greer’s bed?”

“Beer goggles meets confirmation bias,” Holiday mused. “Sure, I’ll buy it.”

“It’s not a bad theory, is it?” I pressed, cringing a little when I heard how eager I sounded for her approval. “Hunter used to date Greer and was mad she broke up with him. That’s motive. He’s a big, jacked, douchey lacrosse player. That’s means. And—” I paused, frowning a little. “Wait, what’s the third thing?”

“Opportunity,” Holiday reminded me, licking tea off the inside of her wrist.

“Opportunity!” I agreed. “Which, actually, now that I think about it—Hunter left the party before me the night that Bri died, which is weird on account of he literally lives in the lax house. Like, where was he going, if not over to Hemlock?”

“Twenty-four-hour CVS,” Holiday guessed immediately, ticking the options off on her fingers. “The bar at the Hong Kong. All-night hot dog buffet truck on Revere Beach Parkway.”

“I’m serious!” I said, kicking her lightly in the combat boot. “I do miss that hot dog truck, though.”

“Same,” Holiday agreed; we’d been regulars over the summer, loading up our hot dogs with chili and hot peppers and eating them while we listened to horror podcasts in her car. She held her hand out, making grabby fingers in my direction. “Let me see what he looks like?”

She sat back on the mangy couch as I dug my phone out of my pocket, her hands wrapped tight around her London Fog. “It is a good theory,” she mused, “but a good theory isn’t enough. We need to put Hunter in Hemlock House the night Bri died.”

“How?” I asked distractedly, clicking through the app until I found Hunter’s profile.

“I don’t know yet.” Holiday shrugged into the cushions. “What about the note?” she asked. “?‘You owe me’? Like, what would Greer owe to Hunter? I guess sex, conceivably, in his opinion, but—”

“Here he is,” I interrupted, not particularly wanting to follow the thread of that inquiry. I passed her the phone. “Hunter Hayes.”

Holiday snorted a laugh. “That’s not his real name,” she said immediately. “That’s the name of someone who cheats in a sailboat regatta in an episode of a WB show from the early aughts.”

“First of all, I don’t know that you’re exactly in a position to talk about whose name does or doesn’t sound real,” I teased. “Second of all, how would you cheat in a sailboat regatta?”

Holiday eyed me darkly. “There are ways.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

She flicked idly through Hunter’s profile for a moment, then handed the phone back to me. “What’s the security situation at Harvard?” she asked. “You can’t use your ID card to get into a building you don’t live in, can you?”

I shook my head. “No, but people let each other in all the time. That wouldn’t have stopped him.”

“No security desk?” she pressed hopefully. “Nobody who might have seen him come in that night?”

I shook my head. “Harvard uses a private security company in a lot of their buildings, to handle lockouts for first-years and garden-variety stuff like that,” I explained. “Some of the houses—including mine, actually—do have a main desk, but Hemlock isn’t one of them.”

“Of course it isn’t.” Holiday sighed.

“There are cameras, though,” I offered. “I don’t know if there’s one near the front door of that building, but if I had to guess—”

Holiday brightened. “Okay,” she said, “that’s definitely something to check out, then. And do you want to try to see what you can find out from Greer’s suitemates, meanwhile? If Hunter has been giving her a hard time lately, they’ll be the ones to know it.” She took a sip of her latte. “Unless you want to talk to her about it directly?”

“And tell her you and I are working on a theory that Hunter was trying to kill her but missed, even though we have absolutely no evidence to back it up?” I asked. “Not particularly, no.”

“Fair,” Holiday admitted. “Even I would probably have a hard time selling that one.”

“Only probably?”

“I’m very convincing,” she said with a shrug. “But you’re right that it makes most sense at this point if we don’t loop her in.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking. I could almost see the synapses firing behind her eyes, exploding like the fireworks over the Charles every Fourth of July. “Not yet, anyway.”

Holiday wanted to see Hemlock House for herself, so we finished our drinks and she walked me back to campus, our feet crunching the dry, brittle leaves. We’d changed the clocks back this weekend, winter barreling down the tracks in our direction like an Acela made of sleet and hail. We passed the wide stone steps that led to Hemlock’s main entrance—“Bingo,” Holiday murmured, nodding at a security camera mounted on one of the columns—then looped through the courtyard and back past the dumpsters behind the building. “Really getting your money’s worth from that private security company, huh?” she asked, smirking at the unmistakable fug of weed smoke drifting out of the alley. Some of the guards liked to take their breaks back there, in particular a couple of skinny white dudes who couldn’t have been much older than us; I’d seen them shuffling smilingly back to their posts a couple of times, their eyes gone a telltale red.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “it’s a full Paul Blart situation. I actually kind of don’t blame Greer for not wanting to go to them about her watch.”

“She didn’t report it?” Holiday asked curiously.

“No, no, she did in the end,” I said, “but they were basically like, Cool, we’ll keep an eye out, have you checked the lost and found? ”

Holiday hummed quietly, glancing behind her at the alley one more time before pulling her phone out of her coat pocket and scowling at the clock. “I gotta get across the river,” she reported. “I have a rehearsal tonight.”

“What about Hunter?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“I think he mostly rehearses in the morning,” she deadpanned, then made a face at me. “Goodbye, Michael!”

I brought a box of cookies from Flour over to Hemlock that night, partly because it felt like a nice thing to do for a group of girls who had recently lost a suitemate and partly because I wanted to see if I could find out anything else about Hunter but wasn’t one hundred percent sure Greer was done being mad at me, so thought it was best to buy her forgiveness and trust with expensive baked goods. Four of the five of them were camped out in the common room when I knocked on the open door of the suite, Keiko doodling on her iPad while Greer bent over her sociology homework at the breakfast bar. Margot and Dagny were playing gin rummy on the wobbly university-issued coffee table.

“Linden,” Dagny greeted me; her voice was the one you might use to say hello to the annoying neighbor on a TV sitcom from the ’90s, which was how I knew Greer had told them what I’d said to her back at the library. “You’re looking well.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said, lifting the bakery box. “I brought dessert.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Keiko said, holding a hand out without bothering to look up from her screen.

I passed it over, bumping my shoulder against Greer’s. “Hi,” I said softly.

She lifted an eyebrow, noncommittal. “Hi yourself.”

“Anyway,” Margot said, picking up the thread of a conversation that had obviously been in progress before I got there, “my bitchy aunt Jane is using the house to host actual dinner on the Thursday, but they’re all going to clear out on Friday morning and go to Stratton for the weekend if you guys want to drive up that night.”

“We’re going to Margot’s family’s camp the weekend after Thanksgiving,” Greer informed me.

“You should come with,” Margot offered. “My cousin and a couple of his buddies are going to be there, and Celine’s bringing her pervert boyfriend from Bowdoin, so. Really it’s a free-for-all.”

“Fuck you!” Celine called from inside her bedroom, her voice muffled through the door. “He’s not a pervert.”

“Of course he’s not!” Margot called back, then rolled her eyes. “Full pervert,” she assured me, dropping her voice a little. “He literally asked her to send him a picture of her—”

“I’d love to,” I interrupted quickly. “Come to the camp, I mean. Assuming Greer wants me there.”

“I think I can probably tolerate you,” Greer said thoughtfully, biting into a ginger molasses cookie. “Assuming you bring more treats.”

“Hey, dudes?” Celine asked before I could answer, padding barefoot into the common room in her bathrobe. “Have any of you seen a necklace floating around in the bathroom or anywhere? That Georgette McKeown one I have, the rose gold C ?”

I watched as the rest of the girls shook their heads. “That reminds me,” Keiko said, twisting around on the sofa to look at Greer, “did you ever find your watch?”

“I sure did not,” Greer said, “though to be clear, if my dad asks, it’s safe and sound and you all saw me wear it to class the other day, where I delivered half a dozen clever answers and aced a pop quiz.”

“A stunning performance,” Keiko agreed seriously. “You were truly a shining star.”

“You know,” Dagny put in, her dark brow creasing as she pulled one leg up underneath her on the sofa, “Phoebe Chung on the third floor was saying she had a ring go missing the other day. I wonder if there’s, like—”

“A Hemlock House bandit?” Margot asked with a laugh. “Creeping through the suites in a striped shirt and skullcap like the Hamburglar?”

“I mean, it kind of feels that way, doesn’t it?” Dagny asked. “It seems weird that like, all of you guys would suddenly lose your shit at the same time.”

Greer caught my eye across the common room. “Remember the underwear thief back at Bartley?” she asked with a grin.

“Woe unto you who leaves his dryer unattended, et cetera,” I said, but the truth is, I wasn’t really listening. My mind was racing—the possibilities unfurling in a million different directions, the threads unspooling too quickly for me to gather them up and stitch them back together into anything resembling a working theory. It had seemed plausible to me—likely, even—that Hunter might have taken Greer’s watch as some kind of fucked-up trophy. But why would he have risked stealing from anyone else in Hemlock? Or were the thefts an entirely separate thing?

I ducked into the bathroom as the girls passed around the box of cookies, dug my phone out of my pocket. Two more pieces of jewelry missing at Hemlock, I texted Holiday quickly. Celine in the suite and some girl on the third floor.

Holiday texted back right away, a long string of exclamation points . Okay, she told me. Well. A lot to think about THERE, clearly. But the good news is I think I might have an idea for how to get a look at that security footage.

You do? I straightened up, a little thrill skittering through me. How?

Just walking into rehearsal, she wrote back. More soon.