I felt myself relax after that, listening to the conversations wandering all around me and the faint crash of the waves down at the beach. Eliza taught Holiday to play the Minister’s Cat, the two of them side by side on the lounge chairs; Jasper turned idle somersaults in the pool. And yeah, I wasn’t exactly sure how any of this was going to help us figure out what had happened to Greg, but as I took the joint that Wells handed over, it occurred to me that maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe there really was nothing to figure out in the first place.
I was thinking about getting into the pool—after all, I consoled myself, ithadjust been cleaned—when I heard the sound of the sliding glass door to the house whooshing open. Up until now Meredith had been sitting mostly silent at the patio table, looking at her phone, but I turned just in time to spot a glimpse of her gingery red hair as she disappeared into the kitchen.
Holiday noticed too—and, to my surprise, she got unobtrusively to her feet a moment later. “Bathroom?” I heard her ask Eliza, who directed her to the powder room off the kitchen. Holiday caught my eye as she went, shooting me a pointed look that definitely meant eitherFollow me ASAPorStay exactly where you are and don’t mess this up for us,though unfortunately I had no idea which.
In the end my curiosity got the better of me, though, and I heaved myself up off the pool deck and handed the joint back toWells in what I hoped was an extremely casual and unsuspicious manner. “Who needs a beer?” I asked, brushing my palms off on the back of my shorts.
“I do!” Jasper called cheerfully; Eliza’s hand went up across the patio, and Wells called out detailed instructions for how to make a vodka tonic just the way he liked it as I padded into the cool, quiet house.
I stepped into the kitchen just in time to see Holiday holding the necklace out in Meredith’s direction, the charm swinging gently as it dangled from her hand. “This isn’t yours, is it?” she was asking, her round face open and guileless. “I just saw it floating in the pool, and I thought I remembered seeing you wearing it at the beach the other night.” She grinned. “IloveGeorgette McKeown.”
Meredith’s eyes widened in surprise. “Oh jeez, yeah, it is. Thank you.” She glanced at me over Holiday’s shoulder. “Aidy the trash bag pulled it right off my neck.”
“Jasper’sAidy?” I blurted before I could stop myself. Holiday whirled around, and I realized too late that she’d probably intended for me to stay outside after all. “Really?”
Meredith laughed at that, a short mean cackle. “First of all, that girl has hooked up with basically every trust fund on this island, so if I were you, I’d take a breath before I called herJasper’sanything.” She plucked the necklace from Holiday’s outstretched hand, frowning darkly at the broken clasp before tucking it into her pocket. “Second of all, you saw her at that party last night. She was totally shit-faced. I know you guys all love to eat up that little Cinderella act she puts on, but get a couple of drinks into herand believe me, her townie starts to show.” She reached up and scooped her hair off her shoulders: sure enough, there was a trio of livid red scratches on the side of her neck.
“Oh mygosh,” Holiday said, and I suspected her alarm was probably real. “What were you guys fighting about?” Then, affecting a slightly dorky sheepishness: “Sorry. It’s fully none of my business.”
Meredith shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, jerking her chin in the direction of the patio, “it’s not like it isn’t everyone’s favorite thing to talk about out there. I’m sure you’d hear about it eventually. Greg—my boyfriend, the guy who got hurt—had like, a moment of insanity with that girl at the beginning of the summer, which he admitted to and apologized for and which, not for nothing, has never mattered less to me than it does in this moment when he is actively fighting for his freakinglife,but Aidy like, can’t let it go.” She huffed a breath. “She thinks he’s the one that got away, or some other Taylor Swift sad-sackery. Never mind the fact that he’s told her to get lost like a thousand times.”
I blinked, the contents of my brain reshuffling like a deck of cards in the hands of a boardwalk huckster; beside me, Holiday had gotten very still. I’d hardly given Aidy a second thought since the party—she’d barely even come up when Holiday and I were talking this afternoon—but all at once, I couldn’t believe our mistake. After all, it made perfect sense: At some point late last night, she and Greg must have argued about him going back to Meredith. Tempers flared, the situation escalated, and Greg wound up in the pool. “You don’t think—” I blurted beforeI could stop myself, then clamped my jaws abruptly shut: the last thing I wanted was for Meredith to get suspicious, or to tell Eliza I’d been pestering her with a million weird questions about Greg.
But Meredith just looked at me blankly. “I don’t think what?” she asked. Then the penny seemed to drop. “Wait, like do I think she pushed him into thepool?” She laughed again then—louder now, the sound of it faintly hysterical; just for a second, I was afraid it was going to turn into a sob. “Oh my god,” she said—almost to herself, it seemed like, pushing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “Oh mygod,how is this my life right now?”
I opened my mouth to backpedal, to tell her she definitely didn’t need to talk about it, but this time the look that Holiday shot me was clear:Don’t say another word.Sure enough, a moment later Meredith pulled herself together, taking a deep breath and shaking her head. “Look,” she said finally, “I’d be the first person to tell you if I thought Aidy had anything to do with what happened to Greg last night. That girl is fully garbage, and I hate her fucking guts, and honestly, the only thing that keeps me from smacking her across her smug face most of the time is the knowledge that she’s going to be stuck on this tourist-trap island forever, slinging fish sticks to support her six children who all have different fathers.”
Holiday’s eyes widened. “That is…evocative,” she said.
“Thank you,” Meredith said, though I was pretty sure Holiday hadn’t exactly meant it as a compliment. “In any case, she and Jasper were going at it like they were auditioning for alow-budget porno all night long. I don’t know if she was hoping it would get back to Greg and he’d be jealous, or what, but I don’t think they came up for air long enough for her to have done anything like that.” She was quiet for a moment, scrubbing her hands roughly over her face. “I feel like roadkill,” she announced when she looked up again, and I noticed for the first time how exhausted she was—bluish hollows blooming under her eyes, her eyelashes pale and mascaraless. A generous spray of freckles stood out across her nose and cheeks. “Thanks for bringing me the necklace,” she told Holiday, then turned to me. “Will you tell Eliza I went to bed?”
I nodded so hard and fast it was a miracle my head didn’t pop off and go rolling into the pantry. “Of course,” I promised, feeling both oddly guilty for prying into her personal life and deeply exhilarated that it had worked. The second she disappeared down the hall, I whipped around in Holiday’s direction.“Dude,”I started, but she held up a fierce hand to stop me, then put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to follow.
“Right.” I trailed her out onto the wide wraparound porch of August House, the two of us plunking ourselves down on the front steps to debrief in the pale glow of the porch light. “Sorry about that,” I said, “and also about barging into the kitchen back there. I didn’t mean to like, salt your investigative game.”
Holiday waved me off. “No, no,” she said, “it’s fine. We’re better as a team anyway. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to get all that out of her on my own.”
“How the heck did you notice Meredith wearing that necklaceat the beach the other night?” I asked. “You only saw her for like five seconds.”
Holiday shrugged. “I notice everything,” she reminded me, looking out at the fireflies flickering lazily near the tree line. “I can’t help it.” From the tone in her voice it didn’t necessarily sound like a quality she liked in herself.
“So you knew it was hers when I showed it to you this afternoon?”
“I had a hunch,” she admitted.
I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or annoyed that she hadn’t told me, though I guessed I wasn’t actually surprised. Holiday had been one step ahead of me more or less our entire friendship; she’d been the one to tell me the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, not to mention where babies came from. I might still have believed in the stork if it wasn’t for her.
“So, okay,” I said quietly, glancing over my shoulder to make sure nobody could hear us. The crickets were noisy up in the trees, the moon round and white and full through the dense, leafy branches. “Not Meredith or Aidy, then?”
“NotAidy,” she corrected. “Clearly, Meredith isn’t what you’d call her biggest fan, so it’s probably safe to assume that we can trust her if she says Aidy couldn’t have had anything to do with it. But we don’t know for sure that she’s telling the truth about the necklace.” She tugged on a strand of dark hair, twisting it around one finger. “I also kind of don’t understand why a girl like her was with Greg to begin with,” she mused. “Or like, why she took him back after he cheated.”
“He’s great at oral,” I reported before I could stop myself. Then, feeling the heat creep up my neck: “I mean, so I’ve heard.”
“I will…be sure to put that in his personnel file,” Holiday said with a smirk. “But somehow I don’t think it’squiteenough.”
I shrugged. The ins and outs of Greg and Meredith’s relationship weren’t particularly interesting to me, probably because I’d seen so many variations of it play out at Bartley over the last three years. “Girls like douchebags,” I reminded her. “Sometimes that’s just how it goes.”
“Do you think that’s true?” Holiday asked pointedly. “Or do you think it’s just a thing guys tell themselves when they feel entitled to a date but can’t get one?”
The screen door squealed open behind us before I could reply. “Fuck you guys,” Jasper said, crossing the creaking porch holding a fresh bag of Pirate’s Booty. “Nobody told me the party moved out here.” He sat down on the step above us, holding the cheese snacks out like an offering.
“Yes, please.” Holiday helped herself to a handful. “I love this stuff,” she said once she’d swallowed. “It’s so good. The way it kind of squeaks against your teeth?”
Jasper’s mouth dropped open. “Do you want to get married?” he asked, visibly delighted.
“I don’t think you could handle me,” Holiday fired back with a grin. She stood up then, brushing her fingers off on the back of her jeans. “I should go,” she said, gesturing at her car in the driveway, then looked back at me. “Lunch tomorrow?”
I hesitated, my gaze cutting to Jasper and then to Holiday again; she was working out a plan, obviously, though I had no ideawhat it might be, and it wasn’t like I could ask now. “Tomorrow,” I agreed, and she nodded her approval before waving goodbye and taking off.
Once she was gone, Jasper turned to me, eyebrows waggling suggestively. “What’s up, Ms. Singh?” he crooned, licking his lips like a pervert. I rolled my eyes and flipped him the middle finger, then followed him back up the stairs and into the house.
