I shook my head, a soup of admiration and annoyance and disappointment coming to a slow simmer inside me. “Wells coming over here that night doesn’t necessarily clear him, does it?” I asked hopefully. “I mean, he could have gone back to August House, run into Greg, and—”
“I thought of that,” Holiday interrupted, “but the timing doesn’t work. Look.” She reached over and dragged her thumb along the scroll bar to move the footage forward, the on-screen sky changing slowly from black to navy as the hours passed. According to the time stamp, it was just before four-thirty when the front door opened again and Wells stepped out onto the porch—only this time, he was wearing the same striped rugby shirt we’d foundin his bedroom yesterday afternoon. He wrapped his hand around Mrs. Holliman’s waist, pulled her close, and—
“Anyway,”Holiday said, closing the app so fast I was surprised she didn’t sprain her wrist. “I’ve officially seen enough.” When she looked up at me, her cheeks were pink, though I wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment or sunstroke. She jogged up in the direction of the house, returning the phone with a fresh deluge of grateful tears.
“How the fuck do you keep doing that?” I asked when she got back.
Holiday looked at me curiously. “What,” she asked, “the fake crying? I played Emily in a steampunk version ofOur Townat Greenleaf last spring.” Then, before I could ask what any of those things were: “You’ll be happy to know, meanwhile, that Bunny the wayward Havanese has made her way home safe and sound.”
I blinked. “That’s great,” I managed, though in truth I didn’t really feel like joking around at this particular moment. I felt like someone had hit me over the head with an oar. “Glad to hear it.”
“So, okay,” Holiday said as we turned back toward August House, tucking her wild hair behind her ears; right away it flew into her face again, the ocean breeze blowing it in a million different directions. “Let’s review. Wells left the Kendricks’ after the party and came here. He must have had his own blood on him from the fight, so after they were done doing…whatever they were doing, Greg’s mom gave him one of Greg’s shirts to changeinto?”
“And the blood that we saw on it yesterday in his bedroom—”
“Must have been Wells’s own from a cut opening up again or something, not Greg’s.”
“Either way,” I mused, “this means Wells has an alibi. Even if he sped, he would have just been getting back to the house when Eliza found Greg in the pool—which tracks, actually, since he was the first one out there on the patio after me.” As much as I didn’t want to admit it, Holiday was right. “It couldn’t have been him.”
We were quiet as we trudged back toward August House, the heat from the sand seeping up through the soles of my sneakers and the faintly fishy smell of low tide hanging in the air. The longer we walked, the darker my mood got—and the more ridiculous and humiliated I started to feel. What did I think I’d been doing, running around the island like a little kid playing pretend? Fuck, we’d been this close to accusing Wells of attempted freakingmurder—and over what? Some dopey middle-school hunch? I should have been sitting on an overpriced restaurant patio with Jasper and Eliza and tucking into a giant plate of stuffed French toast right now, not looking for new and creative ways to alienate a family that had been nice enough to welcome me into their house in the first place. The last few days I hadn’t been able to get over the sneaking suspicion that something about the way the Kendricks were acting wasn’t totally aboveboard. But all at once it seemed pretty clear that the only slimy one here was me.
“Look,” I said once we finally made it back to Holiday’s car, which she’d parked on the side of the road not far from August House. I’d sweat through my T-shirt, the damp cotton sticking to my skin. “Maybe we’ve been taking this whole thing a little bit too far.”
All at once, Holiday got very still. “This whole thing, like—”
“The whole thing like, the whole thing.” I shrugged. “Our littleinvestigation,or whatever. I just think maybe we should cool it, that’s all.”
“Cool it?” she asked, looking at me carefully. “Or call it off?”
“I mean, the whole Wells thing was clearly a nonstarter, right? And it’s not like we’ve got a ton of other leads. Not to mention the fact that for all we know, this whole thing really was just an accident.” I was talking fast and loud now, not entirely sure which one of us I was trying to convince. “I just feel like maybe we’re putting all this energy into trying to solve a mystery that doesn’t actually exist, you know?”
Holiday nodded slowly. “Sure,” she said, her voice perfectly even. “I hear you.”
“We should still hang out, though,” I said quickly, though even to my ears the offer sounded hollow. “I’m here for a couple more days.”
I stood on the side of the road for a long moment after we’d said our goodbyes, watching her taillights disappear before turning back toward August House. I wasn’t sure why I felt weirdly bereft. After all, until this week I hadn’t given Holiday a second thought in years, on top of which it wasn’t like we needed to be LARPing an attempted murder in order to spend time together. If I wanted to see her, I could text her. And she could do the same.
Still: it had been kind of nice to have an excuse.
Back at the house I headed out onto the patio, where Jasper was floating around the pool on the flamingo raft, beer in hand. “There he is!” he called, grinning as I hopped barefoot across thehot stones like a cartoon character doing a coal walk. “I was just saying I thought maybe you’d gotten on the fucking ferry and gone home.”
“And miss out on the opportunity to get pelted with some more organic citrus?” I asked. “Not a chance.” I made my way over to the lounge chair where Eliza was lying on her stomach reading, knees bent and ankles crossed. “Hey,” I said quietly. “I was thinking we could take one of the cars into town later, maybe get something to eat?”
Eliza lifted her chin to look at me from behind her sunglasses, offered me a dazzling smile. “We could,” she allowed brightly. “Or I could wander down to the beach, catch a fish with my bare hands, and rip its spine out with my teeth like a dog.” With that, she got up off the lounge chair and strolled across the patio and into the kitchen, index finger still marking her place in her book.
“Oh yeah,” Jasper said once she was gone, in a voice like he’d meant to pass along a message but that it had somehow slipped his mind, “Eliza thinks you’re a giant asshole.”
I looked behind me at where she’d been, watching as one lonely dragonfly buzzed idly across the patio. “I mean, she’s not wrong,” I admitted grimly, then belly-flopped into the pool.
