She held the screen open and waved me into the front hall, where it was cool and dark and quiet. “Wait here,” she instructed, then disappeared upstairs. I stood on the brightly colored rag rug with my hands in my pockets, trying not to look like I was casing the house for a possible robbery. Holiday’s parents’ place was more in line with what I had always pictured beach houses to be like—weathered shingles and a slightly saggy front porch, a living room full of comfy-looking but decidedly mismatched furniture, and a bookshelf stuffed with ancient board games as well as what appeared to be every novel that Danielle Steel had ever written.
“Big fan?” I asked when Holiday thundered back downstairs.
Holiday shook her head. “They were my grandma’s,” she explained. She’d gotten dressed in denim shorts and an army-green button-down, notebook and laptop tucked under her arm. “My mom used to be, like, extremely anti–romance novel, but then like five years ago she wound up reading one while we were here and had this big feminist reawakening, and now she teaches a class about them at the Extension School.”
She thrust the laptop and notebook into my arms, then turned and headed into the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if I should follow, so I stayed where I was, and a moment later she returned again, this time clutching a plastic tumbler of cold brew in each hand. “Out,” she said officiously, shooing me back onto the porch.
I sat down across from her at the tiny iron bistro table, where she took her time organizing and arranging her various supplieswithout bothering to spare me a second glance. “Okay,” she finally repeated, her tone all business as she opened her notebook to a fresh, blank page. “Say all that again.” Then—and only then—she smiled. “Up to and including, obviously, the part about what a horse’s ass you are.”
I grinned, pure narcotic relief flooding through me; it wasn’t until that moment that I suddenly realized I’d been terrified she was going to tell me to fuck off once and for all. “Did I say I was a horse’s ass?” I asked.
Holiday put pen to paper, glancing up at me through her eyelashes. “I think it was implied,” she said crisply. “Now go.”
I relayed the events of last night as clearly as possible, right up until the part about Eliza breaking Wells’s arm when they were kids—which, I reminded myself firmly, didn’t actually have anything to do with our current investigation. When I was finished, Holiday frowned. “First of all,” she began, “Southie is like, extremely gentrified now.”
“I mean,Iknow that,” I said, “but—”
“No, no, I take your point.” Holiday held a hand up. “And you’re right. As a matter of fact…” She trailed off, pecking away at her laptop for a moment before turning the screen to face me.
I squinted, the glare of the early-morning sun making it difficult to see what looked like the results of some kind of records request. “What am I looking at?” I asked.
Holiday’s dark eyes were shining. “The security footage from Greg’s house didn’t give us Wells,” she reminded me, “but it might have given us someone even better.”
I shook my head, not understanding. “Okay…?”
“About an hour before the Kendricks’ party, some guy in a red Honda showed up in front of the Hollimans’,” she explained, tapping the make and model of the car listed on the screen. “Greg came out to talk to him, and I obviously couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from their body language it looked like things got pretty heated.”
I felt my eyes widen. “And you didn’t think to mention that to me at all?”
Holiday was unmoved. “First of all, there are a lot of things I don’t tell you,” she fired back, “and second of all, I didn’t know if it mattered or not. But then when I looked up the license plate—”
“You memorized thelicenseplate?” I interrupted. “In the thirty seconds you were watching that tape?”
“I mean, I also got a cool sixteen hundred on my SATs,” she informed me. “My brain is weird, Michael. I would think you of all people would know that by now.”
It did seem on-brand for her, now that I thought about it. “I didn’t even know you could look up license plates if you weren’t the police.”
“There’s a bunch of stuff like that you can do if you’re willing to pay a fee,” Holiday said with a shrug. “I mean, let’s be real, the site was totally questionable and they probably have my credit card information on file at the Kremlin or whatever, but we can solve that problem next.” She grinned. “The point is, the car is owned by some guy named Topher Leal. Who just happens to be…” She drummed a nerdy little tattoo on the table.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“A drug dealer,” Holiday said happily. “From Southie.”
I shook my head. “Is it weird that I kind of want to kiss you right now?”
The words were out before I could think better of them; right away I felt myself blush, but Holiday only preened. “I mean,” she said breezily, “when don’t you?”
“Cute.” Then, wanting to course-correct the conversation as quickly as possible: “How do you know he’s a drug dealer?”
“Oh, just a little trick of the trade I like to call Google dot com,” Holiday said with a toss of her hair. “He’s been arrested a couple of times, and his name popped up on some local blog about how crime and yuppie coffee shops are equally responsible for ruining the neighborhood. I also found his relay times from when he used to run track in high school and the website for his now-defunct ska band.”
“Thorough,” I admitted appreciatively. “Say Greg really did owe this Topher guy a buttload of money, though. Why would Topher want to kill him? How’s Greg going to pay him back if he’s at the bottom of the Kendricks’ pool?”
“Maybe he just meant to rough him up a little,” Holiday said, and I snorted.
“Rough him up?” I echoed. “Who are you, Sammy the Bull?”
“I’m just saying!” Holiday made a face. “Maybe Greg is dealing for Topher, but he gets in over his head somehow, so he comes out here for the summer thinking he’s bought himself some time to come up with the cash—except for the part where whatever Greg owes to Topher, Topher probably owes somebody else. I’m thinking Topher showed up at Greg’s house to collect, and they argued—that much, at least, is clear from the video. What I’m lesssure about is how we get from there to the bottom of the Kendricks’ pool.”
