“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 hurtGreer?”
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. “Itisa 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 thatyou’reexactly 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 atHarvard?” 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.
