“Hi, Chris,” I say, and I sit down on the end of one of the lounge chairs. The cushion beneath me is damp. It has rained recently in the Hamptons.
It seems to take a few seconds for Chris to recognize me. And when he does, he isn’t too happy.
“Blondie?” He reaches up to slick some of his wet hair back from his eyes. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
“We just dropped by to ask you a few questions,” I say. Lucy has come with us—I couldn’t leave her cooped up in the brownstone all night—and now she butts her head against my knees and sits down, panting happily. “How are you, anyway?”
“I’m okay, I guess,” Chris replies. He looks up at Cooper. “Who’s he?”
“A friend,” Cooper says. Then adds, “Of hers,” I guess so there won’t be any confusion.
“Huh,” Chris says. Then, in an apparent attempt to make the best out of a bad situation, he goes, “Well. Care for a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Cooper says. “What we’d really like is to talk to you about Elizabeth Kellogg and Roberta Pace.”
Chris doesn’t look alarmed. In fact, he doesn’t even look surprised. Instead he says graciously, “Oh, sure. Sure. Oh, hey, where are my manners? Faith, honey, go inside and rustle up some grub for us, will you? And grab another bottle of wine while you’re in there, why don’t you?”
The girl in the hot tub pouts. “But, Chris—”
“Go on, honey.”
“But my name’s Hope, not Faith.”
“Whatever.” Chris slaps her on the backside as she climbs, dripping like a mermaid, from the hot tub. She has on a bathing suit, but it’s a bikini, and the top is so skimpy and her boobs so large that the tiny Lycra triangles seem like mere suggestions.
Cooper notices the bikini phenomenon right away. I can tell by his raised eyebrows. It so pays to be a trained investigator.
Her rear proves as impressive as her front. Not an ounce of cellulite. I wonder if she, like Rachel, had StairMastered it all away.
“So, Chris,” Cooper says, as soon as the girl is gone. “What’s the deal with you and Rachel Walcott?”
Chris chokes on the sip of Chardonnay he’d been taking.
“Wh-what?” he coughs, when he can speak again.
But Cooper’s just looking down at Chris the way he might have looked down at a really interesting but kind of gross bug that he’d found in his salad.
“Rachel Walcott,” he says. “She was the director of the dorm—I mean, residence hall—you lived in your senior year at Earlcrest. Now she’s running Fischer Hall, where your parents live, and where Heather here works.”
Fumbling for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter he had left by the side of the Jacuzzi, Chris pulls one out with trembling fingers and lights it. He inhales, and in the semidarkness, the tip of the cigarette glows redly.
“Shit” is all he says.
I’m not a trained detective and all, but even I think this answer is kind of…suspicious.
“So what gives between the two of you?” Cooper asks. “You and Rachel. I mean, you might not have noticed, but people are dying—”
“I’ve noticed,” Chris says sharply. “Okay? I’ve noticed. What the fuck do you think?”
Cooper apparently doesn’t think this last part is all that necessary. You know, the bad language.
Because he says to Chris, in a much harsher voice than he’s spoken in before, “You knew? How long?”
Chris blinks up at him through the steam from the bubbling jets. “What?” he asks, like someone who isn’t sure he was hearing things right.
“How long?” Cooper demands again, in a voice that makes me glad it’s Chris he’s talking to, and not me. It also makes me doubt his story. You know, about not hitting people in his line of work. “How long have you known that Rachel was the one killing those girls?”
I can see that Chris has gone as pale as the watery lights beneath the surface of the pool, and it isn’t from the cigarette smoke.
I don’t blame him. Cooper’s scaring me a little, too.
“I didn’t know,” Chris says, in a choked voice that is quite different from the cocky one he’d used previously. “I didn’t put it together until last night, when you”—he looks at me “when you and I danced, and you told me Beth and Bobby were…were the ones who—”
“Oh, c’mon, Chris,” Cooper says. “You expect us to believe that with all the publicity on campus after those supposed accidents—”
“I didn’t know!” Chris splashes one hand into the water to emphasize his words, and gets Lucy’s paws wet. She looks down at them quizzically, then goes to work with her tongue. “I swear to God, I didn’t know. I don’t exactly have a lot of free time, and what I do have I’m not going to waste reading the newspapers. I mean, of course I heard two girls in Fischer Hall had died, but I didn’t know they were my two girls.”
“And you didn’t notice that neither of the girls was returning your calls?”
Chris ducks his head. Shamefacedly, I think.
“Because you never called them again.” Cooper’s voice is cold as ice.
Chris looks defensive. “Do you?” he demands, of Cooper. “Do you always call the next day?”
“If I want there to be a next time,” Cooper replies, without missing a beat.
“Exactly.” Chris’s voice drips with meaning. At first I don’t get what he means.
Then I do.
Oh.
Cooper shakes his head, looking as disgusted as I feel. Well, almost, anyway. “You expect me to believe that you never knew those girls were dead until you heard it from Heather the other night?”
“That’s right,” Chris says, and suddenly he flicks his cigarette into the rhododendrons and hauls himself out of the Jacuzzi. All he has on is a pair of baggy swim trunks. His frame is lean but muscular, his skin tanned to a light gold. There isn’t a single patch of body hair on him, unless you count what curls out from beneath his arms.
“And when I heard about it, the first thing I did was, I came here.” Chris stands up, wrapping himself in a wide, pale pink towel. “I needed to get away, I needed to think, I needed to—”