Her reason for rushing to Calhoun felt flimsy, too. Late on a Friday night, why bolt all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie something that could wait until morning? The condo would be foreclosed; they’d no longer be covering her grad-school tuition. Upsetting, but not earth-shaking—more Edie’s parents’ problems than her own.
I played it out, the outlandish scenario: Could Mrs. Iredale have waited in SAKE with a gun, a fake suicide note already typed out on Edie’s computer? I couldn’t picture the woman getting into the building without anyone noticing, although she did know the way; she’d slipped inside to knock on SAKE’s door a few times before. I pictured her biding her time in the dirty hallway. Parties blaring in from every side, the boozy flotsam and jetsam of our hard-partying lifestyle littering the floor. Ridiculous.
It certainly didn’t sound like Mrs. Iredale thought I had anything to do with it. Edie liked you. Well, she liked everything I wanted, too. And unlike me, she got it.
My phone buzzed against my hip, and it was Alex fucking Kotsonis, well of course. I made up my mind to let it go to voice mail and then answered it at the very last second.
“Hey, Alex!”
“Hi! It’s…I was gonna say ‘It’s Alex.’ ”
“Yeah, your name came up.” I glanced outside again: lightning julienning the western sky.
“Old habit, I guess.” He laughed. “So look, I was thinking more about what you said the other night about Edie having drugs in her system, and I realized I kinda hung up before I even asked anything about that. Because that’s super weird. We both know she didn’t use anything. Right?”
“That’s what I thought. But it’s in the autopsy report. Hang on, let me look at it.” I put him on speaker and pulled it up. “ ‘There was a high level of,’ here goes, ‘methylenedioxymethamphetamine in the blood.’ That’s Molly.”
“Huh. I mean, everyone in the building was kinda into it, so it wouldn’t have been hard to get. I just don’t know where or when she would’ve taken it.”
“Yeah, it’s strange, right?” I said. “And that drug makes you happy. You don’t kill yourself on it.”
“If anything, people die because they jump off balconies and stuff. Makes you feel like Superman. Invincible.”
Maybe it’d turned Edie into even more of a braggart, a mean girl. Perhaps it made her say just the wrong thing to the exact wrong person who happened to be with her at that moment. Take me, for example: a little sniping on Edie’s part, maybe a snotty proclamation about Lloyd or about our clique’s true allegiance or about any one of my three thousand weak spots, could’ve set me off. Every clue, it seemed, offered dozens of possible interpretations.
“What are you doing tonight?” I blurted out. “Let’s get dinner,” I went on, when he didn’t say anything, “or just, like, grab a drink after work. It’ll be fun! We’re not too old to be spontaneous, right?”
He half laughed. “Maybe—I had a project I was going to finish up.” I knew this was my shot, the universe plopping Alex in front of me like a cat dropping a very dazed mouse.
“Alex, I think the fact that neither of us has firm plans tonight is a sign from above.” I kept my voice light. “It’s shitty outside and God wants us to get together and eat, you know, caloric things.”
“ ‘Caloric things.’ You really paint a picture with words.” I could hear it, the crack as he relented. “Can we meet near Grand Central so I can catch the train straight from there?”
* * *
I beat him to the restaurant and sat flicking through his photos on Facebook. He was still dreamy; I’d always had a vague crush on him, but he was Edie’s and way out of my league. I’d felt lucky just to be friends with him, to sometimes be spotted in public in such handsome company. Most of the pictures were of him and his wife: on vacation, at a play, at a wedding.
He pushed open the door and moved like I remembered, solid and with an easy swagger. He perked up when he spotted me, and I stood from the dinky table to give him a hug. He smelled warm and autumnal, and for a moment, my only thought was that it was good to see him. Then I remembered everything I needed to ask him, the simmering spite toward Edie that had only come out