She noticed, too, they broadcasted a lot more pictures of his mom wearing the sari than his dad in the golf shirt, and they’d also dug up some photo of Sri in traditional garb at a cousin’s wedding in India. He looked so handsome, a garland of flowers around his neck.
Sussannah wanted to scream. There was no way Sri could do something like this. They made it sound like he was some bored Ivy League kid who’d gone underground, become radicalized, and started to kill. How insane was that?
“How can you be so sure?” Sussannah’s mother said. “He’s just a boy in your house.”
He was much more than just a boy in Environmental House.
*
“This is doubly insane,” she complained to Brent. “Did you know that Sri’s family is Hindu? Not only vegetarian, they practice ahimsa, respect to all living beings, that’s why Sri can’t even bring himself to kill a bug, much less—”
“Sussannah,” Brent interrupted. “So what’s up?”
“What do you mean, what’s up?”
“You know something, don’t you? About Sri . . .”
She could feel her eyes flashing. “Why would I know something and not tell you, or the police, or anyone? No one wants to find him more than I do.”
“I know. That’s what I’m curious about.”
“There’s nothing to be curious about,” she said.
*
The Boston surveillance cameras had picked up images of two young men placing duffle bags on the sidewalk, right where the blasts went off. Sri didn’t wear track suits or baseball caps, a fact the media ignored. But Brent did. And suddenly he became the “second dark-skinned accomplice.”
“Un-fucking-believable,” he said. “My late-spring olive complexion.” On the news, the reporters pronounced his name, the Portuguese Du-ART, as Doo-ar-TAY, as if making him sound Mexican would make him more suspicious.
Sussannah was surprised the phone’s bell hadn’t given out: ring, ring, ring. They couldn’t unplug it, of course, just in case. “Yes, I was in Boston that day,” she heard Brent say on the phone. “I got as far as Wellesley, to pick up my friend—” Sussannah, scribbling on a piece of paper, reminded him that they’d been advised by the Brown lawyers to speak to no one. “Also, I don’t look like the guy in the picture at all—I never wear white sneakers, what is this, the ’90s? Jeesh! And lastly, it’s Patil not Patel. P-A-T-I-L . . .”
Given the resurgence in interest, the Facebook page sprang back to life. There were some terrible trolls making terrible comments, but Sussannah took charge, deleting things before Sri’s parents would see. No new leads, but at least people were thinking about Sri again. They even had a one-inch article in the New York Times.
*
“Yes, he did own a cell phone,” she told the detective. She, Marla, and Brent had agreed to be questioned together. The detective assured Brent he was no longer a “person of interest.”
“That day he disappeared,” said Brent, “you’ll note that while we texted him, we also texted Marla in order to actually deliver the message—we didn’t assume he had his phone. And he didn’t.”
“He hated cell phones, thought they irradiated you or something. He would have never spent hours tinkering on some bomb,” added Marla.
“Maybe he wasn’t worried about long-term health consequences anymore,” said the detective, his hair close-cut like the bristles of a brush, like the stereotype of a hard-boiled detective or a slightly cleaned-up Boston cop. Sussannah realized that pretty much anything they said could be twisted around to make Sri sound guilty. The cop probably felt that in their vigorous, clamorous defense of Sri, they must be covering something up.
“Moving on, he spent a lot of time in the Sciences Library,” said the man. “Even though he was an English major.”
“Not English, he was a Literary Arts concentrator—that’s creative writing,” Marla corrected, as if the guy would know, or care. “Really—our friend is missing. You guys should be helping us look for him, not give us the third degree.”
The cop had probably not gone to college, or maybe not a college where you all live together like they did; could he understand the incredible closeness that developed between people like them? The three years they’d spent together—morning, noon, and night—added up to several lifetimes stitched together.
“So he’s a writing major or whatnot, but the interesting thing is he’s in the Sciences Library all the time. And according to this log, in December he spent almost five hours at one stretch, didn’t check out a single book.” Sussannah almost expected him to end with, So whaddaya think of that, huh? Sound like an innocent man to you? Sam Spade style.