“I don’t know,” Kersti lied, not sure if Hamidou believed her.
Hamidou put her arm around Kersti and held her. She loved Cressida, too, had practically raised her. She was a mother to all the motherless boarding school girls in her care.
The police asked Kersti questions. Did she know where Cressida had gone last night? Who she had gone to meet? Had she heard any noises? Fighting? Kersti’s answer was always the same. No, no, no, no. Had she confided in Kersti about being depressed? Had she been suicidal? Had she fought with anyone?
No, no, no.
They searched her room for a note but found nothing. It soon came out that she’d been very drunk. A bottle of vodka had been found. Her blood alcohol level came back .26. Word spread through the Lycée that Cressida had been wasted and accidentally fallen from the fourth floor. There was little time for speculation before the school closed ranks and put an end to the entire unpleasant matter. The fall was declared an accident, which was confirmed by the police investigation. Any other possibility was bad for business. And the Lycée was a business, first and foremost.
The next thing Kersti remembers, her mother was in Lausanne, standing in the middle of her room, helping her pack. She may have tried to persuade Kersti to stay and finish out senior year, but Kersti refused. She had to get away.
The memories of school she’s tried to keep close to the surface are the lovely, sentimental ones—flinging open her window every morning to look out at Lake Geneva; train rides through perfect green pastures and snowy mountains; afternoons lingering in cafés, sipping hot chocolate, nibbling pastries and gossiping with her best friends. Nights out on cobblestone streets with European socialites or dancing in discotheques with royalty. But that wonderful life tucked away in the Alps also had a sinister underbelly, which culminated with Cressida’s beautiful body broken on the concrete. In the end, that image edged out all the rest, no matter how hard Kersti has tried to blot it out.
She has a few spoonfuls of soup and then turns back to her novel. The voice in her head attacks immediately. How many Estonian Harlequin romances can you write?
She quickly abandons the chapter she’s been working on and googles an egg donor website, losing herself in an endless parade of potential donors. One after another, the fertile, vibrant twenty-somethings smile back at her, their youth and properly functioning reproductive parts making her feel a little more useless with every click.
“What stinks?” Jay calls from downstairs, startling her.
“Boiled eggs!” she answers, closing the donor website and returning her novel to the screen. “There’s Nogesesupp on the stove!”
Moments later, Jay appears in the doorway, holding a bowl of soup. He sits down on the chaise longue and balances the bowl on his lap. “I’m sorry about today, babe,” he says. “I just . . . I freaked out.”
“It was a lot to take in.”
“Can we just take a few days and not talk about it?”
Kersti purses her lips and nods. She doesn’t bother telling him she’s already been researching possible donors. Somewhere along the way, this became her crusade. It wasn’t always this way. When they first found out she had deformed fallopian tubes, Jay pulled her into his arms at the clinic and declared, “We will have a child. We’ll do whatever it takes. We’re partners.”
“Soup’s delicious,” he says, filling the silence.
She reaches for the letter from Lille. “Can I show you something?” she asks him, wanting to change the subject. “I got this letter from Lille. The Lycée friend who just died.”
He takes the letter and reads out loud:
. . . certain things in particular still haunt me:
I don’t believe Cressida “fell” by accident.
There’s something incriminating in the Helvetians ledger. I think Deirdre has it (if not, where is it?).
I wonder if Magnus saw anything (I saw him leaving Huber House that night).
I wish I’d spoken up sooner.
“She never finished it,” Jay says, looking up at her.
“What should I do?” she asks him.
“What can you do?”
“I’m not sure. But I feel like I let Cressida down.”
“How?”
“I moved on. I never questioned anything. I just assumed it happened the way they said, that she was drunk and she fell—”
“Did you really?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Kersti says. “But I think Lille knew something she never got to tell us.”
“What’s that ledger she’s talking about?”
“It belonged to some Lycée girls who were expelled in the seventies,” Kersti explains, not wanting to elaborate. “Cressida was obsessed with it. I never knew why.”
“Was Cressida the suicide type?” Jay asks her.
Kersti thinks about it for a moment and realizes she’s always known the answer. “No,” she says. “She could be dark, but she was never hopeless or depressed. She always had an idea or a plan. I never thought it was suicide.”
Charlie and I are going to travel through Europe this summer. That’s what Cressida told Kersti the night before she fell and she’d seemed genuinely excited about it.
“Maybe Lille thought someone pushed her,” Jay suggests.
“Maybe.”
“You never talk about what happened in Switzerland,” he says.
“It was another lifetime.”
“Your best friend fell off her balcony and you left school before finishing. Hardly insignificant. I’ve always felt a bit shut out of your past.”
Kersti shrugs, not sure what to say. “I told you. I didn’t want to dredge it up. I wanted to forget about it and move on.”
“Did you?”
“I guess not.”
“What about this Magnus guy? Can you talk to him?”
“I don’t know—”
“What about Deirdre? Could she have that ledger? Obviously this was your friend’s dying wish, for you to find out what happened to Cressida. You could probably use the distraction—”
And there it is. Kersti bites her lip. He wants her to find something to occupy her time so she’ll stop pressuring him about an egg donor. “I don’t know where the ledger is,” she mutters.
“What are the Helvetians?”
“It was a secret society at the Lycée. It was banned after those girls were expelled, long before I got there. I have no idea what any of it has to do with Cressida,” she says. “Anyway. I should get back to writing.”
She looks purposefully at her laptop, but they both know she hasn’t been writing.
“Sounds like you might have the makings of a good mystery novel here,” Jay says. “Maybe it would be cathartic to write about what happened to you at the Lycée. Maybe you could look at it as research for your next—”
“Maybe,” she says, gritting her teeth. And even though she’s annoyed with his suggestion, she can already feel the familiar stir of that feral writer inside her getting wind of fresh prey.