“Oh my God.” Stephanie was in the doorway now. “What happened?”
“I have no idea!” Keith shouted, eyes locked on Crystal. “I just found her like this.”
“What do you mean, you just found her?” Stephanie asked, a hand pressed to her stomach like she might be sick. “Weren’t you in the room with her?”
“I was downstairs with Jonathan,” Keith said. He put a hand over his mouth. “Holy fucking shit. I did a line on that fucking nightstand next to her after I got up. Maybe if I’d checked on her instead . . . I didn’t— I didn’t even look at her, really. . . . And she could have been lying there still— holy fuck.”
Whenever she’d died exactly, Crystal’s skin was an awful shade of gray now, her limbs splayed awkwardly. I leaned against the wall and swallowed back bile.
“Oh my God.” Jonathan had appeared in the doorway.
“She must have OD’d,” Maeve said, stepping away from the bed. “Right, Keith?”
Keith shook his head, moving his hand to his cheek. “I guess, I don’t know.”
“You guess?” Jonathan asked, taking a step closer to Keith. “If she didn’t OD, what else could have happened to her?”
“I don’t— I don’t know.” Keith was tugging his fingers through his hair as he stared at Crystal. “We came up here. We used . . . She was keeping up with me. I’d been crashing for hours so I almost overdid it. And I’m much bigger. Maybe it was too much for her. But we had sex after . . . I don’t know what happened then. We fell asleep, I guess. I think maybe I heard her coughing once.”
“I’m calling the police.” Stephanie pulled her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket.
“Stephanie, wait— ” Maeve turned to Keith. “You heard her coughing? And you didn’t do anything?” Maeve looked again at Stephanie, more pointedly. “Isn’t that, um, a problem? Couldn’t that make Keith . . .”
“I don’t think so,” Stephanie said, her trembling hands clumsily tapping on her phone.
Maeve looked stricken, and I shook my head sympathetically.
“Keith, why don’t you back up and tell us exactly what happened,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”
Peter was in the doorway now. “Jonathan, are you— ” He gasped when he saw Crystal. “Oh my God.” We ignored him.
“We started talking in the bar. Crystal offered to pay for the drugs if I bought them. She said she had some kind of conflict with the guy dealing at the Falls. So I bought the drugs, and— ”
“Wait, what?” Stephanie interrupted, pulling her phone down from her ear. “Keith, you bought the drugs?”
“Yeah,” Keith says. “It was her money. But I bought them. Why?” His eyes were darting around wildly now.
“What difference does it make?” I asked.
“When people OD on opioids, they’ve been charging the supplier with homicide,” Stephanie said. “It’s a new war-on-drugs thing.”
“But he didn’t supply them,” Jonathan insisted. “All he did was— ”
“Supply them,” Stephanie finished his sentence. “Keith doesn’t have to have charged her for them, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t his money. I’m not saying that he would be prosecuted, but he could be. It’s at the prosecutor’s discretion. They don’t do it in New York City, but they do on Long Island— parts of it. It’s controversial. There was this big thing about it in the New York Times a couple weeks ago that— ”
“Yeah, I read that, too,” Maeve said, biting her lip and nodding at Stephanie. “And up here— where the opioids are out of control . . . What do you think they’d do?” She turned to Jonathan, wide-eyed. “You said they don’t like weekenders . . .”
Jonathan stood silent for a moment, then gave a slow shake of his head. “They don’t.”
“She was fine when we fell asleep.” Keith stopped pacing between the bed and the window, and looked at Crystal. “She was going to go back to her parents’ house next week, to try to get clean.”
“I don’t understand what you’re debating,” Peter burst out. “You need to call the police.” Nobody responded. “This is your house, Jonathan, and these are your friends, but I’m not going to be a part of this.” Peter shook his head in disgust and disappeared out the door.