Keeping Secrets

Chapter 19

The second day after the murder had already given way to evening. The killer was still hiding in plain sight. Gaurav's teams were relentlessly searching the rooms and belongings of each person for the sixth string, but in vain.

Gaurav decided to search once again in Nikki's personal messages. There had to be some clue, at least to the mystery man behind the pregnancy. Gaurav searched through her recent chats with all her friends. He went through the group chats, media, documents, links and audio clips. He found nothing except glimpses of happy times. There were some short clips from the group's first day on this holiday. They had been uploaded to the group chat by Ruby: he could see three video of Nikki dancing with Anushka, and the clip of Maya enjoying herself, dancing, that Kevin had initially mentioned. He scrolled on to older videos and one of those was a two-minute video of the entire group at a party. These clips were the first time Gaurav was seeing Nikki as a living, breathing person. He was also getting his first glimpse of everything people had been saying about her. The video clearly showed them all setting up for a sleepover party at what looked like Maya's place. Everyone was helping to get the place ready. Nikki was emptying packets of chips into big glass bowls, while Ryan and Kevin were goofing around between making cocktails. Aryan was stacking tissues and setting out platters of cheese, crackers and nachos, while Maya was setting up the big projector for a movie. Everyone was dressed in their pyjamas, and Ruby seemed to be shooting the video. She turned towards Ryan. He was throwing cheeseballs at Kevin, who was trying to catch them in his mouth.

In yet another video, everyone seemed to be at an ethnic celebration. Nikki's giggle was the loudest sound amidst the music and regular chatter. Nikki, Ruby and Maya were posing for a rather graceful photograph, flaunting their festive and heavily embellished long skirts. None of them had any idea that the person behind the camera was recording a video. "Guys, change your poses, at least," Aryan could be heard stifling a chuckle. Meanwhile, something seemed to have slipped into Nikki's eye. Kevin was the first to rush to her rescue, but he was still trying to spot the little spec in her eyes, when Ryan came running from the back and pulled out her hairclip, ruining her entire hairdo. Nikki angrily chased after him, still rubbing her eyes vigorously. They ran halfway around the lawn before she caught up to him and landed a punch in his stomach, still covering her irritated eye with the other hand. The next video showed Ryan helping a grumpy Nikki get the spec out of her eye and helping her pin her hair up again. He was constantly talking to her till she finally gave in and laughed.

This was followed by a photo montage of everyone in the group, individually and together. Nikki's battered, swollen, unrecognizable face flashed before Gaurav's eyes again. To see her so full of life, made him feel a step closer to her, although he did not still completely understand her as a person... Disappointed, he had just set the phone down, when there was a knock on the door. It was Kevin. His hair looked dishevelled and his eyes, still sore. He could barely walk the few steps before collapsing into the chair in front of Gaurav. He gulped down an entire bottle of water before he could talk.

"Sir, Nikki and I... we were in a relationship. It was all very new, just started a few weeks before the trip, and we had not told anyone in the group yet, because we wanted to be completely sure about it first. In fact, we decided to surprise everyone with an announcement during this trip. I had always liked Nikki, since the day I first saw her. To me, she was the most beautiful girl in the world. I never had the courage to tell her, and of course, I was well aware of her feelings for Ryan. I tried to just be a good friend and stick around, but I could not stop wanting her or get her to want me. We were really close, right from the start, and she often told me a lot of things that she could not tell anyone else. I always knew about her tendency to hurt herself. She had told me how the most intimate relationships in her life had been the most violent and abusive ones and she had learnt to associate pain with solace at a very young age. She felt that she was too weird and complicated for anyone to understand, but I got her. I could feel everything she said, everything she felt. Once I got to know her sockpuppet name. I was so shocked to see her profile that I could not dare to reach out to her for months. When I finally did, it took me very long to be the guy she was looking for online, but finally, we were able to get that going. Things were going great, and we even decided to meet in Sliam. I was sure about exactly what I wanted to tell her, but when I heard at the last moment that Ryan was also joining her that weekend, I got really nervous and backed out. I mean, it was one thing knowing how she felt about him, but it was also about saying everything I had been meaning to tell her in front of someone else, especially one of our friends."

"Wait, Sliam? Does that mean you were..."

"Zayn. Yes. That was me." He looked Gaurav square in the eyes when he said it. "I had actually made that profile because I was worried just thinking of the kind of people she could end up in trouble with. It was the scariest, most disturbing thing for me to imagine her, of all people, being spoken to in that way, by some random perv on the internet," Kevin paused, burying his face in his palms. He broke down again, sobbing uncontrollably. "Someone like Nikki did not deserve that, sir," a snuffle almost swallowed his words as he said, "Nobody deserves that."

"But I did get a chance to confess to her, about both, my catfish profile and my feelings for her," Kevin gathered himself again. "College was ending, and I could not stand the thought of losing her. So, I told her just about a month and a half ago. We were just having one of our movie nights, where Nikki and I met on the pretext of watching a movie and spoke our hearts out to each other. It had started as an emergency thing last year. We would ask each other for a movie night when we had something we wanted to share with just each other. By the end, it had become a thing. We did it just to stay up all night and talk to each other. We shared everything with each other: the things that made us miserable, things that made us weird and hard to understand: even hard to love. There was no special reason why we never told anyone else either. It was just an unsaid rule that this was sacred and neither of us wanted to be around anyone else. Then, that night last to last month, when I confessed my feelings to Nikki, she told me she did feel the same for me but her feelings for me were relatively new. She was honest about her fears, about her lack of trust in her ability to get over Ryan, whom she had loved in the most exhausting way for the last three years and I told her that all my time was hers. That's when had our first kiss. It was magical, and I just wanted time to freeze. One thing led to another and we got intimate that night," Kevin's fondness shone bright through his grief.

"Nikki had no doubt about how she felt for me, but she had some very hard-to-forget things to get over before making any promises to me, and I was okay with that. We decided to be friends for some more time, but I could barely contain the excitement of knowing that the girl I loved the most in this world finally loved me too.

About three weeks later, and a fortnight before the trip, we found out that Nikki was pregnant. Our instant reaction was blind panic, but once I let the day pass, I felt different. I felt... ready to settle down. It was with Nikki. I had known her for long enough to know she was the one. Of course, it was not an easy decision. It would change everything we both had planned for ourselves. It was so far away from the life either of us would have imagined that we wanted. Maybe even our friends would think that we were crazy, for wanting to give up so much else to settle down right after college, but it was fine. It just... felt right," Kevin said the last two words slowly, but certainly. "The decision was still hers to make. Nikki took another two days before she decided on this. I know it's quite early in our lives, but it just felt like the right thing to do. We both had never felt this 'at home' anywhere, with anyone. I wanted Nikki to know love, to live it. It was the only thing I wanted from life anymore. To be Nikki's family. She would be my entire world. And we had another member on the way too. Now, I don't know what I'm living for. There's nothing to look forward to."

This was the most Kevin had spoken so far, and Gaurav's mind was already imploding with questions, but he was not done yet.

"Sir, I never thought that a trip where I was about to let all my best friends in on the best news of my life would end up destroying everything. I still cannot think of anyone in our group who could have done this," Kevin looked like a completely broken person. The blue streaks still gleamed amidst his greasy hair, swept back away from his bloodshot eyes. There was no reason to believe that anything he had said was a lie. He gave Gaurav his second number and was happy to share the chats he had had with Nikki on her IM app, and through the catfish account.

Now, there was just one thing to do. Find the missing guitar string and the person who had stolen it.