White Rabbit(14)

“Not for a few days,” April answers, studying my face with quiet intensity.

I nod. No danger there. I won’t be interfering with a police investigation because, as yet, there is no investigation; I won’t be removing or destroying any evidence; and we’ll ultimately go to the police and report the crime ourselves anyway. More to the point: April will report the crime—and any theoretical damage done by her leaving the crime scene was already done by my dragging her into the shower in order to wake her up, anyway. There’s no way to undo that, but we can still mitigate how guilty it looks by calling the police before they even know there’s been a murder in the first place.

But all that is incidental. The only thing that truly matters is that my mom owes the bank eight thousand dollars, and doesn’t know where to get it. She has a little less than two thousand at hand; I have a little more than two in my savings—which I’ll make her accept, no matter what she says; add April’s two and, even though it won’t hit the target, it’ll still bring us to within a respectable margin. Maybe even close enough to buy a temporary extension on the remainder.

Even if it doesn’t pan out that way, though, it’s worth the gamble. It’s all worth the gamble. Even if I’m ultimately expelled for getting involved in whatever psychotic drama has unfurled at Fox’s cottage, it’s still better than being homeless—and if we get evicted anyway, my transcript will be the least of my concerns.

Squeezing my eyes shut for just a second, I take a deep breath and then nod at April. “Okay. I’ll do it.”





4

Wordlessly, my sister bends down and drags a backpack out from under the bed, where it’s been hidden by the lacy curtain of a dust ruffle. She rummages through a couple of pockets before finding and extracting a fat wad of paper currency—rolled into a rubber-banded cylinder thick enough to choke a zebra—which she then hands over to me. “You can count it if you want, but it’s two grand. All yours, no matter what.”

She probably means it to sound comforting, but I’m starting to feel the dry heaves coming on again. Nobody just carries around two thousand dollars in cash like that. It was either intended for something illicit, or was already used for something illicit, and as I sit there adding the tens to the twenties to the fifties, my misgivings redouble. It didn’t escape my notice that April had to search the backpack to find the money, or that from one of the bag’s zippers there dangled a highly recognizable keychain—a cast-pewter emblem of two intersecting lacrosse sticks. It was Fox’s bag, and Fox’s cash, and the less I knew about it the better off I’d be.

“Okay,” I begin unevenly, cramming exactly two thousand dollars into the driest pocket of my damp cargo shorts, “how many people were at the party?”

“Six,” April answers promptly. The math is easy, but the equation puzzling nonetheless: April + Fox, Peyton + Race, and Arlo + “some other people” = six. Before I can ask who the sixth person is, and why she’s being so deliberately evasive about it, she’s already continuing, “It was supposed to be low-key—just our group, you know? Fox was sick of having parties where half the school showed up and somebody broke something or spilled beer on his mom’s work stuff, so this was only our inner circle.”

“So what happened?” Sebastian asks carefully, having not missed the defensive inflection in April’s voice. Clearly, there had been some sort of trouble even before she supposedly slept through a gruesome murder.

My half sister goes quiet for a moment, just long enough for me to realize that what she plans to tell us will be edited somehow, and then she admits, “There was a fight. Arlo and Fox … got into a fight.”

“About what?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She shrugs, appearing truthful enough. “I was out back, in the hot tub, and we heard the two of them shouting. By the time we made it up to the porch, they were throwing punches and stuff. Then Fox told Arlo to get out, and he left.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats guiltily. “Maybe, like, a half an hour before … before I blacked out or whatever?”

The ending of the statement is so blatantly hijacked and directed away from its initial destination that it leaves me momentarily at a loss for words, allowing Sebastian to interject, “So, as far as you remember, Arlo was long gone by the time you fell asleep?”

“Maybe. I mean, I guess?” Immediately, April starts retreating back into Little Girl Lost mode, all Bambi eyes and self-deprecating chagrin, and I have to fight the urge to shake her again. “Like, I don’t actually remember hearing his bike leave, but even if he did take off, he could have come back while I was passed out, you know?”

“Look,” I state, partly unhappy and partly relieved, “if Arlo killed him, you might as well take your money back. That dude fucking hates me, and he’s not going to tell me shit. Especially not if he did it.”

Arlo Rossi had just graduated from Ethan Allen that spring, alongside Hayden, and he could quite possibly be Mother Nature’s most egregious act of criminal malpractice. Where Hayden effects the self-consciously preppy look of a sex-murderer from the 1980s, Arlo is equally committed to inhabiting the role of the stereotypical local badass; he has a motorcycle, an ugly haircut, and a tattoo on his neck that looks like a leopard barfing flames. He and Hayden had never exactly been friends, but they were both popular and feared—and their own personal Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing the school and its student body into spheres of influence, had designated me a zone of mutual hostility. Accidentally-on-purpose slamming me into walls for fun was one of the few things they enjoyed doing together.