White Rabbit(29)
“He’s got a point, April.” Sebastian’s glumly supportive interjection takes me by surprise, considering that I’m in the midst of shit-talking his friends. “I mean, I’ve got a longer history with this crew than you do, and I’m still an outsider to them. Plus…” his eyes flit nervously to my sister and then to me. “You know, don’t take this the wrong way or anything? But Fox has had a lot of girlfriends. Being with him doesn’t buy you any loyalty.”
The problem with the Everybody Did It theory, though, is that the lot of them seem to be doing a piss-poor job of presenting a unified front to bolster the April Did It narrative. If they’re all covering up a murder they each had a hand in, and they intend to pin it on my sister, then their stories should be identical; each one should feature some variation of “April was high off her ass, waving a knife around, and threatening to stab her boyfriend a bunch of times.” Instead, I’ve been getting nothing but feeble alibis and vaguely contradictory accounts. As far as conspiring goes, they seem really shitty at it.
I let out a troubled sigh, aware that both April and Sebastian are watching me, waiting to see what I’m going to do next. But my head is starting to hurt. Fox is still dead, and only getting colder; nothing I’ve done has turned up the answers my sister wanted; and the killer is still at large—a killer we may have spoken to tonight. We can’t keep this up. My sister is counting on me, but I can’t take the ghostly touch of Fox’s fingers on the back of my neck any longer. The fact is, I know what our next move has to be, and suggesting it isn’t going to make me very popular. Not looking at either of them, I announce, “We have to go to the police.”
“No!” April stares at me, stricken. “We haven’t figured anything out yet. If we go to them now, they’ll think I did it!”
“April, if we don’t go to them soon, they’re going to think you did it anyway, and that you hired the two of us to help you cover it up. Even if I think your friends are all hiding something, we can’t prove—”
“But I’m innocent!” she shrieks. “You can’t just hand me over to the police when I didn’t do anything! They’ll put me in jail, Rufus!”
“Nobody is handing you over!” I yell, but my sister’s panic mounts like a thunderhead right before my eyes, and I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to soften this blow. I doubt I’d be much calmer if our roles were reversed, and I don’t feel very good about myself for what I’m volunteering her to do. April might be guilty of a lot of things, but I don’t believe she killed Fox, and I don’t think she deserves to go through this nightmare—but I can’t see any choice other than what I’m proposing. “The whole point is to make you look innocent, here. If you report the murder before they find out about it, they might actually be willing believe your story,” I assert, hoping it’s the truth. That’s how it works on Scandal, anyway, although I’m not sure I’m going to admit that that’s where I’m cribbing my plays from. “The longer you wait, the more they’re going to think you’re hiding shit.”
“You were supposed to help me!” she screeches, thrusting an accusatory finger at me from the backseat. “I fucking paid you to help me! You took two thousand dollars from me and now you’re just going to throw me under the bus? I should have known I couldn’t actually trust you! You’re a liar and a freak and all you’ve ever wanted to do is ruin my family. You and your greedy fucking mom—”
“Stop right there,” I interrupt, fury instantly forking my tongue. “April, if you say one more word about my mom, I swear I will go straight to the police and tell them you did it—that you confessed and tried to bribe me to lie!” Sparkling white pinpoints dance before my eyes. “You called me for help tonight because you didn’t have anybody else to turn to, because your friends are all garbage people and your family’s even worse. They’re the ones ruining you, and you can’t even see it!” My ears are ringing and my throat burns. “You paid me to talk to your lying, back-stabbing, shithead friends, and I held up my end of the deal. Now you hold up yours!”
I swing back around in my seat, blinking and breathing hard, trying to unclench my fists, and April is quiet for a moment. I wish I could believe she feels chastened, but more likely, she’s just recalculating, planning a new attack. Her voice is plaintive when she finally speaks again. “Look, I’m sorry I said that. I-I didn’t mean it, okay? I’m just … I’m really scared, Rufus. There has to be something we haven’t tried yet—”
“There is,” I cut her off, brutally. “We haven’t tried the cops yet. Call Peter—tell him he needs to get a lawyer and meet us at the police station.” Then, because I’m feeling vengeful and particularly cruel, “And tell him it had better be a really good lawyer.”
April bursts into tears.
9
The Burlington Police Department is located in an unassuming brick building next to Battery Park—a pleasant expanse of grass and trees near the lake, where tons of people had probably gathered earlier in the evening to watch fireworks bloom against the stars. At one-fifteen in the morning, however, the only folks still hanging around are probably shooting up in the bushes, either too high or too stupid to realize that they’re all within moaning distance of being arrested. As Sebastian steers the Jeep into the parking lot, all three of us are as tense and silent as a German horror film.