White Rabbit(35)

“We need to give our statements,” I declare loudly. I sound like a coward, inventing excuses to duck out of a fight, but it is a known fact that the dignity you preserve by standing up to Hayden is never worth the price.

“Yeah, Bash.” My brother stares dead into Sebastian’s eyes, coiled and unblinking. “You better go and give your ssstatement.”

Like someone wrenching his tongue from a frozen lamppost, Sebastian steps haltingly back from Hayden, tacitly conceding defeat in their macho standoff.

“Hope he’s making it worth your while, Williams,” my brother calls out in a tone that sounds an awful lot like a threat as we walk to the doors of the station house. “And don’t think this conversation is over.”

Even after the glass doors have shut behind us, I can still feel Hayden behind me, like a tsunami about to hit the shore.





11

For lots of reasons, I don’t want to just march right up to the desk officer in the lobby and announce myself there to talk about a murder—among them being that I have no desire to be listed in the dispatch as the person who reported Fox’s death. It will invite too much scrutiny. I’m about to lie to the cops, and don’t need them to be thinking about me every time they open the case file. Another reason is that I was dead serious when I told April it would be best if she does it—if she comes forward before she can be found out. Offense as defense.

Only, April’s conference with Peter and their lawyer takes much longer than I expected, and so Sebastian and I just sit and wait in a clumsy silence, minutes piling up while we struggle to get comfortable on hard-backed chairs that might have been stolen out of a seventeenth-century dungeon. A television screen mounted behind the front desk is playing the local news at a low volume, the officer on duty dividing his attention between it and us. I do my best to appear guiltless and upstanding every time he looks our way, but my constant checking of the time and anxious glances out into the parking lot probably don’t serve me very well.

Sebastian hasn’t spoken a word since we walked away from Hayden, keeping his eyes focused moodily on his feet. The aborted confrontation has left a considerable footprint on his mental state, and I can’t figure out how to brush over it—or if brushing over it is even the right way to handle things. I’m the only one of my guy friends who’s even been in an actual fight before, and no one has ever tried to talk me through the aftermath. Everything I can think of to say sounds condescending and stupid in my mind, and Sebastian seems determined to remain mute, so I follow his lead and try not to feel bad about my silence.

But then my ex-boyfriend surprises me, his eyes snapping up to mine, suddenly alert. His voice electric, he hisses quietly, “He was there tonight.”

“Huh?” I blink at him, confused by his seemingly abrupt change in mood.

“Hayden,” he says urgently, and I chance a look back over my shoulder. I can no longer see my brother outside, but I feel him lurking nevertheless, a sinister disturbance in the Force. “He was there tonight—at the lake house.”

“I know.” I give Sebastian a quizzical look. “Race already told us that.”

“No! I mean—” My ex-boyfriend drops his volume even lower, wary of the desk officer. “I mean later. Rufus, I think he went back.”

This gets my attention. “What? You mean … you think he might’ve killed Fox?”

“Maybe, why not?” His knee starts bouncing. “He’s not exactly shedding tears over the guy’s death, and those questions he was asking … they were a little too on point, right? ‘Are you blackmailing her?’ ‘Did you tell her to wipe off the knife?’” He scratches a bug bite on his arm compulsively. “At first I figured they were just freaky-accurate guesses, but, like, why ask about those things—those exact things—unless he knows something?”

“But how? We didn’t tell anybody, April sure as heck didn’t tell anybody, and there was no one but the three of—” and I stop dead midsentence, my eyes going so wide it feels like they might fall right out of my face. “Upstairs. Sebastian … holy shit. We never checked the upstairs bedroom at the lake house.”

We stare at each other for several seconds, frozen in place, asking ourselves the same question: Is it possible that Fox’s murderer was actually in the cottage with us the whole time? Like an out-of-body experience, I can suddenly see myself standing in the foyer again, tilting an ear up at that narrow, twisting stairway and listening for April. Had Hayden been up there instead, hiding, listening to our initial panic, our subsequent arguing, our ultimate agreement? We hadn’t seen his car, but if he’d come back to the island intending to commit a murder, he might easily have parked it somewhere up the road, out of sight.

And then the moment passes, and I start breathing again, surprised to find my temples are damp with sweat. “No. There’s no way the killer was still in there with us,” I reason faintly, my lips feeling stubborn and cold. “It doesn’t make sense. Fox was already dead when April called me, and it took us thirty minutes to get out there. If Hayden killed him, why would he still have been hanging around? Especially a half hour after hearing April call for help?”

“I don’t know.” Sebastian searches my gaze, as if he might find the answer there, and I realize—suddenly, inappropriately— that it’s the longest eye contact we’ve sustained since he dumped me. “Maybe they really were just wild guesses. Wiping away fingerprints is pretty basic, and Hayden … he talks a lot of shit about you and your mom because you don’t have as much money as they do. Money’s a really big deal to him, and he thinks it’s the same for everybody. Maybe he just accused you of trying to get cash from April because if he’d been in your position, it’s what he’d have done. Maybe you’re right.”