White Rabbit(70)
“I just wanted to make sure she listened to me,” I protest. “All the way over here you were saying maybe it was Race; well, maybe it was! She needs to know she can’t afford to trust him right now—not if he killed Arlo for what he knew.”
“If she’s really in danger, then she needs to go to the police! I mean, we should be taking her there right now—”
“To say what?” I give him a frank look. “That we sorta think two kids from a couple of the most prominent families in town just might be on a murderous rampage tonight?” I toss my hands up. “Even if they don’t laugh us right out the door, we’ll have to explain a whole lot of dubious shit we did—like finding Arlo’s body and not reporting it, for instance—and we’ll have to tell them about the video, and the brawl that started after Lia showed it to April, which means letting them know that April was deliberately keeping stuff from them in her official statement.”
“Who cares about that?” Sebastian exclaims. “You just said yourself that Lia ‘could be next’—she needs some kind of protection!”
“It’s not like the cops are gonna give her a new identity and move her to Bali! They’ll just say, ‘Thanks for the wild allegations and the total lack of evidence to back them up,’ and send her home again.” A moth swoops and darts around the streetlight above us, throwing monstrous shadows against the fog. “Don’t forget: When April’s story starts unraveling, our stories unravel, too; and the last time we checked in, Race and Peyton were covering each other’s ass. Lia will sound like a crank, the police will start wondering what else we might be lying about for April, and the only two who will come out of it okay will be the ones with the corroborated alibis and the fancy lawyers.”
“Fuck!” Sebastian smashes his hand against the steering wheel and shifts his jaw. “You’re right.”
Once again, I feel like shit. Everything I’ve said is pretty much true, but the real reason I don’t want Lia sending the police after her friends just yet is because I need to be the one who does it. If I want a chance in hell of getting the four thousand dollars Isabel Covington promised me, I’ve got to follow her directive to the letter, and not give her a loophole to wiggle through. Well, technically, Lia Santos was the one who got April’s name cleared, so I’m afraid …
Giving my phone a quick glance, I see more texts from Lucy, but nothing from my mom, and I breathe out a little sigh of relief. My curfew has long since passed, and if she wakes up and realizes I’m still out, my window of opportunity to resolve this thing is going to slam shut—hard. Fox’s death won’t make the headlines until his family is notified, and because Peter represented himself to the police as my dad, they probably won’t bother contacting my mother; but Peter himself is another matter. To say he was furious when we parted ways would be an understatement, and it’d be standard operating procedure for him to call Mom and chew her a couple new assholes about me entangling myself with April.
Only he clearly hasn’t done that. Yet. Maybe he took my parting threat to heart and wants to strengthen April’s case before he provokes me into being honest with the cops; or maybe Isabel has prevailed upon him to leave my mom and me alone, buying some time so I can have a chance to deliver on the deal we’ve struck. Or maybe his heart grew three sizes when the police let April go tonight—I have no idea and can’t afford to take anything for granted. Now, more than ever, I’m racing the clock.
I can pull it off. I know it. I can protect Lia, I can find some kind of evidence incriminating Race and/or Peyton, and I can give my mom the money we need to pay off the bank and save our house, all at the same time. Some damn how.
“We just need to prove Race and Peyton lied to us,” I say, thinking out loud. “Maybe we can turn them against each other?”
“I don’t understand why they’re backing each other up in the first place,” Sebastian grunts. “They were barely speaking to each other when we saw them.” He looks over at me. “Which of them do you think did it?”
“My gut says Race, but with that video … I mean, it turns out Peyton’s got a solid motive, too.” My skull thumps against the headrest and I let out a weary breath. “Fox secretly recorded them together and then showed it to his friends. If she just found out about it tonight, it could’ve totally pushed her over the edge.”
“That bloodbath at the cottage did sort of scream ‘crime of passion,’” Sebastian agrees, “and there was no one behind Peyton on the road after Lia and Arlo passed her. If she’d turned around, nobody would have seen.”
“But then why would Race be covering for her?” I rub my hands on my knees. “She cheated on him, but he’ll lie for her anyway? Put his own ass on the line to keep her from getting busted for killing the guy she slept with behind his back?”
Sebastian fingers his car keys, metal and plastic clicking together. “So maybe it’s like I suggested on the way over here: Race went back to the house, and Peyton followed. Either she saw him stab Fox and is backing his story out of guilt, or they somehow killed the guy together and formed a pact to protect themselves—mutually assured destruction.”
“Let’s hope it’s the second one,” I state. “The less they trust each other, the easier it’ll be for us to get one of them to tell us what really happened.”