White Rabbit(81)

For what feels like the millionth time in a few short hours, I deflect a loaded question with an explosive statement. “Fox Whitney is dead.”

The explosion is a dud—again; Peyton merely draws in some air and looks away. “I know. I heard.”

“You heard?” I ratchet my eyebrows up a little, analyzing her tone, and then offer my blunt assessment of it. “You don’t seem very broken up about it.”

“Oh, screw you, Rufus Holt!”

Sebastian puts a hand on my arm, a tacit suggestion that Bad Cop isn’t the right way to approach Peyton Forsyth. He’s probably right, but I can’t imagine approaching her any other way, so I hold my tongue and let him take the lead. “Who’d you hear it from?”

“Does it even matter?” She tosses her hair. “You still haven’t answered my question. What’s it got to do with Lia?”

Sebastian deflects as well. “Arlo’s dead, too.”

Her mouth drops open. “What? How do you—?”

“He was killed a few hours ago. We don’t know if the police have found him yet, but…” Sebastian looks over at me again. “We saw him. It happened at his house.”

Peyton lifts a fist to her mouth and shakes her head, then wrings out her fingers with a fierce twisting motion. Through stiff lips, she insists, “This can’t be happening.”

“Arlo and Lia went back to the lake house after you all left tonight,” I jump in, seeing Peyton’s guard down and wanting to press the advantage. “Arlo had it in his head to finish the fight he’d started with Fox, but they were too late. Lia says whatever he saw in the house freaked him out so badly that he drove them all the way to Burlington again before he was willing to talk about it.”

Peyton squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Arlo saw what happened to Fox.” I spell it out. “And from what he told Lia, it sounds like it gave him the incredibly stupid idea to blackmail Fox’s killer. Long story short, we’re pretty sure that’s why he’s lying on his porch right now with a happy face carved into his neck.”

“Arlo sold drugs,” she points out, like I’m an idiot, but the muscles in her shoulders have gone stiff. “If he’s dead, it’s probably because of that.”

I narrow my eyes, taking in how tense she is. Peyton apparently really doesn’t want to believe that Arlo’s death is connected to what he saw at the lake house, and it seems pretty clear why. “There were six people at that party tonight, and only four of you are still alive; April was with the cops when Arlo got his ticket punched; and now Race wants you and Lia to meet him in the middle of a deserted park, a million miles from anyone who might hear you scream, at five thirty a.m. Any thoughts on that?”

I don’t even make it to the end of this little summary before a shudder crawls ineluctably up my spine. The obscuring closeness of fog lends an impression of intimacy to our little gathering, but we’ve got no idea what lies just past the thick scrim of vapor hanging in the air—or how far our voices are carrying. Where is Race, anyway?

Peyton steals my attention back, shaking her head again, lips clamped into a thin line. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Is that what Lia told you? That Arlo saw Race—?”

She can’t seem to finish the thought, and I save her from having to try. “She’s not sure what Arlo saw. But something tells me you are.”

Her face pales a little. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You and Race lied to us tonight.” I notice a flicker of something in her eyes. Doubt? Fear? “He said you two went straight from the party to his house, and you backed him up; but it was bullshit. We know you guys were fighting, we know you left South Hero separately, and we know you ran into each other at Silverman’s later—actually, not long before we came over to the Atwoods’ place to ask about April. Nobody knew Fox was dead yet, so why were you two already covering for each other, Peyton?”

“We weren’t,” she insists impossibly, her voice faltering.

“Stop lying!” Sebastian is as fed up as I am, his nerves equally strained.

“I’m not! I mean, I thought … I mean—” She breaks off, clapping both hands over her face, and a muffled sob emerges through her fingers. We wait her out again, resisting the heartstring tug of her emotional display, and eventually she pulls herself together. Thickly, she mumbles, “You just … you don’t understand.”

Sebastian shuffles his feet uncomfortably. “So explain.”

She looks up, peering from one of us to the other. “I wasn’t covering for him. Or, at least, at the time, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I thought … I thought he was covering for me. Okay?”

For a moment, it’s so quiet I can hear the water dripping behind me in the sightless depths of the picnic shelter. “What are you trying to tell us, Peyton?”

“You have to … you have to understand what happened between me and Fox, first,” she says beseechingly. “If you know Race and I were fighting, then I guess April probably told you about the video? Well, that whole thing wasn’t just some spur-of-the-moment attack of hormones, okay? Fox and I … it was sort of inevitable.