White Rabbit(87)

He isn’t there. The window is open, and the car is empty. But something catches my eye anyway: the dull gleam of a metallic object resting on the passenger seat, caught in a square of pale light cast down by the burgeoning dawn. When my brain computes what I’m seeing, I freeze in my tracks again. There are a million possible explanations. It could mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. And yet …

“Come on, Rufus!” Sebastian halts when he realizes I’m not behind him anymore, glancing back with exasperation and concern. I barely hear him. Moving to the Camaro, as if in a trance, I grab for the door handle and give it a try. It’s unlocked. The interior lights pop on, and I hear Sebastian stifle an incredulous yelp at the same time that my suspicions are confirmed. “Rufus, what are you doing?”

He makes it back to my side just as I find the trunk release and activate it, the lid popping open with a muted clunk. He practically bounces from foot to foot, his eyes darting frantically around the empty parking lot, on the lookout for a killer, but he follows me anyway as I step to the back end of the car and look down. My stomach drops, but it’s my boyfriend who gulps a shocked breath of air, taking in what we’ve discovered, and blurts, “What. The. Fuck?”





27

Curled up in the trunk, dressed in battered tennis shoes, track pants, and an oversize lacrosse hoodie—his hands and feet bound—is Race Atwood. And he isn’t moving.

“I don’t…” Sebastian stares, his face blank and uncomprehending. “I don’t understand. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yes it does,” I say numbly, squeezing my eyes shut, the image already burned into my mind. Race’s skin is pallid, his eyes closed, his mouth sealed with tape—at a glance, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s alive or dead. His hands are bent awkwardly beneath his chin, and the red stain on one finger is dark and ghoulish under the sulfurous lights of the trunk. “It does make sense. Go look at what’s sitting on the passenger seat.”

Sebastian circles back to the driver’s side door, still hanging open, and peers into the vehicle. “It’s a can of spray paint. So wh—”

The minute the words are out in the open, he makes the connection. His eyes meet mine, his lips parting in surprise, and I turn my gaze back down to Race. To the finger dyed the same vivid scarlet hue as the words emblazoned across Fox Whitney’s front door: LIAR. COCKSUCKER. DRUG DEALER. RAPIST.

When we were talking to Race and Peyton earlier in the night, I’d been thinking about blood, looking for blood—and I’d seen it in that split-second glimpse of the guy’s fingertip. As if Fox’s murderer could have washed away every trace of the crime except for that single one. But spray paint won’t come off with just soap and water, and if Race had hooked his finger too far over the nozzle of the canister when he was using it—

“This still doesn’t make any sense,” Sebastian insists flatly, his expression stricken. “Peyton burned down the Whitneys’ house—she told us! I mean, her story … she couldn’t have made that up.”

“She didn’t. The story was true.” I can picture her face again perfectly, her frightened expression, her trembling chin. “It just wasn’t her story. It was his. Race is the one who went to Fox’s house; Race is the one who accidentally set it on fire. Peyton is … Peyton—”

“No.” Sebastian shakes his head, unwilling to believe we were so duped.

“She played us. She didn’t know what Lia knew, and she needed to find out if Arlo had said anything about her. She knew that if he had, Lia would ignore her calls, so she texted from Race’s phone instead. Because of that, and because…” I shoot him an uneasy look. “Because if Lia had to die, the phone records would implicate Race.”

“No way. No way, Rufe, that’s nuts. You saw her when she was telling us what happened tonight—she was losing her shit! Peyton’s not that good of an actress!”

I’m just about to speak when a voice interrupts from somewhere behind me, and my heart all but lunges out of my chest and runs away down the street like a spooked horse. “Peyton is better at a lot of things than people give her credit for.”

I pivot, and there she is: standing on the other side of the Camaro, having emerged from the heavy fog as silently as a cat, her green eyes hard and glittering. She appeared so quietly, it occurs to me that she could easily have been shadowing us this whole time, matching us stride for stride as we stampeded through the park in our flight from the picnic shelter.

“I’m a fucking great actress. You should’ve seen the performance I gave Arlo tonight.”

“Peyton,” I begin, intending to say something brilliant and persuasive; but my brain rusts to a complete halt as I stare at the frightening emptiness in her expression.

“This can’t be real—it doesn’t make sense.” Sebastian still refuses to believe, his eyes traveling from Race’s prone body to Peyton’s cold, serious face. I can tell by the way her right arm moves that she’s holding something, but her hand is hidden from view behind the Camaro. I imagine a giant butcher knife, and the four-thousand-pound car between us suddenly seems ridiculously insubstantial. Sebastian is scowling, frustration and fear catalyzing his anger. “Race didn’t have anything to do with it at all, did he? You killed Fox and then torched his house, and … and then—”