“It would be kind of a shitty trap. I mean, she knows you don’t have a car, so how could she be sure you’d—”
He stops short as he finally catches up to the rest of my insinuation, and his voice takes on a thorny quality that is immeasurably more pleasing than his attempts at friendliness. “You think maybe I’m in on it.” I respond to the charge with silence, and he states gruffly, “I wouldn’t do something like that, Rufe. Not to you. You know I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’d do,” I shoot back, and six weeks of hurt and doubt and raw anger break the surface like an underwater explosion, venom scorching my throat and pricking my eyelids. Embarrassed, I turn my face to the window.
We leave the causeway and head inland on Route 2, rolling past the apple orchards and farmhouses of South Hero Island, the crack-boom of fireworks still intermittently punctuating the night. Presently, Sebastian turns off the main road and onto a narrow lane, heading toward the western shore through a corridor of lushly overgrown trees. The darkness is total, isolating, and the island suddenly feels terribly remote. My hands drift to my seat belt, worrying the fabric with rhythmic motions as the road turns from pavement to hard-packed dirt beneath the Jeep’s tires. Where the hell are we going?
Eventually, the tree line breaks before us, Sebastian’s headlights stabbing out into the moonlit void of Lake Champlain, and he turns north again to parallel the water. We pass a few cottages—mostly vacation rentals—before we finally reach our destination and the Jeep begins to slow.
On our left, a gravel drive snakes through a copse of aspens and pines, leading to a craftsman-style cabin with peaked gables that form an upper half-story. Massive bushes cluster beneath a wraparound porch, and a detached carport shelters a black Range Rover. A Playboy bunny decal on the imposing vehicle’s tailgate flares under Sebastian’s headlights and, recognizing it, I shift in my seat. The SUV belongs to April’s superdouche boyfriend, Fox Whitney.
Fox is seventeen, a senior-to-be at Ethan Allen, and an absolute prolapsed rectum of a human being. He’s also the youngest of three boys, sons of a corporate attorney and a dermatologist, and is therefore nearly as spoiled as my sister. I blink in confusion at his car, even more ill at ease than before we pulled up; if Fox is here, why does April need me? And, come to that, why me and not the brother she’s allowed to associate with—or one of her many popular friends?
“This is it,” Sebastian says a little uncertainly as he shoves open the door of the Jeep and jumps out. I follow suit, a welcome wagon of mosquitoes instantly gathering around me, and I almost regret my choice to wear a tank top to Lucy’s party. I say “almost” for two simple reasons: 1) my arms and legs are already stuccoed with bites, so what can a few more hurt? and 2) I’ve been working out a lot over the past six weeks, determined to be hot as fuck the next time I crossed paths with Sebastian, and my arms actually look pretty good.
My ex-boyfriend leads the way to a set of wooden steps that ascend to the porch, and I try to ignore how good his arms look—how the muscles in his calves flex before my eyes, how the scent of his dumb cologne still makes me dizzy in a treacherous way after all this time—and concentrate on what I might be walking into. Lights burn in the cottage, every window ablaze, and I can hear music pumping from inside.
Sebastian knocks at the front door and peers through the beveled glass insets, and I feel like telling him not to waste his time; I’ve been calling and texting April repeatedly on the trip over and haven’t gotten any response. If she’s in there, she’s not going to answer. Reaching past him, I try the knob, and the door swings open.
“April?” I call out apprehensively. A pinewood foyer extends into a family room decorated in a style an obscenely wealthy person might call “rustic”—the kind of down-home, country charm that requires raw silk slipcovers and objets d’art imported from Provence—but it hasn’t been treated well; the furniture is out of alignment, red Solo cups and abandoned bottles are everywhere, and fragments of broken glass and ceramic litter the floor like bloodthirsty confetti. My sister is nowhere in sight.
Cautiously, I step over the threshold, my concern mounting. Still, I’m hyperaware of Sebastian’s presence immediately behind me, and I wonder—not for the first time—how he intends to explain what he’s doing here. There’s still a chance this is a ruse, that he’s tricked me into another ambush to prove something to his asshole friends—who, for all I know, have somehow sussed out the truth of our relationship. Maybe he’s about to pass some kind of ruthless social test at my expense. “April, it’s Rufus. Are you here?”
A highly polished staircase rises on my right, climbing to what I suspect is a loft-style bedroom or study, and I cock an ear toward the upper story. The soft noise I then hear, however—a cross between a sigh and a whisper—comes not from above, but from somewhere else on the ground floor.
As I move forward out of the foyer, a dining nook appears to the left off the family room—and then, just to its left, the kitchen. This is where I find April at last, when I round the corner, clearing the central island so I can look down at the floor.
My sister is slumped against the cupboards beneath the sink, her head bowed forward, her skin as white as candle wax against her purple bikini; and Fox lies sprawled across the tiles beside her, half-curled into the fetal position, his face nightmarishly slack.
Both of them are drenched in blood, and the fingers of April’s right hand are loosely wrapped around the hilt of a massive butcher knife.
2
“April!” I grip her by the shoulders, her flesh frighteningly cold and sticky to the touch, and drag her forward, straightening her up. The knife slips from her right hand as my knee jostles a discarded cell phone resting by her left, and her head lolls and swings on her neck, heavy as a sandbag. Frantically, I give her a hard shake. “April!”
“Holy fuck, dude.” Sebastian’s eyes are huge with panic as he prowls Fox’s body, searching for a pulse. “Holy fuck, Rufus, I think he’s dead!”
Willing myself not to lose it, I press my fingers against April’s carotid, holding my breath. When I feel the faint and erratic undulation of blood moving beneath her pallid skin, I emit a primitive noise of relief and squeeze my eyes shut tight. “She’s alive.”
“What the fuck happened here, man?” Sebastian asks me, deathly serious. His face is stricken as he backs away from Fox’s corpse, the Whitneys’ favorite son stretched across the slate floor tiles, his T-shirt so saturated with blood that its true color is impossible to determine. “What the fuck happened?”
He jolts to his feet and stumbles a little, eyes still getting wider. His anxiety is so sincere that, I finally realize, if this is some twisted prank, he is certainly not in on it. I search my sister’s body, looking for wounds or some other sign that she’s been hurt, but I can’t find anything. The blood doesn’t seem to be hers.
“April, wake up,” I command sharply, sweeping her auburn hair out of her face and tilting her chin to the light. She mumbles something unintelligible, and I pry one of her eyes open. Her pupil is a tiny dot in a pool of aquamarine, her gaze glassy and unfocused as it drifts up into her skull. “She’s on something.”
“Shit, man!” Sebastian paces agitatedly, but he can’t stop staring down at Fox’s body. “We have to call someone.”
“Not yet,” I tell him firmly, giving April another hard shake. With a guilty feeling, I swat her lightly across the face. She gives a sharp snort and her eyelids lift unevenly. “April! April, can you hear me?”
“… Rufus?” Her voice is a breathy whisper.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Fat tears roll down her cheeks as I watch, and then, to my complete surprise, she tosses her arms around me in a flaccid, desperate embrace. Her forehead thuds against my shoulder, and she begins weakly to sob. I let it go on for just a moment before I straighten her back up again, flustered. “April, what happened?”
“I-I don’t…” She starts to look toward Fox’s body, but I
take hold of her chin again and force her to face me. I can’t afford to lose her concentration now.
“Focus on me, April. Tell me what happened.”
She licks her lips, her eyes clouding for a moment before she seems to will them clear again, but her voice is a faded, broken whisper as she moans, “I don’t remember. I don’t … there was … all that blood…”
With Sebastian’s help, I haul her to her feet, and the two of us start walking her through the dining room and living room, hip-hop music blasting from speakers I can’t see. She’s like a newborn colt, her legs rubbery and untrustworthy, and her chin keeps dropping to her chest. I ask her what she’s taken, but her answers are unintelligible, and I feel the quick heat of impatience snapping under my skin. I try to quell it, recalling my therapist’s advice: Take a deep breath and step back. Over April’s head, I ask Sebastian, “Do they have a shower? Maybe it’ll wake her up.”
“There’s a bedroom through there,” he answers after a beat, his face alarmingly gray, and gestures to a door set in a small vestibule beside the stone-fronted fireplace. “It’s got a bathroom. I don’t think there’s a tub, but—”
“Let’s get her in there.”
The Whitneys’ master suite is cozy in size and luxurious in appointment—Egyptian cotton sheets, a hand-carved headboard, priceless antique armoires—but an open doorway leads to a surprisingly spare bathroom with a shower stall.
I shove April into Sebastian’s arms while I kick my shoes aside, strip off my tank top, and crank the cold water to full blast. Then I pull my blood-soaked, half-dead half sister under the hard spray with me, holding her upright while she squirms and mumbles, pink water sluicing off her and swirling ominously down the drain. Her bare skin becomes slippery as the drying blood loosens up, and I have to hold her tighter. Eventually, her struggling grows more forceful, her protests more lucid, and I slap the water off at last.
With most of the blood washed away, it’s even more apparent that she’s physically unharmed, her slight, pale frame streaky and textured with goose bumps but otherwise pristine. I sit her down on the lid of the toilet, and she stares at the white tiles of the floor, shivering and blank. Breathing hard from the exertion of holding her up, I ask, “Are you feeling better?”
A long second passes where she just gazes up at me, and then she gives a faint nod. “Yeah.”
“Where are your clothes?”
She raises her arm like it weighs two hundred pounds, and points vaguely into the master bedroom. “In there. Is … is Fox—”
“Get yourself cleaned up, put your clothes back on, and then I’m gonna need you to tell us what happened tonight, okay?” I try to deliver it like a statement, mimicking the way my mom “asks” me to do chores—I need you to mow the lawn, okay?—but my voice is shaking. I clamp down hard against the fear. I cannot lose control. Take a step back. “Can you do that for me?”
April nods again, and mumbles, “Yes.”
As I herd Sebastian back into the chaos of the living room, shutting the bedroom door behind us, I hear the shower turn on again. My ex-boyfriend gives me an incredulous look, his soft, kissable lips scrunching up like a cat’s anus. “You’re letting her take a freaking shower, man? She’s covered in evidence!”
“This whole place is covered in evidence,” I fire back, waving my hand around the connected rooms. We’ve tracked Fox’s blood across the pinewood floors, and streaks of it cling to Sebastian’s clothes, arms, and face. I’m standing there, trying to compartmentalize, fighting to think, when I notice his eyes bob up and down the length of my torso and I finally remember that I’m still shirtless. Even in the midst of all the shock and disorder, I feel a wave of wildly inappropriate satisfaction as my ex-boyfriend gets a look at how toned my chest and abs have become in the weeks since he dumped me.
I had this whole plan to turn into a crazy-hot sex god over the summer, to build muscle like an underwear model and then have Lucy take some “candid” photos of me that I could post on Facebook and Instagram and anywhere else Sebastian might see them and realize how awesome I was doing without him—so he could see the newer, hotter Rufus Holt and eat his heart out. My biology proved unequal to the fantasy, however; my upper body hardened a bit, but after putting on exactly two extra pounds of muscle, my narrow-shouldered physique seems to have just plain given up. No matter what I try, I appear to be stuck permanently on lanky. Still, I look way abs-ier than I did the last time Sebastian saw me without a shirt on, and I guess that’s all that matters.
“We have to call the police,” he insists next.
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“What the fuck do you mean, not yet?” Sebastian demands, his voice climbing into the realm of hysteria. “Why not? Fox is fucking dead, Rufus!”
“Not until we hear what April has to say! We need to know…” We need to know what we’ve walked into. “We need to know what happened first.”
Something’s not right. On the surface, it sure as hell looks like April killed her boyfriend with a big old knife … but why? And why did she call me for help? At the risk of sounding selfish, this is the real reason I don’t want to involve the police just yet. Instead of her doting parents or her close friends or even our take-charge asshole of a brother, she’s involved me in this thing, and I want to know exactly where I stand before I start getting all reporty with the cops. My recent history with the law is dodgy, anyway, and I can’t exactly afford any misunderstandings.
“Just wait until she’s told us, okay? Just wait.” I try to sound authoritative again as I turn and start for the front door, my brain speeding while I struggle to close off any avenue of thought that doesn’t lead directly forward.
“Where are you going?” Sebastian asks, indignant.
“I just want to have a look around outside. I think— Let’s just know as much about what’s going on here as we can, okay? Before we call anybody?”
Sebastian is silent for a moment, his lips still pursed tightly. He looks more than a little freaked, but he gives me a short nod. “Okay. Okay.”
The second the door closes behind me, I sprint to the porch rail, barely covering the three steps before I start to heave. Nothing comes up but an unearthly retching sound, my stomach convulsing, drool running over my bottom lip as I struggle to breathe and fight my nausea into submission. The air outside is still heavy and warm, but it’s not until I start sucking in great mouthfuls of it that I realize how good it smells. For all its rarified trappings, the lake house reeks inside with the metallic stench of blood.
I will my stomach to settle, my head to clear. When I’m finally breathing evenly again, I step back and begin a methodical circuit of the house, eyes sweeping left to right as I look for something I can’t even begin to anticipate. Nothing special catches my eye, though—just more Solo cups and cigarette butts—and I soon reach the end point of the porch. A set of steps descends to the yard on my right, while on my left, a patio door affords me a full, Technicolor view of the kitchen and Fox’s body—still swimming in a lap pool of his own congealing blood.
With a shudder I quickly reverse course, tugging my phone out of my shorts. It’s damp from the shower but seems to have avoided the worst of the spray, and it still works. I’m definitely not ready to talk to the cops, but I haven’t totally lost my mind, either; I know an adult needs to be involved in this slasher-movie nightmare. But it has to be one that I trust.
My mom answers on the fourth ring, her voice groggy and thick. I can picture her lying on top of her bed, a paperback splayed across her chest, fumbling for her glasses on the nightstand. “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?”
“H-hey, Mom, I—” My voice chokes off, the reality of what I have to say slamming into me like a crosstown bus. April might have murdered her boyfriend.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” She’s immediately alert, her hair-trigger panic tripped by my hesitation. “Did you and Lucy have a fight? Do you need a ride?”
“No, it’s nothing like
that,” I assure her in a quiet hurry, feeling my way through my own words. “It’s … actually, it’s, um … April?”
“That girl.” Mom’s tone becomes as hard and sharp as a broken tooth. “What did she do this time? Did she crash your party tonight? Listen, if she said … if she said something about my calling Peter—”
“No, Mom, it wasn’t—” I stop short, her words hitting their target. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘calling Peter?’ Did you talk to him?” She stays silent, and I feel the back of my neck prickle. “Mom?”
“I might have phoned your sperm donor today,” she admits at last in an aggrieved huff. “It was a moment of weakness, and I’m not proud of it.”
“Why?” I ask, surprised to find that it’s actually still possible for my night to get worse. With one possible exception—me—nothing good has ever resulted from any kind of contact between Peter Covington and Genevieve Holt.
Sixteen years ago, my mother was a bright-eyed, twenty-five-year-old interior designer and art consultant, new to the city of Burlington, Vermont, and the proud owner of a small firm bearing her name. She’d done three years of art school, dropping out when an internship with a major decorator in New York turned into a full-time job she couldn’t refuse, and then eventually followed her heart to New England. Thanks to a modest inheritance from my grandparents—a, by all accounts, quirky and lovable couple who ran a country store in a small Maine village, taught their kids to pursue their dreams, and unfortunately died before I could ever meet them—she was able to rent an office, hang out her shingle, and take on private clients.
It wasn’t always easy. Work came in when the economy was up, and vanished when it went down, leaving her scrambling to cover the bills; and so, when a law firm by the name of Pembroke, Landau, and Wells offered her a massive chunk of cash to help them choose a few impressively priceless works of art for their offices, she was overjoyed to accept. When she met their junior partner, a Harvard legacy by the name of Peter Covington II, she was quickly swept off her feet. He was tall and handsome, with blond hair and gray eyes, and he was utterly charmed by the bohemian and unpredictable free spirit that was the young Genevieve. They were a total mismatch, his white-collar starchiness at complete odds with her offbeat joie de vivre, but—in my mom’s mind, at least—the sparks their differences generated were what fueled their romance.
White Rabbit Page 2