I fight the urge to roll my eyes. The gene carrying Peter Covington’s notoriously short fuse must be a particularly dominant one. “What about Fox?”
“I would’ve gone after him, too, but Lia stopped me. And then he and Race were getting into it, and then … I don’t know.” She looks up again, and her expression is utterly guileless. “Honestly, Rufus, I don’t know what happened after that. That’s where it all just goes blank. Until I woke up and called you, I mean.”
“How did you find out about Fox and Peyton?” I ask. “Did he tell you?”
“No, Lia did. She … well, she found out about it from Arlo.”
This raises questions I know April won’t be able to answer, so I move on to one she can. “Why didn’t you tell me that Hayden was also at the party tonight?”
“Because he wasn’t.” She looks at me like I’m nuts.
“Race said he came by, and that Fox was kissing his ass.”
“Oh, that. He was just buying some pills. He had his own party, as usual.”
“White rabbits?”
“I guess.” She shifts uneasily, just like Race did, and I know the reason. Hayden doesn’t tolerate people talking about him, and if he finds out we’ve been discussing his fondness for controlled substances, he’ll put all of us in intensive care. “I stayed out of Fox’s business, and I stay way out of Hayden’s business. You know what he’s like. Anyway, he was only there for a few minutes, and then he took off. He didn’t even say hi.”
But he was there, I note in my mind. My personal knowledge and healthy fear of Hayden Covington run too deep for me to dismiss his presence at the lake house as unimportant or coincidental. Guys like Race and Fox, perpetually drunk on their own mean-spirited testosterone, love to push around anyone they’re sure they can take; a guy like Arlo, better with his fists than his words, will eventually stop whaling on you when he’s finally sure his point is made. But Hayden is different from all of them.
The day I started kindergarten, I still didn’t know enough to be automatically suspicious of anyone named Covington, so when Hayden—in the second grade, and already shining with the irresistible light of popularity—sought me out at recess, telling me how cool it was to finally get to know me, I felt warmed and exalted by the attention. On the pretense of wanting to show me “something awesome,” Hayden then led me behind a screen of bushes, punched me in the face as hard as he could, told me our father wished I was dead, and then walked serenely away. It was my first bloody nose, and the last time I ever trusted my older brother.
Peter and Isabel have made an art out of ignoring or excusing Hayden’s violence, and April, a convenient target for his lazy cruelty, has told me she avoids him as much as possible. He hurts people because he enjoys it, and if he’s also in the habit of using drugs that are known to cause violent outbursts …
I stop there, knowing I’m getting way ahead of myself. I’ve already got more suspects than I know what to do with, and not nearly enough information to keep them sorted. The blood on Race’s finger had seemed significant in the moment, but I’m no longer so sure; while he has a motive for wanting to put his alleged best friend in the morgue, that doesn’t mean his hands are stained from stabbing the guy. April said the two boys scuffled after she took her own swing at Peyton, and considering that Fox had already taken a beating from Arlo, it makes sense that Race would have some blood on him.
And then there’s Peyton; but if she has a motive for wanting Fox dead, I can’t quite see it yet; however, if she felt sufficiently guilty for cheating on her boyfriend, she might have been willing to help him frame April—and to vouch for his cover story later.
“The problem is,” I finally say out loud with a dispirited grunt, “that as far as I can tell, both Race and Peyton are in the clear. Lia said they left the party first, and they gave us the same story independently—so unless she texted them, too, and told them what to say to us—”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Sebastian interrupts sullenly.
“She did it for Arlo.” I swivel to face him, aggravated by the reflexive defense of his ex-girlfriend. “We don’t really know what went on up at that party—aside from, you know, drugs and murder; Lia could have a million reasons for making up bullshit and then warning her friends to stick to an established version of events!”
“I’m telling you, I know her. She couldn’t kill anybody, and if she knew Race or Peyton had done something to Fox, she wouldn’t be helping them with a fake alibi.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but your girlfriend—excuse me, ex-girlfriend—seems to have a problem with the truth!” I shoot back, my heart beating in my face. “She broke up two fistfights tonight, but she only told us about one of them. Why?”
“I kinda wondered about that, too,” April admits softly. “I was sure she’d tell you guys about me clocking Peyton. Actually, I’m surprised she didn’t.”
“Exactly,” I say, with more than a little satisfaction. “She was so worried about us persecuting poor little gun-wielding Arlo that she called ahead and told him we were on our way over, but when she made the conscious decision to edit one of tonight’s free-for-alls out of her story, it was the one that involved April, Peyton, and Fox—the one that actually ended the party—not the one between Fox and his business partner. She handed us a clear motive for Arlo but glossed over the rest of it.”
Grudgingly, Sebastian allows, “It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I agree, suddenly tired. If Arlo really had gone back into the house and murdered Fox, and Lia knew about it and wanted to protect him, why didn’t she try harder to draw our attention away from him? Why didn’t she make it a point to implicate someone else?
I shuffle Arlo’s piece to the center of my mental game board again and frown at it. He’s mean, he’s violent, and he picked a fight with Fox not long before his grisly demise … What do I really have that testifies against him as the killer? My sort of vague impression that he was scared of something when we made our unannounced visit to his house? He’s a freaking drug dealer, for Pete’s sake—there are any number of people he might have good reason to be afraid of, and who might drop by with less-than-friendly intentions in the middle of the night.
“Fuck, maybe they all did it,” I finally exclaim in a frustrated huff. “Maybe the fight kept going after April blacked out, Fox ended up dead, and they all just panicked and decided to pin it on the most convenient scapegoat.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” April hazards, sounding entirely unsure.
“How well do you really know those guys?” I counter. “How long have you been hanging out with them? Two months? You’re the new kid, and I guarantee you they don’t care about you half as much as they care about themselves.”
“He’s got a point, April.” Sebastian’s glumly supportive interjection takes me by surprise, considering that I’m in the midst of shit-talking his friends. “I mean, I’ve got a longer history with this crew than you do, and I’m still an outsider to them. Plus…” his eyes flit nervously to my sister and then to me. “You know, don’t take this the wrong way or anything? But Fox has had a lot of girlfriends. Being with him doesn’t buy you any loyalty.”
The problem with the Everybody Did It theory, though, is that the lot of them seem to be doing a piss-poor job of presenting a unified front to bolster the April Did It narrative. If they’re all covering up a murder they each had a hand in, and they intend to pin it on my sister, then their stories should be identical; each one should feature some variation of “April was high off her ass, waving a knife around, and threatening to stab her boyfriend a bunch of times.” Instead, I’ve been getting nothing but feeble alibis and vaguely contradictory accounts. As far as conspiring goes, they seem really shitty at it.
I let out a troubled sigh, aware that both April and Sebastian are watching me, waiting to see what I’m going to do next. But my head is starting to hurt. Fox is still dead, and only getting colder; nothing I’ve done has
turned up the answers my sister wanted; and the killer is still at large—a killer we may have spoken to tonight. We can’t keep this up. My sister is counting on me, but I can’t take the ghostly touch of Fox’s fingers on the back of my neck any longer. The fact is, I know what our next move has to be, and suggesting it isn’t going to make me very popular. Not looking at either of them, I announce, “We have to go to the police.”
“No!” April stares at me, stricken. “We haven’t figured anything out yet. If we go to them now, they’ll think I did it!”
“April, if we don’t go to them soon, they’re going to think you did it anyway, and that you hired the two of us to help you cover it up. Even if I think your friends are all hiding something, we can’t prove—”
“But I’m innocent!” she shrieks. “You can’t just hand me over to the police when I didn’t do anything! They’ll put me in jail, Rufus!”
“Nobody is handing you over!” I yell, but my sister’s panic mounts like a thunderhead right before my eyes, and I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to soften this blow. I doubt I’d be much calmer if our roles were reversed, and I don’t feel very good about myself for what I’m volunteering her to do. April might be guilty of a lot of things, but I don’t believe she killed Fox, and I don’t think she deserves to go through this nightmare—but I can’t see any choice other than what I’m proposing. “The whole point is to make you look innocent, here. If you report the murder before they find out about it, they might actually be willing believe your story,” I assert, hoping it’s the truth. That’s how it works on Scandal, anyway, although I’m not sure I’m going to admit that that’s where I’m cribbing my plays from. “The longer you wait, the more they’re going to think you’re hiding shit.”
“You were supposed to help me!” she screeches, thrusting an accusatory finger at me from the backseat. “I fucking paid you to help me! You took two thousand dollars from me and now you’re just going to throw me under the bus? I should have known I couldn’t actually trust you! You’re a liar and a freak and all you’ve ever wanted to do is ruin my family. You and your greedy fucking mom—”
“Stop right there,” I interrupt, fury instantly forking my tongue. “April, if you say one more word about my mom, I swear I will go straight to the police and tell them you did it—that you confessed and tried to bribe me to lie!” Sparkling white pinpoints dance before my eyes. “You called me for help tonight because you didn’t have anybody else to turn to, because your friends are all garbage people and your family’s even worse. They’re the ones ruining you, and you can’t even see it!” My ears are ringing and my throat burns. “You paid me to talk to your lying, back-stabbing, shithead friends, and I held up my end of the deal. Now you hold up yours!”
I swing back around in my seat, blinking and breathing hard, trying to unclench my fists, and April is quiet for a moment. I wish I could believe she feels chastened, but more likely, she’s just recalculating, planning a new attack. Her voice is plaintive when she finally speaks again. “Look, I’m sorry I said that. I-I didn’t mean it, okay? I’m just … I’m really scared, Rufus. There has to be something we haven’t tried yet—”
“There is,” I cut her off, brutally. “We haven’t tried the cops yet. Call Peter—tell him he needs to get a lawyer and meet us at the police station.” Then, because I’m feeling vengeful and particularly cruel, “And tell him it had better be a really good lawyer.”
April bursts into tears.
9
The Burlington Police Department is located in an unassuming brick building next to Battery Park—a pleasant expanse of grass and trees near the lake, where tons of people had probably gathered earlier in the evening to watch fireworks bloom against the stars. At one-fifteen in the morning, however, the only folks still hanging around are probably shooting up in the bushes, either too high or too stupid to realize that they’re all within moaning distance of being arrested. As Sebastian steers the Jeep into the parking lot, all three of us are as tense and silent as a German horror film.
It’s been about thirty-five minutes since April’s sobbing subsided enough for her to make the necessary phone calls. Lacking anywhere better to go, Sebastian drove us to the parking lot of Silverman’s, a twenty-four-hour diner that’s popular with his crowd, and we positioned ourselves in a remote corner while my sister phoned our father and told him she needed an attorney. As soon as she hung up, she dialed my number, and we left the line open for exactly eighty-six seconds before she terminated the call.
That was our own alibi. For all my talk about relying on the police, I’m not about to waltz in and volunteer the information that we’ve helped April abscond from a crime scene and spent the evening chasing after possible suspects—I’m not a fool, and I definitely can’t afford any “misunderstandings” between myself and the authorities. Our story will be that April woke up beside Fox, called Peter, and then called me; pursuant to Race and Peyton’s advice, Sebastian and I were already on our way out to South Hero when she reached me and I learned she was in trouble, and once we picked her up, we drove her straight back to town and the police.
I’ve got no idea if they’ll buy it, of course—if we can somehow talk our way out of all the snags and conflicts that our fuzzy timeline will show, if the cops think too hard about what time we left the Atwoods’ and what time we reached the police station—but it feels way safer than the truth. And I’m desperately hoping that it’s the right choice.
While we waited for Peter to call back, we sat and watched through the broad front windows of Silverman’s as the bleary-eyed late-night crowd shoved burgers and fries into their drunken, happy faces. All the while, resentment gradually consumed my gut like some kind of mold. It struck me that I’m always forgetting how, in spite of her occasional sweetness, April is still a Covington—and the Covingtons, to a one, think my mom and I are trashy, scheming lowlifes.
With the passion of a revivalist preacher, Peter has spent years spreading the gospel of my mother’s moral turpitude, calling her a grasping, conniving tramp—and me the fruit of the poisonous tree—until he has managed to convince himself it’s the truth. All my life I’ve had to deal with his relentless accusations, Hayden’s unrestrained sadism, and the surgical strikes of Isabel’s calculated, long-term vengeance. Only April has ever been willing to extend us the benefit of the doubt, but she is by no means immune to her father’s influence. Sooner or later, his words find their way into her mouth.
I was still cursing myself for letting the Covingtons trap me in their web when Peter finally called back with the news that their lawyer was en route; I was still brooding over it as we made that uncomfortable left turn into the Burlington Police Department parking lot. But by the time I see Peter Covington himself, leaning against his S-Class Mercedes, his fine-boned face drawn into a dishearteningly familiar scowl, I resign myself to the hell I invited into my life by answering April’s summons in the first place.
Before Sebastian even brings the Jeep to a standstill, April flings her door open and starts sprinting across the pavement toward our father, weeping like a hostage who’s just been released from a besieged bank. Sebastian shoots me an uneasy look, eyebrows tented with worry. “Are you … I mean, are you ready for this?”
I’m not exactly sure which “this” he’s talking about—dealing with Peter, or lying to the cops. Either way, my answer is the same. “Not even close. You?”
He doesn’t reply right away, and when he does, he can’t seem to look me in the face. “I didn’t find you by accident tonight, Rufus.”
My eyes widen and my stomach plunges. “Sebastian—”
“There’s stuff I need to say to you.”
“This is really not the time,” I fume, feeling my back against a wall—one that’s covered in spikes and slowly squeezing toward another wall, also covered in spikes. As if what he’s saying is some kind of huge surprise. As if it isn’t completely obvious that he didn’t find me by accident at Lucy’s party.
He also invited himself along on this insane and borderline-criminal adventure, I noticed, without demanding any compensation for his trouble. Clearly there’s something on his mind tonight, and I am terrified that allowing him to bring it up will reopen every last one of the hastily sutured wounds in my heart. Choosing the fire over the frying pan, I shove open my door. “I’ve got one crisis to deal with already. Tell me about it if I’m still alive when this is all over.”
* * *
Four and a half weeks after Sebastian had surprised me at the Front Line meeting with my first ever Actual Kiss, my feet were only just starting to touch the ground again. We’d become expert at finding secret ways to spend time together, stealing kisses in hidden corners and scheduling “study dates” at my house, where we’d microwave pizza rolls and then make out in my room for entire lifetimes. My mom figured out pretty quickly what we were up to, but she also knew that Sebastian was terrified of being “out,” and so she walked the thin line of feigning ignorance while still finding excuses to insist I keep my bedroom door open whenever he came over.
On a brisk day in March, after an especially boring away game the Ethan Allen boys’ soccer team had played in Montpelier—which we’d covered for the Front Line—we delayed our return to Burlington in order to go see a movie in a city where no one knew us. It was a proper date, with popcorn and handholding and no terrified jolting apart whenever we heard a noise, and I loved it. It was situations like those where we could just be ourselves, just be together without having to think about it.
And yet I was thinking about it; I couldn’t think about anything else. The weight of our strange situation built slowly, like a trickle of sand that buried me bit by bit as the hours passed, snuffing out the happiness I’d initially felt. By the time the final credits rolled, I was depressed and off-center, lost in an ugly spiral of insecurity. Back in the lobby, I was feeling worse than ever when Sebastian steered me suddenly away from the exit without warning, pulling me into a photo booth set up alongside some arcade games.
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