“Hayden, what the fuck is wrong with you, man? Let him go!” Sebastian actually reaches in and peels my brother’s hand off my arm. I feel the lingering pain of his grip thud with each beat of my heart as my flesh rebounds, but I refuse to acknowledge it, won’t give Hayden the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurts; I just stare bullets over Sebastian’s shoulder when my ex maneuvers himself between us. “Nobody’s getting blackmailed, and nobody’s covering anything up, okay? Fucking chill out! What’s your problem?”
“What’s my problem? What the hell is your problem, Bash?” Hayden redirects, his tone hard enough to drive nails through cement. “What’re you doing hanging out with this freak, anyway, driving him around in the middle of the night? What’s that about?”
“I … we…” My ex-boyfriend retreats, facing down his own personal kryptonite. “We were at the same party, and—and I heard him saying he was worried about April, and it got me worried, too. I was … worried.”
“You were at the same party?” Smelling blood in the water, Hayden twists his mouth into a vicious grin. “How’d that happen? I mean, it sounds like something I should hear about. You guys are hanging out, driving around … now you’re coming to the homo’s rescue? I mean, Bash. Is he sucking your dick or something?”
“Some of us from the school paper were having a thing tonight,” I interject, trying to settle the issue quickly, “and Bash is on the staff. It’s not a fucking scandal that we were both there.” Sebastian surprised me, putting himself at no small personal risk by intervening with Hayden, and I want to return the favor. Too late, though, I realize I’ve made a grave mistake.
“Oh. It was for the ssschool paper.” Hayden mimics my voice, making my notable sibilance sharp enough to slice paper in half. “‘Bash, we’re having a little sssoiree for the ssschool paper! Sssay you’ll be there, oh, pretty pleassse!’”
“Stop it,” Sebastian mutters irritably, but Hayden is only getting warmed up, mirth gilding the edges of his voice.
“‘Bash, I hope you like sssausages and sssticky bunsss, because that’s what we’ll be ssserving at our little sssoiree!’”
“Okay, dude, let it go!”
“Hey, Rufusss,” Hayden continues gleefully, “is it true what they say about black guys? Do they have bigger sssausages?”
“Fuck you, man!” Sebastian finally snaps. With great force, he shoves Hayden, knocking my older brother back a few steps.
The atmosphere in the parking lot changes so quickly my ears pop, and I watch Hayden snap taut as a sail in a high wind. Suddenly, he and Sebastian are toe-to-toe, noses almost touching, muscles bunching under their skin. His voice lethal, my older brother snarls, “You better fucking watch yourself, Williams, and be careful who you mess with. I don’t give a shit who your dad is, or how badass you think you are; I will fucking end you.”
Staring helplessly from the side, I feel like a spectator at a round of Russian roulette. Sebastian doesn’t have my history with the Covingtons, doesn’t know that when you tangle with Hayden there is literally no chance you can win; even if a physical fight miraculously ends in your favor, a million-to-one chance, you still have to go up against Peter—the Final Boss in a rigged game that Sebastian has never played before. My ex-boyfriend is one swing away from getting that free night in the county lock-up that April has been dreading.
“We need to give our statements,” I declare loudly. I sound like a coward, inventing excuses to duck out of a fight, but it is a known fact that the dignity you preserve by standing up to Hayden is never worth the price.
“Yeah, Bash.” My brother stares dead into Sebastian’s eyes, coiled and unblinking. “You better go and give your ssstatement.”
Like someone wrenching his tongue from a frozen lamppost, Sebastian steps haltingly back from Hayden, tacitly conceding defeat in their macho standoff.
“Hope he’s making it worth your while, Williams,” my brother calls out in a tone that sounds an awful lot like a threat as we walk to the doors of the station house. “And don’t think this conversation is over.”
Even after the glass doors have shut behind us, I can still feel Hayden behind me, like a tsunami about to hit the shore.
11
For lots of reasons, I don’t want to just march right up to the desk officer in the lobby and announce myself there to talk about a murder—among them being that I have no desire to be listed in the dispatch as the person who reported Fox’s death. It will invite too much scrutiny. I’m about to lie to the cops, and don’t need them to be thinking about me every time they open the case file. Another reason is that I was dead serious when I told April it would be best if she does it—if she comes forward before she can be found out. Offense as defense.
Only, April’s conference with Peter and their lawyer takes much longer than I expected, and so Sebastian and I just sit and wait in a clumsy silence, minutes piling up while we struggle to get comfortable on hard-backed chairs that might have been stolen out of a seventeenth-century dungeon. A television screen mounted behind the front desk is playing the local news at a low volume, the officer on duty dividing his attention between it and us. I do my best to appear guiltless and upstanding every time he looks our way, but my constant checking of the time and anxious glances out into the parking lot probably don’t serve me very well.
Sebastian hasn’t spoken a word since we walked away from Hayden, keeping his eyes focused moodily on his feet. The aborted confrontation has left a considerable footprint on his mental state, and I can’t figure out how to brush over it—or if brushing over it is even the right way to handle things. I’m the only one of my guy friends who’s even been in an actual fight before, and no one has ever tried to talk me through the aftermath. Everything I can think of to say sounds condescending and stupid in my mind, and Sebastian seems determined to remain mute, so I follow his lead and try not to feel bad about my silence.
But then my ex-boyfriend surprises me, his eyes snapping up to mine, suddenly alert. His voice electric, he hisses quietly, “He was there tonight.”
“Huh?” I blink at him, confused by his seemingly abrupt change in mood.
“Hayden,” he says urgently, and I chance a look back over my shoulder. I can no longer see my brother outside, but I feel him lurking nevertheless, a sinister disturbance in the Force. “He was there tonight—at the lake house.”
“I know.” I give Sebastian a quizzical look. “Race already told us that.”
“No! I mean—” My ex-boyfriend drops his volume even lower, wary of the desk officer. “I mean later. Rufus, I think he went back.”
This gets my attention. “What? You mean … you think he might’ve killed Fox?”
“Maybe, why not?” His knee starts bouncing. “He’s not exactly shedding tears over the guy’s death, and those questions he was asking … they were a little too on point, right? ‘Are you blackmailing her?’ ‘Did you tell her to wipe off the knife?’” He scratches a bug bite on his arm compulsively. “At first I figured they were just freaky-accurate guesses, but, like, why ask about those things—those exact things—unless he knows something?”
“But how? We didn’t tell anybody, April sure as heck didn’t tell anybody, and there was no one but the three of—” and I stop dead midsentence, my eyes going so wide it feels like they might fall right out of my face. “Upstairs. Sebastian … holy shit. We never checked the upstairs bedroom at the lake house.”
We stare at each other for several seconds, frozen in place, asking ourselves the same question: Is it possible that Fox’s murderer was actually in the cottage with us the whole time? Like an out-of-body experience, I can suddenly see myself standing in the foyer again, tilting an ear up at that narrow, twisting stairway and listening for April. Had Hayden been up there instead, hiding, listening to our initial panic, our subsequent arguing, our ultimate agreement? We hadn’t seen his car, but if he’d come back to the island intending to commit a murder, he might easily have parked it somewhere up the
road, out of sight.
And then the moment passes, and I start breathing again, surprised to find my temples are damp with sweat. “No. There’s no way the killer was still in there with us,” I reason faintly, my lips feeling stubborn and cold. “It doesn’t make sense. Fox was already dead when April called me, and it took us thirty minutes to get out there. If Hayden killed him, why would he still have been hanging around? Especially a half hour after hearing April call for help?”
“I don’t know.” Sebastian searches my gaze, as if he might find the answer there, and I realize—suddenly, inappropriately—that it’s the longest eye contact we’ve sustained since he dumped me. “Maybe they really were just wild guesses. Wiping away fingerprints is pretty basic, and Hayden … he talks a lot of shit about you and your mom because you don’t have as much money as they do. Money’s a really big deal to him, and he thinks it’s the same for everybody. Maybe he just accused you of trying to get cash from April because if he’d been in your position, it’s what he’d have done. Maybe you’re right.”
Sebastian has a point, of course—and a good one. Hayden is a mercenary prick who believes the rest of us are all just as bent as he is. But now my ex-boyfriend has got me thinking more carefully about that conversation. “Maybe I’m not right. He brought up the knife, Sebastian.” I settle my mouth into a determined line. “But April never said Fox had been stabbed—all she told Peter was that Fox had been killed. He could’ve been shot or poisoned or run over or drowned in the lake, as far as Peter was aware, so how did Hayden know there was a knife?”
Sebastian doesn’t get a chance to answer me. At that very moment, the doors to the station crash open and April appears. Pale and blotchy, her eyes swollen from crying, she’s flanked on one side by Peter and on the other by Lindsay Wells, their attorney—whom I recognize from my own legal dustups with the Covingtons. Purposefully, the three of them march straight up to the desk officer, where April speaks in a faltering, scratchy voice. “My name is April Covington, and I need to report a m-murder…”
* * *
The dominoes fall somewhat quickly after the big announcement. April is whisked through a door, along with Peter and Ms. Wells, and Sebastian and I finally introduce ourselves to the relevant authorities. My ex-boyfriend is squired away immediately, but it takes some ten minutes before a dashingly square-jawed young policeman in a patterned tie ushers me down a series of corridors and into a small interview room.
Introducing himself as Detective Lehmann, he asks if I want coffee. I nod, and he leaves the room briefly, returning with a cup full of what seems to be lukewarm battery acid. I have to wonder if it’s some sort of interrogation tactic.
I also kind of have to wonder if Detective Lehmann’s foxy green eyes, slim-hipped physique, and unruly chestnut hair are also part of the same brilliant strategy—a charm offensive to tease out my secrets. The guy can’t be much older than, like, twenty-four. Twenty-five tops. Immediately, I’m tempted to remind him that I’m above the age of consent in the state of Vermont, but I have a feeling that might weaken my position. Prudently, I remind myself that I’m about to lie to this man—this droolworthy cartoon prince of a man—and I need to keep my shit together.
Besides, he’s a cop; he undoubtedly already knows the age of consent.
“So, Rufus,” he begins, leaning back in his chair as if this were just a casual chat. “That’s a cool name—I like it.”
He spreads his legs a little, and I almost start to hyperventilate. Exhibiting tremendous self-control, I manage a neutral “Thanks.”
“I always wanted a cool name. Mine is Conrad.” He gives me an adorkably sheepish grin. “I hate it, but it’s sort of a family legacy. Our other legacy name is Humphrey, though, so I guess I got off kinda easy, huh?”
“Sure,” I agree, but his you-and-me Good Cop routine has just tripped my bullshit meter, and my guard begins to go back up by degrees. I’m used to authority figures trying to snare me in my own words, and I feel an instinctive mistrust of his pleasantness.
The time they kept me waiting for this little conversation comes back to me all of a sudden, and my shoulders go tense as I wonder if maybe the detective was checking up on me. Hayden was right: I do have a questionable history speckled with violent incidents, and it’s not going to help me in this situation.
Every kid has temper tantrums, but as my friends in daycare and elementary school were growing out of theirs, I was growing in to mine. By the age of ten, my tantrums had evolved into howling frenzies, episodes of rage so ferocious that they scared even me; my anger was like a physical presence inside me, one that would swell so large, my body simply couldn’t contain it any longer, and I would rant and flail and attack until I collapsed with exhaustion.
When my mom realized my issues were getting worse instead of better, she started looking into solutions. We went through a handful of mental health professionals and a slew of medications—from pills that made me paranoid and hyper to ones that made me numb and affectless—until we found the right mix. I haven’t had a serious outburst in over a year, and the meds I’m on now help me manage my emotions without making me feel cut off from them; but my past is my past, and I’m not anxious to start babbling excuses for it to a man with police credentials.
Detective Conrad Lehmann folds his arms behind his head, his biceps straining against his tailored oxford shirt, and fixes me with a friendly look. “So, Rufus Holt with the cool name, why don’t we start at the beginning. You tell me what happened tonight, in your own words, and I’ll stop you if I have questions.”
Clearing my throat, I do as I’m told, keeping my story as basic as possible. Liars often embellish, thinking little details are what give a tale its ring of truth; it is not so. Details are home to the devil, as they say, and every one you toss in becomes a trap to catch you out if you’re not careful.
As I speak, though, running through our reimagined timeline—wherein our visits to Lia, Arlo, Race, and Peyton all come before April’s call for help—my mind is wholly occupied with thoughts of Hayden. Is it really possible that he was hiding in the upstairs bedroom all along while we bumbled around on the ground floor? If he had murdered Fox, though, why on earth would he have still been hanging around the lake house when Sebastian and I arrived? Why wouldn’t he have left immediately? Unless …
It hits me so suddenly that I actually stop speaking for a moment in the middle of my account, faking a coughing fit so I can buy a few precious seconds to think. The money.
Money’s a really big deal to him. Sebastian has no idea how right he is. If Hayden went back to the lake house, murdered Fox, and then set April up to take the heat, he still wouldn’t have gone anywhere—not until he recovered the cash he’d paid to his dealer earlier in the evening. No sense leaving it with a dead guy, right? I think about April’s breathy, tremulous voice over the phone—I need … I need help, Rufus—and the loud blaring of Fox’s music when we arrived; it’s just possible that, if Hayden had been in another room, he might not even have heard April’s call to me. He might not have been aware that anyone was on the way until Sebastian actually started knocking at the front door.
“Why didn’t you call the police from the scene?” Detective Lehmann asks me suddenly, breaking through my reverie. I blink at him, thrown for just a moment, and he reiterates, “You found your sister shut up in a house with a dead body; why didn’t you call the police right away?”
He sounds markedly less friendly now, but it’s a question I’ve been anticipating. “April was really freaked out, and she phoned her parents first. They didn’t want her talking to anyone without them present.”
This has the benefit of being more or less the truth, but Detective Lehmann frowns anyway. “That sounds kinda strange, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t they want her talking to the police?”
“Peter Covington is a lawyer.”
He nods slowly. All cops understand interfering lawyers. “Did you know the victim, too?”
“
Fox? Sort of. We’re in the same grade, and he’s popular.”
“But you weren’t friends?”
“No.” I regret my tone the second the word leaves my mouth.
Detective Lehmann arches a brow. “You didn’t like him.”
Caught, I mumble, “We just … weren’t friends.”
“Why not?”
Now that is a loaded question. “Because I’m not popular. Because he didn’t have any use for me. The only thing we had in common was our zip code.”
“Did he pick on you?”
“He picked on everybody,” I answer flatly, and watch the man chew on this for a moment, exploring it for alternate routes.
“So you’re not going to miss him.”
My body won’t let me answer. I know how stupid it would be to lie—there’ll be no minimizing it if he checks up on my story and finds out how much bad blood there really is between me and Fox’s crew—but the truth feels too damning to admit, so I stare back at the detective dumbly until he speaks again.
“What time did you get to the lake house?” He poses the question in an off-handed way, but it’s information I’ve already supplied, and I feel heat prickle under my arms. Maybe I should have lied after all—said anything to keep him from tugging at the threads of our story. I need him to dismiss me as a potential suspect and move on.
For a split second, I consider bringing up Hayden, putting them onto his scent; April is unlikely to mention him, having made no connection between his visit to the cottage and the events that transpired after she blacked out, so it might be down to me to make sure the cops consider him. But I have to let the notion go almost as soon as it pops into my head. How can I implicate my brother without compromising myself and April and Sebastian in the process? I don’t even have a clear sense of motive yet.
Steadily, I meet Detective Lehmann’s eyes. “We were already on our way out there when April called to tell me what happened, so I guess like maybe ten minutes after that?”
Lehmann nods thoughtfully. Then: “I’ve got to tell you, Rufus, something about this isn’t adding up.”
White Rabbit Page 11