White Rabbit

by Caleb Roehrig

  Sebastian starts the Jeep, grumbling under his breath, but as he reverses out of the parking spot, he grunts, “That’s idiotic. I’m coming with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I return, exasperated. “You’ve done enough.”

  Sebastian slams on the brakes hard enough to make my seat belt engage, and my heart jumps reflexively into my throat as the vehicle bounces to a sudden stop. His eyes smoldering, my ex-boyfriend glares at me from behind the wheel. “What the hell is wrong with you, Rufus? Do you really think I’d let you do this by yourself? When April gave you that money, I thought … I thought she’d killed Fox, and she was just trying to game you or something. But you could be walking into some serious, life-threatening shit, here, and I couldn’t live with myself if I let you do it alone!”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Fuck! I know what I don’t have to fucking do!” He exclaims furiously, smashing his fist against the steering wheel, and I stiffen in my seat. I’ve never seen Sebastian so angry. “I want to help you! Do you get that? One of these guys might’ve actually wasted Fox, and at least if there’s two of us, they’ll think twice before doing it to you, too. I should have said something the first time, when you agreed to take the money from April. It was completely insane, and I knew it, and I should have tried to stop you. But I thought if I—” He cuts himself off abruptly, eyes flickering with surprise, as though catching himself in the middle of something he didn’t mean to say. Rubbing the expression away, he gives me a forlorn look. “Don’t forget I’m part of this, too, okay? I found Fox, too; I lied to the cops, too; and I’m also worried about April. And … and you, too. You can’t just shut me out.”

  “Okay,” I agree awkwardly, chastened and unmoored by the feeling in his tone, disappointed in myself for not considering that he also has some emotions of his own invested in the search for the killer. Megadouche though he may have been in life, Fox had still been one of Sebastian’s friends. “Um … I’m sorry.”

  My ex-boyfriend is silent for a moment. “You know, if Fox’s killer also set that fire at the Whitneys’, the cops might clear April on their own.”

  Theoretically, he’s right—only, according to the story we’ve given the police, April’s time remains officially unaccounted for when the blaze was first reported. It would require some suspension of disbelief, but the cops might deduce that she could technically have killed Fox, stolen his car, torched his house as a diversion, and then driven back to South Hero. “All the more reason to get started now.”

  “So.” Sebastian puts the Jeep into gear, gliding past the entrance to the police station and turning left onto North Avenue. “Where are we headed?”

  Unable to help myself, I study his reaction out of the corner of my eye and answer, “Lia’s. I want to know what Fox and Arlo were really fighting about. And I want to know why she lied to us.”

  “Me too,” he admits. But he won’t look at me.

  * * *

  A mist rose up from the lake while we were grappling with cops and Covingtons. It rolled through the streets of Burlington and turned the glow of streetlamps into thick smears of gold in the opaque night air. The blue glow is still flickering in the upstairs bedroom at the Santos house when we pull up to the curb, and in spite of the late hour, it almost seems as though Lia has been expecting us; it takes only one text from Sebastian—Outside again. You up?—and within seconds, the front door eases open and the girl is hurrying down the front walk for the second time tonight.

  “What is it?” She whispers when she reaches us, but the annoyance that sharpened her tone on our first visit is gone; now, she sounds frightened. “What do you want this time?”

  “Fox is dead,” I declare, ready to pounce at the first sign of artifice in her reaction. To my surprise, she gives only a fluttering, distracted nod.

  “I know.” Her face is pale, the bruise like an inky paw print stamped on her gray skin.

  “You know?” Sebastian stares at her.

  “Hayden told me.”

  It’s my turn to gape. “Hayden?”

  “He was here. Just a little while ago. He said April did it—that April … that she stabbed Fox?”

  It’s a question, as if she can’t quite believe it, but my insides sink like a torpedoed battleship anyway. What the fuck is Hayden doing? Apart from undercutting my admittedly crappy scheme to surprise everyone with the news myself, I can’t fathom why he would want to spread this bulletin around. Is he deliberately trying to compromise April by telling her friends she’s guilty? “He just showed up out of the blue and told you Fox was dead?”

  “Yes. I mean, no—not exactly.” Lia glances nervously up and down the fog-cloaked street like she’s terrified my psycho older brother will emerge from the brume at any moment to punish her for talking. “He was upset, okay? He was pissed. He had an issue with Fox, but he said Fox was dead, so … so—”

  “So he came to you?” I make my skepticism plain.

  Lia swallows and gives me a strangely plaintive look. “Don’t ask me to explain why—he wasn’t making a lot of sense. He was really, really angry, and I thought … I was afraid he was going to hurt me. I mean, look what he did!” She holds her bare arms out, and in the diffuse light, I can see for the first time that she has new bruises forming, the flesh over her biceps darkening with the suggestion of powerful hands. “He grabbed me, started shaking me—”

  “Hey, just take a deep breath, okay?” Sebastian steps forward, putting his own hands on her arms—gently—unconsciously supplanting Hayden’s grip with his own. “You’re okay now.”

  An unexpected wave of jealousy steals over me as I watch him soothe her injuries, watch her tilt her face to his with casual intimacy, their displaced chemistry palpable. They’re not together anymore, and I know it now—hell, Sebastian and I aren’t together anymore—but I feel a needle of crestfallen dismay stab into me anyway. Clearing my throat, I interrupt their moment. “Why did he come here, though? What did he want?”

  “Money,” Lia whispers quietly, like it’s a dirty word. “He wanted his money back.”

  Sebastian raises an eyebrow in my direction. “The money he paid Fox earlier tonight? For the drugs?”

  Lia glances up, startled by his knowledge, but after a beat she gestures a mute confirmation. Baffled, I ask, “Why did he think you had it?”

  “I don’t know!” She looks genuinely bewildered. “Like I said, he wasn’t making a lot of sense. He just showed up here, calling my phone over and over until I agreed to come down, and the second I was out the door he was in my face—ranting and threatening and shaking me—”

  “Why did he want his money back?” I interrupt, hoping to distract her with something concrete to focus on. “What was his issue with Fox?”

  Taking a breath, Lia glances around again—and this time, so do I. Her anxiety is contagious. Licking her lips, she says, to Sebastian, “Not here. Can we … can we sit in your car?”

  I get into the back this time, allowing Lia to have the front, and when the doors of the Jeep are closed against the sightless expanse of the night, she relaxes visibly. “You already know that Fox and Arlo were partners—or, at least, they were supposed to be.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “I’ll get to it. Basically, they had this system worked out. They’d get a shipment from their supplier, divide it up, and then sell it. Fox’s customers were rich kids and college students and stuff; Arlo had a lock on basically everybody else. I mean, aside from our squad at Ethan Allen, they ran in totally different crowds, so working together made sense.”

  “Okay,” I say, hoping this has a point.

  “Once they sold everything,” she goes on, “they’d give their take—all of it—to their supplier, who would bank it and pay them back their cut. I don’t know exactly how much they were moving, or what their percentage was, but neither of them was really hurting for extra cash, you know?”

  “So what did Fox do? Why did Arlo
go after him tonight at the party?”

  Lia’s face hardens, her dark eyes flashing like obsidian. “Fox got fucking greedy, that’s what he did. He wanted more money—as if he needed it—and thought he was such an untouchable badass that he could get away with pulling one of the stupidest, most dangerous scams in the book.”

  “What scam?” Sebastian asks, and Lia drags her hands through her hair.

  “The big problem with white rabbits is that, you know, every now and then they make some people go completely berserk, right? Lady thinks her neighbor’s turning into a dragon, so she runs him down with her SUV; or a dude jumps through a window because he’s trying to escape a swarm of invisible robot hornets.” She purses her lips. “Fox—who barely passed chemistry last year—decided that he could fix the problem and make some serious cash under their supplier’s nose.

  “He had a thing about power. He wanted everybody to kiss his ass and bow down when he walked into a room, and it bugged the shit out of him that Arlo was the one who actually intimidated people. Fox insisted on being the point man with their supplier, so all the deliveries would go through him, because it meant he got to tell Arlo what to do. It made him feel like he was the one who was really in charge.” Anger pushes color back into her cheeks. “This dumb-fuck plan of his … he didn’t even ask Arlo if it was cool—he just went ahead and did it.”

  “Did what?”

  She meets my eyes steadily across the back of the seat. “He cut the supply. He bought a pill press and a rabbit stamp from some shady Chinese company over the internet, he took an entire delivery of white rabbits from their supplier, ground it all down to powder, and then mixed it with … I don’t even know. Baking soda and ketamine, or maybe GHB or fucking Ambien or something, I’ve got no idea—a bunch of depressants. Stuff he figured would mellow people out. Only, Fox is an idiot, and he fucked it all up! He thought he could double the amount of pills right under their supplier’s nose, pocket half the take, and that no one would notice!”

  “Oh shit,” Sebastian observes, eyes wide.

  “Yeah.” Lia laughs. “‘Oh shit.’ Turns out, Fox’s version of the white rabbit made people sick as hell, or it made them black out, or have fucking seizures. But Fox thought he could still get away with it. I mean, he had to try, anyway—it was either that or admit what he’d done, and volunteer to get his kneecaps pounded into gravel.”

  I slump back against my seat, my head whirling from the impact of Fox’s mind-boggling stupidity. Burlington is a small town; there are less than fifty thousand people within the city limits, and only just double that if you include the outlying urban zone. Any kingpin who’s bothered to claim our little strip of Lake Champlain shoreline as his territory would know in a heartbeat if extra merchandise suddenly hit the street. The scheme was breathtaking in its hubris and staggering in its ineptitude.

  “So he bungled it,” I summarize, “and he sold Hayden a defective batch.”

  “A thousand dollars’ worth.” Lia’s tone actually borders on satisfaction. “Arlo’s customers had started complaining, and he knew something was up because the pills looked different; but it wasn’t until he found Fox’s extra stash at the Whitneys’ lake house tonight that he figured out what was really going on.”

  “And that’s when they started brawling, and Fox threw Arlo out,” Sebastian concludes.

  “Yeah.” She exhales, the energy that carried her through the account abating on a single breath. “I don’t think you have any idea what kind of position Fox put Arlo in. He was moving those pills, too, you know. And even though he had nothing to do with Fox’s dumbass plot, that doesn’t mean his supplier will see it that way.”

  The cynic in me wants to say something sarcastic about her concern for Arlo, who has still been intentionally selling a notorious drug with wildly violent side effects. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy who accidentally got cut while living by the sword.

  But, of course, the one who had been truly endangered by Fox’s half-witted scheming was Fox. By my count, in one fell swoop he’d made three dangerous enemies: Arlo, Hayden, and whatever shady drug lord was paying them to fence white rabbits to high school students in the first place. The real problem is that, if I wanted to get my four grand, I was going to have risk antagonizing all the same people—and with potentially similar results.

  “But why did Hayden come here looking for the money?” Sebastian asks. There’s a secondary meaning to the question: We both know where Hayden’s money is, and he’s already come perilously close to guessing the truth about it.

  “I told you, I don’t know!” She tosses her hands up, exasperated. “He was barely speaking in complete sentences! He just kept saying that he wanted it back, and how ‘Nobody cheats Hayden Covington,’ and he said … he said he was going to get it one way or the other, even if it was too late to get it back from Fox.” Her voice drops to an agitated whisper, and light spilling through the Jeep’s windshield makes her eyes shine like gemstones as she states, “And now I’m worried he’s going to go after Arlo.”

  15

  “The last person who needs our help is freaking Arlo,” Sebastian argues nervously as the Jeep rumbles over fragmented asphalt on the short drive to the Rossi home. “Not only is he just about the only guy we know who could possibly take Hayden in a fair fight, he’s also got a fucking gun, remember?”

  “Yeah, well. I won’t pretend I’d cry about it if my asshole brother took a couple rounds to the face, but I’ve got a feeling Isabel will be more likely to pay me if I can stop him from getting his head ventilated.” My response sounds as flip as I intended it to, but, truthfully, I’m just as on edge as Sebastian. I’m not at all interested in becoming collateral damage in a drug dispute, and I don’t like the way the edges of Fox’s death seem to bleed inevitably into ugly, menacing territory.

  To compound my worries, I’m starting to become convinced that my older brother has more or less officially lost his feeble grip on mental stability for the night—that he’s willing to do violence to anyone he thinks is standing between him and his money. Arlo’s gun won’t scare him, as I believe that fear is something Hayden genuinely does not experience; and since the tattooed drug dealer obviously doesn’t have what Hayden is looking for, there’s every chance that we could be on our way to interrupting a very volatile confrontation.

  Based on what Lia said, I’m even more certain that Hayden went back out to the lake house after his first visit earlier in the evening. Whether he’d been there when we were, I still can’t be sure—but if he’s going around town in search of his money, then it means he somehow knows it wasn’t in Fox’s possession, where he should by all rights assume it was. The minute April turned herself in, the Burlington PD undoubtedly notified the authorities on South Hero, who would have immediately sealed the Whitneys’ property off as a crime scene; so then, at some point prior to that, my brother must have returned there and searched the place thoroughly enough to become convinced that someone removed his thousand bucks from the premises.

  “Do you think Hayden did it?” Sebastian asks me after a moment, radiating anxious energy. “Do you think he killed Fox?”

  “I don’t know. He’d be my first pick, but … I don’t know. It could have been … someone else.”

  Sebastian nods slowly. “You still think maybe it was Arlo?”

  I mumble something, unable to give him a clear answer. I don’t not think that; Arlo is Suspect Number Two, as far as I’m concerned. And I know I want it to be him or my brother. It would make my heart sing to see either of Ethan Allen’s two biggest assholes go to jail for murder—and Hayden’s arrest based on evidence I discovered would almost be worth the four grand Isabel would thereby never, ever pay me. The unnamed supplier also makes for an excellent suspect—albeit one that inarguably puts the water level of this pitiful investigation well above our heads.

  The problem is, there’s yet another person I want to suspect, as well. A sliver of resentment is lodged in my he
art that I can’t seem to ignore, no matter how hard I try, and it keeps calling my attention to two little molehills that cry out to be built into mountains.

  Molehill the first: Lia hadn’t been very moved by the news of Fox’s death. Sure, she acted pretty rattled when we first arrived, but that was more about Hayden’s threats than the news he’d imparted. The only emotion she exhibited with regard to Fox—one of her closest friends, who had just been murdered in a pretty awful way—was contempt.

  Molehill the second: It was twice now that Lia had made a point of seeming to staunchly defend Arlo’s character while simultaneously describing a perfect motive for him to want Fox dead. I can’t figure out if this is a subliminal act of sabotage, like she believes him to be guilty and her conscience is making her betray him without her even being aware of it—or if maybe it’s deliberate misdirection.

  But the subject of Lia Santos is booby-trapped for Sebastian and me, and there’s no point in pursuing it further until we’ve finished looking into Hayden and Arlo. One thing at a time. Out loud, I offer a feeble laugh. “Well, I know this for sure: I’ll have a kick-ass ‘What I Did on My Summer Vacation’ essay to write this year.”

  Sebastian smiles in spite of the ominous tension in the air. “‘How I Almost Got Shot by a Drug Dealer,’ by Sebastian Williams.”

  “‘How My Sister Bribed Me with Blood Money,’ by Rufus Holt,” I rejoin.

  “‘How I Learned That a Bunch of My Friends Are Actually Kind of Psychotic!’”

  “‘How My Family Is Full of Liars and Possible Murderers Who Still Call Me the Black Sheep!’”

  Sebastian pauses for just a moment, and then: “‘How I Finally Got Up the Courage to Tell My Ex-Boyfriend That I’m Sorry for the Way I Ended Things.’”