White Rabbit

by Caleb Roehrig

  13

  “Rufus. We need to talk.”

  I stumble backward, hands flying up in self-defense, my brain a typhoon of adrenaline as I blink uncomprehendingly into the darkness before me. The figure stopped short, abruptly, and only now finally steps out of the shadows. Dazed, I watch as moonlight deftly describes the harshly beautiful features of Isabel Covington—Peter’s wife. Even at two in the morning, she is elegant: Clad in dark slacks and a silk blouse, her auburn hair tied back, she looks like she might be on her way to an afternoon business meeting. On a finger of her left hand, a diamond the size of a shrunken head glitters coldly, deliberately. April isn’t the only thing Peter gave his wife in an effort to save their marriage.

  My pulse starts to slow down again—but only marginally; just because Isabel isn’t about to chainsaw me to death doesn’t mean she’s not a threat. “Whatever you have to tell me, I’m sure Peter already said it inside.”

  She doesn’t even blink. “I doubt that very much.”

  “Okay, well … you can keep it to yourself, anyway.” I keep my expression stony, even though my nerves are still crackling like Rice Krispies. “Peter already promised to get a restraining order, and I’m more than happy to go along with it if it means you guys will keep the hell away from me.”

  I try to step around her, but she moves like a cat—quickly, and with startling quiet for someone in spindle-heeled pumps. “What we have to talk about is more important than that.”

  Searching her face, I wonder how much disrespect I can get away with. Isabel has the capability to make my life truly miserable if she wants, and a long time ago I learned it was better to put up with infuriating insults than to give her an excuse to make her point in more consequential ways. But it’s been a very long night, and I’m pretty much done being abused by the Covingtons. Coldly, I state, “I have to go home.”

  I push past her again and am almost to the back of the Jeep when she calls out, “I know everything that happened tonight, Rufus. The money April paid you, the visits to her friends, the fake phone call to establish your alibi … everything.”

  For the second time that night, I do a slow, horror-movie turnaround in that parking lot, cold all the way through with the frostbite of alarm. “What?”

  “April told me,” Isabel says simply. “Peter and Lindsay got out of the car for a private conference”—these two words, private conference, are shaded with a subtle disdain that suggests volumes—“and April gave me the whole story. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”

  “Of course not.” I could strangle April. Of course she told her mother everything. She’s never been in serious trouble before, has never faced parental discipline, and has probably never been punished by anyone for telling the truth. She was either too naive to understand—or too apathetic to give a shit—what would happen to me when she laid all our cards on the table before Isabel. I taste bile. “So, what now? Are you here to threaten me? My mom already agreed to stop seeking child support. What else do you want?”

  “You misunderstand me.” Maddeningly, she’s still completely unruffled. “Peter doesn’t know anything about it. I could have told him—I could also be in there right now, telling the police. But I’m not.” She waits a beat. “Aren’t you curious why?”

  “Not really,” I lie stiffly, refusing to be baited.

  “Because April’s the one with her butt in a sling,” Sebastian interjects, his reminder etched with confused agitation; he seems to sense that Isabel is up to something, but he can’t figure out her angle. “If the cops find out what … well, what really happened, she’s way worse off than either of us will be.”

  “Not entirely true, Mr. Williams,” Isabel counters, vaguely amused. “April has a very, very good lawyer, and Rufus is under a lot of scrutiny right now by the school board. Probably more than his permanent record could withstand if charges were brought against him for withholding evidence, tampering with a crime scene, obstruction of justice—”

  “What do you want?” A surge of unbearable rage spoils the meager contents of my stomach. Every time I think I’ve exhausted the supply of loathing I have for my father’s family, I tap into a brand-new vein of it waiting to be plumbed—a dark harvest that burns my insides like poison. No one knows better than Isabel Covington how much scrutiny the school board has me under; she is their president.

  Six months ago, I was hanging out in an alcove behind the school one night with Lucy and our friend Brent, sharing a forty-ounce of disgusting beer procured for us by Brent’s older sister. Ironically, we were only out there—where it was dark as hell, and the lake gleamed like graphite through winter-stripped trees—because it was the most desolate place we could think of to consume alcohol. Imagine our surprise, then, when a security guard appeared out of nowhere, flashing his Maglite around like a death laser and screaming at us to put our hands up.

  Brent and Lucy got off with slaps on the wrists, but since I had actually been holding the bottle when we got caught—and because my name is Rufus Holt—I was brought before a very special kangaroo-court school board hearing, where all my prior sins were exhaustively catalogued. My fights with Hayden and his cronies; the time I busted Cody Barnes’s tooth with that chair in the eighth grade; the time, freshman year, when my science teacher falsely accused me of cheating on a test and I got so upset, I hurled a ridiculously expensive microscope at a plate glass window, shattering both—they were all exhumed and picked over in front of me, like corpses found crudely buried in a basement crawl space.

  In the end, I was given a week’s suspension and two months’ probation—along with the dire promise that the school board would be watching me.

  “I want you to be fully aware of your circumstances, here. Given your background, I’m sure the board would feel compelled to review your file again in light of any police action against you,” Isabel goes on, my red-faced resentment clearly warming the cockles of her heart, “and put some further consideration into whether or not Ethan Allen High is really the proper environment for a student such as yourself.”

  I’m so angry it feels like my eyes are bleeding. Paralyzed by wrath, I can’t seem to move or even think clearly enough to speak—which is fine, as there exists no insult equal to the challenge of capturing Isabel Covington’s coldblooded deviousness.

  “Contrary to what you might think, Rufus, I don’t hate you,” she continues serenely, absurdly. “I’m sure you think I’m a bitch, but everything I’ve done, all the recommendations I’ve made to the board in the past, have been in your best interest. I believe you could do with a more disciplined setting than Ethan Allen offers, and I think—I hope—that someday you’ll see I’m right.”

  “What. Do. You. Want?” I repeat, shaking all over and once more on the verge of tears. I cannot deal with this. I shouldn’t have to deal with this; it isn’t fair.

  Isabel sighs, her nasty, self-satisfied smirk vanishing into the shadows. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “Huh?” I actually cock my head to the side, my mind-altering fury stumbling over its own feet as I try to process this statement.

  “April did not do this.” She declares it flatly, but an anxious line appears between her brows. “Obviously, she didn’t do this, and what she’s going through right now is … It’s a nightmare. It’s my worst nightmare.” She squeezes her eyes shut, and for the first time in possibly ever, a glimmer of fragile humanity shows through Isabel’s rock-hard exterior. Just as quickly, though, she banishes her fragile humanity back to the hell from whence it came, snarling, “It was that good-for-nothing Rossi boy, of course; his father is an alcoholic, his mother was a whore, and he’s been a time bomb waiting to go off for years. I am certain the police will find the proof against him. In time.”

  This sentence has ended with a silent but, so I supply it. “But?”

  “I know how bad it looks for April. The Whitneys are incredibly high-profile in this community, and the authorities will be under enormous pressure t
o close this case as quickly as possible.” Her mouth tightens. “The Atwoods and the Forsyths … they won’t care what the outcome is, so long as their precious little brats are kept in the clear, and I know how teenagers operate. Race and Peyton and … that Mexican girl, Lisa—”

  “Lia.” Sebastian mutters his surly correction automatically.

  “They won’t want to say anything. Arlo Rossi is a thug. A violent thug, and he’s had half the school cowering with fear since the day he started there.” She might just as easily be speaking of her own son, and I wonder if she even sees the irony. “He was supposed to have been held back a year, but no one wanted him at Ethan Allen a day longer than necessary—and I mean no one.” She takes a deep breath. “The kids will be terrified of retribution from him and his knuckle-dragging friends if they speak out, and so they’ll just hold their tongues and hope that April isn’t convicted for something she didn’t do. I cannot afford to be that careless.”

  I can’t contain my sarcasm. “But April has a very, very good lawyer.”

  “And she would be acquitted at trial,” Isabel returns promptly. “Only—”

  “You don’t want it to go to trial,” Sebastian concludes.

  “It would be devastating for April. This is too small a town for her to survive the kind of spotlight it would bring her under, and her entire life would be—” She swallows the words, unable to finish. “The police will have to make an arrest soon; the Whitneys will see to that. And if they can’t convince one of the other kids to turn on Arlo, April will be a sitting duck. Her life will be ruined.”

  “So what’s your proposition?” I ask with toneless reluctance, sweating in fear of her answer.

  “You know these kids.” Her self-consciously cultured voice is almost imploring. “I am aware that they’re not your friends, but you are their age, and they’ll admit things to you that they won’t say in front of an adult—certainly not a police officer, and certainly not in the presence of an attorney hired by their parents.” Her hands flex open and shut, that massive diamond winking and spitting moonlight. “April paid you two thousand dollars to talk to these kids, to see what you could find out, and she said you believed they were lying to you.”

  “They were,” I affirm carefully, taking an instinctive step back. The stench of blackmail is still thick in the air, and I still don’t like the direction the wind is blowing. “But I can’t even be sure they were all lying about the same thing.”

  “I will pay you,” Isabel finally states, “to keep trying. The money April gave you is yours; I don’t care about it, and insofar as it looks bad for her, I am happy for no one else to learn about it, either. But I will give you double again—an additional four thousand—if you can turn up evidence that exonerates April before the police are forced to make an arrest.” She steps forward, her eyes flashing. “That is critical, Rufus. The deal depends on that condition. I will pay you, but only if you can provide something that preempts April’s arrest.”

  I stare at her, open-mouthed. Isabel Covington is actually begging me for help. It’s a deal with the devil—literally, from my viewpoint—but once again, the arithmetic is incredibly simple: April’s two, plus Isabel’s four, plus the two thousand my uncle Connor borrowed last Christmas together equals the eight grand my mom needs to pay back the bank. But is it worth it?

  I think about Arlo’s gun and Hayden’s powder keg of violent rage; Peyton’s derisive sneering, Race’s open hostility, and Lia’s withering rudeness. It has been a hair-raising and wildly unpleasant night. Do I really want to go, once more, into that dismal breach? The answer is a resounding, and easy, no.

  But then I picture my mom again—asleep in bed with her latest romance novel or self-help guide forgotten beside her—and this time I also see the pile of unpaid, unopened bills spilling off the nightstand and onto the floor. I envision April sitting in an interview room across from a scowling detective, trying to hold it together and tell the lies I scripted for her out of little more than a sense of self-preservation, and wonder if it’s even fair of me to abandon her cause now.

  Holding my breath, I meet Isabel’s eyes with a silent prayer for some of that protection that’s supposed to grace fools and children—at the moment, I feel like both. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  14

  “Rufus, are you fucking nuts?” Sebastian demands the second we’re back inside the Jeep. Isabel is already halfway to the police station doors, but I glance nervously in the direction of her sensitive ears anyway as my ex-boyfriend continues. “I mean, have you actually lost your damn mind? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I need the money,” I mutter uncomfortably.

  “How can you be sure she’ll actually pay you?” He’s becoming belligerent. “I mean, do you even trust that woman?”

  “No.” The glum admission doesn’t make me feel any better. In my experience, most adults suffer from a crippling case of selective amnesia, prone to flare-ups any time they’ve made an inconvenient promise to someone under the age of eighteen. In particular, I’ve got absolutely no reason to think or hope that Isabel will decide to honor our arrangement if I manage to give her what she wants; after all, there’s no one to hold her accountable if she chooses to screw me over.

  On the other hand, about the nicest thing I can say regarding Isabel Covington is that she doesn’t waste her breath. Peter, when he’s caught up in the ecstasy of his rage, has a habit of guaranteeing hellfire he can’t actually deliver; and half of Hayden’s threats are deliberately empty, because he likes to keep his victims jumping at shadows. But Isabel is too obsessed with her own power to weaken it with empty saber-rattling. When she makes a promise, she follows through, and I just have to hope she’ll consider it a matter of personal integrity to make good on the deal we’ve struck.

  “Are you listening to yourself?” Sebastian is still upset, his large, dark eyes probing me angrily through the gloom in the Jeep. “Somebody murdered Fox, Rufus! Murdered him. Let the police deal with it! I mean, this was stupid enough before, when we were going around pretending we didn’t know anything, but what do you think you’re gonna do now? Show up at everyone’s door and say, ‘Hey, by the way, did you happen to stab Fox a million times and frame April for it?’”

  I grit my teeth. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” he fumes. “And you’re just gonna, you know, hope that Maleficent Covington remembers to give you four grand when it’s all over—if no one’s killed you by then.”

  “Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” I snap back.

  “Do you not even see that something is very seriously fucked up in the state of Denmark, here?” His tone is incredulous. “If Mrs. Covington is really worried about April’s life being destroyed, why isn’t she hiring an actual detective? She obviously despises you, Rufus; she didn’t even bother to hide it! So unless she’s got something up her sleeve, why the hell would she ask you to do this?”

  “Lots of reasons.” I count them on my fingers. “For one thing, a real private detective might cost her way more than four thousand dollars, and still not turn up anything; for another, if a legit P.I. found out about all the lies you, me, and April told the cops tonight, he’d have to report them or lose his license—and Isabel sure as hell doesn’t want that happening; and for thirds, whether I prove April didn’t do it or I get arrested or killed in the process, it’s a win-win situation for the Covingtons.”

  “Oh, well that’s just fucking great.” He sounds disgusted. “What if she’s planning to screw you? You told me yourself that she gets off on seeing you suffer; you don’t even trust her, but you’re willing to maybe put your life in danger because she says she’ll pay you? How do you know she’s not just jerking you around?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, then, what the hell, Rufus? Why did you agree?”

  “Because. I need. The money!” I shout furiously. Sebastian’s been to the tiny bungalow where my mom and I live—seen the beat-up old Niss
an we share, the refurbished laptop I use, and my mom’s shabby collection of flaking, secondhand paperbacks—but he has zero understanding of how deep our financial troubles go. It isn’t his fault, but he simply can’t relate. For Sebastian, a cash flow problem means he’s spent his allowance and has to wait for the next installment. “We could lose our house, okay? My mom’s business has been eating shit for years, and when Peter stopped sending support payments, she had to start using her savings to cover our bills. We’re really, really fucked, Sebastian, and I can’t afford not to take the chance that Isabel will deliver. I can’t.”

  There’s a thick silence, the shadows moving around us like slime, and then he says the worst thing possible. “Shit. I’m sorry, Rufus. I had no idea—”

  “Just drop me off at my house,” I cut in roughly. I’ve put up with Hayden’s bullying, Peter’s contempt, and Isabel’s manipulations; I’ll be damned if I let Sebastian Williams pity me. “I can use my mom’s car.”

  His eyebrows arch in disbelief. “You mean you’re gonna try to go through with this ridiculous bullshit tonight?”

  “When’s a better time?” I challenge. “At least now I’ve still got surprise on my side. Once news of Fox’s death gets out, and everybody hires a lawyer, I’ve got nothing. Whatever Isabel believes, none of those guys are going to talk to me unless they think I’m holding something over them. If I hit them with what happened to Fox, somebody’s gonna have to fake a reaction, and I’m betting I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “That is literally the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard.”

  Unfortunately, it is stupid. And what if it does turn out that Hayden is the killer? Not only is it too late to spring news of Fox’s death on him and measure his response, but will Isabel still be willing to pay me if I only prove her daughter is innocent at the expense of her son? Still, it’s better than the alternative—no plan at all—and so I state, churlishly, “Well, lucky for you, you don’t need to worry about it. Just drive me home. You know … please.”