Chapter 46 #2
“I don’t think anyone will hear us over the sound of the fireworks anyway,” Perdita said, covering her mouth as she looked away from their father’s corpse. She was visibly shaking, as was Bilal next to her.
“W-why don’t w-we c-call H-Henry? H-he c-can h-help us,” Octavius said between choked sobs.
Fola shook her head frantically. “No, we can’t. Henry can’t be trusted.”
“Why not? Henry always helps us,” Bilal said.
“Yes, but not when we might have killed his employer. Henry is paid to be loyal to Father, not us. We need to figure this out ourselves,” Fola said, pulling out her pager now from her pocket and typing a message to a very good friend of hers, a cybersecurity guy from one of the advanced computer science classes she took, who she knew she could trust with anything.
After all, she’d helped him evade his own criminal issues.
“That’s my alibi sorted,” Fola said, as cold and as calculated as ever, as though she did not just witness the most horrific sight.
As if her father was not currently impaled behind them.
She wiped her face and pocketed her pager. “Now you guys need to think of yours.”
“But the police—If we leave, if we don’t say anything, they’ll think this is murder. They’re going to have to arrest someone for this.” Bilal’s own face was now wet with tears.
“It should be me, I can tell the police it was me …” Octavius’s face was pink, hot tears coming in shock waves.
“No, I pushed him in the first place, it should be me,” Romeo said, breathing heavily and pacing the floor. “Oh God, I basically killed him. I’m a murderer! I should turn myself in—”
“No,” everyone said in unison.
“Guys, we really don’t have time for this, every second counts now.
” Fola tried to snap herself back into focus, but her mind was swimming, her eyes holding back a floodgate of tears.
“None of us are going to prison, okay? We’ll just have to make sure our alibis are watertight …
hope the police see this as a self-inflicted accident …
Or if it comes to it, we find a scapegoat,” Fola said, feeling nausea lurch inside her.
She patted her chest, trying to draw the bile back down her throat.
“A scapegoat? We can’t do that—” Perdita said quietly.
“Well, we might not have a fucking choice, will we?” Fola replied in a broken whisper. “Tavi isn’t going to prison and neither is Rome. We were all here, we all did this, and we all have to stick together. Okay? We are all one another have left in the world now.”
There were silent nods.
No one moved for a few moments, their nervous systems collectively doused in shock.
Bilal suddenly looked up at their impaled father, and did something that would somehow make everything ten times worse.
As if on autopilot, he moved past the frozen bodies of his siblings, over to the corpse of Mr. Button, and pulled him off of the horn. Instantly, he could feel the quick splutters of blood from the wound dribbling out, staining his white shirt a burnt crimson.
“Bilal, what the hell are you doing?” Perdita said, her eyes wide and glassy.
“I—I don’t know, I figured I should move him, make it l-look more accidental!
” he said, panicked as he felt more of his father’s blood splatter all over him.
In that panic his arms gave out and his father’s body fell to the ground with a thud.
Bilal scrambled to pull him, his father’s dead body, up again.
Fola looked ready to explode. “Bilal, when you broke your leg, did you also break your common sense? Rule number one of getting away with it, Do not touch the fucking body. Rule number two, Don’t fucking drop the body. Rule number three, Don’t pick it up again! ”
“Well, I’m sorry. I haven’t done this before, have I?” Bilal said, his voice shaking.
“None of us has, and yet none of us thought to do it but you. I swear you can be so thoughtless sometimes—”
“There she goes again, Father’s heartless mini-me,” Bilal cut her off sharply, feeling his own erratic heartbeat in his chest against his father’s lack of one.
“Stop this! Stop it! Stop fighting, this isn’t the time or place. You guys, we need a solution,” Perdita said.
Fola sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “All right,” she said. “Since Father has already been moved, we need to stage this. Put him back at his desk.”
Bilal quickly dragged their father over to the desk, struggling to maneuver him into a seated position at first, but with Romeo’s help, eventually managing to make him sit in a slumped-over fashion.
“What about Bilal’s hands?” Perdita asked. “They’ve been all over him.”
“And there’s blood on them,” Octavius said, gagging.
“With these things, forensics teams usually assume that DNA from family members would have been accumulated from casual interaction beforehand. Let’s hope that’s how they see it,” Fola said.
“And as for the blood … Billy should leave first, do not touch anything. Head over to one of the private bathrooms on this deck near the back. Make sure you wash your hands and clean the sink thoroughly. You’ll need to use one of the cleaning products with an active oxygen ingredient, that’ll make the blood traces undetectable.
Do it fast. There should be a lost-and-found room next to that.
You need to change quickly, but don’t leave that shirt behind—In fact, give it to me, I’ll get rid of it,” she said, holding her hand out now.
Bilal just stared at her in disbelief. She knew what he was thinking, what they were all thinking.
That she was heartless. But if that were true, she wouldn’t feel the excruciating ripping in her sternum.
“We need to erase any trace of Father from us as well as any traces of us from this moment,” she continued, as her wounded heart bled out in her chest. This seemed to be enough to make Bilal snap out of his dazed stupor and start unbuttoning the shirt.
He shoved it into her hands and she held it—stained in her father’s blood—in her shaky grasp without an ounce of confidence in the world about how she would get rid of something so stark.
So damning. If only she could hide this on her.
She looked over at Perdita’s ballgown and held the bloodied shirt out to her.
Perdita blinked at her and cowered back. “W-what do you what me to do with that?” she asked.
“You need to hide this in your dress, get it back to the house, and we’ll destroy it there.”
Perdita looked at the shirt wearily, clearly wanting to do anything else, but knew there was no other choice. So she shivered and took the shirt from her sister, careful not to touch the drying blood.
“What now?” Romeo asked the question that had been on all of their minds.
What now? Fola thought as she looked up at the bloodied horn protruding from the head of the taxidermy rhino that had just pierced her father’s neck. She remembered their awful lessons in taxidermy from years ago, how her father always liked to remove the horns of the animals he slaughtered …
That was it. That was what she needed to do.
Fola wouldn’t place the burden of dismantling and getting rid of the bloodied horn on her siblings.
She’d handle it, like she handled everything else.
She would get rid of the evidence. Keep her family from ruin.
She just hoped that no one would notice the difference between it and all the other dead creatures on the walls.
“Now we figure out alternate timelines,” Fola said, already thinking of how she might destroy the weapon.
Animal horns were made of keratin, softer than bone and thus easier to grind into dust. “We need to figure out places we could have been instead of down here. Try to stay largely unseen when we head back up. Hopefully the drones and the fireworks will keep the attentions of the guests. And the lights on the yacht have been dimmed for the display, so that should work in our favor,” she continued through bleary eyes, refusing to make eye contact with her father’s corpse.
“But most importantly, we need not to draw any suspicion toward us. From this point on we treat our false alibis as the truth. We pretend that this never happened,” she finished with as much certainty as she could muster, but it was all a lie.
She had no faith in this strategy working; there was no real science behind it. They very well could still be doomed.
But she would do all she could to make sure they wouldn’t be.
Their plan was far from perfect; in fact there was a strong possibility that they’d all be behind bars by Monday morning. They needed a whole ocean of luck to somehow stay in the good graces of the universe now.
Everything from that point on was a haze of uncertainty.
They had to get comfortable in that uncertainty. Things were never going to be the same.
There was only one thing that was certain now.
Their father was dead and they were to blame.