I Killed Zoe Spanos

by Kit Frick

  Unless Caden doesn’t go into the stable tonight. Unless he goes to the “servants’ wing” to read, or has a hankering to watch Cabin in the Woods or The Ring, or does some yard work, or does any of the other things he does around Windermere aside from hanging out in the stable with Pike and Jackie O. As long as he doesn’t check his stall tonight, I can get up super early tomorrow, while the Talbots are still sleeping, before Emilia and Tom come home, and return the flash drive and envelope to the exact spot where I found them.

  I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. Caden will never have to know.

  17 THEN

  July

  Herron Mills, NY

  MY ALARM DOESN’T WAKE ME.

  Sirens do.

  At two forty-five, I shove my feet into my sneakers and run out to the road along with the rest of Linden Lane. I can smell smoke; I choke on it. It’s close, coming over the tree line. Coming from Windermere.

  Three fire trucks crowd the street, along with an ambulance and two police cars. The neighbors are everywhere, milling. I look around for Caden, but I can’t find him.

  “What’s happening?” I ask a woman I know I’ve seen before. It takes me a moment to place her as Mrs. Cooper, Claudia’s mom, without all her black eye makeup.

  “The stable at Windermere,” she tells me. “Someone burned it to the ground.”

  PART III: A Fire

  Late last night when we were all in bed Old Lady Leary lit a lantern in the shed When the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said: There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight Fire, Fire, Fire!

  —Traditional children’s song

  18 NOW

  September

  Herron Mills, NY

  “WE’RE RECORDING.”

  “Thanks, I got it.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “Your last episode got a lot of play.” It’s not exactly a compliment, not exactly an accusation. Martina makes an active choice to ignore the subtext in Caden’s words and just press on. She’s waited a long time for this interview. Months. And she knows this is the only shot she’s going to get.

  “Eighteen thousand downloads and counting,” she says. “People wanted to hear Anna speak.” Martina is glad Caden can’t see her cheek twitch. Most people wanted to hear Anna. Except for Aster, who’s still not talking to her, and presumably the entire Spanos family. This is her chance to redeem herself in her best friend’s eyes. Caden knows more than he’s been letting on, more than he told police. She knows he does. If she can get him to reveal something on the record that could move the investigation forward, Aster will have to forgive her.

  On the other end of the line, Caden grunts. Martina tries to picture him in his dorm room at Yale. Or maybe he lives in a house off campus. She doesn’t really know much about his life, now that he’s gone again from Herron Mills, moving on into his junior year, his regular life falling back into place like none of this is happening. Or maybe that’s unfair. Maybe Caden is as fixated as she is, as hell-bent on learning the truth. But she doubts it.

  For her part, Martina is closed inside her bedroom closet. It’s not the ideal setup, with Mami downstairs and liable to interrupt her at any time, but it’s Saturday, and recording at home was the easiest option. At least the sound quality inside the closet is pretty great.

  “I agreed to speak with you about Anna Cicconi,” Caden says. “You had some questions?”

  Caden has made it very explicit to Martina that he will discuss Anna and only Anna during this interview. Not Zoe. Still, after all this time, not Zoe. And even though Martina is desperate to ask about what was happening between Zoe and Caden last winter—all the things she and Anna uncovered over the summer, after the first four episodes of the podcast had already aired—Martina will respect Caden’s stipulations. At least until the end of the interview, after she’s already gotten the tape she came for. Anything else is just a bonus.

  She knows Caden only—finally—agreed to this interview because of two things. One, the autopsy results have led to (as of yet unsubstantiated) talk of Anna’s legal team filing a motion to dismiss the charges against her. And Martina suspects that Caden is as conflicted about Anna’s possible involvement in Zoe’s death as she is. That, coupled with the fact that people are actually listening to Missing Zoe, spurred Caden to finally respond to her interview request. Episode Five aired on Tuesday; she doesn’t have a lot of time to get Episode Six together to meet her posting schedule. But whatever she can get from Caden today, even if it’s only a little, will entice people to press play.

  “Let’s start with the fire. Can you tell us what happened early in the morning of Monday, July sixth?”

  “Okay. Well, Mom and I had been in the city that weekend, visiting family friends. We’d only been home for a few hours.”

  “Your friends on the Upper West Side? The same friends you were visiting the night Zoe disappeared?”

  There’s a slight pause before Caden speaks. “I don’t know why that matters, but yes, the same friends. Doreen is a close friend of my mom’s from childhood. We visit them frequently.”

  “Okay, so you were in the city with Doreen and her family for the Fourth of July, and you drove home that Sunday?” Martina presses her head back into the soft fabric of the many vintage dresses hanging behind her.

  “We left the city in the early afternoon. Traffic was terrible, holiday weekend. We got home around four thirty or five, I don’t remember exactly.”

  “And the stable was fine that evening?”

  “I didn’t go inside that night, but Mom did. She took Jackie O. out for a ride soon after we got home. That’s one of her horses.”

  “And she didn’t mention anything concerning to you? No electrical problems, nothing like that?” Two and a half months later, and Martina knows charges were never filed against anyone in connection to the stable fire. She has reason to believe the fire was no electrical accident, no accident at all. But Caden doesn’t know what she knows. Whatever Caden tells her now, she’s willing to bet it won’t be the whole truth.

  “She didn’t, but it wouldn’t be like my mother to notice if the wiring was on the fritz. She’s very devoted to her horses, but she doesn’t maintain the stable herself.”

  “And who does that?”

  “Charlie Anderson. He runs an equestrian care business on the East End. He’d been out that afternoon, tending to the horses and doing some landscaping for us. The police spoke to him right after the fire. He wasn’t involved.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Completely. No stable, no business for Charlie. We’re boarding the horses in Pine Neck until we get the stable rebuilt. The first contractor fell through, and now that I’m back on campus, it’s slow going.”

  “So Charlie didn’t set the fire on purpose, but could it have been an accident? He was the last person known to be in the Windermere stable, aside from your mother.” Martina doesn’t really think Charlie was involved, but she wonders about Mrs. Talbot. How much she might have known about her son and his romantic relationships. What she might have seen—or seen missing—from Caden’s hiding spot. How deep her love for her son’s fiancée might have run.

  “Unlikely. Charlie was working at Windermere between noon and three that afternoon, give or take. The fire didn’t start until the middle of the night. By the time Kyra noticed the flames and called the police—she’s our neighbor at Magnolia House next door—it had burned almost entirely to the ground.”

  “The fire trucks came around two thirty?”

  “About that. That’s almost twelve hours after Charlie left. If there was an electrical short, it would have been from a light my mom left on, not Charlie. But that wasn’t what started the fire.”

  “You think it was arson?” Martina picks up a gray cardigan sweater that has fallen to the closet floor and fiddles absently with its buttons.

  “Someone opened the stable doors and let out the horses. It was most definitely arson.”

  For
once, Martina and Caden are on exactly the same page. “But the police didn’t agree?”

  “By the time the fire was out, there wasn’t much of the stable left to inspect. We keep a simple wooden latch on the doors; it opens with slight pressure from inside. It’s specifically designed so animals won’t be trapped in case of an emergency. In theory, the horses could have broken through their stalls and let themselves out, but they didn’t.”

  “How do you know?” Martina knows the answer already, but she needs Caden to say it for the podcast. It’ll make a great sound bite.

  “They weren’t panicked when Arvin and Jeffrey found them two houses over, at Seacrest. They were just grazing on their garden. There was no smoke on their fur. No burns, no wood splinters. They were never anywhere near that fire.”

  “But the police didn’t see this as compelling evidence of arson?” To Martina, as to Caden, it seems clear enough. It’s the identity of the arsonist that remains a mystery.

  “I guess not. The problem was, there was no evidence anyone had been on the Windermere property that night. No fire starters or accelerants found at the scene, although that doesn’t mean they weren’t used. Nothing to point to anything or anyone being involved. The stable and everything in it was completely destroyed; it’s a miracle the fire didn’t spread to the trees. They just didn’t have any leads to investigate.”

  “So let’s talk about Anna. She was there that night?”

  “I didn’t see her, but a couple of the neighbors remember speaking to her. Everyone on Linden Lane was out in the street, so it’s no surprise she was there.”

  “But you found her behavior strange?” Martina knows perfectly well why Anna’s behavior toward Caden changed after that night. It had nothing to do with the fire, not specifically. It was because of what Anna found inside the stable earlier that day. As far as she knows, Caden is still unaware that Anna discovered the card and flash drive. If they’d been inside the stall where they should have been that night, they would have burned along with everything else.

  “It’s not how Anna was acting that night. It’s how she started acting in the weeks after the fire.”

  “How’s that?” Martina drops the cardigan back to the floor and leans forward.

  “It’s hard to explain. Anna and I weren’t close exactly, but we’d gotten to know each other a little that summer. I was pretty tethered to Windermere, looking after my mom, so Anna would come over sometimes. We’d just watched a movie together earlier that week. And she’d been inside the stable before.”

  “So she had access?”

  “Well, as I mentioned, the stable wasn’t locked. Technically anyone with access to Windermere had access to the stable. You’d have to get through the entry gate out front, which has a security system, or break in through the hedge, I guess. But I’d shown Anna a shortcut through the trees between Clovelly Cottage and Windermere. So she knew how to get onto the grounds without going through the gate.”

  “I see.”

  “We’d made tentative plans to meet up that week, after Mom and I got back from the city. But after the fire, Anna started avoiding me, making excuses for why she couldn’t hang out. That was the first strange thing.”

  “And there was more? Behavior that seemed strange?” Martina is dying to hear Caden’s take. To understand how this escalated to the point where Anna confessed to manslaughter and concealing Zoe’s body.

  “When we did see each other, she started acting … weird. Describing in vivid detail places in Herron Mills she swore she’d never been. Asking a lot of questions about Zoe.”

  “Maybe she was curious, like everyone else.”

  “It wasn’t just curiosity. It was like she knew Zoe, or thought she did. She was trying to connect dots that just weren’t there.”

  “So you don’t think Anna knew Zoe. That Anna was there the night Zoe died.”

  “I don’t know. I did believe it at the time. I told Anna she had to go to the police, to tell them what she knew. When she confessed, it made sense. She’d convinced me. She knew too much about Zoe, about us. But now that the autopsy results have come back, now that we know Zoe didn’t fall from the balcony, now it’s all starting to sound a bit absurd. People kept telling her she looked like Zoe. This whole town was trying to solve the mystery of what happened. I think she became obsessed with the idea of some connection between them that just wasn’t there.”

  Martina takes a deep breath. This might go south real fast, but if it does, she has what she needs. “I want to go back a minute, to something you said earlier.”

  “Okay?”

  “For a person on foot, it wouldn’t be hard to get onto the Windermere grounds through a break in the hedge, or from one of the surrounding properties.”

  “Yeah, it’s not exactly high security. All the houses around here are like that.”

  “And the night Zoe disappeared, no one was home at Windermere.”

  “Right …”

  “So why didn’t you tell police you found evidence of someone drinking in the Windermere stable when you got home from the city on the afternoon of January first?”

  “What the—?”

  “After Zoe’s body was found last month, that’s when you told police what you discovered back in January. That someone had been in the stable while you were in the city. You found an empty whiskey bottle and several empty bottles of beer. But instead of telling police, you disposed of the bottles.”

  “I obviously didn’t think they had anything to do with Zoe.” Caden’s voice is thin.

  “The police could have used a print kit, found out who was in the stable that night. But instead, you threw the bottles away.”

  “If this doesn’t have anything to do with Anna—”

  “But I think it does. Because here’s my question. Who do you think was drinking in the stable that night? Was it Zoe? Anna? Were you there?”

  “I was in the city, as you know. I have no idea who was drinking in the stable that night. As you’ve just established, literally anyone on foot could have gotten in.”

  “A suspect pool that could have been significantly narrowed if you’d have told police about the bottles right away.”

  “We didn’t have any reason to believe Zoe had been anywhere near Windermere that night. Not until Anna confessed to being there with her. Why would I think some empty bottles in the stable had anything to do with Zoe or her disappearance?”

  “Maybe because Zoe Spanos was your fiancée. Maybe because she was at Windermere all the time, and knew you kept whiskey in the stable.”

  “Zoe didn’t drink. She was on antianxiety meds, as has, at this point, been well-publicized. Zoe drinking alone or with anyone else in the stable was not a remote possibility in my mind.”

  “Did Zoe know you were falling for someone else? Did she know about Tiana?”

  There’s no sound on the other end of the line. Martina stares at her phone screen and waits for confirmation. Caden has ended the call.

  19 THEN

  July

  Herron Mills, NY

  AT SOME POINT I go back to bed, but I can’t really sleep. When my alarm rings at four, I stare blankly at my phone. There’s nowhere to return the pilfered items to. The stable is gone.

  My brain cycles into overdrive, the possibilities tumbling around like wet towels in the dryer. Caden going into the stable last night, finding his things missing. Caden starting the fire. Someone else—who?—who knew about Caden’s hiding spot, what I took. The mystery girl from the photos, whoever she is. Mrs. Talbot, maybe. Or Zoe, if she’s out there.

  The timing can’t be a coincidence. Whoever set that fire knew that someone had been in the stable. The fire was either a message for me to back off, or an attempt to cover up what I’d done. Stop digging.

  It hits me that one way or the other, the fire starter probably doesn’t know it was me. They didn’t target me directly; the fire sent a message that would reach anyone who took the flash drive.

&nbs
p; By the time the sun comes up, I’m exhausted and no closer to any answers. Caden seems like the most likely candidate; he definitely knew what he had hidden. The card suggests he didn’t have anything to do with Zoe’s disappearance, that he was waiting for her to come home. But he left the flash drive there too. And what’s on it definitely doesn’t make him look good. He was engaged to Zoe, but he wanted to be with someone else. That’s motive.

  A sinister voice at the back of my head says Caden could have staged the scene in the stall. That the card wasn’t ever there for Zoe to find. But then my mind gutters out when I try to unravel who he was staging it for. Much as I don’t want to believe it, Caden might be responsible for Zoe’s disappearance—or even death.

  I make myself take a shower, apply aloe, make breakfast. Tom and Emilia will be back sometime this afternoon. Paisley returns tonight. And then tomorrow morning, it’s back to business as usual at Clovelly Cottage. If I’m going to do anything with what I found, it has to be today.

  At a quarter till eleven, I set off on foot toward Jenkins’ Creamery, taking the quicker way into town, past Windermere. The estate looks quiet, at least from the outside. Nothing lingers from last night’s commotion, and there’s no view of whatever remains of the stable from the road. I pause briefly at the entry gate, but then I keep going. I don’t want to see Caden. I don’t know what I’d say.

  When I arrive at the ice-cream shop, they’re just opening up. To my disappointment, it’s not Martina behind the counter, or her dad. The girl in the white apron is blond and unfamiliar.

  “What can I get for you?” she asks with a sweet smile.

  “I’m actually looking for Martina. Is she in today?”

  “Martina!” she calls into the back. “Visitor.”

  A minute later, Martina emerges from the back of the shop, white apron draped over what looks like another vintage dress, green this time.