Presumption of Guilt

by Rachel Sinclair

  “I needed to talk to you about a few things. I understand that you might be in here involuntarily. And my firm sent me down here to to speak with you to see if there’s anything that you needed.”

  He shook his head. And then he started watching the television again. “No, amigo. I mean, I was put in here against my will. But I kinda like it in here. I don’t really want to leave. So I guess you’re kind of barking up the wrong tree, aren’t you?”

  Aidan took a deep breath. “I was also going to ask you about a girl that you knew. Her name was Aria Whitmore. Do you know anything about her?”

  He looked at Aidan and then turned his attention to the TV again. “I don’t know nobody named Aria Wentworth. I know somebody who said she was Aria Wentworth but she really wasn’t. I could never forgive her for doing what she did, but I could kind of understand it.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean when you say that you knew somebody who said she was Aria but she really wasn’t?”

  “I had an amiga, her name was Sophia Delgado. She came up with me, out of Mexico. I got to come over here legally, I was a winner of a lottery visa, and I brought her with me. She wasn’t legal. She had no papers. But she had to get out of Mexico because there were some gang members who were trying to kill her. She was a prostitute, but she got in with the wrong crowd. The very wrong crowd. The worst kind.”

  Aidan was confused as to why it was that this guy was talking about this Sophia Delgado. “Okay. So you knew somebody by the name of Sophia Delgado. And she was in this country illegally, and she came over with you. And you are here legally. Is that what you’re saying to me, dude?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. So she goes and she’s with this rich couple. A couple of rich weirdos over on Coronado. Sophia. She goes over there, pretending to be their daughter. All of a sudden, she’s going by a different name. Calling herself Aria or some shit. I told her that that she shouldn’t be doing it, but she told me that she had no choice. She told me that there ain’t no way she’s going back to Mexico. She goes back to Mexico, she’s a dead woman. She stole money from some gang members down there. You don’t do that, you don’t do that unless you want to get burned alive. She told me that this family said that she could live with them, and call herself Aria, and they wouldn’t turn her into the authorities. I found out later on that even though she came over with me, and she didn’t have papers, she went ahead and applied for asylum. They gave her asylum. This was seven years ago, though, this was before all this other crap started going down in this country. It was before we started putting kids in cages and shit like that.”

  Aidan was extremely confused as to what this guy was saying. “Wait, so you’re saying that she lived with this couple, and she said that her name was Aria?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, amigo. I’m saying that she went to live with this couple and started calling herself Aria. I didn’t agree with what she was doing, I thought it was weird. I mean, they had some dead girl by the name of Aria, or something like that, I don’t really know, all I know is that that’s what happened to her. That was okay, I was happy that I could still hang out with her. We were just friends, nothing more than that. And she came around with me a lot, when she could sneak out of that house. That dungeon that she was living in. I just don’t know how anybody could live like that. Those were two strange people, those Whitmores.”

  Aidan had no idea exactly what was going on here. And he didn’t even know if he could believe this guy. After all, he was apparently mentally imbalanced in some way. Aidan obviously wasn’t privy to his chart. He could have asked for it if he wanted to, they would have given it to him, but he didn’t want to go that far. He knew that he was in danger of getting into hot water as it was, just by being there.

  “Can I ask a question?” Aidan probed.

  “Sure, ask away.”

  “ Your friend, Sophia, did she happen to be a genius on the piano?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she never really was able to play an instrument when she was living in Mexico. She was too poor. But she was always writing music, always, and I’ve known her since the age of five. She wasn’t able to even afford to buy those sheets where you can put the notes on, so she made her own. I don’t know, she was doing that before she could write her name. But yeah, she came up here, and she saw the piano and started a playing it like she’d been playing it for her entire life. She had it in her. Why do you ask that question?”

  “I was just wondering.”Aidan was starting to get the picture, but it was still just a little bit hazy. His sister had told him that there was an issue with Aria, and that she had been in a car accident at the age of 14. But how this Sophia Delgado person fit into all of it, he didn’t know.

  “And where is Sophia Delgado now?” Aidan asked him.

  “Dead, man. She got strangled in her own home. She was strangled in the guesthouse of the home that she lived at.” Then he started to speak in Spanish. “When I found out that she had been strangled, that was when I went crazy. I started having delusions, I started hearing voices talk to me. That’s how I ended up here, because the voice told me to take off all my clothes and run naked through the streets. Then I started screaming as I was running, because I felt somebody chasing after me.”

  “What did Sophia look like?” Aidan asked.

  “She was a Guero,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”

  “That means that she was fair, is that right?” Aidan asked.

  “Yeah. White. Blue eyes, blonde hair. Looked like a Barbie doll.”

  “You don’t happen to have a picture of her, do you?”

  “Yeah. I do. I got my phone here. They let me have phone privileges here, because I haven’t been acting up or nothing. Let me go and get it.”

  He went over to his drawer, and got the phone out of it. Then he went to look at it, scrolling through the pictures, smiling as he went. “Here it is, here’s a picture of me and her.”

  Aidan looked at the picture. It was Aria. He had seen her picture in the papers, in magazines, online, everywhere. “This is the woman who is known as Aria,” Aiden said kind of dumbly.

  “No shit, amigo. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I told you that she came to this country, she got protected status, and then she became somebody else.”

  “So, when she became this other person, did you say anything to anybody about it?”

  “No, man. She told me not to say a word. She told me that she had to do it, because the people that she was staying with, they were going to do something that would get her deported. She was protected by the government, and everything, but apparently she was afraid of those people. She said that they were responsible for her becoming protected, they pulled some strings with immigration judges or some shit, and they said that just as sure as they pulled those strings, they could pull some other ones and get her sent back to where she came from. So she told me that I can’t say a word about who she really was. And, I was gonna say nothing. Why would I say anything to anybody? Why do I really care? I mean, I didn’t like that she was kind of walking away from who she was, I thought who she was was great, but, at the same time, I knew that she had her reasons for doing what she did. And that’s all I knew.”

  “Who else knew that this person who was going by the name of Aria was actually this Sophia person?”

  “Nobody knew. Just me. The only reason why I knew was because she came up here with me. It was just the two of us. So nobody knew.”

  Aidan didn’t know what else to ask this guy. He was anxious to go in and see his sister and tell her what he found out. And then maybe Regina would be able to get to the bottom of exactly what had happened. This entire scenario somehow fit in with everything else he had learned about Aria from his sister and from Regina. Namely, that Aria was in an accident at the age of 14, and that she did not play the piano when she was younger. It all fit in. Perhaps the real Aria died in the car accident, and this Sophia person took her place? But that didn’t make much se
nse to him. Why would a family do something like that? It’s not like the family was desperate to have another daughter, because, after all, apparently this Jacob guy only wanted sons. And he ignored her anyways.

  So, if she died, she died. He couldn’t imagine why it would be that if the real Aria had died that they would just replace her with an imposter. And how would that even work? You can’t just substitute one person for another. Everybody would be suspicious about that. The teachers, her friends, everybody.

  There was something else that he was not seeing. And, of course, there was always a possibility that this Julian guy was mistaken about this entire thing. After all, he was in the mental institution because he had been having delusions. Perhaps he was delusional about Aria - that she was somebody else. The whole thing could just be fabricated in his entire head.

  But, at the same time, it all made a kind of sense. Because he couldn’t figure out why it was that a rich girl like Aria would’ve been hanging around with this Julian person to begin with. How would she have even known him? It was entirely possible that perhaps, like Regina had said, she was doing drugs and she was palling around with people in that area. But, at the same time, Julian was not known to be somebody who was a drug dealer. So that would not explain why she would have been palling around with him.

  Aidan stood up and held out his hand. “Listen, I’m really glad that you were able to meet with me. You’ve been a big help. More than you know.”

  “ My pleasure, amigo. De nada.”

  Aidan left, and immediately planned to call his sister. He was anxious to tell her what it was that he found out from this guy.

  But as he was walking out of the building, a van pulled up. Before he knew what was happening, two guys with masks forced him into the back. Before he had time to react, somebody had put something over his mouth.

  And that was the last thing that he could remember.

  Chapter 22

  Homeless woman

  The woman gingerly got out of her tent. She had pitched a tent on the beach, and, for the past two nights, she’d been lucky enough to go ahead and stay there. Usually nobody was able to stay on the public beaches overnight. The beach cops would come along and make sure that everybody was gone by a certain time, usually around 3 AM. But she was lucky enough that nobody had chased her off just yet. And, in her sleeping bag, inside the tent, listening to the ocean waves at night, she was able to actually sleep through the night for the first time in she could not remember how long. Because she was getting more sleep, her mind was clearing up.

  She was going to have to see Avery Collins. She was going to have to find a way to see her. She had finally read in the paper that her daughter, Aria, was murdered. At first, she was devastated.

  But then she realized that she had really no reason to be devastated. Because Aria had died, but she had died years before. Somehow, her brain had not let her imagine that to be true. Somehow, she had always thought that her daughter, the young girl who she dearly loved, was still alive. She thought that she could see her again.

  She was lucid these days. She was living in reality, and the reality was that her daughter was dead, her son was in a mental institution, and her husband hadn’t spoken with her in years. Not that she really cared that Jacob had not spoken with her in years. He was the cause of most of her problems. After all, he was aware that her mother had an issue with schizophrenia. He knew that there is a good chance that she, too, would also be schizophrenic, because schizophrenia was inherited.

  Yet, what he did to her after her daughter had died, and she was on the edge, pushed her further over the edge. She was showing signs after her daughter had died that she was ready to go off the deep end. She was hearing voices, she was imagining her daughter was still there, she was also imagining her mother was there. She was talking to people who weren’t there. Her husband had seen that. And when he did, he pushed her even further over the edge.

  Now that she was lucid, as she was from time to time, she knew what her husband did. He had encouraged her to take drugs. When she told him that she was feeling out of sorts, he said that his doctor had told him that the best thing for her was to take LSD and amphetamines. When she told him that she didn’t want to take those drugs, he gave her an article that talked about how LSD was used to treat mental illness, that showed that psychoactive symptoms could be helped with a dosage of LSD. He told her that that was a common method of therapy and that his doctor was still a believer in it. He didn’t bother to tell her that the LSD therapy involved microdoses. That was the important thing - tiny doses of LSD have been shown to alleviate symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses. But that’s not what he gave her. He gave her large doses.

  She didn’t really know whether to believe her husband or not. She was very naïve, and tended to believe anything Jacob said. If he said something to her, she believed it. She just saw the article that was given to her by her husband, it was an article in Newsweek, so she just took it as gospel that LSD was something that she should be using to treat her mental illness. It didn’t occur to her that she needed to actually see a psychiatrist. Jacob told her that she didn’t need to. She just faithfully went with anything that her husband told her, as she always did.

  What happened after she had taken LSD for a period of several weeks was that she went into a full-blown psychosis. That was when she was institutionalized, and her husband abandoned her. She went into an alternate reality, one where her daughter was clearly still alive. She wasn’t just seeing her from time to time, talking to her out in the backyard, like she was before. She actually was living in a place in her mind where her daughter had not died. And that was comforting to her. The six months that she stayed in that mental hospital when she had her breakdown were the best of her life. Her daughter was with her every single day, and her son had not been put into an institution himself.

  It took her a long time to realize that what really happened was that her son apparently had killed her daughter, and after that, he was put into an institution. He was never tried for her murder though. Why was that? That was still something that was a black hole in her brain. She didn’t know exactly what happened after she went into the institution. All that she knew was that, according to the entire world, Aria had never died in the first place. That was something that she found out when she tried to go home one day. She had been released from the mental institution, and she went back to her house, and she saw somebody there. She looked just like Aria, but she wasn’t her.

  She saw neighbors there. She tried to tell them that Aria was dead, but they told her that that wasn’t true. She was alive. She looked different, because she apparently had been in an accident, in Mexico, and was in a coma for six months. Then, apparently because her face was so scarred from the accident, she had extensive plastic surgery. And, even as Aria’s mother, the woman fell for that line. In fact, that was the story that her own husband had given to her. When she came home, and saw the young girl who looked just like her daughter, but not quite, Jacob had simply told her that she had imagined that Aria was killed. That that was just apparently a nightmare, and, after all, she had just been released from the mental hospital. Nothing that she had seen was real. Nothing that she had imagined had happened was real.

  So she accepted this new girl as being her daughter. But it wasn’t long before Jacob had informed her that she could no longer be on the premises. They had been divorced, and he had a restraining order against her. She wasn’t going to be allowed to see her daughter anymore, either. She had nothing.

  So she had to leave. And, by that time, her mind was so fragile, and her spirit was so broken, that she just left the house willingly. She felt even more psychotic after seeing the girl who looked like her daughter. She didn’t understand what was real, and what was not real, and that was the way she that lived her life for all these years.

  But, sometimes when she was lucid, she understood exactly what had happened. And this was one of those times. This was one of thos
e rare times when she understood exactly what the reality was. And she understood that her daughter really had died all those years ago. And somehow, someway, somebody else had taken her place. Someone that she didn’t know.

  And that new person was now dead.

  And she had to see the attorney for Esmeralda Gutierrez. She had to see her and tell her the truth.

  It was very important, because she knew that her husband was a murderer.

  Chapter 23

  “Aidan!” I screamed as I ran over to him, and threw my arms around him. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Listen, sis, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t able to see that dude. I thought that my usual charm would carry me through, and I did see everybody I knew down there, but they still wanted to have a patient code for him. I don’t know, they usually trust me, but not this time.”

  My heart fell. “That’s too bad, but I guess he was a patient there? Did you at least find that out?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t even find that much out. Sorry sis.”

  “So where have you been?” I demanded, suddenly feeling enraged. “You went over there yesterday afternoon, and you haven’t been back since. I thought that something had happened to you.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, man. What can I say, I got distracted. I was so disappointed about not being able to see that dude that I went over to Tommy’s house, and we smoked a bowl. Next thing I know, I’m waking up on his porch, and I don’t really remember what had happened yesterday.”

  I wanted to kill him. I wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. “And your phone? I’ve been calling you since yesterday. Aidan, I don’t think that I need to put up with this crap from you anymore. I ask you to do one thing, one goddamn thing, and you can’t get it done. I mean, I understand that you can’t get it done. If they’re not gonna let you see him, then they’re not going to let you see him. There’s not much that you can really do. But to disappear like that, and not even call me, that’s just….” I shook my head and started pacing the floor. “I thought you were dead. Dammit, I thought you were dead, and that it was my fault. And now here you are, telling me that you’re not dead, but that you were just stoned. At this point, I wish you were dead.”