“Ready,” I answer, as if the voice can hear me. I’ve cleared my desk of Sophie’s framed scribbles and all the photos of Dex, even the one his mother took at law school graduation. Gone, too, is the tiny nubbin of peat Dex carried home from Scotland, and the grapefruit-scented candle he brought me from Harrods. I kept only one remembrance, a dappled fist-size rock he’d found, its bulky heft smoothed by the Aegean.
I blink away tears. There’ll never be another gift from him.
“Thirty seconds,” the voice announces. I envision an assistant director in a plaid shirt, maybe tortoiseshell glasses and unruly hair, seated at a flickering console inside the mobile broadcast studio, an unmarked white van parked in the lot behind the courthouse.
Is there truly a white van? Is there truly a flickering bank of controls? Here at my desk, I conjure the aging stone and granite courthouse, the constant battle for parking in a crumbling asphalt lot, pungent and sticky in Boston’s ridiculously unbearable September. The reporters, lugging tote bags and cell phones and spiral notebooks. I’ve seen these things so many times, why should it be any different now?
But maybe the van is blue. Maybe everything is different. It is for me.
“Attention stations,” the voice says. “You may roll tape. We’re about to hear the opening statement from District Attorney Royal Spofford.”
CHAPTER THREE
“They found the decomposing remains of that beautiful child in a garbage bag,” the district attorney told the jury. The full-color crime scene photographs—grotesque and unforgiving—glowed on the courtroom projector screen.
I’d closed my eyes against them and listened to the DA. Until I couldn’t bear it. Now, balancing one hand on the cool porcelain of the toilet, eyes closed again, I wipe a slimy strand of hair away from my face. I can’t breathe. Or think. Or see straight.
My imagination is holding me hostage.
The pictures DA Royal Spofford showed were as real as if I’d been standing on that beach at Castle Island. As if I’d seen the choking strands of seaweed twining around that pink-clad leg. As if I’d been there when the black Labrador found her. Bloated. Murdered. Dead. In a trash bag.
My stomach wrenches again, gags with the memory. That woman, dumping her own daughter. Her own daughter! A little girl is not disposable.
My knees ache, even though my bathroom rug is thick and soft. I’m fine now. I’m fine. With one last wrenching breath, I push myself to my feet.
I stand, almost dizzy, my vision dim and my back aching. I feel my heart struggle, my brain unable to focus. My mouth tastes disgusting.
Royal Spofford had assured the jury, and all of us watching in bars and offices and livingrooms, that he would prove only one person responsible for that poor little body.
“Only Ashlyn,” the DA told them, “had the access, the motive, the opportunity, and the power to snatch life from angelic little Tasha Nicole. You will hear how Ashlyn Bryant decided the daughter she brought into the world hindered her nightclubbing lifestyle. You will hear how Ashlyn Bryant, with malice aforethought, extinguished that child’s innocent life with chloroform and duct tape. Then, thinking only of herself, tried to cover up her unspeakable crime.
“Only Ashlyn.” He made it a mantra, shaking his head. “Only Ashlyn.”
I wipe the tears from my eyes, flap down the toilet seat, and flush, my body dank and clammy, my T-shirt clinging to my back. I picture my darling Sophie, all of us, on that very beach. The wind in her curls, and the sun spackling the harbor. Dex and me, hand in hand, knowing we’d all live forever.
“I love you every day,” I whisper. “I am so sorry.”
The only thing that’ll make this better—and I apologize mentally to the otherwise-admired Quinn McMorran—is the bullshit I am about to hear from Dex’s pal, the defense attorney. My tablet had taped her opening statement for me as I sprinted to the bathroom.
I can’t wait to hear that load of alternative facts. My darling Dex would disapprove of my scorn, but I still wonder how Quinn McMorran can defend such scum. I’m supposed to talk to her on the phone “possibly Wednesday.” She’d made it clear she agreed only as a “favor” because of her respect for Dex. I get ten minutes. Fine.
I peel off my T-shirt, yank on a clean one, make some tea, go sit at my desk again. It’s late, after four, and trial’s in recess until tomorrow. I’m okay. I really am.
“Let’s hear what you can do, Quinn,” I tell the screen. “May the jury sneer at your every word.”
I touch Dex’s heavy Aegean rock for luck, take a breath, and push Play.
On the video, a navy-suited Quinn McMorran stands up. Her short auburn hair, now unabashedly showing its gray, illustrates her experience on the legal battlefield, case for case as much a veteran as her DA adversary. She places her hand on Ashlyn Bryant’s shoulder. Ashlyn’s about half her age, twenty-four. The papers report they’re “like mother and daughter.” Ashlyn looks up at her as if it’s more like savior and victim.
“Gimme a break,” I mutter. But I’m riveted.
“I’ll be brief,” the defense attorney promises the jury. “You don’t need me to tell you that under our Constitution, a person is innocent until proven guilty. Our legal system makes it the prosecution’s burden to prove—beyond a reasonable doubt—that the defendant is guilty. That means they have to prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That the defendant killed the victim without justification, and that it was premeditated. That she intended to do it. With premeditation. With atrocity and cruelty. Bottom line, they must prove how and when Tasha Nicole was killed. And how ‘only Ashlyn’ could have done that.”
Quinn lets out a breath. The courtroom is so still, I can hear her whoosh of air. She lifts her chin, then points to Ashlyn.
“Sitting here, facing you, my client Ashlyn Bryant is innocent. Neither she nor I have to prove that. It is already a fact.”
Quinn McMorran lays out her defense case for seventeen more minutes. No witnesses, no fingerprints, no DNA, no hair samples, no surveillance. No evidence whatsoever linking Ashlyn Bryant to the death of her beloved daughter. Apparently the director is having trouble following her movements and cueing the camera changes, so I see her back, then her face, briefly out of focus.
She finally faces the jury full on. “Over the next week or so, my learned colleague will try to dazzle you with computer searches and scary words and some family disagreements. But every time, ask yourself, so what? What does that prove?”
“Puh-leeze,” I say out loud. I punch off the video and talk back to the blank screen. “It proves the monster is guilty as hell.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It’s not like I can’t leave the house. I do it when I need to. Even drive. But when I do I can’t avoid seeing the driveway, and our street, and that tree. Four hundred and forty-three days ago they took away the crumpled car. Took away my family, too. When I’m out in public, I can’t avoid people asking if I’m okay. I’m not. Of course I’m not.
But now, alone at my desk and ready to write, I can focus on another little girl. Thanks to the relentless coverage, I’ve compiled a gold mine of material. Interviews. Photographs. Video from local and national news. Katherine had dropped off a stack of revealing documents, including the Dayton police reports and inside investigative stuff her sources gave her, so now I’ll devour that, too. I’ll double-check the facts when I can. It’ll feel real, all right.
Instead of using today’s opening statements, I’ll open the book with an inside look at Ashlyn Bryant’s parents. A personal take on their then-missing granddaughter. After a chapter or two of buildup, I’ll do Day One of the trial.
It’s tricky.
The order of the book, chronological from beginning to end, won’t follow the actual order of the trial, which will go witness to witness. Two stories underway at once. Mine, and Ashlyn’s.
Two weeks after the verdict, Ashlyn Bryant will be sentenced. As soon as the judge sends her away for life, the p
ublisher wants my book ready to go. That means the two weeks between verdict and sentencing will be a writing marathon. And of course, I’ll have to add the ending.
Ending? She killed her own daughter! My brain almost screams at me. While you were burying yours.
It had almost confused me, if I could have been any more confused fourteen months ago, when news broke that they’d found the body of a little girl on the beach. A spectacular June day—sunny, and sadistically gorgeous. I had just managed to walk out of Dex and Sophie’s funeral. With everything else going on, Dex’s mom had tried to keep the story from me, best she could. Someone at the cemetery, I forget who, actually told me about Baby Boston. Of course back then, no one knew who she really was.
Well, Ashlyn did.
I look at my almost-blank laptop screen. I delete, letter by letter, “DAY ONE.” I replace it by typing something else in the manuscript. The title I just thought of.
LITTLE GIRL LOST
Where was their Tasha Nicole?
Sun-battered and dry as only western Ohio can be, Dayton was breathtakingly hot that summer day. Inside their modest Laughtry Drive split-level in a beige and concrete suburb, the little girl’s grandparents, Tom and Georgia Bryant, were telling a story that made no sense.
Georgia—pale lipstick, a hint of brown eye shadow, and wearing a sleeveless top studded with tiny pink pearls—was a devoted homemaker. Solicitous and insistently helpful. She looked too young to be a grandmother. Tom, a retired insurance adjuster gone gray, sat silently beside her on the gold damask couch, stiff-backed in shorts and a knit polo shirt, a glass of iced tea sweating in his hand.
Georgia’s words tumbled out, as if she couldn’t reveal the mystifying information about their daughter, Ashlyn, quickly enough. Ashlyn Louise, their only child. “I’ll start at the beginning,” she said to a reporter.
Since the moment Ashlyn gave birth to Tasha Nicole, two years ago August at Edgewater Hospital, the sunny good-natured child filled her grandparents’ lives. Ashlyn and Tashie didn’t move out of the Bryant’s house to an apartment until a year or so ago, after Ashlyn insisted she was “too old to live with her parents.”
“At age twenty-two? I had to admit she had a point,” Georgia said. “But Tashie needed us. I insisted we see her. Every day.”
And to the Bryant grandparents’ joy, every morning at 8:45 Ashlyn dropped off the little girl. Tom scooped the child up in his arms the moment she arrived, and she’d coo with delight. The doting couple would read Tasha Nicole picture books. Laugh as she learned to count. An adorable girl, a darling girl. They couldn’t get enough of her.
But one morning, Tasha and Ashlyn didn’t show up. Ashlyn called and made an excuse. Again, the next day. Then every day for a week.
“I kept asking Ashlyn, where is our Tashie?” Georgia’s worried eyes filled with tears of anxiety as she remembered. “Didn’t I, hon?”
Tom nodded, silent.
“Ashlyn always had an answer,” Georgia went on. “She was in day care. On a playdate. Once Ash said she wanted Tashie to bond with her new boyfriend. Remember that, hon? In that mocking voice she always used. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said.”
But Georgia had worried. Days went by. A week. Two. Ashlyn eventually ignored Georgia’s calls. “Tasha sends love,” Ashlyn once texted. “See you soon.” Three weeks passed.
Georgia drove to Ashlyn’s apartment at all times of the day and night. Called, too. But no one was there. That is, no one never answered the door. Or the phone.
Where were they?
Tom sipped his tea. Shooed away one of their pesky spaniels. After ten years in the insurance biz back in Minnesota, he knew about family troubles. This had the makings of disaster. But he let his wife talk.
Yes, she admitted, she and Ashlyn had their moments. Ash was headstrong. Manipulative. Demanding. Ambitious. Yes, Georgia was sure she’d been too easy on her only child. But Ashlyn always wanted to be “free” of her “loser” family. She had quit college, and was always on the hunt for a new job, a new life, a richer man.
Georgia picked up a small silver-framed photo. Ashlyn Louise Bryant. Slim, hazel-eyed, pouting glossed lips, and a clinging V-neck sweater. Now she did some part-time work in some—someplace. It was never clear where. Ashlyn would never talk about Tasha’s father. She still had a room of her own, though, here in the house where she grew up. Tashie had a room, too.
“Ashlyn loves Tasha Nicole, I know she does.” Georgia’s voice caught. “And Tasha loves her.”
Georgia opened a pink leather-bound album, “Tasha Nicole” embossed in script on the cover. She turned to a recent photo where her granddaughter, wide-eyed, honey hair, tiny teeth, and wearing Hello Kitty overalls, stood on the seat of a backyard swing set, a chain gripped in each pudgy hand. In another photo, she clutched a purple crayon, a coloring book of baby animals open on a table in front of her. Tasha was too young to stay in the lines.
But now—where was she?
“Where was she?” I ask the question out loud as I type, then lean back in my chair, stare at my words, and read my first scene again. I’ll have to check on the timeline, but I mentally pat myself on the back. Pretty good for a first draft. And I don’t feel like throwing up anymore.
“Good job, Mercer,” I say. Since there’s no one else to say it.
It’s ten after two in the morning. Court recessed yesterday at five. I’ve been writing almost nonstop since then. I should sleep, but I’m too revved.
I’ll make a list of questions so I won’t forget anything.
Tasha Nicole’s father? is first on my yellow legal pad. Who is he? Where? From all accounts, the unmarried Ashlyn never told her parents who the child’s father was. Some stories implied she didn’t know. More than implied. WHO’S HER DADDY? one headline sneered. MURDERED TOT HAS MYSTERY FATHER! But certainly that will come out at trial. Will the “mystery father” be called as a witness?
I sip from my second, okay, third, glass of pinot.
This is a challenge. I’ve got to re-create reality, so, unavoidably, I’ll have to imagine much of it. In other words, make it up. Some scenes that I’ll describe, like the one I just wrote, will be near-fiction. I’ve never been in the Bryant’s suburban living room, but I’m relying on magazine pictures and TV reports. Is that fair? Too late now to second-guess.
Besides the duel of opening statements, two moments of Day One caught my ear. Made me lean closer to my monitor.
First—when Ashlyn Bryant walked in. Not wearing her orange prison jumpsuit, Quinn McMorran would never have allowed that. The defense attorney is obviously trying to bamboozle jurors with her client’s loose dark sweater, baggy skirt, and black tights—it’s still like summer!—hoping sartorial modesty shorthands her client’s innocence. It didn’t fool me.
The other moment—and maybe this was also at Quinn’s direction, but I bet it was Ashlyn’s own personal power move—Ashlyn had angled her chair so her face was off camera.
At one point, though, Ashlyn deliberately turned to the camera. She tucked her now-darker hair behind one bare ear, then looked up from under her lashes. The photographer seemed to get her come-hither signal. As he zoomed closer, Ashlyn’s face, a makeup-free mask of phony cinematic sorrow and, I had to admit, almost beauty, seemed to entreat the lens. Caress it, as if to promise—I did nothing wrong, I’m simply a grieving mother.
Yeah, well, I thought. Join the crowd.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Happy Tuesday, trial-watchers. Got your coffee? You may roll tape in black,” Voice breaks into the morning silence of my study. “Fifteen seconds.”
I’d tried to name the voice. Give it a personality. But every name I came up with haunted me. Mickey—too much like Dex’s beloved Yankees. Mr. Darcy—never. Tigger? Never.
So he’s just Voice. That way he doesn’t have to be like anything else. “Thank you, Voice,” I reply. Might as well be polite, even to an empty room.
I’m prepared for Baby Boston Day Two,
back at my desk, laptop open. Two cups of French roast. Toast, burnt around the edges, easier to put up with it than to fix the toaster. I have no idea how to fix a toaster. Dex would have taken care of it. And I’m not much interested in food, anyway, since everything. The video monitor pings its welcoming trill, but the courtroom is still in black.
One big question: will Ashlyn eventually testify?
If I’d been accused of killing my daughter, I’d leap right on to that stand. I’d demand my day in court. How could any parent not do that?
Unless they’re guilty.
I’d love to hear her, though. Hear her attempt to testify her way out of this. It could provide an entire chapter on self-delusion and self-centered melodrama. Ashlyn testify? I write on my list.
Talk about drama. If District Attorney Royal Spofford stays on schedule, we’re about to hear from the woman whose curious black Lab wouldn’t stop barking at something on the beach at Castle Island.
I stare at the dark monitor, envisioning it. The woman, khaki pants and fleece vest, maybe, walks the expanse of rocky shore, smelling the salt air, maybe picking up shells, the newly risen June sun sparkling on Boston Harbor, her dog frolicking, then stopping, barking, insistent. Poignant, and intensely disturbing. Because every reader will know what her dog found.
How did body get to beach? I write. Tides?
Today’s other testimony will be from Bryce Overbey, the Boston detective who opened that green trash bag to find a murdered child. He’s the one who dubbed the then-anonymous victim “Baby Boston.” I hope I can stand it. I have to, though. It’s the truth.
Why hasn’t court started? In the pixelated blackness of the video screen, I imagine Ashlyn’s face. Not good-girl Ashlyn from yesterday, all demure for the camera. The other Ashlyn. The schemer, the bad seed, who’d finally exploded after a big fight with her mother.
I open my Little Girl Lost file, switching my brain into storytelling mode. I’ll use this time to write about how even before Tasha’s body was found, Ashlyn’s mother began to get suspicious. I type in a new chapter heading. This time, I get to be Ashlyn.
Trust Me Page 2
