Trust Me

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “Told you so,” Katherine says, before I get my cell all the way to my ear. “The great Joe Riss strikes again, and all is well. Except for our defendant, of course.”

  “Yeah. And good morning, Kath.”

  “Food poisoning?” Katherine goes on, her voice a sneer. “No way. She wanted to avoid hearing the details. Seeing those photos.”

  “Makes sense, but even so. I had my whole book on redemption plotted out,” I lie. “And I’d get the kill fee, right, if the book doesn’t go? A thousand bucks?”

  “Kill fee my ass,” Katherine says. “Listen, you win, kiddo. The trial’s delayed until Monday. That means you get more time to write. Count your blessings, Merce.”

  “Counting,” I lie again. I have no blessings. I douse my coffee with milk, head for the study. “But Kath? She’s ‘sick’? And those baggy clothes? Speaking of counting—what if she’s pregnant?”

  “The true facts are awful enough,” Katherine says, “without you making stuff up. Plus, she’s been in jail for a year. Listen, no need to send us any more chapters as you go, okay? It’s great. Just write. Now back to work. You owe me a book.”

  I’d already opened the Little Girl Lost file as she hung up, planning my next scene. One of the important unanswered questions—one that should help explain why the murderer could be “only Ashlyn”—is where did Ashlyn go after she lied to her mother and left the Dayton airport?

  From all accounts, that police investigation started when Georgia Bryant demanded the Dayton cops “find” her granddaughter.

  The detective who caught the case, a mid-level journeyman named Wadleigh Rogowicz, started his investigation at Hot Stuff, the skanky Dayton nightclub where Ashlyn hung out.

  Rogowicz predicted a textbook mother-daughter squabble. “Families are complicated,” he says in the Dayton Sun. “I have a daughter myself.”

  For a heartbeat or two, that stops me. I don’t.

  CHAPTER TEN

  What was it like at Hot Stuff? I pay the club a visit by way of a grainy cell phone video on YouTube. I’d hoped Ashlyn would be in it, but it’s impossible to recognize anyone in the flashing lights and shaky pictures. Watching it, I can almost smell the sex. And the weed. It’s a throbbing mass of sweating twenty-somethings, cruising and dancing and slugging down, I don’t know, Moscow Mules and Tito-sodas. Rock star wannabes in sunglasses leading alcohol-fueled partiers in ear-splittingly loud and indecipherable song lyrics. Everyone wearing as little as possible.

  I jam in my earbuds and play it again, cranking the volume, loud, louder, so loud the music blocks out everything else. Blocks out reality. I transport myself. Change myself. I’m not me.

  I’m Ashlyn Bryant at Hot Stuff. Glossed lips, tank top clinging, hair damp at the nape of my neck. I’m the thump of the music, the harsh sexy fragrance of sweaty bodies, the mind-numbing swirl of lights. The alcohol, seductive, sugar and lime. And drugs, the sweet whisper of marijuana, or the unmistakable dice of a razor blade through chunks of white powder laid out on a mirror. A twenty-dollar bill rolled up as a tube.

  The video runs out. Silence. Back to being just me.

  And, okay, no one’s ever specifically mentioned drugs.

  “It’s a club, right?” I defend myself to no one. I yank out the earbuds, dismissing my own hesitation. “There’s gotta be drugs.”

  The real Ashlyn apparently frequented Hot Stuff at all hours, made up and dressed to kill (oooh). A few stories reveal Ashlyn Bryant was not only a regular, but she and others sometimes pitched in to crank up the fun as unofficial “hostesses.” Hostesses were told to buy a bottle of top-shelf mezcal, then sell it, shot by upcharged shot, to patrons who wanted a hot drinking partner. Ash was “awesome” at it, club owner Ron Chevalier was quoted as saying. “Customers loved her.”

  So where was Tasha Nicole during all this awesome clubbing? With the friend-babysitter-whoever she is?

  Where is Valerie? I write on my list.

  I look at the clock. Still early. Too early for wine, especially on a Thursday. Okay, then. Still working.

  MAKING THIS STUFF UP

  “This had better pan out.” Detective Wadleigh Rogowicz, muttering to himself, slammed his cruiser door and headed toward the front door of the south Dayton apartment building.

  He’d been optimistic about the Skype lead. Until the Skype people informed him calls weren’t recorded. As for “Valerie,” Georgia Bryant had told him the babysitter’s last name was “something like Lucio or Luciano.” Spanish, maybe. Italian. She “wasn’t sure.” He pictured a girl on a student visa, maybe, or illegal. Valerie Luciano in Chicago? Needle in a freaking haystack.

  But Facebook might save him. One of Ashlyn Bryant’s friends had posted that on the night of June 16, her pal Ashlyn and Hot Stuff owner Ron Chevalier were at the movies. In Dayton. Rogowicz checked his “Ashlyn calendar,” a grubby paper printout he kept folded in his wallet. The sixteenth was two days after Georgia Bryant dropped Ashlyn at the Dayton Airport.

  But the friend’s cell phone video recorded Ashlyn and Ron arriving arm in arm that night for the midnight showing of an R-rated thriller called Joy Ride.

  The video’d been posted by a Sandie DiOrio, a Hot Stuff hostess who also worked at the Upton Cinema. DiOrio had apparently let the pair in free, and was boasting about it. Social media, Wadleigh thought. People post anything. Even things that will get them fired.

  Now he’d see. If Ashlyn was in Dayton, that was big. It meant she was lying.

  He knocked on apartment 4B. A young woman opened the door. A white cat in her arms writhed away the moment it saw him. The woman admitted being DiOrio, even offered him a seat on her cat-hair-covered couch.

  “I’ll pay the company back, I promise.” DiOrio, instantly capitulating to his inquiry, obediently transferred her cell phone video to him. She fussed with the strap of her revealing tank top. “And I’ll never let anyone in free again. Am I in trouble?”

  Gotta love it. The old tank-top move. Everyone was hiding something. It made them so helpful. And dumb. DiOrio was so skeeved she didn’t ask why he wanted the video. Simply assumed her employer had discovered her petty larceny.

  “In trouble? Well, that’s kind of complicated.” He scratched his head, pretending Sandie’s future depended on what came next. Then he lied. “Ashlyn told us you hadn’t let them in free. Why would that be?”

  “She was just trying to protect me, I guess. She used to bring Tasha over here, you know? And the three of us would play on our laptops and phones and whatever. But, um, once? Like, two months ago?” she said. “I was driving. Ashlyn was on her cell.”

  “Go on,” Rogowicz said. “By the way, was Tasha in the car, too? Do you know who Ashlyn was talking to?”

  Sandie apparently thought the answers were on the ceiling of her pre-fab condo.

  “No,” she said. “Tasha wasn’t there. And Ashlyn was talking pretty soft. The only thing I remember about it, was after.”

  “After?” Rogowicz looked up from his pad. Pencil poised.

  “Yeah.” Sandie was still not quite looking at him, obviously picturing it. “After Ashlyn hung up, she threw her phone on the dashboard. Then she laughed. Like, laughed. And I’m like, ‘What?’ And she’s like, ‘Holy crap. I am so good at making stuff up.’”

  I did not make up that quote. Sandie DiOrio had said that, word for word, to Rogowicz, and he had told the Dayton Sun. “Holy crap. I am so good at making stuff up.” I cut and pasted the quote into my manuscript from the newspaper’s website, changing only the font to make it match.

  So far, this story feels like it’s on track. But is what I wrote in the right order? Ashlyn, making stuff up, pretends to leave Dayton. She’s actually still in Dayton. For a while, that is. Tasha is apparently in Chicago. Georgia goes to the police. Rogowicz begins the hunt. But Ashlyn—now with Tasha?—has disappeared. Two weeks later, Baby Boston is found. That’s when the misleading composite gets issued. I’m getting ahead of myself, of course. I haven’t put t
hat in yet. Eventually, a thousand miles apart, Dayton’s Detective Rogowicz and the Boston cops will put two and two together. Search, arrest, custody, no bail, trial.

  Okay, it works. Now I’ve got the whole weekend to work on the book.

  Though what I’m writing is all basically true, I am really good at making stuff up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Welcome back, stations.” Voice greets me at my desk Monday morning. “As you no doubt are aware, both sides have stipulated to Estrella Amador’s testimony, and she will not take the stand. Court resumes on schedule at zero-nine hundred hours. That means? You have five minutes to get your morning coffee. Hope you had a great weekend.”

  “Thank you, Voice,” I say to the empty room. “And yes, I got a lot done on the book this weekend, thank you very much.” I’m disappointed Amador isn’t testifying, but I suppose her discovery of the garbage bag on Castle Island beach doesn’t provide anything probative to either side. I’ll still put her and Frisco in the book. It’s such a disturbing story.

  There was never a trial about Dex and Sophie’s deaths—it wasn’t murder, unless an oak tree can be a murderer, and rain its accomplice. The police told me Norwalk Street was slick, and their accident-reconstruction team suspected an animal darted out into the road. Though no animal was found. Dex would always slam on the brakes for an indecisive cat or a dopey bird. Once a wild turkey strutted out onto our street. We’d all burst out laughing. What does a turkey say? Gobble Gobble! Why did the turkey cross the road?

  Dex put it on Facebook. I don’t go on Facebook anymore. People there are too happy.

  “All rise,” the court officer announces.

  I start my tablet recording. Ashlyn, in her usual phony-innocent outfit, sits at the defense table beside a gray-suited Quinn McMorran. She hasn’t returned my calls. I hate using Dex as leverage, but Quinn promised to talk to me. And I’m going to hold her to it.

  “The Commonwealth calls Detective Bryce Overbey,” Royal Spofford says.

  Overbey is the first cop who saw the green trash bag. Craggy, middle-aged, and wearing a tweed sport coat, he strides to the witness box.

  And my phone rings. The landline. Caller ID says GWP. Gorin, Willberg, and Pritchett. Attorneys at Law.

  I can’t breathe. I haven’t seen this caller ID in—I try to do the subtraction, using the instant of silence on the other end of the line—but I can’t. Hundreds of days.

  It takes two more rings before I can convince my muscles to move. Before I can make my brain remember what to say.

  “Hello?”

  “Mercer?”

  I recognize the voice, too.

  “Hi, Will.” The nickname strikes me for the very first time as the most awful name ever. Why a trusts and estates lawyer named William Pritchett wouldn’t call himself Bill or even William, is beyond my imagining. Will is, was, Dex’s law partner, and the lawyer for our … estate. Such as it is. Will did our wills.

  Now what? I hear him preparing to speak, so I wait.

  “Anyway, Mercer,” he says. “This is as hard for me as it is for you.”

  My brain explodes as he talks, blotting out his words. No it isn’t “as hard” for him, not at all.

  “… and so we just wondered when,” he’s saying, “or if, you’d like any of the items—his case notes and calendars, correspondence, memorabilia—from, ah, Dex’s office.”

  “Office?” I picture Dex’s office, a room in a dream. Bookshelves and windows and diplomas. Framed news clippings from his big criminal acquittals. Photos on his desk. Both of us in Nantucket wearing silly hats. Our wedding. All three of us at the hospital with brand new baby Sophie, that stretchy pink bow Mom sent us perched around her fuzz of pale hair. Arm in arm, in mourning black in front of my childhood home in Ithaca, right before Mom’s funeral. With no one left to live there, we sold the house soon after. I close my eyes, try to erase the image.

  It does not exist.

  And it doesn’t, I realize, my heart hitting the floor as Will’s voice buzzes in my ear. There’s no “Dex’s office” anymore. It’s a room, a vacant room filled with items that don’t belong to anyone who’s alive.

  The monitor on my desk shows the trial is underway, Overbey still on the stand. I know his testimony today is only to describe seeing the garbage bag and calling in the medical examiner. The investigation part will come later in the trial. Still, I am missing important stuff. But the past is on the line, the past is calling me. And won’t let me go.

  “… we waited, as you know, Mercer, in an effort to spare you from…”

  I let him talk. It doesn’t matter what he says. On the monitor, I see Royal Spofford gesturing at blown-up photographs of the green bag on the shore.

  “Thank you, Will, that is thoughtful of you,” I reply when it must be my turn. “I’m working on a project, though, so I could pick it all up in say…” I calculate. “A month.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “What if we delivered it?” He finally says. “We need—”

  I don’t care what they need, but I don’t say that. “Fine.” I remember my manners. “And again, you were so kind about the…”

  I can’t say the f word. Funeral. So I stop.

  Apparently Will doesn’t want to say it either. “How are you, Mercer?” he asks.

  “Fine.” I am just making stuff up. On the monitor, Quinn McMorran approaches Overbey for her cross-examination. Get in, get out, Dex would have suggested to her. McMorran will probably remind the jury that Overbey, at this point in the case, had no evidence connecting Ashlyn to the murder. He didn’t even know whose body it was.

  “Yes,” I agree, quickly as I can. The trial is taping, but I’ve got to get off the phone. “If someone brings it over, it would be—”

  Then I hit a vocabulary wall. What word can I choose? It would be good, fine, perfect? Nothing seems good or fine or perfect, especially in describing how my dead husband’s possessions are about to be put in a box, and—in a box. Just like Dex.

  “It would be okay,” I say. My eyes are drawn to the monitor, where, as I predicted, McMorran has already finished, and now Medical Examiner Barbara Zimbel, a slim dark-haired woman, quietly professional in long-sleeved black and glasses on a silver chain, takes the three steps up to the witness chair. She raises her right hand to be sworn in. Coming next is the part that’ll make headlines. And break jurors’ hearts.

  “Will? I have to go.” It’s easier to handle TV death. It’s my job to handle it.

  “I understand,” he says.

  He doesn’t. I hang up, I fear, in the midst of his gratuitous attempts at conciliatory goodbyes. I stand there for a moment, lost in time. The trial is taping, someone else’s life, and someone else’s death, and I am tangled in memories and confusion and uncertainty. Only one thing is certain. The verdict. Which brings me back to real life.

  Dr. Zimbel is talking, and her voice comes up mid-sentence as I unmute the volume and lower myself into the chair.

  “… opinion, a body is more likely to exhibit advanced stages of decomposition if it has been in water than if it has been, for example, on the ground.”

  “So to be clear. A body decomposes more quickly in water,” Spofford translates into plain English.

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning a body could be in water for a very short time to exhibit the level of decomposition that little Tasha Nicole’s body presented?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a result of your experience,” Spofford goes on, “can you give us an opinion of how long the victim had been dead?”

  “Your Honor!”

  I understand where Spofford is going. And why Quinn McMorran wants to stop it. It’s about Ashlyn’s alibi. If they pinpoint a time of death, they can pinpoint where Ashlyn was at that time. The more imprecise the time of death, the more difficult to prove Ashlyn is responsible.

  What could anyone say that’d convince me she didn’t do it? I suppose if Ashlyn points to the “real
killer.” Or if someone else confessed. Honestly? I still might not believe it. I know guilt when I see it.

  “You may answer,” the judge says.

  The medical examiner looks at the floor. Maybe she understands she’s on the verge of revealing something so irrefutable, it’ll clinch Spofford’s case. I’d kill to know what Ashlyn Bryant is thinking.

  “It depends on the temperature and the tides,” the medical examiner says. “It’s not an exact science.”

  “It’s not an exact science,” I repeat out loud. No, sadly, it’s not. Like justice.

  The trial goes on, clinical evidence and inescapable sorrow, for more than an hour. I watch, transfixed. And then my doorbell rings.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The doorbell? I stop, fingers poised over my keypad. Katherine again? She’s been here more in the past couple of days than in the past six months. I wait. No more doorbell. Maybe I’m wrong?

  “You’re losin’ it, sister,” I say aloud. Still, I’m out of practice with visitors. My friends from the magazine stopped visiting months ago. I knew they felt uneasy. Sensing my unpredictability, their common ground with me became unsettled, rearranged by what had happened. No one seeks out regret. Katherine’s visits trailed off—until recently. Dex’s parents almost smothered me with a few months of hovering, but they’ve now decided to give me my space.

  We live in such fragile equilibrium. When one thing changes, everything else has to readjust, same as when a new person steps onto an elevator. People move, shift positions, make sure the remaining room is properly allocated. Most people in my life have decided to leave me alone. It’s my fault, I understand that.

  The doorbell rings again. I’m aware of my sweatpants, my random hair. Did I brush it today? I lift a hand to check.

  One look through the peephole reveals it’s Theo Ballero, the law firm’s messenger-assistant-gopher. Everyone loves Theo, always in a button-down and loosened pastel tie, polished loafers. No aspirations but to please the man, his reach not exceeding his grasp. But why is he here?