“And we’re going into town?” she says.
Duh. “Yup. Linsdale center.”
“There’s like restaurants, and stores? Everything in Dayton is malls.”
“Oh,” I say. I need to be polite. “We have those, too.”
A few cars trundle by, families searching out bagels or the hardware store or the Saturday soccer game. We walk in silence, and I point the way.
Ashlyn will probably want real food more than I do, but I’m wary of taking her to DeMilla’s. If Carmendy spots her, it might ruin Ashlyn’s I’m-only-a-regular-suburban-nobody disguise. Especially if all the photo-laden morning papers are displayed at the checkout aisle.
Although. Watching Ashlyn read the articles about herself might be pretty fascinating. MURDER MOM WALKS was one snarky headline. The Globe stayed formal, with simply BRYANT ACQUITTED. Beneath, in smaller font, WHO REALLY KILLED TASHA NICOLE? Has she seen these? Did they watch TV at Katherine’s? All the papers have a reaction from the victorious Quinn McMorran, who simply thanked the jury and asked for privacy. Nothing from Royal Spofford. He’s reportedly “on extended vacation.” “Possibly never to return.” Poor guy. Defeated by a manipulative defendant and a jury of dupes. I wish I could call him and commiserate. He’d love my plan.
ASHLYN 1, SPOFFORD 0, so sneered the Register’s headline. I’ll even the score.
Joe Rissinelli wrote an article about the deliberations. Not one juror said a word for the record, but Joe still made a story out of it. According to his two “sources”—had to be jurors or court officers—they argued for forty solid hours, with three holdouts for conviction. Then two. Then one. How they arrived at that “not guilty” in the final hour, even Joe could not confirm.
I keep thinking about Juror G. She haunts me, this woman I’ve never seen. Might she have held out, and caused a hung jury? Or even persuaded the others to convict? What if the only reason Ashlyn Bryant is right here, right now, strolling with me down a peaceful suburban avenue, is that I made a decision? I did something to win back Dex’s approval. And that decision set Ashlyn free. What if—but no. Doing the right thing is never wrong. The miserably boneheaded verdict is not my fault. It feels like everything is my fault. I am so sorry, Sophie.
“Turn on Kenhowe Street,” I say. “We’re almost there.”
Ashlyn nods, lost in her own thoughts. And free.
Stupid jury. I’ll get Joe to give me the scoop, eventually, but I’ll have to avoid him for the next two weeks. Right now it’s only about me and Ashlyn.
“You okay?” I ask, as we head down the final block.
“Just being … outside,” she says.
I long to ask—don’t you miss your daughter? How can you stand this? What really happened? Soon, one way or another, I will. It’ll be fascinating to hear her try to twist “they didn’t prove I killed her” into “I didn’t kill her.” Especially since she did.
I’m also curious about how she looks at the world now. Is she afraid? Angry? If she meets a stranger, how will she introduce herself? Exonerated or not, the minute she says her name, there’s only one thing people will think. Baby killer. How do you erase infamy and suspicion? Easier if you’re actually innocent.
As we get to the town center, Ashlyn window shops, studying displays of new fall clothes, all plaid and tweed. A few yoga-pantsed moms sit with their fidgety preteens in Ristretto’s outdoor café. No one gives us a second look. A young woman walks down the sidewalk toward us, pushing an elaborate big-wheeled stroller. As she passes, the child inside—a girl, I gather from the pink sleeve—tosses a green stuffed animal, a dragon or something, out onto the sidewalk. The little girl starts to wail.
Ashlyn stops. Stares at the toy, bright green on the gray concrete.
The mom grabs it, flustered, throws us an apology, then wheels away, comforting her child. The toddler’s cry trails behind them. “Mommy! Want it!”
“What do you think when you see that?” I keep my tone objective with a touch of sympathetic, but I’m a writer, and everything is fair game. “Must be…” I let my voice trail off, let her fill in the silence. Old journalism technique.
“Hard to be a mom,” she says. I can’t see her eyes through those amber sunglasses.
I wait. Nothing. My turn.
“That little girl was putting words together.” I’m thinking about my list. Tasha talk?
“Hmm.” She seems fascinated by the paisley scarves festooned in the window of Verena’s Boutique.
“Was your daughter talking?” I don’t use Tasha’s name.
She turns to me, sun glinting on her dark lenses. “Enough to make me miss it, and her, every day.” There’s a catch in her voice. It’s certainly phony, but still elicits a tiny pang from my conscience.
“I know the feeling.” I echo her tone. Ignore my conscience. “But—may I ask, do you remember the last time you talked with her? Where was that? When?”
“Of course I do,” she whispers. “That age is such a critical time, you know? For talking? And she was learning lots of words. They mimic, you know?”
An ambulance screams by, siren wailing, and we both stop, turn to watch. The coffee shop people look up too. Disaster is always a draw. I wonder what they’d think if they knew who was standing here on the sidewalk with me. Just another Saturday, strolling with a murderer. Acquitted, but a murderer. Whose daughter was becoming proficient at mimicking “lots of words.” Maybe like: chloroform? And cocaine? Just possibilities.
“I know we have to work, but is there a place to get, maybe, some take-out?” Ashlyn says. “I’m so sick of bad food. I can’t wait to have, you know, bacon. Or a croissant. With butter.”
“Sure,” I say. She’s changed the subject, major pivot, but she has to talk at some point. I can work with it. She’s refused to let me tape her interviews, which is ridiculous and annoying and inefficient. But I’m a good note-taker.
By the time we get home, we’ve bonded over mothers. I mentally apologize to my own mother—I’ve been pretending she was a conniving bitch, completely not true, but I wanted to draw Ashlyn out, see how she’d hit the ball back. We’d taken turns in the bathroom. I’ll never get used to that, and am planning constant Cloroxing. Now we sit across from each other at my kitchen table, drinking iced coffee and eating ham-and-cheese croissants from Ristretto.
“My mother’s dead, though,” I say, gesturing with my sandwich half. That’s true, certainly. “Which makes my life easier than yours.” I take a bite, oh-so-pensive. “Anyway, maybe we should talk for the book? Where would you like to start?”
“My mother. On the witness stand, could you believe it?” Ashlyn dabs up a flake of buttery puff pastry from her plate with one finger, pops it into her mouth. She hasn’t eaten much of her croissant, even though she’s the one who asked for it. Her eyes are still tired. “Poor thing. She was … so incredibly weak.”
That’s surprising. “Weak? It seemed like she, forgive me, threw you under the bus.”
“It did?” She looks into the distance. “Yes, I guess if you didn’t know her life, it might seem like that.”
“Her life?” I’m the writer, I’m allowed to ask. “With your father?”
Her face darkens. “Well, they weren’t happy. He wasn’t, for sure. He thought he was such a movie star, you know, all those good looks. But at his age? And that meant my mother, she, well, you know what, never mind.” She offers half a smile. “Let’s just forget about that. Not go there.”
“Sure. It’s your book.” For a while. Her mother on the witness stand. “You know, I taped pretty much the whole trial.”
“Yeah. Katherine told me she arranged some video thing.” Ashlyn sighs, tucks a lock of hair behind one ear. “There was one camera right on me. Pointing at me every second of every day. It was just as much jail as that crappy cell. I couldn’t get one second of privacy. Everyone was seeing me all the time. I’m on trial for my, like, freedom. And the frigging camera never leaves my face. It’s like—thought police.�
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“TV.” I dismiss it. “Relentless. But if you want, it’d be good to explore that emotion in the book.”
Generous me. For now. But I’m certain she used that camera. Milked it. The jury never saw it, but Ashlyn’s savvy enough to understand the court of public opinion. Was she sending messages to someone? A friend? Co-conspirator? But that’s my writer brain going crazy.
“Did you think maybe your friends were watching?” Can’t hurt to ask.
“What friends?”
Okay, another avenue. “Let’s go back to your mother, then. She was so pivotal in all this. Did you feel she chose Tasha over you?” Let’s see where this goes. “She didn’t even try to defend you.”
Ashlyn raises both eyebrows, which I notice have been carefully shaped since the trial. Maybe she and Kath went to some salon.
“Is that how you remember it?” she asks. “Is that how you wrote it?”
“Well—”
Her eyes narrow at me. “Mercer? I want to read how you wrote it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Hang on. Wait. Do you have that on video? My mother on the stand?” Ashlyn takes a bite of her sandwich. “Crap. That Spofford person twisted everything she said. May he rot in hell. That you can use.”
“We can use. We’re doing this together.”
“Yeah.” She rattles the ice in her coffee. “But when Quinn questions my mother. I want to see that.”
“Sure,” I say. Absolutely. Anything to distract her from the “I want to read how you wrote it” demand.
I open my tablet, find the file labeled MCM CROSS GB. I’ve time-coded the most interesting segments. Is it cruel to make Ashlyn relive the testimony? Although she saw the whole thing in real life. I push Play, and Fast-Forward. And Pause.
Scooting my chair closer to Ashlyn’s so we can both see the screen, I easel the tablet triangularly on its folded cover. Our shoulders touch. I try not to flinch as I move away. There’s some kind of—heat? ice?—from her. Which is certainly my imagination.
The hollow muffle of the courtroom audio is almost nostalgic. The trial feels like the past. Another life. I haven’t looked at these recordings for several days.
“Play it,” she says.
The tinny audio begins, echoing off the kitchen walls. I feel Ashlyn breathing. Strange to be taken back to the courtroom, with her now beside me and on the screen at the same time. There’s Georgia Bryant, on the stand, in that awkwardly mismatched blue outfit. I remember the fluff of powder on her lapel. Quinn McMorran, in pearls and impassioned resolve, approaches the stand, in the midst of her cross-examination. Her voice carefully polite.
* * *
“You never witnessed Ashlyn abuse Tasha in any way, did you?”
“No, I did not.”
“And Tasha never went without food or shelter or anything she needed in life?”
“No, she had everything.”
“Did you ever see Ashlyn do anything but care for her?”
“Well, no. But she told me that sometimes she felt—”
“Did Tasha love Ashlyn?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, she did.”
* * *
Ashlyn touches Pause with one forefinger. Turns to me.
“So, Mercer? Did you hear one word that sounds like I was anything but a loving mother? You just said she didn’t defend me—but you heard that, right? Is that how you wrote it? I think I should see the book.”
Like all authors, I remember exactly what I wrote. I’d left out some of the testimony. And I’d created Georgia Bryant’s inner dialogue for each answer, which was designed to cast them as evasive. Full of double meaning and rationalization and protest-too-much undertone. But taken on their face, I suppose, without my added interpretations, what she said could be heard as supportive. I suppose. If you look at it that way.
“Yes, of course you can read it.” I have to say so, or she’ll think I’m hiding something. Katherine had described the book as “objective.” Which is true, if you mean I object to everything in Ashlyn’s duplicitous life. But possibly—well, definitely—it’s embellished toward Ashlyn’s guilt. Since she’s guilty. Given the turn of events, I need to keep that from her. Either she’ll confess within our deadline, in which case all bets are off and I can write that blockbuster; or she won’t, and I’ll have to bang out her warped version of the truth.
“As told to,” Katherine also said. So it wouldn’t be like I was writing something I knew to be false. It’s just “as told to” me. I’d simply be the paid messenger.
But she’ll confess. She has to. I can do it. I have to.
“Mercer?” She’s dangling one flat off her toes, jiggling her foot. “I want to read it now.”
“The chapters are all funky,” I say, trying to change the subject like Ashlyn always does. “In separate files. Let me play more video first. Do you remember this part?”
I fast-forward to later in Quinn’s cross-examination before Ashlyn can reply.
* * *
“Just a few more questions, Mrs. Bryant. First, were you and your husband attempting to trademark Tasha Nicole’s name?”
“Yes. But it never actually—”
* * *
“Did you know about that?” I ask. “That they were trying to trademark your daughter’s name?”
Ashlyn doesn’t look at me as the video plays. “No.”
“Really? What did you think about that?”
Ashlyn waves the question away. “How do I know what’s in those people’s minds? Tom always has some scheme. Mother always goes along with it. If they want something—money, especially—they go after it.”
The late morning light shifts through my kitchen window blinds, and Ashlyn and I angle our chairs and the tablet screen to avoid the glare. Our croissant remnants are still on our plates, and the ice in my coffee is almost melted. Is this murder about money somehow?
“Next is the part where Quinn asks your mother about the Insider Magazine photos from your family album,” I say. “Listen.”
* * *
“Isn’t it true that you sold these family photos to the magazine?”
“Yes.”
“For how much money?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Let me clarify. You sold your family photos for twenty thousand dollars?”
* * *
“Did you know that?” I push Pause. “I mean—before the trial? Did they give you any of the money?”
“No.” Ashlyn is looking everywhere but at me.
“Your mother seems none too happy with Quinn.”
“Yeah,” Ashlyn says, with half a laugh. “I know that look. Mom’s thinking: bitch.”
“But what did you think? Listening to this?”
Ashlyn leans back in her chair, away from the little screen. Laces her hands on top of her head. “I thought—fantastic. My mother and stepfather are profiting off my murder trial. Cashing in on the death of their dear granddaughter. They always needed money, but crap. Even you couldn’t make that stuff up.”
I ignore her diss. “Let’s watch the rest,” I push Play again. “The redirect. When Spofford asks that one final question.”
* * *
“Isn’t it true that you believe your daughter killed Tasha Nicole?”
* * *
“That’s when the whole mistrial thing happened,” I click the video to black. “The judge didn’t let your mother answer. What do you think she would have said?”
“Please,” she says. “Don’t you see? That woman was in an impossible situation. Impossible. Worse than mine, if that’s imaginable.”
“How worse?” I take my plate to the sink, but she still has croissant left.
“Mercer? If you wrote that she didn’t try to defend me—that’d be wrong. She did. She totally did. She didn’t know the real story, of course. But what she said was the truth as she understood it. I understand it kind of seems like two truths. But two truths can exist at the same time, you know? It’s
true to her, if she truly believes it.”
She points a finger at me. “But you heard the part where Quinn asked whether I was a good mother. And Mom said yes, every time.”
“Sure,” I say. “And that’s in the book.”
“Yeah.” She picks up her croissant. “I bet.”
“No, honestly—” I stop myself. I hate when people say that, it always makes me wonder whether they weren’t honest before, and I can’t believe I’ve done it now. And the “good mother” part is indeed there. Just phrased differently. I need to keep her happy. “It’s all there.”
“What did you write about Tom?” she asks.
“Your father?” I’m relieved she keeps changing the subject, and think again of my list. What up with Tom? “Tell me about him. What role did he play?”
At that, I see her eyes dart, and somehow her head is shaking, like saying no a million times, very quickly, almost imperceptibly. She puts down her must-be-soggy half-eaten croissant, only two bites taken out of the remaining triangle. “Why?” she asks. “Have you talked to him?”
I haven’t, but I don’t need to say so unless I decide it’ll be helpful. “Listen, Ashlyn.” I make my voice businesslike. “We’re doing a job. We’re getting paid—sorry to be crass about it—to write a compelling saleable book. For you, it’s to repair your reputation and reset your life. For me, it’s how I make a living.” I figure she’ll understand mercenary. She apparently has no other means of support. “To make it work we have to trust each other.”
“There are some things I can never talk about, never,” Ashlyn says. “Not for the book, not for anyone.”
I wait.
She waits.
She picks up her croissant again. Looks at the edges of it, pushes back some escaping cheese. “Yeah, well. Remember, in that opening statement Quinn gave? How she said I had ‘issues’?”
Trust Me Page 16
