Trust Me

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “I do, sure.” Ashlyn has “issues” with her family, Quinn told the jury. Issues we never really heard about in the trial. Issues is on my list, too.

  “And did you ever wonder why I didn’t testify?” she asks.

  “Well, you didn’t have to,” I don’t exactly answer.

  “I wanted to,” she says. “So bad. But if anyone had asked me about those ‘issues,’ I’d have had to lie. Or, you know, ruin my parents’ lives.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I sit at my desk, computer monitor the only light in the study. I’m looking at the screen through the spaces between my fingers—because my hands are over my face. This whole thing would have been much easier if the jury had simply found Ashlyn guilty. Now I’m the prosecutor. And I have to prove she did it, even if Royal Spofford couldn’t. But that’s a slam dunk, because I’m the jury, too.

  I’ve been gently trying to draw Ashlyn out about what happened. But this afternoon, when we hit the “issues” thing and she said she didn’t want to “ruin my parents’ lives,” I’d asked what she meant. You don’t just toss off a remark like that.

  Her answer? She slugs down the last of her iced coffee, then says she needs a nap. Obviously pivoting again. That puts me back on the tightrope. To make this work, she has to tell me her story. She has to rely on me to be her biographer. To be her voice.

  If she clams up, the book—justice—doesn’t happen. If she gets angry and walks out, the book doesn’t happen. So, sure, I’d told her, take a nap. She’s out of jail. Avoided lifelong incarceration and permanent vilification. I suppose she should be allowed some personal space. If she doesn’t trust me, this will never succeed. While she napped, I worked. I took my laptop to the living room couch and researched every online article about the trial I could find.

  Eventually, about five, I hear the splatter and rush of the shower. I imagine her in my shower, curtain fluttering, door closed. I imagine the bathroom mirror.

  What if she comes out and tells me there were numbers on my mirror? What if she asks me why? I try to think of an answer. Maybe Unlike you, I miss my daughter. And her father. My husband. Maybe I should try the whole truth, and gauge how she reacts. That I’m doing this for Sophie. For all little girls lost. Because Ashlyn has to pay.

  I go back to my reading. Eventually the shower goes off. All is silent for a bit.

  “Sorry.” She’s standing in the living room entryway, wearing a plain pink T-shirt and reasonable jeans. “I guess I’m exhausted.”

  I click off the computer, flip over my notes, and stand, trying to look casual.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Eventually it’ll be.” She sits on the couch, all the way to one side. She politely turns down my potentially kind of tactless offer to watch the news. She does accept a glass of cabernet.

  While I’m in the kitchen getting the two glasses and the bottle, I guess Ashlyn changed her mind about the TV. When I return, she’s clicking through the channels. She mutes the sound, clicking the remote to something benign, a movie. Maybe she thought the room would be too empty with the two of us sitting solitary, mano a mano, in the last of the summery afternoons.

  Or. Maybe she feels comfortable. Safe. And that’s exactly what I want. When was the last time she’d felt that way? Maybe I can mine that vibe, her soul-crushing journey from carefree party girl to murderer to prisoner to wherever she is now, some private personal limbo. I hand her a red lacquer coaster, and she places her wineglass on it. I can be her protector, her supporter. Her—I hope—confessor.

  “Do I ever get to start over?” she asks.

  Her hair is still damp around the edges, making the dark roots seem darker. No lipstick, I notice, not a stitch of it. She’s a lost forest creature, wary-eyed and vulnerable. Take off all that Hot Stuff makeup and there’s a different person underneath. Or maybe this ingénue is the disguise, and the vixen the real thing.

  “Start over my life, I mean,” she goes on, not waiting for me to answer. “I heard what that Spofford said about me. Murderer. Selfish. Party girl. Whatever other gross and unfair words. How can I even use my own name? Will I be on the run forever, you think? Dodging questions about who I am? And how I’m ‘doing’? I mean, how do they think I’m doing?”

  I’d been wondering the same thing. About Ashlyn. And about myself. I sit opposite her on the couch, tucking myself into the diagonal of the corner. “I guess it takes time.”

  She takes a sip of wine. I wait. Wine can never hurt in an interview. Unless you’re the interviewer. My glass stays on the coffee table.

  I stick a toe into the waters of confession. “Time, and the truth, you know?”

  She sighs, blows out a breath. “So here’s a question. If I tell you something, does it have to go into the book?”

  “Of course not,” I instantly lie. No one but a journalist can understand the tension of this moment. But how do you catch a clever fish? Let out the line, make them feel free. Then reel it in, little by little. Then let go again. Then reel it in. At the moment the prey is close enough, grab it. I’ll let out some line now. “Nothing has to be anything. It’s your book, right?”

  I pretend-sip my wine. It’s a useful prop. She’s on her second glass, probably catching up since there’s no wine in jail. But I can’t squander my brain on alcohol.

  “It’s just that we only have two weeks. Or we don’t get paid.” I smile, as if I just remembered that critical thing. The television is flickering an old movie, black and white, something with gowns and dancing. I turn to face her, tucking my bare feet underneath me, settling myself in. “So. You were saying. Issues.”

  Ashlyn’s propped the soles of her black flats on the edge of the coffee table, knees bent, and she’s tucked a fringed throw pillow behind her. She’s silent, staring straight ahead. Then she turns her face to me, inquisitive.

  “How’d you write a book about me without ever talking to me? I mean, did you talk to my…” Another sip of wine. “Family?”

  I explain the process of research, intense research, as quickly as I can. The framework, the trial, the timing. What reportage means.

  She nods, as if she understands. “So you didn’t talk to my family. You just took stuff that might be true and stuff that might not be, decided what you thought was true, or what you wanted to be true, and put that together into a story? So it came out sounding like it really is true?”

  Sure, if you want to put it like that, I don’t say. Like a jury.

  “In a way.” I try not to feel defensive, or sound it. “But it was only a first draft. Until the verdict, of course, I couldn’t write the ending. Or give it context.” Which, blessedly, is true. “So now we have the perfect opportunity for you to set the record straight.”

  “I suppose.” She pours herself more wine.

  Does she need convincing? Time for me to take control of this fish.

  “Ashlyn? If there’s an explanation about what happened…” I begin to reel her in, my tone gentle and tentative, as if I’m searching for the right words. “If there’s something that can prove you didn’t … I mean, if you can prove what really happened, that’s what’s missing. Proof. Yes, you’re legally exonerated. But how can we get you—”

  “Okay. Like we said before. Issues.” Her voice has hardened as she interrupts, as if she’s made a decision. “My ‘father,’ so-called, is really my stepfather. Was that in any of the ‘research’ you did?”

  I think. Feel myself frown. “No, I guess not.”

  “Not surprising,” Ashlyn says. “They never discuss it. My mother volunteered at the hospital, I’m sure you remember that from the trial, and she met Tom there. He’s a private pilot. You read that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was an insurance guy, but now he’s part of that program that flies sick kids to hospitals. Mercy Air.”

  “Yeah.” I’m trying to sound confident, but I’m unsettled that I don’t know that fact, either. Maybe it was never relevant? It seems like the
kind of dramatic irony a reporter would highlight.

  “So, they met when she worked in the children’s ward. You knew that?”

  “No.” I’m actively wondering now, with more than a twinge of apprehension, what else I don’t know. But maybe it doesn’t matter. I should get a notebook, but I don’t want to interrupt her.

  “My real father died when I was pretty young, Mom always used her maiden name. It was just me and Mom. But then, Tom came into our lives.” She shoots a forefinger, bang. “And, bang, she was all about Tom. We all became Bryant. Mom did whatever he said. I mean—whatever. I had to call him ‘Daddy.’ And what do you think it was like for me, a cute fifteen-year-old, suddenly having that man around? Calling him that?”

  I blink. “Well…”

  “As you remind me, we only have two weeks.” The tone of her voice is new, and she’s picked up the remote, flipping channels, the glow from the screen highlighting her eyes, then putting her face in shadow. She stops on some crime show, a police chase, the sound barely audible. “So let’s just say, to make this all totally clear, he was an asshole and a jerk, and I couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. It’s no wonder what happened.”

  This time I take a sip of wine for real, trying to process. I put my glass down so I don’t do it again. “Happened?”

  A good interviewer sometimes lets the conversation go where the subject wants. Give the fish more line. Happy to do so.

  “Whatever you’re thinking? That’s probably exactly right,” Ashlyn says. “I don’t want to say the words. I really—can’t. My poor mother. I was fifteen when it started. Fif-teen. She’s hated me ever since. Hated me!”

  On TV a police car spins out, crashes into a light pole. Sirens, almost muted, fill the silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “You go first,” I tell Ashlyn. I’m not being polite. If she showers second, I don’t get the mirror. When she’s done, it’s my turn. Monday, day 478. My family assured me they were at peace.

  We pass in the hall, her in a towel, me in a T-shirt, like sisters in some horror-movie sorority. The entire energy of my house is off. My first two nights under the same roof with her felt like I was living someplace foreign or unfamiliar or besieged. Whenever I tried to sleep, an iffy proposition anyway, I kept hearing her moving around. Maybe in the bathroom, or getting water from the kitchen. Maybe I imagined it. The study door is closed, but I know there’s no way to keep her out of there. The book manuscript is on my laptop, and when we’re home, I keep it with me. Right now it’s under Dex’s pillow.

  Ashlyn and I are walking, mostly in silence, toward Ristretto, because Ashlyn wants another croissant. She’s again in her soccer-mom disguise, ball cap and scarf with her jeans and T-shirt. Our route into Linsdale center takes us past the oak where the accident happened. I won’t point it out—my grief is shared on a need-to-know basis. A leaf, prematurely turned that luminous red, twists and spins as it flutters to the sidewalk. Slashed gouges, disappearing by the week, disfigure the trunk. That tree is taunting me, showing off the blood red leaves that prove even though its growing season is ending, it is still alive.

  That tree is a murderer. Like my new companion.

  “You want to talk?” I’m trying to craft a question about incest and child abuse. That’s a tough one.

  “Can we not?” she says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  If Ashlyn was molested by her stepfather, which is all I can infer from Saturday’s “conversation,” that’s horrific. But she still killed her daughter. If it’s true, why didn’t Quinn McMorran raise that abuse “issue” as a mitigating factor?

  Okay, I’m not that cold. Okay, I feel bad for her. But she still killed her daughter.

  Yesterday, Sunday, she’d slept in, not a sound from the guest room when I got up at seven. I’d made coffee for myself, and waiting for her, read my whole manuscript again, from the beginning.

  Problem is, I realized, now that the primary source is right here, it’s complicated. Reading it through her eyes, it’s unsettling how my “pre-writing” seems less “feel of real” and more flat-out fiction. Now that the main character is writing the story with me, my journalistic freedom is over.

  “Give yourself a break,” I muttered out loud. And some of it inevitably is fiction. Informed fiction. Now one can “know” the internal thoughts or motivations of others. And I probably have more information about the police investigation and the crime lab than she does. She wasn’t there, so she can’t criticize.

  By Sunday noon I got so frustrated I cleaned the kitchen. Did laundry. Then I gave up. And waited.

  She padded down the hall, finally, around four. Bleary and apologetic.

  “I guess my body is re-acclimating to freedom.” She wiped her palms over her eyes. “They kept waking us up in that jail, it was like—whatever comfort we tried to have, they’d try to steal from us. Sorry if I’ve interfered with your—our—schedule.”

  “No problem,” I’d said. Which was true. So far.

  We’d talked for the rest of the afternoon, and then made dinner. Spaghetti, very chummy. Ashlyn told me (without one hint of irony) about her teenaged aspirations to be a marine biologist, but then how much she “loathed” college. She “could not make it two months in that place” so she dropped out and got a job as a salesperson in a suburban Dayton boutique called Labels. “Totally hip,” she said. “And they called me management material.” All resume, no smoking gun.

  At dinner I managed to ask her, several times, to elaborate about her stepfather and her intimation of abuse. My first couple of tries, she changed the subject. The third time, she surprised me again.

  She looked at me across the kitchen table, as if perplexed. “I never said that.”

  “But—yesterday.” Was I wrong? No. I certainly was not. “On the couch. I distinctly remember. You said specifically—” Am I pushing her too hard? “You said your mother hated you because of it.”

  “You must be mistaken.” She twirled spaghetti on her fork, watching the spiral of marinara-coated strands. “Did you have a lot of wine?”

  It was futile to argue, although she was completely lying. I know what she said. And she had the wine. What Ashlyn thinks, and what she decides to reveal, or confirm, is haphazard. Slapdash, offering a tidbit here and a tidbit there, sometimes changing her story altogether. She still hasn’t said what really happened to Tasha Nicole, which you’d think would be the first thing she’d want to tell me. If she wasn’t guilty.

  When Dex had a murder case, he’d never directly ask the defendant whether they committed the crime. “I don’t want to know,” he’d say. “Because it’s unethical for me to lie, or to allow my client to lie to the jury.” In this case, there’s no jury. Except for me.

  Still, even without legal jeopardy, I don’t expect Ashlyn to confess quickly. She thinks this is about redemption.

  And it is. Just not of her.

  Sunday night post-spaghetti, we also covered one more item on my list—the chloroform. She thinks we covered it, I mean. It’s almost hilarious. Does she think I don’t know about Casey Anthony? That case was all about chloroform.

  Ashlyn herself brought up the issue. She laughed about it, dismissing Spofford’s accusations in the trial. The chloroform “thing,” she explained, was her mother’s fault. Georgia, she said, was “incredibly gullible” and a health-fad fanatic.

  “I came home one day and her teeth were green,” Ashlyn said. “She told me she was adding chlorophyll to her bottled water. Can you believe that? Naturally, she had to show me all about it online. When she did a search for chlorophyll, she spelled it with an f, and chloroform came up. She can be an idiot.”

  She’d pointed to my laptop. “Try it,” she said.

  When I typed in “Chlorof,” chloroform popped up as first on the list.

  Ashlyn took my plate. “You done?” She’d rinsed the spaghetti dishes herself.

  “I see what you mean,” I said over the sound of the run
ning water. She wasn’t looking at me, but I tried to keep a straight face just in case. “Misspelled” searches by her mother is exactly the excuse Casey Anthony fabricated when confronted with her case’s chloroform evidence. I can’t wait to put Ashlyn’s brazenly copy-cat defense in the book. Murder lessons.

  Plus, Ashlyn’s mother was a hospital volunteer. Ashlyn could have visited her there. Or pretended to. Done a little chloroform shoplifting. Maybe with her mother?

  “So there was no computer search for ‘chloroform,’ you’re saying.” I pretended to accept that story as original. “It was a spelling mistake. And she did it a few times.”

  “Right,” she said. “And I’m going to bed.”

  Now we walk a suburban sidewalk on a normal-for-everyone-else sunny Monday. Far from her home, far from her life. I wonder what she’s thinking.

  “Do you miss Ohio?” I figure that’s benign.

  “Kidding me?” She turns to me, making a face. “There’s nothing for me in Ohio.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Let’s just walk, okay?” She gestures at the color-splashed trees, the cloud-dotted sky. A car passes by, windows open, radio blasting, leaving a trail of steel guitar. “Can’t believe I was in that cell, for a year, for nothing, you know? So much for justice.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  We stop at a crosswalk, and I watch a line of elementary school students boarding a polished yellow bus. The sun glints off its side mirror, and cars line up behind it waiting for the flashing red stop sign to flap back against the side. Lives unfolding, normal and safe. Sophie will never be one of those kids, and I can barely watch. One by one, each child takes that steep first step up into their future, their shoes huge on spindly legs, leggings and fluttering dresses on the girls. Oversized backpacks. Tasha will never get on a school bus, either.

  For a moment, it’s overwhelming. The possibilities each of us is born with, and how the doors close, one by one, sometimes—no, usually—without our being aware of it. How can it not be overwhelming to her? Maybe Ashlyn never knew love. Maybe she’s too young.