Trust Me

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “Because it’s not like you’re going to stop thinking about it, right? Even if you pretend you are.”

  I hate this. The suspicion of Katherine is a glowing ember in my chest. Every time I try to extinguish it, it burns brighter. Every word Ashlyn says stokes it. It’s like one of those awful birthday candles. When you try to blow it out, the flame shoots back, and higher.

  “Can you live out the rest of your days, never ever knowing?” She takes a step into the room. “Never being sure? I know what happened to Tasha, even though it’s hideous. But you—still wear your wedding ring. How do you feel, now, when you see that? You have no idea about the truth of your very own life.”

  I look at the platinum band, and envision what’s engraved inside. Until the end of time. I couldn’t decide whether to bury Dex wearing his matching one. Some of me wanted to wear it myself. But if we were married until the end of time, I finally decided, he’d need his ring.

  “Did you write that on the photo?” I ask. “Swear on Tasha.”

  “No,” she says. “I swear. On Tasha.”

  “There’s nothing in Dex’s office anymore,” I say, “It’s all … in the boxes.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Forget the book. Forget everything else. I need to catalog everything in Dex’s boxes. I need to know. Ashlyn’s helping. So what if she touches his stuff. It’s already tainted. The guest room is now getting wallpapered in yellow stickies, all marked in my blocky printing. The flurry of Post-its shows years and months, and then categories: Schedules. Clients. Decisions. Clippings. Cases. The only clear space on the carpet is where we’re sitting, cross-legged, encircled by piles of paper and legal pads and manila folders. I’m a researcher. This is what I do. Now I’m not researching Ashlyn’s life. I’m researching my own.

  We arrange each item underneath its designated yellow square, organizing it to see if we can make it mean something. Reveal something. Where Dex went. What he did. Dex and Sophie were always having “adventures.” Now I realize Sophie couldn’t have told me about them. Pop-si-cle, she would say. Ba-lloon. If she’d said Kath-rine, I wouldn’t have blinked. And Dex, as always, would have explained it beautifully.

  Sophie was shy. Hesitant to talk. But soon, she’d have been saying full sentences. Like: Daddy and Katherine went to a hotel.

  Dex. I print a yellow stickie with his name. Slap it onto the wall. Dex. Had insisted he didn’t want to be with Sophie at the birthday party that morning. The more I think about it, the more I realize I’d nagged him into doing it. But Dex involved with trying to kill me? Impossible. Unless, once in motion, there was no way for him to stop it. No. I won’t believe that. Katherine was probably—I close my eyes for a second. Does everyone lie about everything? I push away the darkness. Truth is the light.

  “Was there anything of Sophie’s missing? Before the crash?” Ashlyn asks. I’d loaned her a pair of my gray sweatpants and a utilitarian T-shirt. It’s disconcerting to see her in my clothes. “I kept noticing Tasha Nicole’s toys were not where they should be. Before she—disappeared.”

  “Things were always getting misplaced,” I say. “Mail, stuff like that. Dex’s passport once.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting. Joe Riss’s wife said his was missing, too.”

  Ignoring the time, we scrutinize each document. There’s so much paper. Seems like Will Pritchett, or maybe Theo, had simply swept everything in, jumbled and unorganized. Every time I see Dex’s handwriting, my stomach clenches. My suspicions fester, fueled by the possibly of what might explode in the next document, or the next.

  “Look for billing information,” I instruct her. “Client names.”

  “And timesheets, maybe?”

  “Exactly.”

  We finished box four first, since that was already open. But the only photo is the heart balloon. I know Dex had others, so where are they? We rip open the box numbered one.

  Ashlyn and I slug down coffee, needing the caffeine. Ashlyn has a PB and J for dinner but I’ll never be hungry again. Around two in the morning she brings cheese cubes and crackers and water from the kitchen. She fell asleep on the floor around 4 A.M., and I guess I did, too, but we woke up at dawn’s light and kept working. By breakfast time Thursday, coffee and Pop-Tarts, the corners of the untouched cheddar cubes are softened and sweating. For lunch we have more coffee, and the stale cheese and crackers. Box two. I roll the sticky packing tape into a ball, toss it into the wastebasket. The box is crammed with paper.

  “Look for anything about Katherine,” I say, handing her a stack of files. I stifle a yawn.

  “You’re so tired.” She offers a sympathetic smile. “Shouldn’t you—”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I say. “Or maybe never again. And look for Ohio.”

  “Like what in Ohio?”

  “I’ll know when I see it,” I tell her. “If you think it’s questionable, tell me. Names. Places. We’ll sort first, then see what’s there.”

  When the sun starts down on Thursday, the guest room looks like it’s festooned with the scribbles of some wacky—or determined—mad scientist. A formula in progress. An emerging theory. We’re scraggly and need showers. But I’m on a mission, and I’ve conscripted Ashlyn.

  She sorts manila folders, like playing cards, into three piles. “Did your husband ever act worried about anything?”

  “Give me a break,” I say. “Worried? Dex was a lawyer. And a father. Of course he worried.”

  “What did he say about Katherine?” She puts a folder under the stickie marked timesheets.

  “Unless you find something, don’t talk about her,” I say. I’m done with Katherine. Did she worry that I’d find that photograph? She was here when the boxes arrived. I’m pretty sure I told her I’d never open them. She thinks I’m focused on writing a book. For her. And I am. But now I’m thinking it’ll not only be Ashlyn’s “redemption,” but also a bigger story. For me, anyway.

  If Katherine denies it, that’ll only prove it’s true.

  All this time she’s been lying. Now she’s taking advantage of me, again, to write this manipulative book. “Feel of real,” she had the nerve to say. Because of Katherine, I pledged my soul to Sophie’s memory. Nothing will ever be pure or right again. Katherine can take her book and shove it.

  I’d sneaked in my numbers when I made a bathroom trip, no time for condensation, just on the bare glass. I’d stopped, my finger paused mid-four. What if I’ve spent the last 488 days mourning a complete fantasy life?

  Still. I head back to the guest room. There must be clues. Dex didn’t think that Saturday morning would be his last on this earth. He would not have left incriminating evidence at home. It must be here. Somewhere.

  “You know,” Ashlyn says as she pages through a file. “If Katherine caused the ‘accident,’ it definitely makes you not guilty. But Mercer? It also means she’s not the only one who is guilty. Right? It takes two to—whatever that saying is.”

  Tango, I almost say. And then it hits me. Solid in the gut. Ashlyn’s right.

  Dex killed Sophie.

  His duplicity and his betrayal and his selfishness killed her. And now it’s destroying me. I’m sitting in my own house, on the carpeted floor, feet bare and in my own sweatpants instead of Dex’s, by the window that faces the street. And I’m dying.

  “Here’s something. Newspaper clippings.” Ashlyn’s head is in box two, her voice muffled. “Some stories are by Joe Rissinelli. Did your husband know him?”

  “I have no idea,” I say. Joe, though, is haunting me. I haven’t heard from the police. There’s nothing in the paper—that’s either the good news or the bad news. I left him yet another voice mail, despite Overbey saying Joe didn’t have his phone. I emailed, too. Maybe he’s working undercover. Maybe he didn’t tell his editor. Maybe he emailed his wife and she didn’t get his message. Maybe he doesn’t care if I know where he is. Maybe he doesn’t want me to. Maybe he’s dead. There’s barely enough room in my brain to speculate.<
br />
  “Car-accident stories.” Ashlyn holds them up.

  “Well, Dex did handle personal-injury cases.” I hold out my hand for the clippings. “Drunk driving. Drugs. Things like that.”

  “Told you.” Ashlyn meshes her fingers together. “My stepfather. Ron. Drugs. Katherine. Dex.”

  For a moment, the only sound is paper, pages turning, files shuffling, and our soft breathing.

  “Oh,” Ashlyn says.

  “What?”

  She hands me a little white card. A business card.

  Katherine’s.

  “Where did you find that?” I hear the flat tone of my own voice. Suspicious. Bitter.

  “In the clippings,” she says.

  “With what article?” It’s a business card. Everyone has them. Everyone loses them, or they get swept up in some pile of papers and misfiled. “Can you tell?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m so sorry, I mean, it kind of fell out. There’s this one about a drug bust in a night club.” She hands it to me. “But not in Ohio. Oh. Or it might be this one. About a car accident where a little girl was killed.”

  “Set them aside,” I say. “Keep looking.”

  We keep looking. In four boxes of Dex’s files, except for that damn business card, we’d found no further evidence, that we recognized at least, of a Dex-Katherine connection. The car accident clipping led nowhere.

  “Time out,” I say, making the sign. “I know we’ve got one more box. But I’m brain-dead. I’m bleary. And we’re gonna miss something. Let’s finish tomorrow.”

  “Sold,” Ashlyn says. “With ya. Pinot or Chardonnay?

  We both stare at the seven o’clock news on TV, our feet propped on the coffee table. Ashlyn’s drinking more than usual. We’d nuked popcorn for dinner, so buttery we brought in a stash of paper towels with the big red bowl. When it got dark outside, we didn’t even bother to turn on the living room lights.

  During a commercial about Halloween costumes, out of nowhere or maybe out of the pinot, she puts the TV on mute.

  “Mercer?” she says. “Listen. One day Tasha Nicole disappeared. I knew why. I absolutely did.”

  “Why?” I say. “Did you tell the police?”

  “No way,” she says. “I had to keep pretending. That Tasha was okay. Or else, um. Or else they’d kill her. They told me that.”

  “Who?” This feels like the real story, not the made-up story.

  “I didn’t say a word. But they did it anyway,” she whispers. “They killed her.” The front of her T-shirt was soggy with tears when she managed to stop crying. “Not me.”

  “But who’s they? Why?”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t, I can’t. I need to protect you,” she says. “And me. I don’t want to die.”

  I click the TV off. The room is dark. Darker. Darkest.

  She’s crying again. Her head in her lap, her shoulders shaking. She looks up, and I can almost see her face.

  “At least they didn’t make it look like you did it,” she whispers. “At least your mother didn’t turn on you. At least they let you believe it was an accident.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  I wake up this morning still on the couch. I’d dreamed about Katherine, and white balloons on curly ribbon strings. She kept giving them to Sophie, so many that they floated Sophie away. Katherine, while I watched, took a photograph of her in the air, and gave it to Dex with a big heart. I almost couldn’t breathe as I finally opened my eyes, wondering how the real-life balloon picture happened and what it might mean. I hardly knew what to believe. If anything.

  Friday, I tell myself, struggling to put my brain straight. Book deadline—moment of truth, ha ha—is Tuesday. I write my numbers on the mirror as usual, 489, and even with everything, I try to communicate with Dex and Sophie, but somehow the connection feels fragile. Am I losing that, too?

  The police investigated, four hundred eighty-nine days ago. The rain, the slick street, the tree. An accident. They decided that. And I’ve consoled myself, a hundred times a day, with my belief that Dex and Sophie never felt a thing. That they were here, and loved me, and then were gone. And they never knew it.

  I was left to bear it, comforted only by the knowledge that it was an accident. That there was no “why,” only a random tragic universe.

  Was it not random after all?

  Just because Dex had a mushy picture from Katherine doesn’t mean they were having some affair. Necessarily. And certainly doesn’t mean Katherine is a killer. Necessarily.

  “You ready?” Ashlyn’s voice from down the hall.

  I throw on a T-shirt and jeans, the first ones I see. As I get to the guest room, I hear tape ripping.

  Ashlyn’s holding a wide translucent strip in her hand, shards of cardboard still attached. “Here we go,” she says, crumpling the tape and dropping it on the floor. “The last box. Maybe what’s in here will give you answers. But let’s start on the law books. Maybe there’s like, a note hidden in one of them.”

  I stare at that brown cardboard cube full of terrifying possibilities, and my brain, confused and fraught and destabilized, cannot take it another moment. I am so hungover, so sleep deprived, so everything-deprived, I probably wouldn’t recognize my own name.

  “You look awful, Mercer,” Ashlyn says. “No offense. Are you okay?”

  “Okay” is a concept I may never experience again.

  “I’m fine.” Hearing the old me, saying what I used to say, I know it’s even more of a lie. How will I ever face Katherine again? But I signed a contract. If I don’t write the book, write something, my career is over. Not that I feel like that matters much now, nothing does. But ridiculously, I promised Ashlyn and Katherine the redemption book. Three days to deadline. “Sorry you had to sleep in this mess, Ash.”

  “You poor thing.” Ashlyn closes the box, folding down the bottom flap, then the side, then tucking in the top. “Get some sleep. In your own bed. We’ll start again later this afternoon. Even tomorrow. It’s okay. Whatever’s here will still be here.”

  I hoist myself to my feet, knees creaking, hold on to the sill for support.

  I’m surprised when the blind clatters down, hitting my knuckles, shutting out the day. Ashlyn has pulled the white cord, and the room goes darker.

  “Hey,” I say, stepping back. I rub my hand. “Ow.”

  “Tuesday is the deadline.” Ashlyn’s voice is soft. Not accusatory. Even sad. “And you still think I killed Tashie.”

  I blink in the altered light, and step back, trying to read her expression.

  “No matter how you try to convince me, no matter what story you’ve promised me you’ll make up for this damn book, you’ve spent every day trying to prove I’m guilty.” Ashlyn twists the blind cord, twisting until the white ball on the end pops up at the tip of her finger. She points down, and the cord twirls away, swinging back into place.

  “But you’re such a good person. I can’t bear that you think I did it. That’s why, risky as it was, I told you as much as I did last night. About them taking Tash. But, Mercer? Please. Let the police do their jobs. Let them find who killed Tashie,” she says. “After all, they accused me, right? That horrible detective in Dayton, Rogowicz. And Overbey. And his sidekick. So unfair. They owe me. Right?”

  I can’t tell her that Overbey still thinks she’s guilty. I wish I could collapse in Sophie’s armchair, but I’m afraid I’d pull the crocheted Afghan over my head and sleep forever, so I stand by the door.

  “Thing is.” Ashlyn goes on, taking one step closer. “In your case, they stopped investigating. But that’s what you need to do now. Investigate. I’ll even help you.” She shrugs. “No one can help me at this point, except for you. But you don’t want to.”

  Even more tired than I’ve ever been, even with that photo of Dex and Sophie stained with Katherine’s name, even unsure about Ashlyn, even then, I need to keep a grasp on reality. I plop onto the chair and sort of toss my hair, to prove I’m still in charge of my life.

  �
��Okay, Ashlyn. Tell me. If you didn’t kill Tasha Nicole, who did? I don’t care about any consequences—what could be worse than what’s already happened to me? Tell me the truth. That’s the only thing that will let me believe you.”

  “I know it sounds…” Ashlyn half smiles, shakes her head. “See, thing is, you can decide for you. But you can’t decide for me. Listen. I did not kill my daughter. But I might be taking my own life in my hands if I tell you who did. Do you want to take responsibility for that? Take responsibility for another death?”

  I blink at her through the gloom. I never thought about it that way.

  “Or,” she says, “do you want to take responsibility for yourself?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Taking responsibility for myself. That means finding the truth about Katherine. And Dex. Yes. I want to know. I need to know.

  Yesterday’s scour of Dex’s law books found nothing. We’d eventually opened wine and ordered yet another pepperoni pizza for Friday dinner and watched You’ve Got Mail, which she called “an old movie.” Both of us actively avoided reality. But after I dragged myself to bed, reality wouldn’t let me go. Sleepless, thrashing and hearing noises, I’d conjured images of Dex and Katherine, skin and sweat and whispers and secrets. Hell with sleep, I thought, pounding the pillow into another shape. Hell with the deadline. Ashlyn’s right. This is about me now. Me. I need answers. I need my truth.

  Only Ashlyn can help me find it.

  And I thought of a great idea where we can start. The balloon guy at Pallisey Park. It’s Saturday morning now, he’ll be there. Maybe he remembers seeing Katherine with Dex and Sophie. Maybe more than once.

  “We have to go find him,” I tell her. We’re in the kitchen, stoking up on coffee.

  “Why ‘we’?” She stirs in sugar.

  “Because you have to talk to the balloon guy. He might recognize me.”

  “Huh.” She adds more sugar. “Well, what if—okay. You should leave by yourself, with, like, an armload of dry cleaning.”

  “Dry cleaning?”

  “Yeah. Because if Katherine, or whoever, is watching, it’s better if I’m still inside, and you’re on some errand. We’re supposed to be working on the book. How about you drive to the cleaners, in case they follow you, but they won’t because you know, dry cleaning. Then I’ll sneak out the back so they don’t see me, and meet you at Pallisey Park. It’s not that far. I’ve seen signs for it on the way to town.”