She’d barely managed those first two miserable days, hiding in Ron Chevalier’s cramped apartment, unable to eat anything, lying to everyone, pretending to enjoy the Joy Ride movie, with her poor dead daughter in the trunk of her—she couldn’t bear to think of it. But Tom insisted it was the only way.
“We have to make sure no one knows,” he’d told her as they stood over the lifeless child in their backyard that day. The front of his maroon country club golf shirt was soaked with sweat, and both knees of his khaki pants grass stained. Minka and Millie, inside, scrabbled their claws on the sliding glass doors, frantic to get out.
Ashlyn, shaking in horror and overcome with sorrow, pulled out her phone to call 911.
“Put that phone away.” Tom grabbed her arm, hurting her. “No way they’ll believe it’s an accident. We’ll be—dammit, it’ll be all over the newspapers. The club. The golf course. We’ll be accused of, I don’t know, neglect. Child abuse. Murder. Why in hell did you let her go on the swing standing up?”
“I didn’t! She—I turned my back for one second, and…” Ashlyn had to admit she saw a glimmering of her stepfather’s point. Poor thing was already dead. They’d covered Tashie’s motionless face with her beloved white blanket. There was no way to bring her back to life. “I don’t know. It was an accident. It was an accident. People will believe it was an accident.”
“With your night life? Your reputation?” Her stepfather’s words had stung, stung with the harshness of truth. “And now you let your own child get killed?”
“She’s yours, too.” In grief, the truth came out. She couldn’t bear to look at Tasha; the child’s hair, like tawny seaweed, matting across her face. She couldn’t bear to look at Tom. Disgusting, pushy, manipulative Tom. His face was all red, veins in his hideous neck bulging. Maybe Tasha Nicole was never supposed to live. Maybe this was meant to be. “Your child, too.”
“Get a trash bag. Get two,” Tom ordered. “And the big cooler. The plastic one.”
Within minutes, the tiny body—so light, Ashlyn realized as she lifted her, perhaps for the final time—was encased in heavy green plastic. Tom used three short strips of duct tape to make the blanket-covered shape less recognizably human. Ashlyn, in a rush of remorse, had snatched up Rabbie just in time, and tucked the beloved stuffed animal into the bag to comfort Tasha in heaven.
“I’ll tell your mother I have a Mercy Flight to Boston, where that big cancer-kid doctor is,” Tom said, pulling out his cell phone. “In two days. Meantime, you put the cooler in the trunk of your car. Add ice or something. Park somewhere else. Figure it out. And then we’ll take the cooler to Boston. Act normal, for chrissake. Tell your mother you and Tasha are visiting a friend. Or shopping. Everyone will believe that.”
Using both palms, Ashlyn wiped the tears from her cheeks, tears of sorrow and fear and guilt. Come to think of it, this disaster wasn’t completely Ashlyn’s fault. Tasha was not supposed to stand on the swings at all, much less alone. It was the girl’s own fault for disobeying.
“And what will they believe when they never see Tasha again?” she asked.
Tom narrowed his eyes at her. “We’ll think of something.”
Which obviously was not successful. For Ashlyn, anyway. She was eventually arrested for murder.
That version of the story raises a lot of questions, most immediately why anyone would do such a gruesome thing, but I’ll face that when I get to it in the narrative. If Ashlyn agrees this could be what happened, her stepfather is not gonna be happy, but he’s not happy anyway. As long as he doesn’t sue me for libel. Or her. Ashlyn told me neither parent is speaking to her. She says they never want to see her again.
Lovely people.
It’s tempting to go back and read my old “Ashlyn is a murderer” story, like poking the place where a tooth was pulled to see if it still hurts. Instead I’ll need to revise it, fast, and make sure there are no howling loose ends.
Because truth has no loose ends. Before the verdict, I thought I knew the truth. Can I prove myself wrong?
One-thirty in the morning now. I read over my new scene, trying to envision it through the mind of an objective person.
My reimagining of the story needs more tension, maybe, between Ashlyn and her handsome but aging money-craving stepfather. And where was Georgia during all this, do I need to include that? It also needs more setting in the first paragraph about Hot Stuff, maybe some disco-lighted, bass-thumping, alcohol-fueled, body-scented description. Maybe I should include what Ashlyn was wearing. I’ll ask her about that.
Then I remember.
I’m making it up. If this scene never happened, how could Ashlyn tell me what she was wearing? I’m confusing myself. It’s late, and silent, and all my realities are tangling into each other.
But my new truth, same story and evidence but crafting the reportage differently, doesn’t have to be entirely true. It only has to be true enough.
Chin propped in both my hands, I stare at the screen until my words blur. I feel my eyes close, and I let them.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Morning sun slants through my kitchen window. And on the table, a printed-out copy of last night’s scene, pages numbered one through five. Sometimes it’s easier to revise if the words are printed on paper—makes them seem more real.
Fifteen minutes ago, as I wrote 491 on the bathroom mirror, I tried talking to Dex, and then Sophie. Our connections seemed different, maybe because I’d been given a possible subplot to their deaths. Katherine.
True? Or not. One simple choice changed everything.
“What happened?” I whispered to them through my reflection. I could not bear to “ask” Dex about Katherine’s signature, those blocky words in smeary Sharpie, that scrawled heart. Could not, yet, allow my soul to believe it. I still half-believe Ashlyn wrote it, imitating Katherine’s all-too-available handwriting. But why would she do that? To mess with my mind? To shift the focus from her?
I wait for the numbers to vanish with the condensation. Ashlyn will be awake soon, and I need to keep my numbers to myself. I pause, the world stopping, as I realize those numbers are supposed to represent my only reliable truth. What have I actually been counting?
The thunk of the Sunday paper on the front porch jolts me back.
I open the Globe as I bring it to the kitchen, and page through, scanning, waiting for my coffee. Nothing about Joe Rissinelli. I add milk, then stir. I’ve gotten no calls from the cops. No response to my emails or texts.
“Hey Merce.” Ashlyn is at the archway to the kitchen, hair in a topknot ponytail, wearing my sweatpants but a T-shirt of her own.
I watch her get out a coffee pod and a mug, familiar with my kitchen. It creeps me out how it seems so natural to her. As she putters, I half-expect a call from Katherine, since I woke up this morning after yet another dream about her. She was behind a glass wall of some kind, and talking to me, but I couldn’t hear. Then a phone rang in the dream, and I opened my eyes.
Ashlyn’s coffee water burbles as the machine heats up.
“So I did some work on the book last night.” I’ve decided to think of my role as “messenger.” Katherine wants a book about the so-called redemption of Ashlyn Bryant, phony as it is, and that’s what she’ll get. Ashlyn wants a book to create a cover story that’s believable and yet doesn’t pin the blame on some mysterious and possibly fictional “bad guys” she’s terrified of, and that’s what she’ll get. I don’t care. The book is supposed to be a compelling true-crime story. If they pay me, that’s the crime story I’ll write. Minus the true. I’m only the messenger.
“Here.” I hold up the printed pages. “Could you read it? See if it makes any sense?”
I can’t believe I’m asking Ashlyn if something makes sense.
“You’re amazing,” she says. “Let’s see.” She yanks out her chair—the one that used to be mine, the only one I’m comfortable with her using—and takes the manuscript. I hear her coffee hissing from the machine, splashin
g into her mug. The kitchen smells like dark roast.
“I’ll get your coffee while you read.” I remember how she brought me coffee, that first day she came to stay. I remember how certain I was that she was a murderer. Now I’m helping her. To everything there is a season. The metal spoon scrapes the bottom of the ceramic mug as I stir in her sugar, two lumps. I watch Ashlyn, reading the life I made up for her. She turns over page one. I try to read the draft through her eyes. Try to gauge her expression as she starts page two.
“Just so you understand,” I begin, “I had to make you somewhat—well, I couldn’t make you perfect. It’s not believable, you know? If you were perfect, you would have called 911. Or watched Tasha more carefully in the first place. I have to balance and juggle to make your motivation’s convincing.”
“Let me read it.” She doesn’t look up from the page.
I’m annoyed with myself for feeling anxious. For hoping she likes it. Writers are nuts. The clock on the coffeemaker shows 8:14, then 8:15, then 8:16. I actually begin to pace. Ridiculous.
Ashlyn puts down the manuscript. Props her elbows on the table. I see her eyes close. Then open.
She’s smiling.
“I love that you used Valerie and Luke,” Ashlyn says.
So silly. Praise, even from her, makes me happy. Writers really are nuts.
I pull out my chair—Sophie’s—and point to the manuscript. “Yeah, but what will they think when they see this?”
“Who?” She takes a sip of coffee.
“Valerie and Luke. I mean, it makes them either dupes or liars. Or both.”
Ashlyn throws her head back and laughs. The sound hits the ceiling and falls to Earth again.
“Oh, holy crap,” she says. “I made them up. I had to make it seem like Tasha was somewhere. So she wasn’t missing. I created ‘Valerie’ and ‘Luke,’ because if they didn’t exist, no one would be able to find them to prove she wasn’t with them.”
“Valerie and Luke are made-up?” I struggle to grasp this. “You can’t just make people up.”
“Guess you can,” she says. “Everyone thought they were real. Everyone was looking for them, and wondering why they didn’t testify. I know you wondered, Merce. I read your list. Remember?”
Ashlyn smiles, triumphant, like she’s proved a point. “Waffle?” She gets up, pulls the plastic bag from the freezer. “No?” Pops one into the slot.
So Valerie and Luke are fiction. Real-life fiction. I take back my pages, tamping them straight on the tabletop. The toaster ticks as Ashlyn opens the fridge for butter.
Katherine had told me they’d thought Valerie was dead—but then, she wasn’t. Then there was nothing more about that. No wonder Katherine had the “wrong” Valerie. There is no “right” Valerie. I’d asked Kath who “they” were, I remember that. But she’d never answered. Katherine again.
Valerie and Luke. What else might not be real? I think of my list again.
“Let me ask you something.” I shift the handle of my coffee mug back and forth. “About the Skype. With Tasha in Chicago? With Valerie?”
“Oh, please,” she says. “There’s no Valerie. There’s no ‘Chicago.’ And that Skype was taped.”
“What?”
“My mother is beyond lame with computers. And so predictable. Tasha could barely talk, anyway. I’d recorded a Skype with her, like, from the living room to the bedroom at a friend’s house one day. You know, Sandie? DiOrio? Just for fun. Tasha loved it. I’d put it on a thumb drive, on my keychain. And then, when my mother got all pissy and demanding, it was easy to set it up before anyone else came into the room. Tom thought it was genius.”
“But how did…” I’m trying to remember the dialogue. “I mean, Tasha had a conversation with your mother.”
“Did she?” Ashlyn’s slathering her waffle with butter. Her knife crunches through as she cuts it in half. “I read your manuscript, remember. There’s nothing in it that Tasha says directly to my mother. Look again.”
It had crossed my mind at the time, briefly, whether that Skype was somehow faked. But it was never used in the trial, so its veracity was never questioned. And I can’t look at it “again” because I’ve never seen it. I only heard Georgia Bryant’s recitation on TV. She believed it was real. I simply believed her.
“Why would you save a Skype video?”
“I’m surprised you’d ask that, Mercer,” Ashlyn says. “Didn’t you save videos of your daughter?”
I had, of course. But I hadn’t tried to use them to trick anyone.
“Wasn’t that risky, though? Weren’t you worried she’d figure it out?”
“You’re kidding, right? Her?”
The machine is gooshing out my second coffee. Right. So either Ashlyn’s mother is super-savvy enough to protect her husband by covering up his crime, or she’s so super-dumb she can’t understand how a computer works. There’s not gonna be enough coffee in the world to understand this.
“How about that surveillance video of you at Logan Airport? With Tasha? That implicates your stepfather.”
“You ever see that?” Ashlyn asks, gesturing with the waffle-square stabbed onto her fork. Almost flutters her eyelashes. “I never did.”
Detective Overbey had admitted to me that the tape wasn’t clear. What’s more, it was lost. So now, like Luke and Valerie, it doesn’t exist. And can’t undermine Ashlyn’s story.
“I better keep writing,” I say. I don’t even know who I am anymore.
“Good,” Ashlyn says. She’s picked up the Globe. “Let me know what you come up with.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Litigation hypnosis.
That’s what Dex called it. It’s when lawyers have a blazingly guilty client, who, at first, they despair of getting acquitted. Then, as their trial prep proceeds, the lawyer devises an alternate theory of what happened—a reimagined narrative of the facts designed to persuade the jury their client is innocent—and eventually begins to believe that story. Buy into it. Completely. They’ve hypnotized themselves.
Dex once lost a drug-conspiracy case and came home devastated; tie askew and with the slack-shouldered demeanor of Eeyore.
“Guilty,” he intoned, shaking his head, as if saying apocalypse or doomsday.
“But you told me the guy was guilty as all get-out,” I reminded him. “That there was no way he’d be acquitted.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But then I convinced myself he wasn’t. And now I’m totally bummed out.”
Do I have litigation hypnosis? I tap my fingers one at a time, pattering a random rhythm on my desk. I have not typed one word since breakfast. Two hours ago.
I keep thinking about Ashlyn’s story. Now that I’ve created the swing-set scenario, it’s difficult for me to uncreate it. What if it’s true, and Ashlyn didn’t want to admit it? If Tom confessed to what happened to help clear Ashlyn, he’d be culpable, too.
My fingers continue to tap the desk. Another possibility. What if Ashlyn fabricated the drug deal/bad guys/rat story? It’s damning, but maybe she thought the reality it creates put her in a better light than the one about conspiring with her stepfather to cover up the negligent death of her own daughter. Their own daughter?
But gee, when she was charged with murder—I have this conversation with myself since there’s no one else to have it with—wouldn’t she have owned up to the real reality then?
I wish Dex were here. I wish someone were here, at least, some lawyer, to tell me what crime it would be. Unlawfully disposing of a body? Maybe child neglect, too. But anything is better than facing life in prison for chloroforming your own daughter, and then shoving her into a plastic bag and dumping her.
Still. The jury decided that’s not what happened.
But why would Ashlyn risk a jury trial?
So maybe the stolen-Tasha threat-to-Ashlyn story is true?
How can I write a true-crime book—if what’s true is unknowable?
“Ahhhhh!” I stretch both hands above my head, hopin
g my brain does not explode all over the carpet and wallpaper. “You just have to write a story,” I instruct myself out loud. “Not the true story. A plausible story.”
When the jury acquitted, my story changed, too. Now the duplicitous Katherine and her exploitive publisher are paying us to write an “as told to” book. Ashlyn’s redemption. Her explanation of what happened. As told to me. Okay, fine. I can decide what she’ll tell.
Whatever way the story unfolds, at some point, Ashlyn was in Boston. She told it one way—that Tasha was not there. The DA told it another—that Tasha was. But what if they’d found that missing airport video? Then whose story would be true?
Mine would.
WHAT’S DONE IS DONE
Two hours from Dayton to Boston. In a single-engine Cessna with no bathroom. Ashlyn raced into Terminal B, hit the Ladies, and then joined the confident hustle of the big-city airport. She must look like shit. Her eyes puffy, no makeup. Her damn Cubs hat screaming outsider.
On the trip over, looking down at the cottony clouds, the sun baked the Cessna so hot she worried Tom would fall asleep. It was another world. Like, heaven. Which reminded her of their gruesome cargo. If I jumped out of the plane, would I just float into the clouds? And be gone, like my Tasha?
She tried not to picture it, any of it. What’s done was done. She had to move on. She could not bring back Tasha, who was so young she’d almost not had a life. But Ashlyn—well, she had a future. And she refused to give it up. Life goes on.
First thing, she decided as she joined the crowd in the bustling concourse, get a new cap. A Boston cap, so she’d blend in. She saw a Hudson News place, where they’d have souvenirs, and candy, too. Ten minutes until she was supposed to meet Tom at the taxi stand. He’d carry the cooler. “No one notices a cooler,” he’d assured her.
This would work. It would be sad. And then it would be over.
She’d almost reached the metal display rack—pink Red Sox caps seemed cute—when a little girl toddled by wearing a lavender pinafore and a floppy hat over her sandy curls. So like Tasha that Ashlyn had to push her own heart back into place. She could be brave, if that was the word, and pretend reality away. Until reality stared her in the face.
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