Okay. I kept the heart photo. For now. But whatever happened with Dex, he—and Katherine?—had nothing to do with Ohio, or drugs, or Ashlyn or Tasha. That was all Ashlyn’s re-created reality. But in some ironic consequence, Ashlyn’s contagious manipulation had stampeded me to open boxes of the past I’d vowed not to. And allowed me to find—nothing else. Nothing I needed, or ever would need. When I finished erasing the past and trashing the baggage of unnecessary memories, all of Dex’s boxes were gone. As my life continued to unfold, whatever Dex would mean to me was not contained in those boxes.
I was almost out of breath with the tension of it, or the relief, as I finally stared at the only alien things remaining in the guest room. Ashlyn’s empty suitcase, and her few clothes in the closet. What was I supposed to do with that? Finally, I yanked everything off the jangling hangers and scooped her possessions from the dresser drawers. The whole mess teetering in my arms, I tried to unzip her roller bag to shove everything inside. That gray hoodie, the one she wore so often, slid onto the carpet. It sounded different than I expected. I dumped the jumble of what I was still carrying into the suitcase, then picked up the hoodie. Something in a pocket had made the noise. I dumped it out.
An amber plastic pill container rolled onto my palm, rattling a few pills inside. It had the logo of a local drugstore, the medicine prescribed to Katherine Crafts. I squinted at the tiny print. Ambien. Ten milligrams. I stared at the bottle, the story shifting again. Ashlyn had sleeping pills. Exactly like mine. From Katherine? Did she steal them from her? Or did Katherine give them to her? Why?
I put my hands over my eyes, trying to squeeze out the truth from my brain.
Had she taken one of mine at all? Had she given me back one of these? Had she put one in my wine, then pretended she didn’t? I’ll never know. But if she’d done it to make me feel unfairly suspicious of her, it worked.
She makes her own reality, I’d thought of that that so many times. And, like Koletta said, she was good at it.
I thought over the past two weeks. Tried writing it into a different story.
That fire in my kitchen. What if Ashlyn simply parlayed my unreliable toaster into an arson conspiracy? The bomb threats. The food poisoning. The graffiti and break-in at Quinn’s. Katherine’s silver-car mystery. Seeing the “juror” and the woman in pink kitten heels on the cell phone. She used all of those, twisted them, to fabricate her own reality. To make a new story. To scare me. To convince me those random events—some real, and some maybe not, was there really a dead baby chipmunk?—were connected to her. She used me. And my grief. To make her own reality.
The depth of her deception was astonishing. Almost brilliant, now that I understand what happened. She’d even appropriated Joe, turning his absence into a tragedy. Again, all about her. I knew, I always knew, she wrote the heart on that balloon photo. I guess.
Maybe.
But there are two stories that need a truth. Tasha’s death, of course. She’ll never be punished for it, but I’m confident of that one: Ashlyn is guilty. But what about the deaths of Dex and Sophie? Is someone—besides me—guilty of that?
I trust my husband.
I trust my friend.
Maybe.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
“Let’s do the interview first,” Joe says. “How’d Rogowicz find Luke? I mean, Denholm Shaw?”
Joe and I are in my living room, Monday morning at ten-fifteen, talking about Ashlyn. At opposite ends of the couch, morning light filtering through the front windows. Some of the leaves on my willow changed to yellow overnight. But not all of them.
Joe’s still being cagey about where he was for the past week. But clearly it had nothing to do with Ashlyn’s imaginary bad guys. I’m embarrassed for having suspected him. But he’ll never know.
We’re up to the part about the double-city sting that resulted in Ashlyn Bryant being charged with murder.
“Easy,” I say. “Shaw wasn’t hiding, you know? No one ever connected him with Ashlyn. He answered the door when Rogowicz went to his house. Boom. Off to the Dayton cop shop.”
I pause, remembering. It was pretty funny when I showed Ashlyn my Skype screen. And got to see her reaction when her boyfriend Denholm “Luke” Shaw was right there with Rogowicz. Shaw had called Ashlyn from the Dayton PD, Rogowicz by his side.
Hard to come up with a lie when the other half of the conspiracy has thrown you under the bus. Shaw had an alibi for the night of Holt’s “accident.” Now Ashlyn will have to prove she had one too. Cops are betting she doesn’t.
“Why’d Ashlyn kill him? She was pregnant with his child, right?” Joe’s writing in a reporters’ notebook, old school. “Did Holt not want to marry her or something?”
“The opposite,” I tell him. “Apparently he insisted on it. Wouldn’t let go. According to Shaw, Ashlyn told him Holt was about to make a big public stink over her pregnancy. Problem was, she’d set her sights on bigger things. Shaw was a better catch. Richer, to be specific. Holt was in Ashlyn’s way.
“So yesterday, when the cops showed Shaw the fingerprints, he ratted her out. Boom. His only choice. He told them she’d borrowed his car that night, and insisted he knew nothing about why. When Holt was found dead, she admitted she’d run him off the road, but said it was to scare him, not kill him. She only wanted to get him out of her life. So she said.”
“Don’t want to get in Ashlyn’s way,” Joe says.
“Tell me about it,” I say, thinking of Dex’s rock. “Anyway, as a cover story, Ashlyn convinced Shaw to ditch the car and pretend it’d been stolen. Lucky for them—I guess lucky is the word—the cops arrested the wrong bad guy. For that incident, anyway.”
“Why didn’t they check the fingerprints bef—oh, I get it,” Joe says. “Even if they did, Ashlyn’s weren’t on file at that time. So they wouldn’t have a match.”
“Yeah,” I say. “So dumb. She could have said she and Shaw were an item, and ‘of course she was in the car’ at some point. But she got careless. Like she does. Too late now for that lie.”
“She lies to everyone.” Joe clicks his ballpoint pen. “Half the time, I think she believes it. A complete sociopath. You knew this when you brought Ashlyn back to your house yesterday?”
“Yeah, it crossed my mind, I gotta tell you,” I say. “But I also knew Overbey would use the key I’d told him I always have under a rock by the front porch and be there, already hidden, when we arrived. So hey. It wasn’t that risky.”
I roll my eyes, replaying it. “On the other hand, yeah, I guess it would have been risky if Ashlyn hadn’t fallen for it. How would I have gotten Overbey out of that closet?”
Joe stops writing. Looks at me, smiling. “You’ve been so great through all this, Merce.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Big story.”
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
Isn’t that what you do in an interview? But his eyes have softened, and—what if he’s not going to ask about the Barker Holt murder? How will I answer?
“Mercer?” he asks again. He looks at his watch.
“Yeah?”
Joe shifts position, turns his whole body toward me. Looks at his watch again. “Who do you think really killed Tasha Nicole?”
“What?”
“Yeah, I mean—there’s still no answer to that.”
I take a deep breath. Not exactly what I thought he was about to ask. But, okay. Who killed Tasha Nicole? How many times have I wondered about that? Ashlyn would deny it, but what she’d told me yesterday sounded like a confession. For sure. But was it “Only Ashlyn”?
“Maybe it happened exactly the way Royal Spofford described,” I say. “Maybe the Skype was real. Maybe the chloroform was real. We might never be sure. And maybe not ‘only’ Ashlyn. Wadleigh Rogowicz says the name Denholm Shaw is on the passenger manifest of the plane Ashlyn took to Boston—so that puts them both in Boston, and with Tasha, like she told me. But doesn’t matter, because they can’t charge her again for Tasha’s mur
der. And if they charged Shaw, well, he’d be acquitted, too. Talk about reasonable doubt.”
“True,” Joe says.
“And it’s a tightrope,” I tell him the clincher. “He could make a deal that he won’t testify against Ashlyn for the Barker Holt murder unless they give him immunity for everything else.”
“People can get away with murder,” Joe says.
“Yeah,” I say. How well I know. But they can never get away from it.
Joe is quiet for a moment, and I am, too.
“It haunts me, you know?” I finally say. “If that black Lab had found the body sooner. If the composite drawing had been more recognizable. If Wadleigh Rogowicz hadn’t lost that video. If there’d been one fingerprint of Ashlyn’s on that duct tape. And maybe it’s—in a way, my fault. That one juror, Juror G, who talked to her daughter and got dismissed. Might it have made a difference if she’d stayed on the jury? I can’t stop thinking about that. And now, it feels like Tasha’s death is not … like there’s no justice for Tasha.”
“Ashlyn’s in custody,” Joe says. “Maybe that’s enough?”
I think of that face, and those pink leggings, and the purple butterfly barrettes. “Guess it has to be. Justice is not an exact science.”
When the doorbell rings, Joe gets up, faster than I do. Follows me to the front door. I look through the peephole.
Katherine.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
“Mercer?” Joe says again as I go to the door. “I need to—”
“Hang on.” Now I have to face it. Katherine. Dex and Katherine. How will I deal with her? I try to assemble my facts, and Ashlyn’s lies, if they were lies, and my quandary about that photo. What still haunts me, relentlessly, is that not everything Ashlyn said was untrue.
Which is this?
I haven’t seen Katherine, or heard from her, for two days. Mainly because I’m avoiding her calls. Now that there’s no way to send her to voice mail, I’ll play it by ear. See where she takes it. And if I decide to confront her over the photo, I certainly won’t do it while Joe is here.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Katherine says as I open the door. “And hi, Mercer.”
Before I can unscramble her greetings or read her expression, she’s inside, the fingers of one hand intertwining with Joe’s.
I close the door. Every time Katherine arrives, it’s The Twilight Zone.
“Yeah,” she says, before I can remember how to talk. “We wanted to tell you first. We’re—Joe’s wife is—they’re—ah.”
“That’s what I was going to tell you,” Joe takes over. “Kath and I are, um, together. And last week we—took off. Of course we didn’t want anyone to know. It would have been fine, except my wife—who I’d told I was out of town on business—went nuts. Called the police. We’d been having trouble for a while.” He shrugs. “And she was getting back at me. She’s incredibly suspicious, and I’m not a very good liar. The cops tracked me—us—down pretty quick. Exactly what my wife wanted to happen, complete with the embarrassment.”
“Is it too early for wine?” I ask. Kath and Joe? So that means the whole Dex and Kath thing is—well, no, not necessarily. Joe’s wife is a married woman, too.
“I’m so sorry,” Katherine says. “That’s why we both showed up at your house on closings day, remember? Joe had three coffees? We just wanted to be together, somewhere we could really be.”
Does every story have another explanation?
“You crazy kids,” I say, trying to keep my balance. I still don’t know what’s true. “Listen, Joe, can you give us a sec? I want to show Katherine something in the study.”
It takes one minute for me to take the photo from my desk. Fifteen seconds for her to look at it. Ashlyn hadn’t been lying about making a copy. She’d left the original. To torment me, I’d decided. We’d never gone back to check with balloon guy, of course. Her arrest got in the way.
“Aw,” Katherine says. “Yeah, that’s so sweet. Balloon day. What about it?”
“Did you sign that?”
“Sure,” she says, flipping it over, and back again. “Balloon day. I took this, Merce. Then Dex took one of you and Sophie, then some kid took one of all three of you, and all four of us. Last time I was in Dex’s office—planning your surprise birthday party, I think—he had them all on his desk. I signed on a whim. Put hearts on the others, too.”
I blink, looking at the picture. Where are those others? Ah. We never opened the last box. And now it’s gone.
“Balloon day? I was there?” I squinch my face, trying to retrieve any fragment of that day. I look at Sophie’s funny little mouth. Pop-si-cle. “Wait—blue popsicles. Right?”
“Right. You were still pretty sleep deprived, sister. Good thing Dex loved you so much.” She hands me back the photo. “Sophie’s terrible twos were brutal, remember?”
“Yeah. They were.” I open my desk drawer. Take out an amber plastic pill container. “Katherine? Ashlyn had these.”
“That bitch.” Katherine takes the bottle, examines it, shaking her head. “Piece of work, huh? I wondered where those were. I only had five, and I was hoarding them.” She twists open the top. Shakes the orange pills onto her hand. “Four,” she says.
“One more thing.” I pull a bit of paper from my jeans pocket. “Did you give this business card to Dex? It was in his files. With your cell number on the back.”
She takes it. Shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. “Couldn’t have, honey. See? It’s an Arbor Books card. I didn’t have those until—you know. After.”
“An Arbor Books…” I totally spaced on why it was impossible for Dex to have that card. So why … Oh. “Wait. Did you give one to Ashlyn?” She might have planted it in the files. Ashlyn obviously hadn’t checked. Careless.
“Yup. Definitely gave her one.” She hands me the card. “Anyway, what’s up with this?”
“Nothing,” I say, taking it back. And, at that moment, I’m also taking back my truth. All the familiar puzzle pieces of my life resettle into place, right where they were before Ashlyn took all my truths and scrambled them. I’ll never be how I was back then. Never be that happy again. But I was, once. I was. We were. And that is as true as anything can be. “I just couldn’t remember where it came from.”
Lame, but Kath’s floating in her own romance-novel world.
“Great. So what do you think about Joe and me?” She tucks her arm through mine, pulling me close, and leads me back into the living room. Her perfume is lemony-sweet, and her hair has the scent of flowers.
Seeing her like this, I cannot believe I doubted her. Well, I guess I can, Ashlyn’s a pro. But I’m relieved Kath will never know the truth. Our friendship was almost another of Ashlyn’s victims. She ruins everything she touches. But not this.
“Isn’t he terrific?” she asks. “We really get each other, you know? Just like you and Dex.”
She stops. Frowns. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
We’re mid-hallway, right beside my gallery of family photos. Dex and Sophie are watching me. Smiling and happy. Like they always were. Like they always will be.
I reach out, stopping her mid-sentence, and throw both my arms around my one true friend. A quick hug, but full of the future.
“I’m happy for you, honey,” I tell her. “I am. You’re fabulous. He’s wonderful. You deserve every bit of joy. Savor it, you know? Both of you. Should I shop for a bridesmaid’s dress?”
Kath’s laughter encircles me. “I promise you’ll be the first to know,” she says. “We’re under the radar, though, being careful, until the divorce. But I really do think.…”
Katherine keeps talking, and I tune out her bliss. Some people meet new loves, some people go to prison. I only write about it all, write about what I believe is true. But the truth is not what I choose to believe. It’s what’s true.
“Okay?” Katherine is asking. “He should be here any second.”
“Who?” I ask. Joe’s writing in his notebook, feet proppe
d on the coffee table. He’s talking on his cell phone, holding it between his ear and his shoulder.
“The guy. Weren’t you listening to me? To get your courtroom-feed equipment. They’ll try Ashlyn for the Barker Holt murder in Ohio, so you won’t be needing it.”
“Listen to this,” Joe taps off his phone as he stands, holds it up as if to show us who he’d been talking to. “Quinn McMorran confirms the cops have now found all the guys who tried to break into her house. Local yokels, she told me, coked up, they hate all defense attorneys, everybody’s guilty, whatever. But it made Quinn so mad, she’s gonna get a special dispensation from Ohio to go there and defend Ashlyn again.”
“Gang’s all here,” I say. “Hey. Maybe I’ll go to Dayton, too? Cover it myself? And add it to the book?”
Katherine tilts her head, raises one eyebrow. I know that look.
“Brilliant!” she says. “But she might get off, you know. Again.”
“She might,” I say. “It’s a good story, either way.”
The book on Ashlyn Bryant’s life is not closed, and I hope I’m there to write the next chapter, too, the final version of Little Girl Lost. The true version. Ashlyn was lost, too, after all.
The doorbell rings. Again. Maybe this morning is not so much Twilight Zone as madcap sitcom.
“I’ll get it,” Katherine says, talking as she heads to the door. “That’s gotta be the guy for the video gear. It’s his last day at the production company. He’s got some great new job in New York, doing … Hey, Max.”
“Hey, Katherine. Hey, Joe. And you must be Mercer,” he says, coming into to the living room. Plaid shirt, Levis. Tortoiseshell glasses. Unruly hair. Wide smile. Nice eyes. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Oh. I recognize that voice. I mean—that Voice.
I burst out laughing. Purely, openly, laughing. At least I got Voice right. And as tears stream down my face, tears of surprise, and relief, and reality, I wonder—how many days has it been since that happened?
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