Читать книгу Innocent or Guilty? - A. M. Taylor - Страница 13

The following week dragged, long days and longer nights at work stopping me from seeing much of either my family or Kat and Ray to talk about the podcast. In stolen minutes I managed to arrange with Kat to meet them in Twin Rivers on Saturday. They were already there, setting up shop and making a camp for themselves in the small city where my brother had been convicted of murder. I hadn’t been back to Twin Rivers in years. Not since my parents sold up and moved, as soon as they possibly could, to the outskirts of Portland. And now that I was facing down the reality of having to physically go back and confront my family’s past and my brother’s present, Friday had come around all too quickly.

I let out a sigh of exhaustion, and Karen Powers, the second chair on Reid Murphy’s case, and my boss, shot me a caustic look. Karen Powers didn’t sigh or yawn. She didn’t ever give the sense that she was as physically fallible as that. “We keeping you from your bed, Kitson?” she asked archly and I felt burning red begin to creep up from underneath my shirt collar. Kitson was the name I’d taken when I applied for law school. ‘Hall’ was a common enough surname, but when combined with my first name, not to mention my face and its uncanny similarity to my twin brother’s, it was a name I no longer wanted to be burdened with. Sometimes it felt like a betrayal. Of Ethan, of myself, of my family in general. Other times it just felt like what I had to do to get through the day.

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

“Good, well why don’t you run along and get us all some coffees just to stave off that evident exhaustion you’re feeling.”

With a nod I left the room, catching Daniel’s eye who smiled back at me sympathetically, as I did so. By the time I returned to the conference room, jobs that would take all evening and probably all night had been delegated and I was left with the least interesting; babysitting the defendant, Reid Murphy. Reid had been released on bail, and the whole week had been dedicated to preparing her for taking the witness stand. It’s fairly unusual for defendants to take the stand, but Karen liked to lean into controversial situations and had made what I thought was the fairly shrewd observation that Reid was likely to elicit sympathy from the jury more than anything else. There was a reason everyone on the team but me seemed to think she was innocent. Small and slight, with wide watery blue eyes, and mousey brown hair, she didn’t look like she could hurt a fly, let alone almost kill a man. Quiet dropped over the room once everybody else had left, taking the coffees I’d retrieved with them. Reid stared down at the table, or possibly at her thumbs, the skin around her nails bitten and ripped to ribbons, while I sat in the corner by a large window that was slowly being plastered with rain. I scrolled through my phone, switching between email, Twitter and Instagram while drinking my coffee, and was largely ignoring Reid when suddenly she spoke, her voice quiet at first but getting stronger.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

I looked up from my phone slowly, eyes meeting hers almost involuntarily. “I don’t have to believe you, Reid. I’m your lawyer not your mother confessor.”

Her face pinched together a little, skin losing color. “I just thought you of all people would get it. Would believe me.”

“What do you mean, ‘me of all people’?” I demanded, back straightening in my chair, legs uncrossing, both feet planted on the ground.

“You’re Olivia Hall, right? Ethan Hall’s sister? I just figured you’d get it, what with everything you and your family went through?”

I could feel my muscles tightening, clenching, almost against my will, and I forced myself to relax, lean back again, and maintain eye contact. “Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Well, you are Olivia Hall, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you, but then everyone kept calling you Kitson.”

“I changed my name,” I said, finally answering her question.

“I knew it,” she said, this time quietly again. “You look exactly the same.”

“Well, not exactly the same,” I said, mildly affronted. “Ethan’s jaw is much stronger.”

“No, not as Ethan. As you did in high school.”

Something pulled at my stomach, something hard, sudden and strong; the same thing that always warned me when I was about to walk into something I should probably walk away from. “High school? You’re from Twin Rivers?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re too young for us to have been in high school at the same time,” I said. Reid was just 22, making her six years younger than me.

She nodded, agreeing with me, “Yeah, but my sister was the grade below you. Spencer. You came by our house a few times, and I always had to go watch the basketball games because she was a cheerleader. Like you.”

I remembered Spencer. She’d been keen, a little clingy even, desperate to be part of the squad, always making sure she was at every single party. I hadn’t been her biggest fan, but she was nice enough I supposed. “You’re Spencer’s little sister? Wow, that’s so weird. Where is she now?”

“Twin Rivers still. She’s a teacher there,” she said quickly, clearly not here for me to reminisce vicariously about her older sister. “You know he totally deserved it, right?” She said this in a rush, her words picking up speed as if she’d been revving up to this all along and suddenly taken her foot off the gas.

“My brother?” I asked, a slight cold sweat pricking at my back.

“No, not your brother. I don’t care if your brother did it or not. Tyler Washington. He totally had it coming.”

I looked at her carefully, trying to work out what she was saying. Sympathy for Tyler Washington was practically universal; I’d never heard anyone say anything like what Reid had just said. “What do you mean by that?” I asked finally.

“He was an asshole.”

I sank back into my chair, disappointed. “Not all assholes deserve to be killed, Reid.”

“No, but he did.” She took a deep breath and swallowed, her gaze holding mine right where it was.

“What on earth would make you say that?” I asked sharply.

I felt pinned by her eyes as she said forcefully, “I just don’t think he was a good person.”

“And what could you possibly have known about that?” I asked, “You didn’t know him, did you? You couldn’t have known what kind of a person Tyler was.”

“I didn’t, but my sister did, and she said he was just … awful. She said your whole group was full of kind of shitty people.”

“Oh really?” I said, taken aback, “Because that’s not how I remember it at all. From what I remember Spencer was desperate to be our friend.”

I watched as Reid’s expression changed, as her posture grew more rigid, as she seemed to tighten up within herself. Shutting down and zipping herself up.

“Was James Asher an awful person too?” I asked lightly, looking down at my phone again in the hopes that she’d think I wasn’t too bothered about how she answered.

“Yes,” she said, her voice so firm and strong, so direct, that I was forced to look back up at her. Something in her eyes shifted and a little light crept in. She smiled, however small, and nodded at me. “Yes. He was a terrible person.”

* * *

When I’d left Portland, the morning had been low and grey, the sky practically within reach as it hovered over the earth, but the sun had cracked the sky wide open, just as the car rolled into the city of Twin Rivers, and Daniel had claimed it as a good omen. I hadn’t intended to let Daniel join me on this trip, but he’d dropped by early that morning, and had teamed up with my roommate, Samira to convince me I needed the support.

Checking into the B&B I’d booked earlier in the week, Daniel proceeded to amuse himself by pretending we were there for a romantic getaway, while I messaged Kat to find out where she and Ray had got to by then. They were staying in a motel closer to the edge of town to save a bit on money, so we arranged to meet at one of the many breweries that dotted the town.

“This is nice,” Daniel said. He’d been waiting for me out on the porch while I visited our en-suite bathroom.

“You did choose it,” I said drily. I’d been about to book in at the same motel as Kat and Ray when Daniel intervened on my behalf, pointing out that I had a bit more money to spare than a couple of investigative podcasters, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d been intending to join me all along. What I hadn’t told him when I booked it was how close the B&B was to my old neighborhood. We were a few streets over from my childhood home, but really, Tyler had died mere minutes from here, and standing on that front porch set something on edge. The B&B could have been my house, the street it was on could have been my street; luckily it couldn’t have been ten years ago. Far too much had changed.

We walked to the brewery in milky sunlight, Daniel excitedly pointing out landmarks of my former life to me. At one point we crossed over the top of my old street, and I hesitated, looking up at the street sign, exactly as it once was: there was no evidence of previous heartache, no indication that this was somewhere I and my entire family had run from. As I walked next to Daniel, it simply became a pleasant Oregon town, currently basking in some surprising autumnal sunshine.

Kat and Ray were already there when we got to the brewery. Huddled together at the end of a long table they looked a little conspicuous, heads bent towards each other, talking intensely, a private world for two. But Ray jumped up immediately when he spotted us, speed walking over to clap Daniel on the back and join us at the bar.

“Is day drinking really the best way to kick off an investigative podcast?” I asked as we joined Kat, orders in hand.

Ray laughed, a round little chuckle, “Well, not normally no, but during some of our research this week, we found out that one of the witnesses at the trial works here now, so we thought we’d scope it out.”

My hand stopped in mid-air as I raised my beer to my lips. “Who?” I asked.

“Cole Sampson,” Kat said. “You knew him, right? He’s the general manager and head brewer here now.”

“Cole?” I said, shifting in my seat, looking around me at the large, semi-industrial room, sure that he must have suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. “Yeah, I knew him. We used to date.” ‘Date’ didn’t really cover what Cole and I were together, and ‘I knew him’ was a pretty poor way of describing what he once meant to me, but I wasn’t about to get into that in the middle of a busy brewery he apparently worked in. I’d experienced most of the significant ‘firsts’ in a teenager’s life with Cole, and that included my first major betrayal.

“Wow, that’s great,” Kat was saying, blissfully unaware of the cord tightening inside me. “Do you think you could reach out to him, see if he’d be willing to do an interview? We’ve been coming up against a little resistance when it comes to people talking.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised. My brother is hardly this town’s favorite topic, unless it involves dragging his name through the mud.”

“But Cole would be up for it right? If he testified for your brother?” Kat asked.

“Cole? No. He was a witness for the prosecution,” I said slowly.

“Wait, what?” Kat looked stricken, embarrassed by her error and she opened up her laptop with practiced ease, swiping through various documents before coming to the right one. “Oh, right. He testified the same day as Jessica Heng and Nick Green. I guess I got confused when you said you guys dated.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Well, it was a pretty big part of why we broke up.”