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“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning across the table, trying to read the furrowed lines of his forehead.
“Just that we live in different worlds. I don’t know that a podcast will change anything in here.”
I leaned back, watching him still. “You don’t think this will work. You don’t think anything will change.”
“It’s hard to imagine change from inside here. Nothing ever changes. The faces do maybe, but then eventually, we all start to look the same anyway.”
I stared around the room, looking at the faces of Ethan’s fellow inmates, realizing how remarkably true his words were. We were running out of time though. The guards were hustling prisoners back towards their cells, and there were fewer and fewer visitors in the room. The room was losing its warmth; what little there was of it in the first place, and suddenly I felt a desperate urgency.
“You know I’ve done everything I can on my own, right?” I asked, leaning towards Ethan once more, “I’ve written to the Oregon Innocence Project every year since you were arrested.”
Ethan nodded, his eyes boring into mine, holding fast. “I know that, Olivia. What I don’t know is how some radio show is going to change my situation.”
“Podcast,” I said, reflexively.
“Podcast, sorry. But you know what I’m saying, don’t you? You were there, you remember what it was like. The closing of the ranks in town, the accusations. I can’t imagine it going any other way, even now, ten years later. Kat said they were after the truth, and I respect that. I’m just … not sure anyone will ever know the truth about Tyler Washington. Except for the people who were there.”
* * *
“Mom? Dad?” I called, opening the door to my parents’ house with the key they still insisted on me having. I’d tried knocking already but to no avail. I walked through the hallway and down towards the kitchen, where I could normally find one or the other of them, but the house was still and quiet. The rain had let up that morning, peeling back a faded blue sky of a Sunday and I wasn’t surprised at all when I spotted them both outside in the yard, the back door open a little, pushing back and forth in the light September wind as they enjoyed the thin rays of the sun. “Mom!” I called again, and this time her head shot up from the flower bed she was working on and she called back, “Georgia?”
I walked out onto the back porch and waved at Dad sitting in his favorite lawn chair, before realizing his eyes were closed and he was deep in a nap. “Oh, Liv,” Mom said, standing up, a little unsteady on her feet and brushing her hands on the fabric of her pants as she walked towards me. “I wasn’t expecting you yet, sweetheart,” she said as she pulled me into a hug.
“I messaged you last night, you didn’t get it?” Mom let go of me and shook her head, squinting at me, even though the sun was hardly bright out here. “You lose your glasses again?”
“I can’t find them anywhere, sweetie, they’ve disappeared forever this time, I’m afraid.”
“And that’s why you haven’t read my message?”
“My little detective,” Mom said, squeezing my shoulder and walking with me back towards the house. “Anyway, it’s nice to see you. I thought you might be little too busy for dinner tonight. You have a big new case to work on, don’t you?”
“I do, but I have something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Uh oh.”
Even though neither Georgia nor I lived at home anymore, Sunday night suppers remained a fairly regular tradition in our family. When we were growing up it was often the only time all five of us would sit down to eat together in the week, and after Ethan went to prison and we all moved away from Twin Rivers, they continued on as a familial touchstone. We all loved to cook, but my mom and Georgia were by far and away the best chefs in the family. So, it wasn’t unusual for us all to gather together like this, it wasn’t even that unusual for me to turn up unexpectedly on a Sunday night with the expectation of being fed; I’d spent plenty of weekends in law school, working my brain into disarray, just trying to keep up and catch up, and sometimes the only way to maintain a semblance of sanity was to keep Sunday nights sacred and to have a member of my family cook for me. I never failed to think of Ethan and the endless numbers of meals he must have eaten in prison; barely distinguishable ingredients swallowed down at speed, while trying to avoid whatever prison politics were being played out in the canteen that day or week or month. There were times during this whole ordeal when I was so, so sure that Ethan’s arrest and prosecution were going to pull our family apart, leave us looking nothing like the family we were before. But over time the four of us managed to stitch ourselves back together, and sometimes I found myself wondering what we would all look like if Ethan was sat at the table too, and I scared myself by thinking that we might all have become closer without him.
We didn’t sit down until much later, not until Georgia had arrived, her arms full of the fresh vegetables she’d been harvesting at her community garden all day. Mom was a landscape gardener and all the green fingers and thumbs had been inherited by Georgia, completely bypassing me. Ethan had them too, although I doubted they got much use in prison.
“So, you guys know what a podcast is, right?” I asked, Georgia shooting me a look that said duh, as well as where are you going with this, while Mom put down her fork to grab a glass of wine before saying,
“Yes, we have managed to figure out what they are, thank you darling.”
“Cool, have you listened to Shadow of a Doubt at all?”
“Which one’s that?” Dad asked.
“It’s true crime,” Georgia said, “right, Liv?”
Dad groaned and rolled his eyes towards me, “Not all that true crime nonsense again, I thought you’d got that out of your system years ago. Hasn’t your brother’s troubles taught you anything?” I’d been something of a true crime junkie growing up; inhaling episodes of Forensic Files the way most people watched Friends. I even used to fall asleep to them.
“This is different. It’s not just going over what happened, they actually investigate and they’ve even led to retrials, and sentences being overturned.” I realized that I was taking on the role Daniel had played on Friday night, convincing my parents of the podcast’s validity, persuading them towards my view.
“Okay, so what? You want us to listen to this podcast?” Mom asked, looking a little bemused. “Or are you going to start working for them instead of Coleridge and White?”
“No, I’m not leaving my job. But they’re interested in covering Ethan’s case for their new season. And I think it’s a good idea. And so does Ethan.”
I watched as my parents shared a look. A zipped up, private communique that I’d witnessed a thousand times before, and yet still didn’t really know how to decipher. “You’ve spoken to Ethan about this already?” Georgia asked.
“Yeah, I went to visit him yesterday with the host, Kat.”
Both my parents put down their cutlery at the same time, their gazes now firmly locked on me, “That’s not – he thinks it’s a good idea?” Mom asked, a tremor of worry lining her voice.
“Yeah, well I’m still not sure he quite gets what a big deal the podcast actually is, but yeah, he’s on board.”
“I’m surprised at you, Olivia,” Dad said, his voice firm and low, “you know what this kind of attention can cause. We can’t go through all that again.”
“I know, and I thought about that, believe me. But this could really change things, Dad. It’s not just about attention, it could potentially change the outcome. Look,” I said, picking up my phone and googling the name of the first case Shadow of a Doubt had covered, Warren Kincaid, “this guy had filed for appeal three times before the podcast started investigating his case. Now he’s been acquitted.”
Dad took the phone from me, squinting down at the screen. He didn’t say anything for a while, taking his time reading through the article before removing his reading glasses and passing a hand across his face. His shoulders were slumped, exhausted. “I just don’t know, Liv. I’m surprised you even think this is a good idea. You’re the one who changed her name, after all.”
“I know, I know. I just … I’ve done everything I can think of to help him. I’ve filed for retrials, I’ve contacted the Innocence Project every year for almost ten years, I even went to law school for Christ’s sake, but he’s still in there, and I genuinely think this could change that.”
“It’s certainly impressive, this Warren Kincaid story,” Dad said, picking up the phone again and waving it around. “Very different case, though.”
“They’re all different cases, Dad,” I said.
“Would we have to be involved?” Mom asked, her eyes on me as they had been this whole time.
“Not if you didn’t want to,” I said with a small sigh, “Kat wants as many participants involved as possible, and obviously as Ethan’s family we’d help with perspective and giving the show legitimacy, but I spoke to her about it earlier, and she says she’s okay with it just being me and Ethan. It’s not ideal obviously – really what they’d want is to interview all three of you, as well as me, but I think they’d still be interested in going forward with Ethan’s case, even if you didn’t agree to interviews. I don’t think Ethan will give the go-ahead until you gave it your blessing though. What do you think Georgia? You’ve been pretty quiet.”
Georgia was listlessly twisting her fork through some spaghetti squash and didn’t look up when she said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”
I let the discussion turn to less controversial topics and waited until both of us were getting ready to leave before questioning my older sister. “So, you hate it right? The podcast?” I asked, while pulling on my coat.
Georgia rolled her eyes, “I don’t hate it. I actually like the podcast – I’ve listened to it before. I just think maybe you’ve forgotten what it was like ten years ago. I don’t want to go through all that again, I really don’t want Mom and Dad to go through it all again, and I don’t think you do really either. Do you?”
“No of course not, but we’d be more in control this time. Plus we’d know what to expect, how to prepare for it.”
“We wouldn’t be more in control,” Georgia said, shaking her head, “you think that now, but all it takes is a few Reddit threads, an article in BuzzFeed and the whole thing has run away from us. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to wake up with pig’s blood on my porch again.”
7.
THEN
We’re three weeks into the trial, and despite everything, the end seems to be in sight. It has felt interminable, these twenty days, each one longer than the last, an entire lifetime rolled up into three weeks. But this is the last day of witness testimonies, and then there will be closing arguments, and then the jury will be told to deliberate on whether or not they think my twin brother is guilty of murder. My chest tightens as I think of it, and I force myself to get out of bed. Every time I wake up now, I think of where Ethan is waking up, and the sheer force of the guilt that he is there, and I am here, propels me out of bed.
The day is bright, clear, crisp. Morning sunshine streaming through my window as I draw the curtains open. It’s the kind of day you want to drink in, to bathe in, sunlight warming skin, cool air burnishing the edges. There are sounds of activity coming from downstairs, my parents already up and about. Mom has stopped sleeping, spending nights holed up in the den, reading over documents, poring over anything and everything that might help out Ethan’s case. Her eyes have become bloodshot, and her skin pale. She hasn’t been in the garden in months. Weeds grow in her vegetable patch, choking the life out of formerly lovingly cared for plants and flowers. Heading downstairs I almost slip on the hardwood floor as a strangled scream comes from the hallway, setting me off running. A loud “FUCK!” follows the scream, followed by a sob of frustration and a slam of the front door.
“Do you know what they’ve done?” Georgia screams at me as I get downstairs, her face an abstract painting of red and white blotches, her eyes wide and wild with anger. “There’s blood on the fucking porch, Olivia, BLOOD. How can people be so fucking disgusting.” She rushes through the hallway, back to the kitchen where Mom is waiting, pulling her into a hug and I watch as my normally calm, quiet older sister shakes with rage in our mother’s arms. Walking away from them I open the front door, always needing to see something to believe it. The whole front porch is covered in a thin slick of bright red blood. In some places, it has run so thin it looks pink against the white of the wooden boards. The sun bounces off it, this glittering red pool of accusation and for a reason I can’t quite fathom, I crouch down to stick my finger in it. The blood on my finger glows up at me malevolently, practically neon, and I stand up too quickly, suddenly feeling lightheaded.
I wash my hands in the downstairs bathroom before heading back into the kitchen to silently grab the mop and bucket. I push blood away from me, watching it spill over the edge of the porch, fertilizing the green, green grass below, and then I wash it all away with water. Every so often I feel eyes on me and look up to stare back at whoever is staring at me. Across the street ten-year-old Billy Strong, who I have spent half his life babysitting, watches me the longest, but he’s not the only one. I wonder which of our neighbors did this, which of my friends potentially. The nausea that rippled through me when I first saw the blood disappears as I clean it all away. The firm feeling of the mop handle gripped in my hands reassures me, and as the blood tumbles to the ground beneath the porch I watch it disappear into the earth with satisfaction. In certain light, a slight pink tinge stains the white porch, but I have made this mess disappear, I have solved a problem, however small, and I decide I like how that feels.
I make coffee and breakfast for my family, preparing us all for the day ahead. We drive over to the courthouse in silence, unable to listen to the radio in case they report on my brother’s trial, and too distracted to pick and choose between music. As we pull into the car park, I yell at Dad to stop but I’m too late and the bucket of blood sloshes its way all across the windshield, with a sickening sound. I strain out of my seatbelt to see who it is, and my stomach rolls over when I recognize the face of Hunter Farley, one of Tyler’s best friends and someone I’ve spent countless hours with at lunch tables and movie theatres and parties.
“MURDERER!” someone shouts as I get out of the car, my heart shuddering to a near stop in terror, before pulling myself together, putting my mask back on and grabbing Georgia’s hand so that we can walk up the courthouse steps together. On the other side of those doors to the courthouse is the Mayor and her family, waiting for us to arrive as they have done every day since the trial began. Every day they have stared us down as we walk past them and into the court room. Burning their own version of justice into our skin and the back of our heads as they follow our every move.
But what I’m really bracing myself for on the other side of those doors is Ethan. Because every day that we walk through those doors holds the potential to be the last that we see him as he really is, as Ethan Hall, twin, brother, son, rather than Ethan Hall, convicted murderer. I take a deep breath and hear and feel Georgia do the same as we push the heavy wooden doors open at the same time and confront those waiting eyes.
8.
NOW
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.