1
Hannah
It was Jenny’s death that killed my mother. Killed her as good as
if she’d been shot in the chest with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The doctor said it
was the cancer. But I saw the will to live drain out of her the moment the
policeman knocked on our screen door.
“It’s Jenny, isn’t it?” Mom rasped, clutching the lapel of her
faded dressing gown.
“Ma’am, I don’t know how to tell you other than to say it
straight.” The policeman spoke in the low-pitched melancholic tone he’d used
moments earlier when he’d pulled up and told me to wait in the patrol car as
its siren lights painted our house streaks of red and blue.
Despite his request, I’d slipped out of the back seat and rushed
to Mom’s side as she turned on the front porch light and stepped onto the
stoop, dazed from being woken late at night. I hugged her withered waist as he
told her what he had to say. Her body shuddered at each word.
His jaw was tight under strawberry blond stubble and his light
eyes were watery by the time he was done. He was a young cop. Visibly
inexperienced in dealing with tragedy. He ran his knuckles across the corners of
his glistening eyes and swallowed hard.
“I’m s-s-sorry for your loss, ma’am,” he stammered when there was
nothing left to say. The finality of those words would reverberate through the
years that followed.
But at that moment, as the platitudes still hung in the air, we
stood on the stoop, staring at each other, uncertain what to do as we
contemplated the etiquette of death.
I tightened my small, girlish arms around Mom’s waist as she
lurched blindly into the house. Overcome by grief. I moved along with her. My
arms locked around her. My face pressed against her hollow stomach. I wouldn’t
let go. I was certain that I was all that was holding her up.
She collapsed into the lumpy cushion of the armchair. Her face
hidden in her clawed-up hands and her shoulders shaking from soundless sobs.
I limped to the kitchen and poured her a glass of lemonade. It was
all I could think to do. In our family, lemonade was the Band-Aid to fix life’s
troubles. Mom’s teeth chattered against the glass as she tilted it to her
mouth. She took a sip and left the glass teetering on the worn upholstery of
her armchair as she wrapped her arms around herself.
I grabbed the glass before it fell and stumbled toward the
kitchen. Halfway there, I realized the policeman was still standing at the
doorway. He was staring at the floor. I followed his gaze. A track of bloody
footprints in the shape of my small feet was smeared across the linoleum floor.
He looked at me expectantly. It was time for me to go to the
hospital like I’d agreed when I’d begged him to take me home first so that I
could be with Mom when she found out about Jenny. I glared at him defiantly. I
would not leave my mother alone that night. Not even to get medical treatment
for the cuts on my feet. He was about to argue the point when a garbled message
came through on his patrol car radio. He squatted down so that he was at the
level of my eyes and told me that he’d arrange for a nurse to come to the house
as soon as possible to attend to my injured feet. I watched through the mesh of
the screen door as he sped away. The blare of his police siren echoed long
after his car disappeared in the dark.
The nurse arrived the following morning. She wore hospital scrubs
and carried an oversized medical bag. She apologized for the delay, telling me
that the ER had been overwhelmed by an emergency the previous night and nobody
could get away to attend to me. She sewed me up with black sutures and wrapped
thick bandages around my feet. Before she left, she warned me not to walk,
because the sutures would pop. She was right. They did.
Jenny was barely sixteen when she died. I was five weeks short of
my tenth birthday. Old enough to know that my life would never be the same. Too
young to understand why.
I never told my mother that I’d held Jenny’s cold body in my arms
until police officers swarmed over her like buzzards and pulled me away. I
never told her a single thing about that night. Even if I had, I doubt she
would have heard. Her mind was in another place.
We buried my sister in a private funeral. The two of us and a
local minister, and a couple of Mom’s old colleagues who came during their
lunch break, wearing their supermarket cashier uniforms. At least they’re the
ones that I remember. Maybe there were others. I can’t recall. I was so young.
The only part of the funeral that I remember clearly was Jenny’s
simple coffin resting on a patch of grass alongside a freshly dug grave. I took
off my hand-knitted sweater and laid it out on top of the polished casket.
“Jenny will need it,” I told Mom. “It’ll be cold for her in the ground.”
We both knew how much Jenny hated the cold. On winter days when
bitter drafts tore through gaps in the patched-up walls of our house, Jenny
would beg Mom to move us to a place where summer never ended.
A few days after Jenny’s funeral, a stone-faced man from the
police department arrived in a creased gabardine suit. He pulled a flip-top
notebook from his jacket and asked me if I knew what had happened the night
that Jenny died.
My eyes were downcast while I studied each errant thread in the
soiled bandages wrapped around my feet. I sensed his relief when after going
through the motions of asking more questions and getting no response he tucked
his empty notebook into his jacket pocket and headed back to his car.
I hated myself for my stubborn silence as he drove away. Sometimes
when the guilt overwhelms me, I remind myself that it was not my fault. He
didn’t ask the right questions and I didn’t know how to explain things that I
was too young to understand.
This year we mark a milestone. Twenty-five years since Jenny died.
A quarter of a century and nothing has changed. Her death is as raw as it was
the day we buried her. The only difference is that I won’t be silent anymore.
2
Rachel
A single streak of white cloud marred an otherwise perfect blue
sky as Rachel Krall drove her silver SUV on a flat stretch of highway toward
the Atlantic Ocean. Dead ahead on the horizon was a thin blue line. It widened
as she drove closer until Rachel knew for certain that it was the sea.
Rachel glanced uneasily at the fluttering pages of the letter
resting on the front passenger seat next to her as she zoomed along the right
lane of the highway. She was deeply troubled by the letter. Not so much by the
contents, but instead by the strange, almost sinister way the letter had been
delivered earlier that morning.
After hours on the road, she’d pulled into a twenty-four-hour
diner where she ordered a mug of coffee and pancakes that came covered with
half-thawed blueberries and two scoops of vanilla ice cream, which she pushed
to the side of her plate. The coffee was bitter, but she drank it anyway. She
needed it for the caffeine, not the taste. When she finished her meal, she
ordered an extra-strong iced coffee and a muffin to go in case her energy
flagged on the final leg of the drive.
While waiting for her takeout order, Rachel applied eye drops to
revive her tired green eyes and twisted up her shoulder-length auburn hair to
get it out of her face. Rachel was tying her hair into a topknot when the
waitress brought her order in a white paper bag before rushing off to serve a
truck driver who was gesticulating angrily for his bill.
Rachel left a larger than necessary tip for the waitress, mostly
because she felt bad at the way customers hounded the poor woman over the slow
service. Not her fault, thought Rachel. She’d waitressed through college and
knew how tough it was to be the only person serving tables during an unexpected
rush.
By the time she pushed open the swinging doors of the restaurant,
Rachel was feeling full and slightly queasy. It was bright outside and she had
to shield her eyes from the sun as she headed to her car. Even before she
reached it, she saw something shoved under her windshield wiper. Assuming it
was an advertising flyer, Rachel abruptly pulled it off her windshield. She was
about to crumple it up unread when she noticed her name had been neatly written
in bold lettering: Rachel Krall (from the Guilty or Not Guilty podcast).
Rachel received thousands of emails and social media messages
every week. Most were charming and friendly. Letters from fans. A few scared
the hell out of her. Rachel had no idea which category the letter would fall
into, but the mere fact that a stranger had recognized her and left a note
addressed to her on her car made her decidedly uncomfortable.
Rachel looked around in case the person who’d left the letter was
still there. Waiting. Watching her reaction. Truck drivers stood around smoking
and shooting the breeze. Others checked the rigging of the loads on their
trucks. Car doors slammed as motorists arrived. Engines rumbled to life as
others left. Nobody paid Rachel any attention, although that did little to ease
the eerie feeling she was being watched.
It was rare for Rachel to feel vulnerable. She’d been in plenty of
hairy situations over the years. A month earlier, she’d spent the best part of
an afternoon locked in a high-security prison cell talking to an uncuffed
serial killer while police marksmen pointed automatic rifles through a hole in
the ceiling in case the prisoner lunged at her during the interview. Rachel
hadn’t so much as broken into a sweat the entire time. Rachel felt ridiculous
that a letter left on her car had unnerved her more than a face-to-face meeting
with a killer.
Deep down, Rachel knew the reason for her discomfort. She had been
recognized. In public. By a stranger. That had never happened before. Rachel
had worked hard to maintain her anonymity after being catapulted to fame when
the first season of her podcast became a cultural sensation, spurring a wave of
imitation podcasts and a national obsession with true crime.
In that first season, Rachel had uncovered fresh evidence that
proved that a high school teacher had been wrongly convicted for the murder of
his wife on their second honeymoon. Season 2 was even more successful when
Rachel had solved a previously unsolvable cold case of a single mother of two
who was bashed to death in her hair salon. By the time the season had ended,
Rachel Krall had become a household name.
Despite her sudden fame, or rather because of it, she deliberately
kept a low profile. Rachel’s name and broadcast voice were instantly
recognizable, but people had no idea what she looked like or who she was when
she went to the gym, or drank coffee at her favorite cafe, or pushed a shopping
cart through her local supermarket.
The only public photos of Rachel were a series of black-and-white
shots taken by her ex-husband during their short-lived marriage when she was at
grad school. The photos barely resembled her anymore, maybe because of the
camera angle, or the monochrome hues, or perhaps because her face had become
more defined as she entered her thirties.
In the early days, before the podcast had taken off, they’d
received their first media request for a photograph of Rachel to run alongside
an article on the podcast’s then-cult following. It was her producer Pete’s
idea to use those dated photographs. He had pointed out that reporting on true crime
often attracted cranks and kooks, and even the occasional psychopath.
Anonymity, they’d agreed, was Rachel’s protection. Ever since then she’d
cultivated it obsessively, purposely avoiding public-speaking events and TV
show appearances so that she wouldn’t be recognized in her private life.
That was why it was unfathomable to Rachel that a random stranger
had recognized her well enough to leave her a personalized note at a remote
highway rest area where she’d stopped on a whim. Glancing once more over her
shoulder, she ripped open the envelope to read the letter inside:
Dear Rachel,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name. I feel
that I know you so well.
She recoiled at the presumed intimacy of the letter. The last time
she’d received fan mail in that sort of familiar tone, it was from a sexual
sadist inviting her to pay a conjugal visit at his maximum-security prison.
Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat of her car and continued
reading the note, which was written on paper torn from a spiral notebook.
I’m a huge fan, Rachel. I listened to every episode of your podcast.
I truly believe that you are the only person who can help me. My sister Jenny
was killed a long time ago. She was only sixteen. I’ve written to you twice to
ask you to help me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you say no again.
Rachel turned to the last page. The letter was signed: Hannah. She
had no recollection of getting Hannah’s letters, but that didn’t mean much. If
letters had been sent, they would have gone to Pete or their intern, both of
who vetted the flood of correspondence sent to the podcast email address.
Occasionally Pete would forward a letter to Rachel to review personally.
In the early days of the podcast, Rachel had personally read all
the requests for help that came from either family or friends frustrated at the
lack of progress in their loved ones’ homicide investigations, or prisoners
claiming innocence and begging Rachel to clear their names. She’d made a point
of personally responding to each letter, usually after doing preliminary
research, and often by including referrals to not-for-profit organizations that
might help.
But as the requests grew exponentially, the emotional toll of
desperate people begging Rachel for help overwhelmed her. She’d become the last
hope of anyone who’d ever been let down by the justice system. Rachel
discovered firsthand that there were a lot of them and they all wanted the same
thing. They wanted Rachel to make their case the subject of the next season of
her podcast, or at the very least, to use her considerable investigative skills
to right their wrong.
Rachel hated that most of the time she could do nothing other than
send empty words of consolation to desperate, broken people. The burden of
their expectations became so crushing that Rachel almost abandoned the podcast.
In the end, Pete took over reviewing all correspondence to protect Rachel and
to give her time to research and report on her podcast stories.
The letter left on her windshield was the first to make it through
Pete’s human firewall. This piqued Rachel’s interest, despite the nagging worry
that made her double-lock her car door as she continued reading from behind the
steering wheel.
It was Jenny’s death that killed my mother [the letter went on].
Killed her as good as if she’d been shot in the chest with a twelve-gauge
shotgun.
Though it was late morning on a hot summer’s day and her car was
heating up like an oven, Rachel felt a chill run through her.
I’ve spent my life running away from the memories. Hurting myself.
And others. It took the trial in Neapolis to make me face up to my past. That
is why I am writing to you, Rachel. Jenny’s killer will be there. In that town.
Maybe in that courtroom. It’s time for justice to be done. You’re the only one
who can help me deliver it.
The metallic crash of a minibus door being pushed open startled
Rachel. She tossed the pages on the front passenger seat and hastily reversed
out of the parking spot.
She was so engrossed in thinking about the letter and the
mysterious way that it was delivered that she didn’t notice she had merged onto
the highway and was speeding until she came out of her trancelike state and saw
metal barricades whizzing past in a blur. She’d driven more than ten miles and
couldn’t remember any of it. Rachel slowed down, and dialed Pete.
No answer. She put him on auto redial but gave up after the fourth
attempt when he still hadn’t picked up. Ahead of her, the widening band of blue
ocean on the horizon beckoned at the end of the long, flat stretch of highway.
She was getting close to her destination.
Rachel looked into her rearview mirror and noticed a silver sedan
on the road behind her. The license plate number looked familiar. Rachel could
have sworn that she’d seen the same car before over the course of her long
drive. She changed lanes. The sedan changed lanes and moved directly behind
her. Rachel sped up. The car sped up. When she braked, the car did, too. Rachel
dialed Pete again. Still no answer.
“Damn it, Pete.” She slammed her hands on the steering wheel.
The sedan pulled out and drove alongside her. Rachel turned her
head to see the driver. The window was tinted and reflected the glare of the
sun as the car sped ahead, weaving between lanes until it was lost in a sea of
vehicles. Rachel slowed down as she entered traffic near a giant billboard on a
grassy embankment that read: WELCOME TO NEAPOLIS. YOUR GATEWAY TO THE CRYSTAL
COAST.
Neapolis was a three-hour drive north of Wilmington and well off
the main interstate highway route. Rachel had never heard of the place until
she’d chosen the upcoming trial there as the subject of the hotly anticipated
third season of Guilty or Not Guilty.
She pulled to a stop at a red traffic light and turned on the car
radio. It automatically tuned into a local station running a talkback slot in
between playing old tracks of country music on a lazy Saturday morning. She
surveyed the town through the glass of her dusty windshield. It had a charmless
grit that she’d seen in a hundred other small towns she’d passed through over
her thirty-two years. The same ubiquitous gas station signs. Fast-food stores
with grimy windows. Tired shopping strips of run-down stores that had long ago
lost the war with the malls.
“We have a caller on the line,” the radio host said, after the
final notes of acoustic guitar had faded away. “What’s your name?”
“Dean.”
“What do you want to talk about today, Dean?”
“Everyone is so politically correct these days that nobody calls
it as they see it. So I’m going to say it straight out. That trial next week is
a disgrace.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the radio announcer.
“Because what the heck was that girl thinking!”
“You’re blaming the girl?”
“Hell yeah. It’s not right. A kid’s life is being ruined because a
girl got drunk and did something dumb that she regretted afterward. We all
regret stuff. Except we don’t try to get someone put in prison for our
screw-ups.”
“The police and district attorney obviously think a crime has been
committed if they’re bringing it to trial,” interrupted the host testily.
“Don’t get me wrong. I feel bad for her and all. Hell, I feel bad
for everyone in this messed-up situation. But I especially feel bad for that
Blair boy. Everything he worked for has gone up in smoke. And he ain’t even
been found guilty yet. Fact is, this trial is a waste. It’s a waste of time.
And it’s a waste of our taxes.”
“Jury selection might be over, but the trial hasn’t begun, Dean,”
snapped the radio announcer. “There’s a jury of twelve fine citizens who will
decide his guilt or innocence. It’s not up to us, or you, to decide.”
“Well, I sure hope that jury has their heads screwed on right,
because there’s no way that anyone with a shred of good old-fashioned common
sense will reach a guilty verdict. No way.”
The caller’s voice dropped out as the first notes of a hit
country-western song hit the airwaves. The announcer’s voice rose over the
music. “It’s just after eleven A.M. on what’s turning out to be a very humid
Saturday morning in Neapolis. Everyone in town is talking about the Blair trial
that starts next week. We’ll take more callers after this little tune.”
Copyright © 2020 by Megan Goldin
The Blame Game by Sandie Jones
