by Kit Frick
[END BACKGROUND MUSIC]
Next up, I’ll be speaking to criminal defense attorney Katarina Wall. Ms. Wall does not represent Anna Cicconi, but she’ll be able to provide a general overview of the legal procedures involved in pretrial motions to dismiss in New York State. …
30 October
Herron Mills, NY
IT’S LATE. The night sky swirls with the first inky ribbons of autumn-crisped air as Martina and Aster make their way through the girl-sized gaps in the unkempt privacy hedge that has long ceased to effectively partition Windermere from Linden Lane. A wayward branch reaches out to snare Martina’s hair in its grasp, and she pauses a second to free her ponytail, yank it back into place.
Martina’s mind travels to the olive branch she extended to Aster tonight when she invited her to come along. Things have been frosty verging on arctic between the two girls since Martina aired her interview with Anna three weeks ago. There was a momentary thaw when it looked like Max Adler might be a real suspect—a new arrest to give the Spanos family hope while Anna’s story disintegrated between their fingers—but with no arrest made and Max’s role crystalizing in the public eye (an asshole, for sure, but not a killer), the glares Aster shoots Martina at school have become pure ice again.
Aster walks ten steps ahead of Martina, her pace quick and sure-footed. Martina has barely extracted herself from the privacy hedge, but Aster is halfway down the drive, veering right to skirt the porch, her body swallowed by shadow as she rounds the side of the estate.
Martina picks up her pace. Her friend knows the Windermere grounds well, has spent afternoons here with Zoe and Caden, others babysitting Paisley. But this place—made even more gothic, more ghostly in the cold October moonlight—is uncharted ground for Martina. She stops a moment to tip her head back, straight up to the third-floor balcony that has loomed with infamy in her mind’s eye since August. It juts out against the sky, a stone jaw missing a few teeth at the rails. No bird-boned girl could survive a fall from such a height. But no, Martina reminds herself, pressing on down the drive, after Aster, no one fell from Windermere.
To sort story from reality. Fact from fabrication. That’s why Martina is here tonight, at least she hopes. She’s here for Anna, mostly. She’s spent weeks torn between Anna’s potential guilt and innocence, but now Martina is sure. Anna didn’t kill Zoe, accidentally or otherwise. But someone did. She hurries quietly around the side of the estate, into the backyard where the weeds reach up to snag her tights like bony fingers in the moonlight. She shivers.
Aster is already at the back of the property, feet planted in the soot where the stable doors used to be. Their destination. The ruined ground the keeper of Zoe’s secrets. Because after Max left Zoe alone that night, something happened. Her story continued, then ended somewhere between the Windermere stable and Parrish Lake. The rational part of Martina’s brain says it’s too late to find anything here, that the police missed their chance at answers when Caden threw away the empties he found, when Max failed to report his story back when it could have been of any use, before the stable burned to the ground three months ago.
But a small, insistent tug in her gut says she has to look for herself. For Anna. And that bringing Aster with her tonight, including her in this longest of long-shot attempts at finding something, anything police missed in the ruins of the Windermere stable, might be the only chance she has of winning her friend’s forgiveness. Because if they find something tonight—a scrap of information, a shred of a clue—maybe, just maybe, Aster will begin to thaw the hard wall of ice she’s raised between them.
Martina steals one glance back at Windermere, eyes traveling up to the second floor. The windows are dark. Caden is all the way across the Long Island Sound, in New Haven, but Mrs. Talbot is inside, hopefully sleeping deeply. Martina feels bad about snooping around out here without permission, but she knows enough about Caden’s mom’s desire for privacy to know that asking would have gotten her nowhere. So.
“See anything?” she stage-whispers to Aster as she steps across a charred beam, into the soot.
Aster stays where she is. She hooks her thumbs into her jeans pockets and shrugs. “What’s to see?” she asks, not even attempting to whisper. Martina flinches, but they’re far enough out on the property that there’s no way Mrs. Talbot could hear them through closed windows. Hopefully.
“It’s just a bunch of burned-up wood and charred metal,” Aster continues. “If there was ever anything to find, it burned with the stable.”
Martina presses her lips between her teeth. Aster’s not wrong, probably, but she had been hoping that once they got here, Aster would get into the spirit of the search. Instead, her resentment toward Martina is as steely as ever.
“I’m going to start looking around.” Martina tugs on a pair of latex gloves and holds another out toward Aster, who takes them soundlessly. Then she slips her phone from her jacket pocket and switches on the flashlight app, holding the beam close to the ground and hoping it won’t attract any unwanted attention. Wood crumbles beneath her boots as she walks toward what used to be the far end of the stable, in the general direction of Caden’s stall.
At the front of the stable, Aster sinks down onto a plank of what probably used to be rafter and scuffs the ground aimlessly with her foot.
Phone in one hand, Martina begins sifting through the rubble. She’s not even sure what she’s looking for, if she’s entirely honest, which she’d rather not be. She needs to find something. Something that will lead to justice for Zoe, that will win her best friend back, that will compel the judge to grant Anna’s pretrial motion to dismiss. It’s a lot to hope for.
A wheedling voice at the back of her head says the Herron Mills PD won’t thank her for meddling with what might be a crime scene, but they’ve shown little interest in the Windermere grounds after Max Adler spoke with them. She knows they’ve been out here once, about a week ago, but the visit seems to have been perfunctory. Nothing’s taped off, no evidence tagged, no sign that the police plan to return. Their thinking seems to be very much in line with Aster’s: Whatever evidence there was to be found here was witlessly tossed by Caden in January or sent up in flames in July. Martina knows it’s a real possibility that Zoe left the stable shortly after Max that night, that whatever happened to her happened far from Windermere. But she’s not ready to give up yet.
She’s been on her hands and knees for less than a minute, tights and gloves thoroughly blackened with ash, when the flashlight beam catches a small glint in the rubble. The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickle. She switches her phone off and slips it back into her dress pocket. Breath hitched in the back of her throat, she glances over her shoulder. Behind her, Aster is still scuffing the toe of her shoe in the dirt, boredom glazed across her face.
Martina’s pulse quickens. She won’t say anything until she’s sure. She scoots closer. As her fingers find the gleam in the ash, cool and delicate and familiar, a voice cuts across the lawn.
“You.”
Just the one word. Both girls’ heads whip around toward the source of the sound. Ten yards away but approaching fast, Mrs. Talbot is striding across the grounds in a bloodred nightgown and black riding boots. The girls’ faces are snared instantly in a flood of white light from the hurricane lamp clutched in the older woman’s right hand. In her left swings something else, the length of a hunting rifle. Martina stops breathing.
“Let’s get out of here,” Aster mutters, shoving herself to her feet, but before she can run, Martina is next to her, clutching her wrist in her soot-smeared glove.
“Wait,” she cautions, frozen by visions of Mrs. Talbot raising the rifle, firing after them as they run across the lawn toward Clovelly Cottage. “Is that a gun?”
But it’s a parasol with a long, ornate, wooden handle, lovely if rather out of place in the moonlight. Every few steps, Mrs. Talbot presses its pointy tip into the grass like a cane.
“You,” she says again, and Aster wrenches herself f
rom Martina’s grasp. “I’ve seen you here before.” She raises the makeshift cane, points it straight at Martina. Pretty or not, she doesn’t doubt it could do some damage.
“I haven’t—” Martina starts to say, but before she can finish, the stick wavers. Toward Aster.
“On my property,” Mrs. Talbot continues. “Trespassing, just like tonight.” She stops at the threshold to the stable, as if doors still stood between them. The pointy end of the parasol trembles in the air, a foot from Aster’s chest.
Martina sucks in a sharp breath. In her jacket pocket, her fingers close around her phone.
“I used to bring Paisley over here,” Aster says, voice shaky. “Remember?”
“I know who you are,” Mrs. Talbot says, voice slicing the night air. “Little Aster Spanos. Always tagging after Zoe. Your sister’s the only reason I didn’t call the cops the other times I saw you back here, snooping around. Your family’s already had so much grief.” Her voice softens then, and the parasol lowers slowly to the ground.
“We’re very sorry,” Martina says. “We were just leaving.” With her free hand, she reaches slowly toward Aster’s elbow, ready to guide her friend away from the stable.
Aster flinches back. “That wasn’t me,” she says, voice pitched high. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“Careful there,” the older woman growls. “Don’t tell me what I saw.” The parasol’s pointy tip jabs the air.
This time, Martina flinches. Mrs. Talbot has likely endured a lifetime of people telling her what she saw or didn’t see, what’s reality and what’s an invention of her brain. Maybe Aster didn’t intend to make any hasty implications, but she needs to let this go.
The parasol jerks then, toward Martina. She lets out a small gasp, raising both hands in front of her.
“And you,” Mrs. Talbot says, eyes narrowing. “You’re the Jenkins girl.”
“Martina,” she manages to get out.
“I’m well aware.” Mrs. Talbot presses her lips together in disapproval. “You’ve done my son no favors with your podcast. Back to stir up more trouble?”
Martina swallows, but her throat stays dry. “We’re very sorry. Again. It’s just, after what Max Adler told police … and they don’t seem to be looking very hard, so we thought we’d try on our own—”
“And what did you find?” Mrs. Talbot shines the bright LED light of the hurricane lamp on Martina’s raised hands. Her fingers are still wrapped around her phone, and something else, a gleam of gold in the lamplight.
Martina tries to shove it back into her jacket pocket, but Mrs. Talbot’s words stop her short.
“I saw you back there, pulling it from the rubble. Is that Zoe’s?”
Martina’s eyes flicker to her friend. “No. It’s Aster’s.”
In the back of her mind, the implications have been spiraling since the second her fingers closed around the gold hoop earring with the helixed twist. The last time she saw Aster wearing them was the afternoon before Martina’s interview with Anna aired. Martina assumed her friend had taken the earrings off to spite her, but the flash in Aster’s eyes now tells Martina she was wrong. Dead wrong.
“You don’t know that,” Aster says, voice high and sharp. “They’re hardly one of a kind.”
But Martina does know. Fear dances across Aster’s face.
“Mrs. Talbot saw you,” she says, not quite gently. “On the grounds, more than once. What have you been doing at Windermere?”
Aster’s eyes dart between Martina and Mrs. Talbot. She takes a step back. For a moment, it looks like she’s going to run, and Martina reaches out toward her friend. Aster flinches away from Martina’s grasp.
“I didn’t—” she starts to say, then falters.
“I’m sure the authorities will sort this out,” Mrs. Talbot says. “If you weren’t doing anything wrong, Aster, there’s no need to worry.” Her voice is brittle.
Aster freezes. Two sets of eyes are trained on her, burning through her skin. To Martina, she looks like a rabbit snared in high beams. Pure panic blooms across her face.
For a second that seems to yawn out forever, no one speaks. No one moves.
Then, lightning quick, Aster’s hand shoots down into the rubble. When she straightens up, she’s clutching a charred metal beam, about the length and width of her forearm.
Martina stumbles back. “What are you doing?”
“Your fucking podcast,” Aster spits, taking a step forward.
Martina’s eyes flicker to Mrs. Talbot, silently willing the older woman to do something, but Mrs. Talbot is stepping back, back, back toward the house. Away from this turn of events.
“I’m sorry,” Martina mutters, although she’s not sorry, not at all, just confused. Her mind whirrs. Aster came here, to the ruins of the Windermere stable, the day the interview with Anna aired. She lost her earring. And that’s not the only time Mrs. Talbot has seen her on the grounds. Now Aster is threatening her. She’s missing dots, or lines to connect them, can’t think at all with Aster stepping toward her again, beam trembling in her hand.
“You ruined everything, Martina. Can’t you see that?”
Martina can’t see anything beyond the twisted piece of metal in Aster’s hand. She swallows. “I ruined everything,” she repeats. Her heart is pounding. She can’t outrun Aster, star athlete versus wannabe journalist. All she has are her words, and they’re failing her. “I should never have done the podcast. Gotten involved.”
“You were getting way too close,” Aster continues. “Back in July. Someone took the flash drive, and Caden’s stupid apology card. It was you.”
It was Anna, Martina thinks, but this is hardly the time for technicalities. “You set the fire,” she says numbly.
“You can’t prove that,” Aster snaps, panic rising in her voice. “You need to back off. Forget what you think you found.”
“I’m sorry,” Martina says again. The words taste sour on her tongue. Aster may not be ready to admit it, but it’s all coming into focus: Aster had been keeping tabs on the flash drive and Caden’s card. When they disappeared, she set the stable on fire. What’s still murky is why.
“When she confessed, I could breathe again,” Aster says. “But then you couldn’t let it go. The police believed her. Everyone believed her except you, Martina.” Aster’s words sing with venom and fear. Blood rushes to Martina’s head, roars in her ears.
Behind her, Martina can hear Mrs. Talbot’s voice, but she can’t make out what the older woman is saying. She must be back at the house by now. Abandoning Martina. Saving herself. She could have left her the parasol, at least, not that Martina’s sure she could have used it, even to protect herself.
Aster takes another step forward, and Martina steps back. Her foot lands on a broken beam, and her ankle rolls. First Mrs. Talbot, now her own body, betraying her. She goes down hard, wood splinters biting into her palms and tailbone cracking painfully against the dirt. The earring and her phone skid away from her, into the ash. A whimper slips through her lips, and Aster takes a step forward, two, until she’s standing directly over Martina, one foot on each side of her chest.
“Let it go, Martina.” It’s part warning, part plea. “Promise me.”
Martina’s eyes fill with tears. Her best friend, petite Aster, too short for swimming and ten times as fierce because of it, is standing over her, metal beam clutched in her hand. It’s shaking, hard.
“Okay,” Martina says. “Okay.”
Aster looks down at the rod, really seeing it for the first time. “Shit,” she mutters. She flings it hard into the grass, like it might bite. Then she collapses down beside Martina, buries her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’d never …”
Martina shoves herself up to a sitting position, then places her palm hesitantly on her best friend’s shoulder. “Aster,” she whispers. “It’ll be okay. We’re going to figure this out.”
“Aster Spanos.” A woman’s voice cuts across the lawn. Bot
h girls’ heads snap up. The woman is striding purposefully toward them. “My name is Officer Gwendolyn Park with the Herron Mills PD.”
“Trespassing,” she can hear Mrs. Talbot say from somewhere safely across the lawn. “And now this.” Martina thinks she can make out a second uniformed figure standing next to her. The older woman’s words from earlier flood her ears: Your sister’s the only reason I didn’t call the cops the other times I saw you back here, snooping around. But this time, she’d made that call. Probably before she even came outside.
Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Talbot.
Very slowly, Aster struggles to her feet. She offers her hand to Martina, who takes it, allows herself to be helped up. She searches her friend’s eyes, desperate for the truth, but Aster looks away.
“We have a few questions we need you girls to answer,” Officer Park is saying. She approaches, shines her flashlight beam at their feet until it lands on Aster’s earring. In a minute, her partner is at her side. Carefully, eyes never leaving Aster, he slips on a pair of gloves, then bends down to pluck the earring from the ash. He places it in a baggie, then turns to Martina.
“Is everything okay here?” For a moment, Martina’s eyes stray to the metal rod, where it landed in the grass. Then she turns back to the officer.
“I’m fine.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Martina can see Aster exhale.
He nods. “We need you to come down to the station with us. Both of you.”
Martina hears the words voluntary interview and your parents and your cooperation and then she stops listening as the officers guide them toward the front of Windermere, toward the car. She tries to catch Aster’s eyes one more time, but Aster won’t meet her gaze.
31 October
Pathways Juvenile Center, East New York, Brooklyn