All Eyes on Her

by L. E. Flynn

  THE COLORADO CHARGER

  September 19, 2019

  New witness comes forward in boyfriend-killer case

  By David Moss

  A shocking new witness statement from Coldcliff, Colorado, resident Abe Hendricks, 47, alleges that Tabitha Cousins, 17, was seen at Coldcliff’s Crest Beach stuffing rocks into a picnic basket the morning before Mark Forrester’s August 16 death. Hendricks called in to the local police tip line with his testimony. While he doesn’t have photographic proof of Cousins collecting the rocks, he is certain it was her he saw at the beach that morning.

  Forrester’s body was found in a creek approximately fifty meters from a backpack weighted down with rocks, leading investigators to surmise there was foul play in the competitive swimmer’s drowning death.

  “Usually I’m the only one there,” Hendricks told the Coldcliff Tribune yesterday. “It was early, not even seven. The sun was just on its way up. There was this girl. I didn’t think of it again until I saw her face on the news.”

  A source who did not want to be named reached out to the Charger exclusively to report that Cousins and Forrester had recently been fighting at a house party thrown by one of Cousins’s friends.

  “I couldn’t make out what they were saying,” the source said. “They kept their voices down. Then she stormed off.”

  Speculation exists that Cousins was cheating on Forrester with her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Becker Rutherford III, and she may have shoved Forrester when he confronted her about it during their hike. However, District Attorney Anthony Paxton has stated that the plot to kill Forrester was carefully crafted by a dangerous girl. Cousins’s attorney, powerhouse lawyer Marnie Deveraux, maintains that the accusations against her client are “absolutely invalid.”

  COMMENTS: (24 previous)

  CoffeeAddict: awfully convenient that this guy comes forward now. I don’t know. Something about this case isn’t adding up

  KatieKat: I have no idea how she’s getting out of this one.

  PrincessPea: They were fighting at that party because she was screwing another guy.

  Swifty01: Yeah like you would know

  PrincessPea: I would because I was there.

  20

  KEEGEN

  AS MUCH AS I HOPE she ends up in jail, I can’t picture Tabby there. I mean, can you see that girl eating prison food? She used to bitch and complain about the restaurants Mark took her to, like she was too good to be seen there. Made him feel like shit for not feeding her steak every night. Do you know how that makes a guy feel, when he’s busting his ass and it’s still not good enough, and it’ll never be good enough?

  I’m at the Stop & Shop today, working a double because I need the cash, and because I do happen to know how a guy feels when he busts his ass and isn’t enough. Kyla doesn’t have expensive taste. She’s the chick who’s just happy that you’re paying any attention to her. (Don’t tell her I said that.) Except lately the more attention I give, the more she needs.

  If Mark were here, he’d tell me not to waste my time. He’d tell me to find something I could win at. Mark hated being anything other than first. He once came in second at a meet in high school, the fifty fly, which wasn’t even his main event. There was this bonfire after, and I watched him take his silver medal out of his hoodie pocket and shove it in the fire, right underneath everyone’s roasted marshmallows and hot dogs. I was wasted, but I’ll never forget that moment. Mark hated losing.

  I smile at the old lady I’m ringing up. You can always judge a person on what they buy. This granny is all about marked-down meat, stuff that’s going to spoil tomorrow, red pulp that’s leaking bloody juice all over the conveyer belt. I smile anyway because I need this shitty job, because I don’t have enough money to get the hell out of town.

  Mark came over to my place only a couple times all summer. He was always busy doing other shit. Tabby, I guess, or swimming. The Coldcliff Heights Aquatic Center has this Olympic-sized swimming pool. He was so pissed about what happened at the NCAAs. Typical Mark, he only blamed himself, but it was her fault, her calling him up the night before and saying all the stuff she did. It was like she did it on purpose to make him lose.

  I don’t even look up at the next customer, not until I realize he isn’t buying anything. Then I see the uniform, and the stern face.

  “Keegan Leach,” he says. “Do you have a break coming up so we can talk?”

  I already talked to the cops. It came up on Mark’s phone that I was the last person he talked to before he left with Tabby. I was pretty brutal with them. I mean, I told them how Mark felt about the whole hiking idea. That he was worried about it. I showed them the text he sent me, which I’m sure they had already seen.

  Officer Oldman, that’s this guy’s name. He isn’t the one I talked to before. After my shift, I sit in a hard chair at the police station and sweat, because I hate talking to cops. Find me one person who doesn’t feel guilty by proximity, even when they have nothing to hide.

  “Keegan.” He sits down across from me. “Thanks for coming in. We’ve been made aware of some new information in the Mark Forrester case, and I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light on it.”

  I sit back in the chair. It’s, like, exceptionally hard, and I guess that’s probably on purpose, to make you uncomfortable.

  “Someone has come forth saying he saw Tabitha Cousins at Crest Beach on the morning before Mark’s death, loading rocks into a picnic basket.”

  “Okay.” I’ve already read the article. I still can’t picture Tabby with a picnic basket, all wholesome.

  “We believe these were the rocks that were intended to anchor Mark to the bottom of Claymore Creek. I’m sure you know that we found the weighted backpack, the one that was filled up with rocks, in the creek with Mark’s body.”

  With Mark’s body. I can’t fucking think of him like that, as two different things. Mark and body. It’s so messed up. I’d rather not think at all.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I heard about the backpack.”

  Oldman leans forward, all bulk. An intimidation tactic. I wonder if he was the one who questioned Tabby. I wonder if she broke down in front of him. Knowing her, she’d be more likely to break him down.

  “We believe Mark was wearing the backpack that day. Some hikers verify that they saw a girl with a picnic basket and a boy with a backpack walking up toward the Split.” Oldman’s face goes a bit softer. I wonder if he works on his expressions in the mirror at home, like they used to tell us to do for school picture day. “Something just doesn’t add up. Why would he carry a pack that heavy without knowing what was in it?”

  I shrugged. “That’s Mark. He’s an athlete. I mean, was an athlete. He probably didn’t even notice the weight. He used to go for runs every morning over the summer with a backpack full of his mom’s soup cans. Thought it helped his back muscles. Plus, he was just one of those guys who carried his girlfriend’s shit without asking. Sorry, I mean stuff.”

  Oldman nods and gives me a look as if to say, Women and their mysterious shit.

  “That makes sense,” he says. “What doesn’t is that we found the backpack underwater, almost directly beneath the drop-off point from the Split. Mark was found almost fifty meters away.”

  Fifty meters. The hundred-meter freestyle was his specialty. I remember us in high school swim club those early mornings, me sometimes hungover, chugging water bottles filled with a water-Gatorade mixture, because Mark read somewhere it was the best thing for your system before getting in the pool. Mark lapping almost everybody else, in his own league. People saying he was the next Michael Phelps.

  “So you’re saying…,” I start, and Oldman watches me put it together, the whole goddamn mess. Everyone knows Tabby pushed Mark off the Split, even though she’s saying he fell. But nobody believes her. I mean, she says he lost his balance. What does she expect? Just like she doesn’t have the patience for anything else, she didn’t think murder through.

  “The fall wasn’t what ki
lled Mark. We already knew his cause of death was drowning. But presuming he fell with the backpack on, and it was intended to weigh him down, he would have been found that way, with the pack still on. Mark managed to swim away.”

  I gulp back the acid in my throat. He was alive. He fought for it. Just like he fought for everything he wanted. Most people think stuff came easily to Mark. Grades, sports, girls. But he had to work for it, just like everyone else.

  Oldman folds his hands in front of me. He’s wearing a wedding band, a gaudy one with diamonds. “This doesn’t prove anything. But it does lead to suspicions that somebody could have held Mark under the water.”

  “You mean Tabby?” I blurt out.

  “We’re investigating all leads,” he says, calm and professional, the opposite of me.

  “Maybe he got tired,” I say, because it’s too sickening to think Tabby dragged someone else in on this with her, that someone else hated Mark enough to want him dead.

  “The creek is rocky leading up to the area where Mark was found. Any traces of wet footprints would have vanished on the rocks. We’re working to pick out any shoe prints in the surrounding area that would definitively identify a suspect.”

  I rub my face with my hands. Mark almost didn’t go on that hike. I could have talked him out of it—I was with him that day. But I didn’t try at all.

  “What I’m wondering,” Oldman continues, “is what you might know, as Mark’s best friend and arguably the closest person to him. Did he have any enemies? Is there anyone you can think of who might want Mark dead?”

  “No,” I say. “Everybody loved Mark.”

  Except maybe the one person who was supposed to love him the most.

  Text messages from Tabitha Cousins to Mark Forrester,

  October 18–19, 2018

  THE COLDCLIFF TRIBUNE

  September 20, 2019

  Text message history reveals jealousy, possible motive

  By Julie Kerr

  New evidence has been revealed in the death of Mark Forrester, 20, a Princeton championship swimmer whose hiking accident in mid-August is now being treated as a possible murder. Forrester’s girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, 17, who was with him at the time of his death, asserted that Forrester fell. However, text messages retrieved from Forrester’s phone, found in the creek, show a tumultuous relationship with a possible motive for murder. Cousins frequently sent messages to Forrester accusing him of cheating, and she sent an ominous text the day of the hike.

  Cousins’s lawyer declined to comment on the story.

  21

  BECK

  Coldcliff Police Station, September 23, 10:16 a.m.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: I’ll get right down to it, Thomas. That’s your real name, right? Thomas Becker Rutherford III.

  BECK: Nobody calls me that.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: We had a warrant to search your phone. You weren’t exactly forthcoming when we asked you if you’d been in contact with Tabitha. There was a flurry of calls made from her to you right around Christmas. Then again a few months later. And over the summer. She hadn’t lost your number.

  BECK: So she called me. I don’t see what the big deal is.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: The big deal is you picked up. You must have talked about something.

  BECK: I told her to stop calling. She did that sometimes. Just wanted to talk. Maybe there was nobody else who would listen.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Did she tell you she was upset with Mark?

  BECK: No, because we didn’t talk about him.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Did she want anything from you? When she called? She must have wanted something, if she kept calling.

  BECK: Sometimes she’d want to be picked up from a party. She knew I wouldn’t judge.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Judge what?

  BECK: Her. For being wasted. Or whatever.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Tabitha drank a lot.

  BECK: So do most people at parties.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: You picked her up, then. On your motorcycle.

  BECK: Yeah.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: And what did you talk about, on those rides? Where did you go?

  BECK: It was too loud to hear anything. You ever been on a bike before? Can’t hear much, besides the road. I’d drop her at home. Well, a block away, then I’d watch to make sure she got inside okay.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Why not walk her to her door?

  BECK: Her folks didn’t like me much.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Why not?

  BECK: Do you have a daughter?

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Answer the question, please.

  BECK: Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t like me. They just didn’t know me.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Do you feel like a lot of people don’t know you?

  BECK: Are you a cop, or a shrink now, too?

  OFFICER OLDMAN: (clears throat) Those nights you drove Tabitha home. You never went to Queen Anne’s Woods?

  BECK: No. Why would we?

  OFFICER OLDMAN: If you and Tabitha—(pauses, is interrupted by another officer coming in) One moment, Thomas. I’ll be back shortly.

  BECK: My name’s not Thomas.

  22

  ELLE

  IF YOU FEEL LIKE you’ve spent some time with me and still don’t know me very well—that’s fair. I keep people at a distance. Even Tabby. She doesn’t know everything, and it’s better that way.

  I see her as often as I can. Today, I show up with powdered doughnuts from Milky’s Variety—her favorite. She has makeup on, even though she doesn’t leave her house. There’s a news van camped out by the curb. I shoot my middle finger at it before cutting through the gate and knocking on the glass patio doors.

  “You’re the only one who visits,” Tabby whines, reaching down and taking a doughnut. “It’s like everyone forgot about me.”

  I wonder if that’s true. Not that everyone forgot, because obviously nobody did, but whether I’m really the only one.

  “You’re too good to me,” she says, brushing white powder from her lips. “I owe you big-time. The next time you’re a person of interest in a possible murder, I’ll bring you doughnuts, too.”

  I smile, but the truth is, I’m the one who owes her.

  I’m not ready to tell my truth. So I’ll keep telling Tabby’s.

  The first time Tabby and Mark had sex was at my house. We were all downstairs playing video games, then she said she was going to get a drink, and he followed her. I was left with Keegan—sometimes I got left with Keegan when we hung out. I didn’t have a problem with him or anything, but it was like we were expected to hook up by default, and he really wasn’t my type.

  So eventually I went upstairs to see where Tabby was. I called into the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Then I heard a noise coming from my bedroom. I walked up and stopped abruptly. They hadn’t even bothered to fully close the door. Mark was on top of her, and her hands were wrapped around him, digging into his skin. He said something I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded a lot like “You’re mine.”

  They had known each other for five days.

  It wasn’t that I was judging Tabby for having sex with a guy she didn’t know all that well. But that comment was super creepy and possessive. You’re mine. I knew Tabby would have seen it as romantic. It was an embrace. A promise. She wanted somebody who wanted her, needed somebody who needed her. She became a mirror for whoever she was with.

  I closed the door. I went back downstairs to where Keegan was sitting. He had paused his video game, which was unheard of.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Nothing.” I sat down on the couch, leaving an entire cushion between us.

  “Are they fucking?”

  I stared at my jeans, feeling my cheeks turn red. “I don’t know.”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. “Yeah, you do. Get used to it. This is his pattern.”

  I curled my legs underneath me, wanting to make myself as small as possible. Ever since I became aware of my body, I was always trying to take up less
space. “What do you mean, his pattern?”

  Keegan picked up the controller without looking at me. “He meets a girl. He gets obsessed with her. She messes up, and it all blows up.” Some kind of explosion happened on the TV screen, followed by two red words in the middle. Game over.

  I wanted to tell Tabby everything he had said. It was something she needed to hear before she got invested and fell too hard for Mark. But later that night, when the boys were gone, I could tell I was too late. She had already fallen.

  “He’s so amazing, Elle,” she said as we walked to Reid’s Ice Cream. A blanket of humidity hung in the air, making her hair curl around her ears. “You know when you meet someone, and he’s the one? Well, I think Mark might be the one.”

  I don’t think so, I wanted to say. I was sure that Tabby was one in a string of girls that Mark liked to play with. Maybe he only went after her in the first place because he suspected she was in high school. That she didn’t know any better.

  “Great,” I said instead. “I’m happy for you.” I reminded myself that Mark was a summer fling. He was going back to Princeton for his second year. He’d be in New Jersey, almost two thousand miles from Coldcliff, Colorado.

  “We’re going to Skype every night,” Tabby told me at the end of the summer. “I even bought some new bras and stuff. You know, to keep it interesting.”

  I could tell she was panicking inside. Her face did that thing where her eyes told a different story than her mouth. She was worried about the college girls. The ones at Mark’s swim meets, the ones sitting in front of him in class, the ones at parties, bra straps slipping down their bare shoulders as they chugged cheap beer. Mark had probably promised her she was the only girl for him. You’re mine.