Life in High Def

by Kimberly Cooper Griffin

  There was a pause, and Reilly could see Sylvie’s expression as she considered their options.

  “Let’s do something different. Since this will probably be the last time, let’s do something to remember.”

  Reilly heard Sylvie laugh and wished that she were there so that she could hit her, or worse. They were having fun, totally unaware that a man was going to die. A silent rage burned inside of her even as anxiety mounted within her. How had it happened? Would she finally find out?

  “A trash can or something? Like she ran into it?” Parker asked, sounding like she was moving around.

  “No. I have it. Let’s drive her car up the pier a little way. Leave it out there. That should be interesting. The cops will have a field day.”

  “Those metal poles are in the—”

  “We drive around them, idiot. Like the lifeguard Jeeps do it.”

  “Okay. Okay. Let’s do it.”

  The sound of laugher and footsteps preceded the sound of car doors opening and closing, then the sound of the car starting.

  “Jesus, Syl! Turn the headlights off. You’ll attract attention. Besides, you’re shining them right on her. She’s moving.”

  “Shit. She’s going to fall off the bench.”

  The seatbelt warning bell sounded.

  “What do you care? What are you doing? Get back in the car! She’s fine. Let’s just get the car up on the pier and get out of here. I have plans for you,” Parker laughed.

  “Is that all you ever think about? I can’t see anything in the dark with the lights off.”

  “That’s why we come here—Stop the car! Someone’s coming. It’s a jogger and he’s headed right by here. Who the fuck jogs at this hour? What if he sees her? Get down!” Parker giggled.

  “Shut up! And get your hands off of me. I swear you’ve got problems. Can you see? What’s he doing?”

  There was a lot of background noise as Reilly imagined both women slumped down low in the car, trying not to be seen.

  “He slowed down and he’s standing right in front of the car. He’s looking at her.”

  “If he asks, we say our friend just needed some fresh air.”

  “Get down! He just looked at the car.”

  Sylvie just laughed.

  “He can’t see us, it’s dark as shit. Besides, he has his back to us. Why’s he just standing there? Go away, runner man. Ow! He can’t hear me. Okay! Okay! Don’t fucking hit me!” laughed Sylvie.

  “Is the car moving? You took it out of gear, right? It feels like…”

  “Oh fuck!”

  A loud thud sounded and a loud keen that sounded like it was coming from an injured man far away filled the air making the skin on Reilly’s body crawl.

  “What was that? Oh my god, was that—?“ Reilly couldn’t bear to finish the sentence. She knew what it was. She had just heard Matt Traynor die. She ran to the sink and threw up.

  “Turn it off! Turn it off!” demanded Drew behind her, and although Reilly couldn’t hear any more of the recording, she was grateful that Drew was there, taking care of her. She finished heaving and rinsed her mouth out with the glass of water that someone handed to her. Gusts of cool air soothed her as Drew gently held her hair back and blew on the back of her neck. “Are you okay, baby? I’m sorry that you had to hear that.”

  “Was that—?” Reilly started and then looked up at Drew with her head still hanging over the sink. Drew just nodded. Reilly dropped her head between her arms resting over the edge of the sink. She closed her eyes and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, not sure if she was finished. Her stomach was churning with the knowledge of what she had just heard. Her mind flew back to that early morning when she had awakened on the bench with a dead man just feet from her. The scene made more sense to her now.

  “Is there more?”

  Hank nodded.

  “Rye, you don’t have to—“

  Reilly squeezed Drew’s hands, which grasped hers, but she had to know.

  “Can you rewind it? I don’t want to… I can’t hear… that last part again. Rewind it to right after that.”

  “Are you sure? I can listen to it and—“ began Hank.

  “Yes. I’m sure. I have to know.”

  Reilly moved back to the place where she had been standing before they had paused it. Drew slid in next to her and wrapped an arm around her waist. Hank put the headphones on and, with Cray holding him from behind, he rewound and listened until he had the recording at the place where Reilly asked. Then he removed the headphones and placed the phone on the counter rather than hold it like he had been, as if he couldn’t bear to touch the conduit of such an event. He pressed the play button.

  “Oh, shit! Shit! Shit!” screamed Sylvie’s voice.

  “What the hell just happened?” asked Parker, her voice low and tremulous. There was a short silence and the sound of muffled and jagged breathing issued from the phone that now sat on the counter.

  “I don’t know!” screamed Sylvie. “You were leaning on me and my foot slid off the brake and onto the gas. We hit the parking barrier. At least I hope that’s what we hit. Fuck! Go check.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  The distinct sound of the seatbelt chime chirped into the room again, and then the sound of doors opening. Noise obscured the next few words and then Parker screamed.

  “Holy shit, Syl! What the fuck is that? Is that—?”

  “Oh my god, Parker! Oh my god! Check—”

  The next sounds were unintelligible until Parker spoke again.

  “Stop clawing at me! I can’t feel anything. So much blood. He’s not breathing. What are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do?”

  “You were driving—”

  “No! This is your ass as much as it’s mine, Parker! We need to get out of here. Give me your sweatshirt.”

  “Why?”

  Loud sounds of rustling and breathing obscured all other sounds.

  “Just fucking take the stupid thing off! I need to get my fucking fingerprints off of everything in the fucking car. Shit! We were in the back seat, too. Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  The sounds of rustling sounded and then the video portion picked up for a few seconds as the phone appeared to fly out of the pocket in which it had been stowed and landed on the driver’s seat. They all had had a fleeting look at Sylvie hurriedly wiping down the steering wheel before, from what Reilly could tell, the phone slid between the front seat console and the driver’s seat. Then the recording stopped.

  Reilly stared at the phone. She expected to feel anger or relief over what she had just learned, but she didn’t feel anything except hot pressure behind her eyes and in her ears.

  Drew pulled her close and held her. It wasn’t until she hid her face against Drew’s chest that she realized that she was crying.

  Here on HardCandy

  REILLY HIT THE PLAY BUTTON on the video box that appeared on her screen. The vertigo-inducing camera angles and rapid in-and-out, now-we’re-close-up, now-we’re-not focus of the video that began to play almost made Reilly slam her laptop closed. At least she’d had the forethought to turn down the sound before she’d hit play. The annoying and discordant techno riff still blasted through the speakers even at minimum audio. A still image of Randy Candy’s face imitating the Home Alone kid’s classic hands-on-cheeks expression started to swell, filling the space in the player window.

  Reilly and Drew sat in bed staring at the laptop, their backs propped up by a pile of pillows. Reilly relaxed into Drew’s side, pulling her arm around her. Drew was her rock, her safety, her sanity. It had been Drew who’d calmed down a revenge-seeking Hank who’d been ready to storm over and do physical damage to the two women who’d nearly ruined Reilly’s life, and it was Drew who had her call her lawyer who, in turn, had advised them to go to the police station with what they’d found. Drew was the one who repeatedly helped to protect her from the swarms of persistent paparazzi that always knew where she
’d be. Drew was there every night to comfort her when the nightmare of Matt Traynor’s scream echoed in her nightmares. It had even been Drew who’d carried the conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house when Reilly was mostly silent. Drew had done all of that and more, and she protected her now, by checking in to see if she should be watching even more press about the still unbelievable turn of events that had found her innocent of a crime that she had willingly taken full responsibility for.

  “Baby, are you sure—?” began Drew, but Reilly just stroked the arm that held her and she continued to watch the video. Drew sighed, but relaxed beside her. Reilly knew that she was being slightly obsessive about seeking out news about Parker Stevens and Sylvie Simonson ever since she’d turned them in for what they’d discovered in the recording, but she needed to hear what the world was saying.

  Reilly turned the volume up just enough to hear what Randy Candy was saying.

  “All I want for Christmas is my free-ee-dom, my free-ee-dom, my free-ee-dom!’” Randy Candy’s surprisingly good tenor voice sang the butchered and mercifully short version of the classic holiday song to open his latest installment of his video blog. The still image shattered into a thousand smaller images of the larger picture, which spun in a circle, and then shot off the screen to reveal the man standing in front of UCLA Medical Center. He was wearing what for him was a fairly plain outfit: neat jeans, a pressed shirt buttoned all the way up, and a brightly colored sweater vest. As always the red Cons were on his feet. Randy’s daily vlog had been posting new segments several times a day to keep up with the amazing details that kept turning up in the breaking news of Reilly’s innocence. His website view rate was probably through the roof.

  “Okay, so technically, Reilly Ransome has been free since last March, but now it turns out that she never should have gone to prison in the first place. I’m going to say it,” crowed Randy into the camera. “I told you so. And I’ll keep saying it. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I always said that there was something mysterious about how Reilly Ransome never seemed to be affected by the murder she supposedly committed. Now we know why. It’s because she didn’t do it! I still can’t believe it. But it’s true. You heard it here, almost first, folks! And you’ll keep hearing it here. After CNN, after MSNBC, after Cocks—I mean, FOX—puts their spin on it. I tell you what really happened. Here, on HardCandy. When the others tell you about new evidence, I play you actual recordings. When the others tell you that two other suspects have been identified, I tell you that they’re actress Parker Stevens and entertainment lawyer Sylvie Simonson. When they tell you that arrests have been made and one of them has been admitted to the hospital, I tell you who sang like a canary and which one of them tried to blow her brains out.”

  Reilly flinched, but she didn’t close her laptop.

  Randy Candy cleared his throat, and his face took on a solemn expression. The fidgeting was gone. His eyes looked somber. Even the oversized, neon yellow microphone he usually held had been replaced with a standard-sized newscaster field mic.

  “Just moments ago, doctors for actress Parker Stevens, who was admitted seven days ago into UCLA Medical Center with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, made a statement on her condition with permission from her family. The actress remains in guarded and critical condition, still in a medically-induced coma following the initial emergency surgery she underwent upon her admittance into the hospital. Since then, she has undergone three additional surgeries to repair tissue, relieve pressure from swelling, and to stem the bleeding. Now, doctors are making predictions on her recovery, which aren’t good, folks. If Parker Stevens regains consciousness, she’ll likely never progress beyond a vegetative state.”

  An out-of-focus image came up in the upper right corner of the video. Reilly squinted to see what it might be and realized it was the ivy-covered walls that flanked the delivery entrance to the hospital. A white semi-truck was backed up to one of the large bay doors and next to it was a short set of cement steps that led up to a smaller entrance door. It was the entrance that she’d used to sneak into the hospital when she’d received permission from the authorities to visit Parker Stevens. In the blurry image, a small group of people was descending the steps, and she recognized them as herself, Drew, and the two detectives she’d been speaking to almost every day since the discovery of the recording.

  “How do they do that? There were security guards all over the place.”

  “Who knows? I’ve stopped trying to figure out how those insects get into places they shouldn’t be.”

  “We have exclusive footage of Reilly Ransome and her posse leaving the hospital after paying a private visit to Parker Steven’s room in ICU just this morning. I’d pay money to hear any of the conversations that went on while she was there. I’m not kidding. Real money. If there are any recordings out there, I’m interested. HardCandy will pay cash money.”

  “Good luck with that,” mumbled Reilly. Even if she had wanted to talk to Parker, she hadn’t gotten closer than the doorway to her room because of all of the equipment and attendants in the room. She hadn’t said a word to anyone while she was there. She merely held Drew’s hand and looked at the unrecognizable person in the hospital bed.

  Randy continued. “Sources say that Reilly was visibly shaken during the visit. I wonder what the real story is. So far—and this is the recap for any of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past week—what we do know is that last Sunday, Reilly Ransome discovered a cell phone recording that inextricably and directly links Parker Stevens and Sylvie Simonson to the accidental murder of jogger Matt Traynor. The video, which has been verified as authentic, also shows how they set Reilly Ransome up to take the blame. When the evidence was turned over to the authorities and they approached the suspects for questioning, Parker Stevens tried to take her own life, while several blocks away at her own home, Sylvie Stevens surrendered without incident.”

  The picture changed to a split screen with Sylvie Simonson on one side, looking ten years older than Reilly remembered. The footage showed her being led into the Los Angeles Police station, flanked by two police detectives, and her hands were cuffed behind her back. The other side of the screen displayed hectic televised news coverage of Parker Stevens on a gurney being wheeled into an ambulance as emergency medical personnel surrounded her in a flurry of activity. Reilly had seen the scenes many times, but the same feeling of painful confusion and anger washed over her again.

  “Why do you keep watching this stuff, baby?” Reilly felt Drew pick up her hand, which was balled into a fist next to the laptop. She looked over to watch her unbend her fingers, and then weave them together with her own.

  “I don’t know. It’s for the same reason I had to go down to the hospital. I just can’t help it. You’d think I’d feel some sort of closure, but I don’t.”

  “I guess I sort of understand,” responded Drew, kissing the hand she held. “But, maybe you should avoid his stuff. It’s not news. It’s just screaming and begging for attention.”

  Randy Candy’s image was briefly replaced by a group of video snippets that showed Reilly repeatedly refusing to talk to reporters who tried to ambush her for sound bites whenever she left her house. The words “NO COMMENT” materialized on the screen, spinning until they landed on a still image of Reilly with her head turned away from the camera, her palm predominately displayed on the screen. Randy returned to the video, the main doors to UCLA Medical Center just behind him.

  “Reilly Ransome still refuses to talk to the media about the accident that happened four years ago. And now she refuses to speak about the new evidence that proves her innocence. For a person who once flaunted her party girl lifestyle, she’s been a virtual shadow since she was released from prison. One can only speculate on what she’s trying to accomplish with the whole mystery building thing.”

  “Not that again. Can’t the guy let it go?” Drew sounded angry, and Reilly thought that maybe that’s how she sho
uld feel, too. But she didn’t. Mostly, she just felt tired.

  “Let’s see what people have to say about Reilly’s newly proven innocence,” said Randy Candy as his eyes scanned the area around him and he held out the microphone toward a young man trying to enter the hospital. “You, sir. What do you have to say about the new evidence in the Reilly Ransome case?”

  Reilly closed the laptop and leaned into Drew’s arms.

  New Year’s Eve

  THE SNOW WAS COMING DOWN, fat and heavy. Stuffed from a delicious dinner and feeling mellow, Reilly sipped a glass of wine and cuddled next to Drew on the posh outdoor furniture of the spacious vacation home in Lake Tahoe that they had rented for the week between Christmas and the new year. Hank and Cray were sprawled out on a matching sofa across from them, illuminated by the gas fire that roared in the circular pit between the two couples. Every one of them was worn out—in a good way—from a week of snowboarding and snowshoeing.

  Fluffy white powder piled up on the wood railing that spanned the length of the third floor balcony, but the fire and the canvas awning that stretched out above them kept the area toasty. Drew’s arm was wrapped around Reilly, and low music drifted from unseen speakers situated around the wide deck. It was a fitting end to an overall perfect day in the Heavenly Ski Resort, in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. Reilly took in a deep draught of the snow and pine-scented air and couldn’t think of a better way to ring out the year.

  It was only a few minutes after 10:00 pm, but with the low clouds and thin mountain air, the sounds of early New Year’s celebrations could be heard from all directions. A party was in full force in the condo next to theirs, though they could only hear the thumping music and laughing crowd when the door opened to admit more guests.

  “I’m glad that we decided to stay in tonight. I’m really not up to dealing with a bunch of drunk revelers,” said Cray, as another snippet of dance music filled the night. Boisterous greetings echoed from next door, followed by sudden silence with the slam of a door. Cray was lying with his head in Hank’s lap, and Reilly smiled at the way his normally perfect hair was sticking up in crazy tufts all over his head, an effect caused from the knit cap he’d been wearing all day. Reilly thought the look suited him.