4
RIVERS AND ROCKS
I FIGURED I would sort it out at some point: how I felt, what to do about it, where this would leave things with us. Soon I’d feel better about myself, back to normal, perhaps, or just different but okay. Then we could come together again and I’d marvel at how much stronger I’d feel around her. This would be a growth experience of some kind, when I’d look back at it. Later I’d be able to handle everything differently, maybe even have some big Conversations with a capital C. Ashley was Ashley and I was myself, and we could still maybe hang out and not have everything in common anymore and it wouldn’t have to feel as if everything were falling apart. At some point, yes, that was how it would work.
She called a few months after her trip, saying how great she thought it all had been and how I needed to come out to Los Angeles as soon as I could. There was lots of fun to be had. For the turn of the millennium, New Year’s Eve 1999, she was thinking about going to this big party at LAX, the club in Hollywood. I should come! It would be amazing! I played as if I were considering it, but I knew there was no chance I’d go. Ashley would be perched on some circular banquette in a loud club with a DJ and flashing lights. There’d be disco balls and that thumping bass line that hits you in the gut. I’d be surrounded by people I didn’t know in a city far from home. Everything would be too expensive, and I’d be nervous about who would pay. There’d be men all around, maybe even one of those older ones she mentioned, and I wouldn’t have a thing to say. One would put his hand on my leg, and I’d stare at his hairy fingers a beat too long. I’d catch myself pretending to laugh and then remember that I didn’t belong. Scenes like that could level you if you let yourself get too into your own head, and that was still the space I was in, despite the part of me that wished I could rise above it. I didn’t have the perspective, I wasn’t far enough away.
The weather had gotten colder, and much of my life had thankfully resolved itself to the way it was before she had come. After a few touchy weeks and some circumspect talks, Nick was back around, and it actually felt as if things might be going somewhere. We were starting a literary magazine about design together, and he had spent Thanksgiving with my family. It all seemed promising but tenuous and, much like my sense of self, held together by a golden ratio of chance and protracted effort. I couldn’t risk another potential breakdown.
I’d stay on the East Coast for New Year’s Eve, I decided. I couldn’t handle Ashley in my world; there was no way I was going to go into hers just a few months later. Next year, maybe . . . or the one after.
• • •
The phone rang, the phone rang. I didn’t pick it up on the first ring. Or the second. Or the third. Her voice came through on my answering machine while I was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, hot and depressed in the summer of 2000. Nick had left me in the spring for a copywriter at his firm, a Danish woman who had broken up her own relationship with her live-in partner to be with him. She’d moved out of her shared apartment into his uptown the same day, and I had taken to coming and going at odd hours to avoid running into the two of them together in the neighborhood.
College was almost over; I would graduate one semester late at the end of the year. I had nothing resembling a real job prospect for afterward or even an idea of what that would look like. I was working nights as the graveyard-shift bartender at a twenty-four-hour French bistro between a few classes that I needed to finish up. I was perpetually exhausted and had gotten used to the buzz of anxiety that had lodged itself in my chest. I had become mostly nocturnal. Drunks and other sad characters I encountered behind the bar occupied most of my waking hours, as well as the perpetually coked-up night manager at the restaurant, who would alternate between hitting on me and ranting about the way I stacked glasses.
Sometimes a woman would come to visit him on her way home from the clubs, usually after 3 a.m., and the two of them would disappear to his basement office for hours. Usually she would emerge by herself later on, but once in a while he’d walk whoever it was to the door. There’d be sloppy giggles, and she would tug on her skirt self-consciously and his shirt would often be inside out. After that he’d often want to chat with me and sometimes share a joint, and I’d feel complicit in something gross. There was a huge glass curtain window fronting the space looking out onto Broadway, and occasionally I’d wonder if some crazy person would one night emerge out of nowhere and slam himself against the thing, shattering it to pieces. Oliver came to visit me a few times, and so did a few people from my classes, but none of it ever felt the fun way I imagined it could if I weren’t heartbroken, fragile, and half awake.
On one of Oliver’s visits, while drinking his fourth Heineken, he let slip a detail about his night with Ashley that I hadn’t heard before. Apparently while they were at dinner he made a joke that went off the wrong way and Ashley had suddenly turned defensive. “I’m a smart girl,” she’d shot back. “Maybe not as smart as Carolyn, but I am.” What a weird thing to say, he slurred in the retelling. Why had she suddenly gotten so insecure? Whatever, he shrugged, and then continued playing with the candle in front of him.
A confusion welled up in me, a cognitive dissonance I couldn’t articulate. That comparison thing—Ashley had it, too? There were parts of herself that she measured against me and found lacking? I couldn’t believe it. There had to be some mistake. Oliver must have misunderstood her. I filed it away as a random one-off as I started wiping down the bar.
• • •
“Hey, sweetie! How are you? Oh my god, this actor flew me out to the set in Toronto, so I’m just on a layover on my way back.” It was her voice, sounding warm and haughty at the same time. “How’s Owen? Austin? What was his name?” Could she really not remember his name? My head was facedown on the pillow. “What else is going on? How’s that other guy? Are you still with him?” I looked out the window through the airshaft across to where my answering machine sat on the other side. I listened to her words come out, electronically processed, chirpy. There was a chance to answer . . . there was another one . . . I could get up now, and fling myself around the corner, and grab the phone. I could make it. I could pull it together. Or I could just call back . . . “Anyway, that’s about it for me. Call me back!” All right, then. Never mind. I’d get her another time perhaps . . . maybe . . . I didn’t know.
• • •
Eight months later she was dead and I was reading about it in the paper, trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter to me as much as it did. I knew that I had just about let her go in the months leading up to things and it was impossible to know if we would have found our way back together. It would take me years to reconcile that one—complicated grief, I had heard it called. It was what happened when you hadn’t cried—at least not yet—and you hadn’t gotten depressed, but you still couldn’t move on, either. “Why is my needle stuck in childhood?” asked Maurice Sendak. “I guess that’s where my heart is.” I felt something similar.
It was all the whys and hows that had gotten Ashley from age nine to twenty-two that weighed on me, almost more than the loss. How had we ended up in such different places?
The loss itself left me kind of numb, because part of me felt as if I had already lost her before she died. I had let her go or she had slipped away, off to a place where I couldn’t join her: a place of body glitter and body shots, favors from men with agendas, Hollywood, strip clubs.
Maybe because she had seemed almost unrecognizable to me the last time we had been together, it was hard to understand exactly who I was mourning. Was it the girl I had jumped across rivers and rocks with while shouting a made-up language into the summer air? Or was it that tanned, jaded cipher, the not-quite-a-woman who navigated the world using male desire as a compass?
I wasn’t an investigator or a lawyer or even Ashley’s closest party partner at the time of her death, but I knew there was a lot more to learn about what had happened to my childhood best friend. And I knew that somehow, someday, I need
ed to learn it.
PART
TWO
5
GERMAN, SPANISH, FRENCH
WHO DID I think did it? Seven years after Ashley died, I still had no idea who’d killed her, and it seemed as if no one else did, either. There had been no news reports and no word from her family, and no one from our town had any information. Depending on the week, I would come up with some vague theories based on whatever movie I had just seen. It was Hollywood, right? Ashley’s killer must have been one of her clients at the strip club, of course, or someone in the drug world, or maybe both. You do dangerous things, and dangerous stuff can happen to you. Dark shit went down at strip clubs. Mafia stuff, illicit bargaining. Fights and beatings and pacts of secrecy. Ashley must have made some promises in the service of better tips, and there must have been a client or two who took the bait and wasn’t too pleased when she wouldn’t deliver. One of them had become violently obsessed with her and showed up at her door without warning. Or maybe it was one of those guys’ wives who had hired someone—I wouldn’t put it past Ashley to inspire the type of jealousy that brought out a kind of madness in people. I manufactured stories both exotic and unseemly. It was all so unfathomable that anything was possible.
• • •
It was late 2008, and I was nearly thirty years old. Thirty! When had that happened? I was an adult, people told me, and I guess it did look like that from the outside. I lived in Brooklyn in a large, light-filled loft where I could see the Empire State Building from my window and the Fourth of July fireworks from my roof. I had moved there with an older boyfriend at twenty-five, and when the relationship had run its course, I had inherited a kitchen full of Japanese knives and cast-iron pans to go with my newly discovered domestic side. I had spent my midtwenties moving up the ranks of the New York media world—answering editors’ phones at Interview giving way to fact-checking at Food & Wine progressing to freelance writing and then editing, and then suddenly at twenty-eight I found myself at the magazine I had grown up aspiring toward—New York—with the title “Senior Editor” after my name; going to work was a consistent pleasure for the first time in my professional life.
There had been experiences more joyful and wild and decidedly mature than anything I could have imagined for myself when I was younger, but in some ways it still felt as though I was stuck at age twenty. I thought of that last week with Ashley in 1999 all the time, as if it were a parable that I hadn’t fully unpacked that contained all the emotional truths I would ever need to know.
• • •
I would google her name every month or so, and when I got access to LexisNexis through work, I looked her up there, too. It took a couple of years after her death for anything new to be reported, and it took a lot longer for me to figure out, let alone tell anyone else, why I kept looking.
In the spring of 2004, while I was still at Interview, something weird came up. My job had me steeped in celebrity culture—a typical day saw me recording an interview at Cyndi Lauper’s apartment and transcribing a tape of Tom Cruise chatting with Will Smith—but suddenly my searches about Ashley brought pages upon pages of celebrity gossip sites. They were in a variety of languages, German, Spanish, French—it was initially hard to make sense of what was the actual news and what was part of the Internet’s circular game of telephone.
I finally traced the story back to something originally reported by the celebrity weekly InTouch. In the piece, Ashley’s family talked to the press for the first time since the murder, revealing anguish and frustration at the lack of movement in the case, and some of it was directed at Ashton Kutcher. Apparently Ashley and Ashton had had some sort of relationship, and they were even supposed to be going out on the night of her death.
Ashton wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous in 2001, when Ashley died, as he is now, but still this news landed with a bit of reverb. I wasn’t entirely shocked, however. I had seen Ashley’s power over men firsthand in New York, and I knew that her circle had encompassed plenty of model/actor types. But that guy? How did they know each other? What had gone on between them? Did Ashton know her from her “secret life,” or was it something more innocent?
I was overwhelmed with questions. It also felt like a dash of cruel irony to see how far Ashton’s stock had risen since 2001, while Ashley’s had ended on such a jagged edge. It was amazing how much a person’s life could progress in seven years, if given the chance.
• • •
The issue of InTouch was a few weeks off the stands, but I managed to find a copy through a friend who worked in ad sales for the publisher. He left it for me in a manila envelope at the front desk of his office in Midtown, like contraband.
“Ashton Kutcher’s TRAGIC NIGHT” read the cover line. Looking at it made me feel annoyed. Poor, poor rich, gorgeous, living celebrity Ashton. Did any readers actually feel empathy for him? The story inside was a doozy. I learned that Ashley and Ashton had met through friends, and they were set to attend some Grammy Awards after parties that night. Ashton had arrived at her house around 10 p.m. but had gotten no answer when he knocked on the door. He went around to the side of the house to try to look through the windows and saw red stains on the carpeting he apparently later told police he thought was spilled red wine. “She was a very special girl,” the magazine said Ashton told a reporter at the time of her death.
There were two nearly full-page pictures of Ashton in the three-page story and three smaller ones of Ashley. There was one where Ashton had stubble and an unbuttoned collared shirt; the other was a cleaner-cut image where he wore a suit and smiled with teeth. “Ashton, pictured at a New York fashion show exactly one week before Ashley’s brutal murder” read the caption. I imagined some preteen girl somewhere in middle America cutting out the pictures to tack them up on her bedroom wall, the border of the page with Ashley’s face falling to the floor.
How odd to see Ashley reduced to a footnote to someone else’s meteoric rise. She was not the story people cared about here; to this magazine’s audience, she existed only in reference to Ashton, a sad blip on his bio, his “tragic missed encounter with a beautiful young woman on the night she was murdered.” I hated it.
But then again, part of me understood; in my head things had taken on a similar refashioning: in my own search for answers, the story of Ashley had also become a story about me. I wasn’t just letting her go quietly into the annals of my past. I wasn’t just content to remember her and accept the things I couldn’t change. I was digging. And grasping. But why?
• • •
The Ellerins told the magazine that they had suggested to police that Ashton use his celebrity status to bring attention to the case, but the police had said it wasn’t a good idea. “It would have been nice if [Ashton] had contacted us or sent flowers,” said Ashley’s father. “There is a murderer walking around free,” said her mom.
• • •
I couldn’t begin to imagine her parents’ grief. I had written and called them in the first year after her death and gotten no response, and my father had even tried to see Ashley’s dad when he was on the West Coast, but the plan never came together. Over time I’d stopped writing and begun to consider my feelings about Ashley to be acutely private ones. There was no one I could talk it over with—our old mutual friends I had long since lost touch with. I filed the InTouch issue away with the rest of my clippings in the folder I kept in my desk. The notice of her death from our town newspaper was in there, along with our class pictures from grade school and a few piano music books from childhood. How did it all fit together? Researching Ashley and collecting these scraps of information had become part of my own “secret life.” We all had one—that much I knew.
• • •
Four years later, everything changed. Finally, in late 2008, one of my Lexis-Nexis searches turned up that incredibly unlikely development I had convinced myself would never happen, the thing I had quit holding out hope for and the thing all the crime shows tell you has only the tiniest chance of co
ming together after a case has been cold for seven years: a suspect, an arrest, and an indictment. Everything had come alive again.
Details were just coming out: I had a location, an age, and the bare bones of a narrative, like an Onion headline. “Area Man, 32.” There were allegedly other victims.
He was currently in LA County Jail, awaiting trial and facing the death penalty.
When I read the words for the first time, pixelated lines in black and white on my computer screen at the office, I had to leave the building, go outside. I didn’t know where, just that I needed air. I ended up near a parking garage on Thompson Street, my fingers cold and dry as I tried to dial numbers into my phone.
“Something crazy just happened about Ashley’s murder,” I said to my mother, the story sputtering out in incomplete sentences as I processed it in real time. “There’s a guy who lived in her area. It seems like he’s a serial killer. There will be a trial and maybe the death penalty. I don’t know. Can you believe it?” My head was buzzing. This was my childhood and my adulthood all at once, and I felt I needed my mommy—a mommy, some proverbial mommy—to sort it out for me, to provide an order for what this meant and what I was supposed to do with it.
“Oh, honey,” was about all my mother said, multiple times, as if I had just come home from the playground with a skinned knee. What else was there to say?
Everything from the past had come rocketing forward into the present and exploded out in front of me in a smoldering heap. My private things—the clippings I had saved in my desk—had become public again, just like all those years ago with the photos of Ashley and me in my childhood bedroom. People were looking now—prosecutors, investigators, maybe strangers, even—they were looking at her and asserting a narrative and claiming it as the last word. Was it the whole truth?
Whatever it was, I sucked it up like my first breaths after being trapped underwater. Finally there was the beginning of some kind of explanation for Ashley’s death, and it was bigger and more bizarre than I anything I could have ever imagined. A serial killer? Someone from the neighborhood? This changed everything. All of my pulpy ideas about spurned lovers or escort clients gone violent were out the window. There were other victims involved, a web of brutality I couldn’t even conceive of. All of my tacit judgmental speculations about Ashley’s drug use or fast crowd were pushed aside. What did I even know anymore? It felt like very little.
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