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4.
NOW

“Did you ever doubt him?” Kat asked, swirling the wine in her glass around so it shone in the candlelight. “Did you ever think he might have done it?”

“No,” I said.

“Really?” She said, her head pulled back in surprise, her voice going up. “Not even once?”

“We shared a womb. It breeds a certain amount of trust.”

“So, you guys are like, really close?”

I took a sip of wine, licking my lips after, “We weren’t when it all happened … when Tyler died, we hadn’t been close for years, not since we were nine, ten.”

“Why?”

I shrugged, trying to think back that far. It had all seemed so important then. “We were just really different. We still are.”

“But you’re close now?” Kat was leaning forward, her arms resting on the table. It felt casual, but it wasn’t and I wondered for a second if she was recording the whole thing.

“It’s a little difficult to be close when there’s an entire prison system between you, but yeah, I guess you’d say we were close.”

“I’d really like to meet him. To go and see him, but I don’t think he’ll see me without you there.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, my palms beginning to itch.

“Because that’s what he told me.”

“You’ve spoken to him already?” I asked with a sideways glance at Daniel. He was drinking from his glass of wine and didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t be here unless I had done. Look, Olivia,” she said, rearranging herself in her seat, settling in for something, “you can’t take this lightly. We go all in on a subject and a case when we research it. We want the truth and we want some kind of resolution, and it can be really painful and uncomfortable for a lot of people, even the innocent and the victims. If we do this, we’re going to be dredging up your whole family’s past. Yours, Ethan’s, pretty much everyone who was involved in the investigation. So, you have to know what you’re getting yourself into. And Ethan really has to know, because it’s going to affect him the most. I need to see it in his eyes that he understands everything that we’re going to do in the process of making this podcast, otherwise it’s not going to happen. I need that from you too.”

The birthday party was still roaring with delight at the table next to us, and the couple on the date had descended into distractingly awkward and prolonged silences. Waiters and waitresses were passing our table constantly, eyeing up our rapidly depleting carafe of wine with professional interest, stopping to drop by some dinner menus. But it was as if the four of us, hell the two of us – Kat and I – were all alone in that din. She was staring at me with such intensity, my natural inclination was to look away, but I couldn’t. She demanded attention. I reached for the stem of my wine glass, needing something to touch, something to do, and finally I shrugged, feigning a kind of natural indifference I felt a million miles from, and said, “Of course.”

“Okay,” Kat said, suffusing that one word with a sense of boundless relief and animation, and leaning back in her seat with a wide grin before reaching over to pick up one of the menus that had been left for us, “So, what’s good here?”

I sank back in my own seat, mirroring her and said nonchalantly, “Here? It’s all good.” But it was a nonchalance I didn’t feel – does anyone ever feel truly nonchalant? – and when I picked up the menu to see what was on offer tonight, I felt like I’d set something in motion that I’d never be able to stop. I wasn’t used to feeling so out of control. Ever since Ethan had been arrested, I’d done everything I could to maximize the sense of control I had over my life, and that of my twin brother’s. It was the whole reason I’d gone to law school, the reason I’d stayed in Oregon, so close to a home that had so thoroughly rejected me and my family; I was going to clear his name. But I’d never imagined doing it this way, with microphones and journalists, and a whole audience watching. Or listening, at least. So, why did I? Maybe it was Daniel’s luminous eyes staring so expectantly at me, as bright as a child’s; or maybe it was Kat’s, hard, dark and defiant, the face of true tenacity. Or maybe it was the thought of Ethan’s, so similar to mine – identical in fact – staring at me in horror and disbelief, an unasked, pleading question hidden within them on the day he was pronounced guilty. I knew that he’d given up thinking that anyone, least of all me, would be able to get him out of there by now. I’d gone to college for him, surprised everyone and got into law school for him, and yet I still hadn’t been able to do the thing that really mattered, and have him exonerated. Or maybe I said yes to the podcast, because I’d finally figured out that control was an illusion; a net the size of the world trying to catch just one single butterfly. And that chaos always managed to creep in, flap its wings, and change everything forever.

So, we ordered dinner, a bright pink beetroot risotto with bright white beads of goat cheese melting into it for Kat who turned out to be vegetarian, a shared beef bourguignon for Daniel and Ray who most certainly were not, and a cedar plank salmon for me. By the time we were ready for dessert, the restaurant had quieted to a lull, the birthday party having moved on to a bar, the flaccid date disbanded in near-silence, and my roommate Samira came out to join us, bringing more desserts than we’d ordered with her.

“You have to try the apple, cheddar and caramel pie,” she declared, skootching in next to me on the bench, “all anyone’s ordered tonight is the chocolate freakin’ torte.”

“Well, if you didn’t make it so freakin’ delicious maybe they wouldn’t order it so much,” I said.

“I’m not going to argue with you there, all I’m saying is it’s a crying shame that only four people so far have tasted this sensational delight. It’s served with rosemary ice cream for Christ’s sake,” Samira said.

I took one of the servings of pie from her and introduced her to Kat and Ray. “Shadow of a Doubt?” she said, her eyes widening, “Man, this is an honor. I do my best pastry making listening to you guys.”

It was Samira who had got me listening to Shadow of a Doubt in the first place. She’d told me about it before Daniel had even realized he’d gone to college with the often referred to, but rarely heard producer, ‘Ray’. Shadow of a Doubt had been my introduction to true crime podcasts, and now I listened to them constantly, voraciously, omnivorously. Funny ones, sentimental ones, sincere ones, straight down the line ones. At first I’d thought I’d be too close to it to enjoy any of them. Both as a lawyer and as my brother’s sister. But it turns out the opposite was true; I loved them just as much as anyone did. And boy, did everyone seem to; our collective blood lust undimmed since Jack the Ripper stalked the streets and sold out newspapers, and the Victorians realized just how much murder sells.

“Are you sure about this?” Samira asked as she looped her arm through mine and we walked home together. Daniel had left with Kat and Ray, his face silly and drunk, eyes alight when Ray had mentioned something about their hotel bar. It was a Friday night, but the neighborhood was crisp and quiet as we walked. All it took was a sudden left turn, and the lights and sounds of restaurants, bars and coffee shops transformed into rows of quiet houses, buttoned up against the early fall evening.

“Why are you asking? I thought you loved Shadow of a Doubt.”

“I do, and don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled to have just met the great Kat Thomas, and mysterious Ray Mackenzie in person, believe me. But come on, it’s going to be a whole different thing, actually being on the podcast.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean, you did change your last name just to stop people knowing you were Ethan Hall’s sister. This is kind of going to blow that little charade right over.”

I laughed, the sound getting lost on the wind; Samira was always coming up with sayings and aphorisms that weren’t quite right, that she’d plucked straight from the air in front of her. “I know that.”

“Yeah, I guess you do.”

“Anyway, it’s all a moot point until Ethan agrees to it.”

We walked along in silence for a while, our house coming into view, the streetlight that stood sentry outside it turning the red of the cherry tree’s leaves almost neon in the night. “Do you think he will?” Samira asked.

“I think he’ll think he doesn’t have a choice,” I said, although as we ascended the steps to the front porch, I had no idea if that was true or not.

“And what about your family? Kat said she’d want them to be involved right? You really think they’d be cool with that?”

I sighed, thinking about my parents and sister, all three of whom, as much as they loved Ethan, preferred to pretend that none of the nasty business of ten years ago had ever happened. “I don’t know,” I said, sliding my key into the lock, “I’m seeing them for dinner on Sunday though, so I guess I’ll find out then.”

* * *

“Keys, wallets, all personal effects in the trays to your left, and then step through, please ma’am.”

It was just like being at the airport, except instead of boundless freedom and flight on the other side of security, there was the complete opposite. I went through the motions without comment, Kat right behind me, free of her recording equipment and her producer, Ray, as only two of us were allowed during visiting hours at a time. This part of any visit was always the strangest. When Ethan was right in front of me, and I could see his face, hear his voice, I could almost forget where we were, and when I wasn’t there, the reality of it was dimmed, but this in-between part reinforced that reality all too clearly. I’d expected to have to talk Kat through the rigors and rigmarole of prison visitations, but realized that she must have done plenty of prison visits in the past for the first two seasons of Shadow of a Doubt. Her face was blank and mild, although her eyes retained their alert liveliness, and she was unfailingly polite to everyone we came into contact with.

Ethan was already in place when we walked into the visitor’s room. Gone were the days when I had to talk to him through bullet proof plastic and a telephone handset. Good behavior had seen his privileges expand, and now we could sit around a round, concrete table, curved benches fucking up our backs. The windows were high in there, taller than any human and the room had the same artificial lighting of any institution; harsh and unforgiving. Ethan watched us walk across the room towards him, his eyes trained on Kat. He didn’t look at me at all until after I’d introduced them and they’d awkwardly shaken hands. He looked tired and thin, but then he always looked tired and thin, so I tried to look for ways in which he looked different to normal, certain that something was off. It took me a little while to realize, but finally I got it; his eyes. They were alight and alive in a way I hadn’t seen in years. That was why it had taken me so long to figure out; because it had been so long since I’d seen him like this. He looked excited. He looked awake.

Kat had got out her notebook and pencil she’d been allowed to bring in with her and was making note of the date, time and place in grey lead.

“What’s your show called again?” Ethan asked.

“Shadow of a Doubt,” Kat said.

“And it’s an online only thing? Like YouTube?”

“It’s a podcast. It’s audio only. Most people listen from their phones. Obviously, we have a website though, where we post updates, and sometimes transcripts or other artefacts that listeners can read for a deeper understanding and experience.”

Ethan’s brow furrowed, the light leaving his eyes a little. “But people really listen?”

“Yeah, they really listen,” Kat said.

“They average about 250,000 downloads per episode,” I added, Kat turning to me in surprise. “I looked it up last night,” I said, shrugging.

“And that’s a lot?” Ethan asked.

“That’s a whole lot,” I assured him. They had a TV in the rec room, and there was internet access from some ancient computers, but sometimes it was hard to truly fathom just how far the prison, and therefore the prisoners, lagged behind the rest of the world. Ethan lived in a time warp where the word ‘Netflix’ meant DVDs arriving by mail, and Instagram nothing at all. It always brought me up short in conversations with him; he hadn’t even joined Facebook before being imprisoned, that’s how long ten years was in the 21^st century. To someone raised on the viewing figures of Friends or CSI, 250,000 people must have sounded inconsequential.

“Okay,” Ethan said slowly, turning his attention back to Kat, “so, what’s the point of your show? Are you going to prove I’m innocent, somehow?”

Kat took a deep breath and shifted in her seat so she was sitting up a little straighter. She was wearing the same yellow head wrap she’d been wearing the night before, a deep yellow color, almost gold, but the rest of her outfit was grey and black, in contrast to the colorful get-up I’d seen her in at the restaurant. “We never set out to prove if someone is innocent or guilty,” she said, “that would mean we were starting from a hypothesis and that’s definitively what we do not do. In both the cases we’ve worked on before there was strong indication that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and I think we’ve been able to help shed light on that, and maybe even bring about some real change. But really this is about figuring out what happened and why there’s still doubt hovering over any one case.”

She spoke like she did on the show, in full, thoughtful sentences that sounded as if they might have been written beforehand, but in this case clearly weren’t. Maybe it was the way she always sounded – it was certainly how she’d come across last night, but I found myself wondering what she’d sounded like before she started podcasting, or when she was two bottles of wine in and sloppy and drunk.

“And is this going to be on the podcast?” Ethan asked, motioning between the two of them to indicate he meant their current interaction.

“No. They wouldn’t let me bring my cellphone or any recording equipment in, so I’m not recording this. I’ll take notes though, and if we decide to go ahead with the show – all of us – then what I’ll probably do is describe this initial interview to the audience. Does that all sound okay to you?”

“Okay. So, how will you actually interview me, then?” Ethan asked, looking puzzled.

“Probably over the phone. If you give your consent, that is. We wouldn’t be able to keep coming back and forth from here anyway,” Kat said.

“Right, okay,” Ethan said, although I thought I could detect a tremor of uncertainty as he glanced over at me.

“Okay, so. Tell me about Tyler,” Kat said and my stomach rolled over. I hadn’t expected her to ask about him, although why not, I’m not sure.

“Tyler?” Ethan asked, his eyes locked on mine.

“Yeah. You must have known him, right?”

“We both did,” Ethan replied, his gaze returning to Kat.

5.
THEN

The judge calls for closing arguments and I turn instinctively to the jury. I’ve been studying them, searching their faces for weeks now, scouring for anything, any little thing, that gives their sympathies away, and I’m still none the wiser. Any time one of them shifts in their seat, sighs from bodily discontent, or shrugs a shoulder, my eyes swivel to them like the search beam of a lighthouse. But they all sit up a little straighter now, their attention trained on the prosecutor; they like him, I realize, or maybe they’re just relieved to see light at the end of this tunnel, a way home and a way out. At least for them.

“Tyler Washington was eighteen when he died, his whole life ahead of him,” the prosecutor begins and I think, despite myself, here we go. It’s not that I don’t feel bad for him, or for his family, but this is the way every statement about Tyler Washington, from the very first news article, to his obituary, to the opening statements of the trial, have begun. At first they stopped me short; dead at eighteen, a life cut so very, very short, but it’s been almost a year now and hearing the same sentences over and over has worn me down. The jury is listening though, alert, not quite jaded. Only one juror is sitting slightly slumped in her seat. She’s young, the youngest on the jury by quite some margin, and as I stare at her, her eyes flick from the prosecutor, straight to me. As if she could feel me watching her. She has sullen, hooded eyes and the look of someone who doesn’t spend much time outdoors, which is unusual around here. I wonder if she went to the same high school as Tyler, as all of us, maybe a few years ahead, and then I realize that the prosecutor is still talking and I’m missing the whole thing.

“It wasn’t just that Tyler was class president and captain of the basketball team, or even that his mother is mayor of this city. It’s that his teachers described him as ‘charming’ and ‘cheeky’, his friends would call on him to help move furniture, to drive them out to a new climbing spot, to lend them money even, and he’d invariably say yes. His peers knew him as friendly and affable, even caring and kind and his family relied on him for cheer and quick wit, even in trying times. ‘He always seemed to have a smile on his face’, his former vice principal said. In comparison, people have very little to say about the defendant. Ethan Hall doesn’t stir up happy memories, or a long list of complimentary adjectives. At school he was a loner, and if he hadn’t killed Tyler Washington, his peers say they barely would have remembered he even attended Twin Rivers High with them.”

Ethan’s shoulders have stiffened; I’m watching them. This is the same shit Ethan’s lived with most of his life, and for most of that time I was part of it, I helped fuel it. I wonder if we weren’t twins it would have happened differently. If Ethan would have blended in to the background more if it wasn’t for me, constantly calling attention to myself. But we’re so different it was constantly remarked upon; the cheerleader and the loner who somehow once shared a womb. So far, this is nothing compared to what’s been written in newspapers and discussed on TV screens, or even what was shouted at him in the hallways of our high school, way back before any of this happened, but the prosecutor’s just laying the ground work. There’s more to come.

“When Tyler Washington left his friend’s house that night, do you think there could have been any way he thought he might not make it home? No. Of course not. That’s not a thought that ever crosses an eighteen-year-old’s mind. At eighteen, you are invulnerable, indestructible, immortal. But Tyler wasn’t any of those things. All he was doing was trying to save time, to cut a couple corners and get home through the woods a little quicker. But Ethan Hall had other ideas. We may never know if Ethan followed Tyler into those woods with the intention of killing his former classmate, but let’s focus on the things we do know. Ethan had been hanging out that night at his friend Kevin Lawrence’s house, just a twenty-five-minute bike ride away from where Tyler was at Jessica Heng’s house. So, when he left Kevin’s house he would have entered the woods at almost exactly the time Tyler Washington is believed to have died. Remember that the medical examiner estimated and testified to the fact that Tyler most likely died between 1:45 and 2:45 on the morning of Sunday August 24, and that Kevin Lawrence has stated that Hall had left his home somewhere between two and two thirty a.m.. Did Ethan watch Tyler enter the woods and seize on an opportunity, or did he happen upon him and the two get into a fight, as the defendant admitted to in a confession he has since recanted?

“Ethan Hall is not to be trusted. His refusal to stand by his initial confession and plead guilty to this crime proves that. Don’t be confused by his quiet demeanor and slight frame. Ethan may not be the strapping basketball player Tyler was, but he trained as a fencer for much of his young life, and as we heard in witness testimony from a fencing expert, this kind of training could easily give him the advantage, even in a fight against a larger man.”

I knew it wouldn’t take long before the fencing came up. It’s been over four years since Ethan did any seriously and yet here we are, talking about how it’s possible he might have killed someone based on the fact he used to be able to point an unusually thin sword in the right direction. The prosecutor has been standing in front of the jury bench the whole time, attention focused on them, impassioned words underlined by hand movements and gesticulations, but now he turns to Ethan and his demeanor changes. Ethan’s does too. His shoulders fold in on themselves, he shifts lower in his chair, shrinking. It makes me want to grab him and pull him up, force him to sit straight, to look ahead, to face these accusations with both eyes wide open. But there’s nothing I can do, and I can see in the way most of the jury members look at him, that they think this shrinking, this shirking, makes him look guilty.

“And what then, of motive?” the prosecutor asks, the words puncturing the room. He’s still looking at Ethan, as if he’ll get out of his seat and answer the question directly, but then, smooth as butter, his attention shifts back to the jury and he leaves Ethan alone.

“Tyler was the golden boy, liked – loved even – by all, as I’ve already mentioned. Who could possibly want to hurt – to kill – him in this savage, unprovoked way?”