Innocent or Guilty?

“Do you mind if I talk to my sister in private?” Ethan asked after a while. Visiting hours were coming to a close and there was new movement in the room. Family members were saying goodbye to one another once again, the guards paying even closer attention when anyone got up, especially if there was physical contact involved.

“Sure,” Kat said, “I’ll meet you outside,” she directed at me.

“What’s up?” I asked once she was out of ear shot.

“I just wanted to make sure you were really okay with this.”

“Me? Why? I’m the one who brought her here.”

“I just – I’m trusting you on this. I haven’t listened to the show, I don’t even really get what it is, what their angle is, if they have one, who their audience is. It’s all Greek to me.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” I said, nodding emphatically.

“Have you spoken to Mom and Dad about it yet?”

“No … that’s on tomorrow’s to-do list.”

“They might not be so sure.”

“I know.”

There was a pause, not long, but loaded, as Ethan looked straight at me. “If you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it,” he said very slowly.

“This can’t be my decision,” I said, shaking my head. “All of this will affect you more than anyone.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning across the table, trying to read the furrowed lines of his forehead.

“Just that we live in different worlds. I don’t know that a podcast will change anything in here.”

I leaned back, watching him still. “You don’t think this will work. You don’t think anything will change.”

“It’s hard to imagine change from inside here. Nothing ever changes. The faces do maybe, but then eventually, we all start to look the same anyway.”

I stared around the room, looking at the faces of Ethan’s fellow inmates, realizing how remarkably true his words were. We were running out of time though. The guards were hustling prisoners back towards their cells, and there were fewer and fewer visitors in the room. The room was losing its warmth; what little there was of it in the first place, and suddenly I felt a desperate urgency.

“You know I’ve done everything I can on my own, right?” I asked, leaning towards Ethan once more, “I’ve written to the Oregon Innocence Project every year since you were arrested.”

Ethan nodded, his eyes boring into mine, holding fast. “I know that, Olivia. What I don’t know is how some radio show is going to change my situation.”

“Podcast,” I said, reflexively.

“Podcast, sorry. But you know what I’m saying, don’t you? You were there, you remember what it was like. The closing of the ranks in town, the accusations. I can’t imagine it going any other way, even now, ten years later. Kat said they were after the truth, and I respect that. I’m just … not sure anyone will ever know the truth about Tyler Washington. Except for the people who were there.”

* * *

“Mom? Dad?” I called, opening the door to my parents’ house with the key they still insisted on me having. I’d tried knocking already but to no avail. I walked through the hallway and down towards the kitchen, where I could normally find one or the other of them, but the house was still and quiet. The rain had let up that morning, peeling back a faded blue sky of a Sunday and I wasn’t surprised at all when I spotted them both outside in the yard, the back door open a little, pushing back and forth in the light September wind as they enjoyed the thin rays of the sun. “Mom!” I called again, and this time her head shot up from the flower bed she was working on and she called back, “Georgia?”

I walked out onto the back porch and waved at Dad sitting in his favorite lawn chair, before realizing his eyes were closed and he was deep in a nap. “Oh, Liv,” Mom said, standing up, a little unsteady on her feet and brushing her hands on the fabric of her pants as she walked towards me. “I wasn’t expecting you yet, sweetheart,” she said as she pulled me into a hug.

“I messaged you last night, you didn’t get it?” Mom let go of me and shook her head, squinting at me, even though the sun was hardly bright out here. “You lose your glasses again?”

“I can’t find them anywhere, sweetie, they’ve disappeared forever this time, I’m afraid.”

“And that’s why you haven’t read my message?”

“My little detective,” Mom said, squeezing my shoulder and walking with me back towards the house. “Anyway, it’s nice to see you. I thought you might be little too busy for dinner tonight. You have a big new case to work on, don’t you?”

“I do, but I have something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Uh oh.”

Even though neither Georgia nor I lived at home anymore, Sunday night suppers remained a fairly regular tradition in our family. When we were growing up it was often the only time all five of us would sit down to eat together in the week, and after Ethan went to prison and we all moved away from Twin Rivers, they continued on as a familial touchstone. We all loved to cook, but my mom and Georgia were by far and away the best chefs in the family. So, it wasn’t unusual for us all to gather together like this, it wasn’t even that unusual for me to turn up unexpectedly on a Sunday night with the expectation of being fed; I’d spent plenty of weekends in law school, working my brain into disarray, just trying to keep up and catch up, and sometimes the only way to maintain a semblance of sanity was to keep Sunday nights sacred and to have a member of my family cook for me. I never failed to think of Ethan and the endless numbers of meals he must have eaten in prison; barely distinguishable ingredients swallowed down at speed, while trying to avoid whatever prison politics were being played out in the canteen that day or week or month. There were times during this whole ordeal when I was so, so sure that Ethan’s arrest and prosecution were going to pull our family apart, leave us looking nothing like the family we were before. But over time the four of us managed to stitch ourselves back together, and sometimes I found myself wondering what we would all look like if Ethan was sat at the table too, and I scared myself by thinking that we might all have become closer without him.

We didn’t sit down until much later, not until Georgia had arrived, her arms full of the fresh vegetables she’d been harvesting at her community garden all day. Mom was a landscape gardener and all the green fingers and thumbs had been inherited by Georgia, completely bypassing me. Ethan had them too, although I doubted they got much use in prison.

“So, you guys know what a podcast is, right?” I asked, Georgia shooting me a look that said duh, as well as where are you going with this, while Mom put down her fork to grab a glass of wine before saying,

“Yes, we have managed to figure out what they are, thank you darling.”

“Cool, have you listened to Shadow of a Doubt at all?”

“Which one’s that?” Dad asked.

“It’s true crime,” Georgia said, “right, Liv?”

Dad groaned and rolled his eyes towards me, “Not all that true crime nonsense again, I thought you’d got that out of your system years ago. Hasn’t your brother’s troubles taught you anything?” I’d been something of a true crime junkie growing up; inhaling episodes of Forensic Files the way most people watched Friends. I even used to fall asleep to them.

“This is different. It’s not just going over what happened, they actually investigate and they’ve even led to retrials, and sentences being overturned.” I realized that I was taking on the role Daniel had played on Friday night, convincing my parents of the podcast’s validity, persuading them towards my view.

“Okay, so what? You want us to listen to this podcast?” Mom asked, looking a little bemused. “Or are you going to start working for them instead of Coleridge and White?”

“No, I’m not leaving my job. But they’re interested in covering Ethan’s case for their new season. And I think it’s a good idea. And so does Ethan.”

I watched as my parents shared a look. A zipped up, private communique that I’d witnessed a thousand times before, and yet still didn’t really know how to decipher. “You’ve spoken to Ethan about this already?” Georgia asked.

“Yeah, I went to visit him yesterday with the host, Kat.”

Both my parents put down their cutlery at the same time, their gazes now firmly locked on me, “That’s not – he thinks it’s a good idea?” Mom asked, a tremor of worry lining her voice.

“Yeah, well I’m still not sure he quite gets what a big deal the podcast actually is, but yeah, he’s on board.”

“I’m surprised at you, Olivia,” Dad said, his voice firm and low, “you know what this kind of attention can cause. We can’t go through all that again.”

“I know, and I thought about that, believe me. But this could really change things, Dad. It’s not just about attention, it could potentially change the outcome. Look,” I said, picking up my phone and googling the name of the first case Shadow of a Doubt had covered, Warren Kincaid, “this guy had filed for appeal three times before the podcast started investigating his case. Now he’s been acquitted.”

Dad took the phone from me, squinting down at the screen. He didn’t say anything for a while, taking his time reading through the article before removing his reading glasses and passing a hand across his face. His shoulders were slumped, exhausted. “I just don’t know, Liv. I’m surprised you even think this is a good idea. You’re the one who changed her name, after all.”