Innocent or Guilty?

“I know, I know. I just … I’ve done everything I can think of to help him. I’ve filed for retrials, I’ve contacted the Innocence Project every year for almost ten years, I even went to law school for Christ’s sake, but he’s still in there, and I genuinely think this could change that.”

“It’s certainly impressive, this Warren Kincaid story,” Dad said, picking up the phone again and waving it around. “Very different case, though.”

“They’re all different cases, Dad,” I said.

“Would we have to be involved?” Mom asked, her eyes on me as they had been this whole time.

“Not if you didn’t want to,” I said with a small sigh, “Kat wants as many participants involved as possible, and obviously as Ethan’s family we’d help with perspective and giving the show legitimacy, but I spoke to her about it earlier, and she says she’s okay with it just being me and Ethan. It’s not ideal obviously – really what they’d want is to interview all three of you, as well as me, but I think they’d still be interested in going forward with Ethan’s case, even if you didn’t agree to interviews. I don’t think Ethan will give the go-ahead until you gave it your blessing though. What do you think Georgia? You’ve been pretty quiet.”

Georgia was listlessly twisting her fork through some spaghetti squash and didn’t look up when she said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”

I let the discussion turn to less controversial topics and waited until both of us were getting ready to leave before questioning my older sister. “So, you hate it right? The podcast?” I asked, while pulling on my coat.

Georgia rolled her eyes, “I don’t hate it. I actually like the podcast – I’ve listened to it before. I just think maybe you’ve forgotten what it was like ten years ago. I don’t want to go through all that again, I really don’t want Mom and Dad to go through it all again, and I don’t think you do really either. Do you?”

“No of course not, but we’d be more in control this time. Plus we’d know what to expect, how to prepare for it.”

“We wouldn’t be more in control,” Georgia said, shaking her head, “you think that now, but all it takes is a few Reddit threads, an article in BuzzFeed and the whole thing has run away from us. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to wake up with pig’s blood on my porch again.”

7. (#ulink_7bf2c14f-8d99-5311-abf4-d07bcc791508)

THEN (#ulink_7bf2c14f-8d99-5311-abf4-d07bcc791508)

We’re three weeks into the trial, and despite everything, the end seems to be in sight. It has felt interminable, these twenty days, each one longer than the last, an entire lifetime rolled up into three weeks. But this is the last day of witness testimonies, and then there will be closing arguments, and then the jury will be told to deliberate on whether or not they think my twin brother is guilty of murder. My chest tightens as I think of it, and I force myself to get out of bed. Every time I wake up now, I think of where Ethan is waking up, and the sheer force of the guilt that he is there, and I am here, propels me out of bed.

The day is bright, clear, crisp. Morning sunshine streaming through my window as I draw the curtains open. It’s the kind of day you want to drink in, to bathe in, sunlight warming skin, cool air burnishing the edges. There are sounds of activity coming from downstairs, my parents already up and about. Mom has stopped sleeping, spending nights holed up in the den, reading over documents, poring over anything and everything that might help out Ethan’s case. Her eyes have become bloodshot, and her skin pale. She hasn’t been in the garden in months. Weeds grow in her vegetable patch, choking the life out of formerly lovingly cared for plants and flowers. Heading downstairs I almost slip on the hardwood floor as a strangled scream comes from the hallway, setting me off running. A loud “FUCK!” follows the scream, followed by a sob of frustration and a slam of the front door.

“Do you know what they’ve done?” Georgia screams at me as I get downstairs, her face an abstract painting of red and white blotches, her eyes wide and wild with anger. “There’s blood on the fucking porch, Olivia, BLOOD. How can people be so fucking disgusting.” She rushes through the hallway, back to the kitchen where Mom is waiting, pulling her into a hug and I watch as my normally calm, quiet older sister shakes with rage in our mother’s arms. Walking away from them I open the front door, always needing to see something to believe it. The whole front porch is covered in a thin slick of bright red blood. In some places, it has run so thin it looks pink against the white of the wooden boards. The sun bounces off it, this glittering red pool of accusation and for a reason I can’t quite fathom, I crouch down to stick my finger in it. The blood on my finger glows up at me malevolently, practically neon, and I stand up too quickly, suddenly feeling lightheaded.

I wash my hands in the downstairs bathroom before heading back into the kitchen to silently grab the mop and bucket. I push blood away from me, watching it spill over the edge of the porch, fertilizing the green, green grass below, and then I wash it all away with water. Every so often I feel eyes on me and look up to stare back at whoever is staring at me. Across the street ten-year-old Billy Strong, who I have spent half his life babysitting, watches me the longest, but he’s not the only one. I wonder which of our neighbors did this, which of my friends potentially. The nausea that rippled through me when I first saw the blood disappears as I clean it all away. The firm feeling of the mop handle gripped in my hands reassures me, and as the blood tumbles to the ground beneath the porch I watch it disappear into the earth with satisfaction. In certain light, a slight pink tinge stains the white porch, but I have made this mess disappear, I have solved a problem, however small, and I decide I like how that feels.

I make coffee and breakfast for my family, preparing us all for the day ahead. We drive over to the courthouse in silence, unable to listen to the radio in case they report on my brother’s trial, and too distracted to pick and choose between music. As we pull into the car park, I yell at Dad to stop but I’m too late and the bucket of blood sloshes its way all across the windshield, with a sickening sound. I strain out of my seatbelt to see who it is, and my stomach rolls over when I recognize the face of Hunter Farley, one of Tyler’s best friends and someone I’ve spent countless hours with at lunch tables and movie theatres and parties.

“MURDERER!” someone shouts as I get out of the car, my heart shuddering to a near stop in terror, before pulling myself together, putting my mask back on and grabbing Georgia’s hand so that we can walk up the courthouse steps together. On the other side of those doors to the courthouse is the Mayor and her family, waiting for us to arrive as they have done every day since the trial began. Every day they have stared us down as we walk past them and into the court room. Burning their own version of justice into our skin and the back of our heads as they follow our every move.

But what I’m really bracing myself for on the other side of those doors is Ethan. Because every day that we walk through those doors holds the potential to be the last that we see him as he really is, as Ethan Hall, twin, brother, son, rather than Ethan Hall, convicted murderer. I take a deep breath and hear and feel Georgia do the same as we push the heavy wooden doors open at the same time and confront those waiting eyes.

8. (#ulink_8d1f8d3b-3bcd-5428-ae75-dc6ba3f86d6d)

NOW (#ulink_8d1f8d3b-3bcd-5428-ae75-dc6ba3f86d6d)

The following week dragged, long days and longer nights at work stopping me from seeing much of either my family or Kat and Ray to talk about the podcast. In stolen minutes I managed to arrange with Kat to meet them in Twin Rivers on Saturday. They were already there, setting up shop and making a camp for themselves in the small city where my brother had been convicted of murder. I hadn’t been back to Twin Rivers in years. Not since my parents sold up and moved, as soon as they possibly could, to the outskirts of Portland. And now that I was facing down the reality of having to physically go back and confront my family’s past and my brother’s present, Friday had come around all too quickly.

I let out a sigh of exhaustion, and Karen Powers, the second chair on Reid Murphy’s case, and my boss, shot me a caustic look. Karen Powers didn’t sigh or yawn. She didn’t ever give the sense that she was as physically fallible as that. “We keeping you from your bed, Kitson?” she asked archly and I felt burning red begin to creep up from underneath my shirt collar. Kitson was the name I’d taken when I applied for law school. ‘Hall’ was a common enough surname, but when combined with my first name, not to mention my face and its uncanny similarity to my twin brother’s, it was a name I no longer wanted to be burdened with. Sometimes it felt like a betrayal. Of Ethan, of myself, of my family in general. Other times it just felt like what I had to do to get through the day.

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

“Good, well why don’t you run along and get us all some coffees just to stave off that evident exhaustion you’re feeling.”

With a nod I left the room, catching Daniel’s eye who smiled back at me sympathetically, as I did so. By the time I returned to the conference room, jobs that would take all evening and probably all night had been delegated and I was left with the least interesting; babysitting the defendant, Reid Murphy. Reid had been released on bail, and the whole week had been dedicated to preparing her for taking the witness stand. It’s fairly unusual for defendants to take the stand, but Karen liked to lean into controversial situations and had made what I thought was the fairly shrewd observation that Reid was likely to elicit sympathy from the jury more than anything else. There was a reason everyone on the team but me seemed to think she was innocent. Small and slight, with wide watery blue eyes, and mousey brown hair, she didn’t look like she could hurt a fly, let alone almost kill a man. Quiet dropped over the room once everybody else had left, taking the coffees I’d retrieved with them. Reid stared down at the table, or possibly at her thumbs, the skin around her nails bitten and ripped to ribbons, while I sat in the corner by a large window that was slowly being plastered with rain. I scrolled through my phone, switching between email, Twitter and Instagram while drinking my coffee, and was largely ignoring Reid when suddenly she spoke, her voice quiet at first but getting stronger.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

I looked up from my phone slowly, eyes meeting hers almost involuntarily. “I don’t have to believe you, Reid. I’m your lawyer not your mother confessor.”

Her face pinched together a little, skin losing color. “I just thought you of all people would get it. Would believe me.”

“What do you mean, ‘me of all people’?” I demanded, back straightening in my chair, legs uncrossing, both feet planted on the ground.

“You’re Olivia Hall, right? Ethan Hall’s sister? I just figured you’d get it, what with everything you and your family went through?”

I could feel my muscles tightening, clenching, almost against my will, and I forced myself to relax, lean back again, and maintain eye contact. “Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Well, you are Olivia Hall, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you, but then everyone kept calling you Kitson.”

“I changed my name,” I said, finally answering her question.

“I knew it,” she said, this time quietly again. “You look exactly the same.”

“Well, not exactly the same,” I said, mildly affronted. “Ethan’s jaw is much stronger.”

“No, not as Ethan. As you did in high school.”

Something pulled at my stomach, something hard, sudden and strong; the same thing that always warned me when I was about to walk into something I should probably walk away from. “High school? You’re from Twin Rivers?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re too young for us to have been in high school at the same time,” I said. Reid was just 22, making her six years younger than me.

She nodded, agreeing with me, “Yeah, but my sister was the grade below you. Spencer. You came by our house a few times, and I always had to go watch the basketball games because she was a cheerleader. Like you.”

I remembered Spencer. She’d been keen, a little clingy even, desperate to be part of the squad, always making sure she was at every single party. I hadn’t been her biggest fan, but she was nice enough I supposed. “You’re Spencer’s little sister? Wow, that’s so weird. Where is she now?”

“Twin Rivers still. She’s a teacher there,” she said quickly, clearly not here for me to reminisce vicariously about her older sister. “You know he totally deserved it, right?” She said this in a rush, her words picking up speed as if she’d been revving up to this all along and suddenly taken her foot off the gas.

“My brother?” I asked, a slight cold sweat pricking at my back.

“No, not your brother. I don’t care if your brother did it or not. Tyler Washington. He totally had it coming.”

I looked at her carefully, trying to work out what she was saying. Sympathy for Tyler Washington was practically universal; I’d never heard anyone say anything like what Reid had just said. “What do you mean by that?” I asked finally.

“He was an asshole.”

I sank back into my chair, disappointed. “Not all assholes deserve to be killed, Reid.”

“No, but he did.” She took a deep breath and swallowed, her gaze holding mine right where it was.

“What on earth would make you say that?” I asked sharply.