Spilled Blood

Chris gave up his driver’s license; he had his picture taken; he walked through a metal detector. The officer led him through a steel door and into a conference room that wasn’t much bigger than a phone booth. Chris sat down on one side of a narrow conference table, and the policeman left him alone. The door lock clicked as the officer left. He waited.

Two minutes later, the door opened again.

Chris told himself he was prepared, but he wasn’t. He’d steeled himself for this moment, but his heart raced, and his stomach climbed into his throat, and his eyes stung with tears. Olivia walked in, her long brown hair dirty and tangled, her wrists bound in handcuffs as if she were praying. She wasn’t in prison gear; she wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and worn jeans. He’d seen her at Thanksgiving, but even in that time, she’d changed. She was growing into her adolescent features. She was more graceful. She was taller. She’d always joked about getting her looks from him, not Hannah, and if anything, she looked more like him than she ever had before. His sharp nose and high cheekbones. His mouth. His expressions.

For all that, he was afraid of what he saw in her face. Her brown eyes were as deep and unrevealing as a black hole, and he thought he could search in them for days without finding her. The daughter he knew, the girl he remembered, could never fire a gun at another human being, but this was someone else. A woman. A stranger.

The policeman undid the handcuffs, and Olivia rubbed her chapped wrists and shook out her fingers. The officer left, and the lock clicked on the door, and it was just the two of them. Father and daughter. Silently, he pushed his chair back and came around the table to embrace her. She hugged him back fiercely, and he clung to her, stroking her hair. When he helped her into a chair, she stole a look at him and then hooded her eyes, her hair tumbling across her face. The shame in her beet-red cheeks was like a ten-year-old who’d broken a figurine she wasn’t supposed to touch. That was the Olivia he knew.

‘Guess I really screwed up,’ she said.

He sat next to her and stroked her face with the back of his hand. ‘First things first. Are you okay?’

Olivia squirmed in the chair. ‘I’ve had the Hershey’s for two days. Yuck.’

Chris smiled. ‘I’ll make sure they give you something.’

‘Other than that, I guess I’m okay.’

‘Good.’

‘Jail sucks.’

‘Yeah, it does.’

His daughter pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘So how was Matt’s?’

‘What?’

‘We texted on Saturday, remember? Didn’t you go to Matt’s Bar that night?’

‘I did.’

‘I could really go for a Juicy Lucy,’ she said.

He didn’t say anything. Olivia was in jail, and she was talking about cheeseburgers like she needed a new Facebook status. He wondered if she didn’t realize the gravity of her situation or if she was simply stalling. He also thought: She texted me on Saturday. That was the day after the murder.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You texted me on Saturday to ask what I was doing that night. Ashlynn was dead. You’d just been through one of the worst nights of your life, and you didn’t say a word about it, Olivia. Why not?’

Her lower lip quivered. ‘I don’t know, Dad. I couldn’t believe it was real, you know?’

‘Your mother says you wouldn’t tell her what happened.’

‘I couldn’t. I can’t deal with Mom right now. It’s easier to talk to you.’

Or maybe it was easier to lie to him. He put that thought out of his mind.

‘Okay,’ he told her softly. ‘Here I am. Let’s talk.’

Olivia sat frozen. Words didn’t pour out of her.

‘I don’t know what to say, Dad,’ she told him finally. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

He was afraid she would give him an excuse. An apology. A plea for forgiveness. It was an accident. The gun went off. I didn’t mean it. He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

‘Just tell me what you know,’ he said.

‘What’s the point? No one will believe me.’

‘Not true. I’ll believe you.’

Olivia swung her head, and he saw those dark, pretty, mysterious eyes again. ‘I’m not so sure, Dad. You’re already scared of what I’m going to say, aren’t you? That’s why you haven’t asked me the Big One. Whether I did it. Whether I killed her. You think I’m going to say yes.’

She was good. Chris had sat across the table from dealmakers who spent their whole careers perfecting their skills at psychological warfare. These were lawyers who conducted opposition research like politicians, knowing what buttons to push, figuring out every weakness they could exploit. He’d built a suit of armor for those confrontations that had never failed him, but against this teenager, he was defenseless. She saw through him as if his heart were opened up on an autopsy table.

‘Lawyers don’t usually ask their clients whether they did it,’ he said. ‘That’s not how it works.’

‘Because you assume I’m guilty, right?’

‘No, because I assume you’re innocent.’

His daughter pushed back her chair, stood up, and folded her arms. ‘If I did it, what difference does any of this make? They should just lock me up.’

‘It makes a big difference,’ Chris explained. ‘You’re sixteen years old. You were drinking. You were mourning the loss of your best friend. There are a lot of mitigating circumstances. If a jury understands what was really going on, they may conclude you weren’t responsible for your actions.’

‘If I killed her, I’m responsible.’

‘Not necessarily. Not legally.’

Olivia stared at the ceiling, as if to hide that her eyes were filling with tears. She shook her head in despair. ‘See? You think I’m guilty, too.’

‘I didn’t say that at all.’

She looked at him, bereft. ‘Don’t you get it? I don’t want a lawyer to play games for me. I want a father who cares whether I did this.’

‘I do care, Olivia. I just want you to understand that nothing you tell me will change how I feel about you. No matter what you say, I’m here to help you.’

‘Ask me,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Ask me,’ she repeated, her voice breaking. ‘Please.’

She needed to tell him, and he realized that he needed to hear it. He got up and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Olivia, did you do this? Did you shoot that girl?’

She sucked in a long, loud breath. ‘No.’

As if she assumed he would doubt her, as if she thought he would wonder in his heart if she were lying, she wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve and repeated herself calmly, so he could hear every word. ‘I didn’t do this. I swear to you. I didn’t. You have to believe me.’

She cried again and threw her arms around his waist. It didn’t matter what he knew or didn’t know about the girl in his arms. He knew one thing. She was his daughter, and she was innocent.

‘Tell me what happened.’

Chris had his briefcase open and a fresh yellow pad in front of him. He’d given Olivia a tissue and asked the police officer outside for a bottle of water, which she sipped in small swallows. She’d composed herself, and when she spoke, he was reminded of how intelligent and passionate she was. Physically, she looked like him. Emotionally, she was Hannah’s child.

‘Tanya and I met at the ghost town on Friday night,’ she said. ‘She drove from her dad’s house in Barron, I drove from St. Croix. The ruins are west of both towns, maybe five miles out. It must have been about ten o’clock when we got there.’

‘Hannah says you used to go there with Kimberly.’