Let me describe where I am right now. On each side of the path is tall wild grass that reaches my waist. Maybe even higher. I’m just short of five foot eight, so that grass is pretty darn tall.
If I spin around and look in every direction, all I see is long burnished grass and the forest beyond. There’s no sign of civilization. No houses. No roads. It feels stark and desolate in a way that kind of makes me nervous. I suspect K felt the same way.
I have no reason to be scared. I’m here in the afternoon. The sun is shining, and my producer, Pete, who’s in the hospital recovering from a car accident, is on speed dial.
That’s not how it was for K. She was here at dusk. Alone. Nobody knew she’d come this way.
Slung over K’s shoulder was a backpack, heavy from the weight of beer bottles she’d brought from home. Her parents were out, so she scrawled a note explaining that she was sleeping at Lexi’s house. She left it under a magnet on the kitchen fridge.
What K didn’t mention in the note was that Lexi’s parents were away until the following evening. They’d left Lexi’s twenty-year-old brother, Miles, in charge. He told Lexi he was out for the night and that she’d better invite a friend to keep her company. That’s why Lexi invited K.
Through a series of texts between the two girls over the course of the afternoon, they decided they would throw a party. Nothing crazy. A dozen friends. Music. Beer. Maybe they’d all chip in money and order pizza. K was rushing to Lexi’s house to get ready for the party when she took this shortcut.
I wonder if she found it menacing?
I do. I saw a discarded crack pipe earlier. Right near me is an empty liquor bottle tossed on the path. It says a lot about the kinds of people who hang out here. At some point, K would have felt vulnerable. Perhaps she sped up. Moved from a fast walk to a jog. Maybe even a sprint. The beer bottles in her backpack would have rattled loudly as she ran down the lone field, pursued by the wind.
By the way, I walked both routes from K’s house to Lexi’s. I can tell you that from a personal safety perspective, both options have potential dangers. Sure, the shortcut through the field is isolated. But the main road isn’t exactly safe. It’s a quiet rural road. Several cars honked their horns when I walked that way earlier. One car slowed down and the driver leered at me as he drove by. At least it felt that way.
Two men stopped and offered me a ride in their open-back truck. They seemed nice enough. They shrugged when I declined, and drove on. Fact is, though, that there wasn’t anything I could have done if they’d wanted to force me into their truck on that lonely stretch of road. I was at their mercy.
It’s a coin toss which route is safer. The shortcut versus the main road. Heads you get there alive and well. Tails you don’t.
I’m Rachel Krall. This is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.
8
Rachel
The night clerk issued a strained “good evening” as Rachel entered the hotel lobby through the revolving glass doors and passed the reception desk. “Good morning” might have been more apt, given it was well after midnight, thought Rachel, flashing a tired smile in return. She had spent most of the evening in a studio she’d rented at the local radio station, recording her latest episode.
As Rachel moved farther into the lobby, she understood the reason for the night clerk’s unease. An unruly group of real-estate conference attendees were drinking beer and shots bought before the hotel bar closed for the night. There was no staff around to break it up, except the night clerk and a porter, a gangly young man who was half-asleep.
Someone in the drunken group finished telling a foulmouthed story as Rachel walked by. The raucous laughter that exploded after the punch line bounced off the faux marble walls. The porter glanced up unhappily, too intimidated to ask them to keep it down.
One of the men stumbled drunkenly to the birdcage. He pressed his flushed face against the gilded bars.
“Sing,” he bellowed. “Sing, goddamn it. What kind of stupid nightingale are you?”
When that didn’t work, he sang a line from a song as his friends laughed. The bird was silent. The man whistled and then tapped the cage with his knuckles. The bird fluttered, visibly distressed.
“If I heard your singing voice up close, Marty, I’d be terrified, too,” someone called out from their table. More laughter. It faded as Rachel entered the elevator and the doors closed.
Rachel’s floor was dimly lit when she stepped out of the elevator and walked down the long carpeted corridor to her room, passing room service trays left for collection on the carpet outside hotel room doors. Rachel entered her room and locked the door behind her, leaning against it as she sighed heavily. It had been an incredibly long day.
A sharp stab in Rachel’s stomach reminded her that she hadn’t had time to eat while she wrote and recorded the podcast all evening. She considered ordering room service but decided she’d make do with the food in the minibar. She ate a packet of cashews and drank a beer straight from the bottle as she listened back to the recording she’d just finished. Satisfied with what she heard, Rachel emailed the audio files to Pete to edit when he woke in the morning.
Pete had insisted that he’d edit the podcast episodes on his laptop while in the hospital. He told her there was nothing in his job description that he couldn’t do from a bed. Anyway, he’d joked, it was the least he could do after picking the worst possible time to get himself almost killed. A few days before Pete had been due to travel to Neapolis, he was sideswiped by a delivery van while riding his motorcycle to work. His bike spun out of control and he was thrown into the street. He rolled into the gutter and promptly lost consciousness as the traffic light changed to green.
A few seconds earlier, or later, and Pete would have been crushed to death before he could get clear of the incoming traffic. He was lucky, but not lucky enough to walk away unscathed. He’d sustained a fractured shoulder and multiple breaks in his left leg.
Pete was in traction in the orthopedic ward, where he was expected to remain for a few more days before being sent home to continue his recovery.
Pete had been with Rachel from the start of her journey into podcasting. She’d had a background as a newspaper reporter and zero experience making podcasts when she started Season 1. Pete taught her everything he knew about producing a podcast. In return, she gave him a crash course in investigative journalism.
They made a good team. Rachel was intense and focused. She could occasionally be wracked with self-doubt, but she was incredibly tenacious. Pete knew audio production like he had been born mixing sound. If that wasn’t enough, he had a real knack with social media. Most important, he took care of all the distractions so that Rachel had the time to dive deep into an investigation.
Rachel was quietly relieved at Pete’s determination to keep working despite his injuries. He’d done a huge amount of work setting up the new season, and she felt it was wrong to replace him with another producer.
Rachel checked her computer. The audio files had gone through. She loosened her hair and arranged her pajamas for bed.
A housekeeping attendant had come into her room to do turndown service while Rachel was recording at the radio station. The drapes Rachel had left open were drawn and the crisp sheets of her bed were neatly folded down. A miniature box of chocolates sat on her pillow.