“Please answer verbally for the recording, Aster.”
“Oh right. Yes, I could. There was an empty whiskey bottle right next to her.” She glances at her parents again. George is staring hard at his shoes. Joan hastily swipes tears from her eyes, then takes Aster’s hand. “She must have, I don’t know, gotten alcohol poisoning, or overdosed on her anxiety meds?” Aster’s chin quivers, and the tears pooling along the rims of her eyes spill over. Detective Holloway pushes a tissue box toward her, and she takes a fistful.
After a minute, she says, “By the time I got there, she was gone. It was just her body left on the stable floor.”
The detective clears her throat and adjusts her position in her rolling chair. “Did you move Zoe’s body, Aster?”
Aster nods, then says yes before they can prompt her. “I panicked. My sister was dead because of me. I was scared of everyone finding out—my parents, my friends, the police. All I could think was that Zoe was dead, and it was my fault. People couldn’t know what I’d done.”
“You didn’t make your sister drink, Aster,” Detective Holloway interjects. “That was her decision. Concealing a body is a felony offense in New York State. Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re not telling us? If you’re protecting someone, we can help.”
Aster’s lawyer shifts in his seat. His client shakes her head back and forth. “I’m not protecting anyone,” she insists.
Detective Holloway and AD Massey exchange a look. “All right,” she says. “Tell us how you moved her body.”
“I buzzed the entry gate open from the inside and drove the car up to the front. Then I carried Zoe around the side of the house and laid her out in the backseat. She was heavy, but I managed. I never even thought about going back and cleaning up in the stable, but I guess Caden did that for me. I just knew I had to get Zoe away from Windermere, so no one would find her. I kept thinking over and over, I can’t get caught.”
“What happened after you placed Zoe in the backseat of the car?”
Aster takes in another shaky breath and reaches for a fresh tissue. “I don’t think I had a real plan until I got to the marina. I pulled over to the side of the road and dug out Zoe’s phone. Then I bought a Greyhound ticket. I picked Asbury Park ’cause I figured it would lead people off-track. I was thinking, I’ll just make it look like she ran away. For a while, I think I convinced myself that’s what really happened. That Zoe made it to Philly, that she was living a new, fabulous life and laughing at all of us.”
“But you knew that wasn’t true, Aster,” the detective says.
Aster dabs at her eyes. “It was a fantasy, but I wanted to believe it. It was a story I told myself to keep from completely falling apart.”
AD Massey rubs his hand across the back of his neck and begins his back-and-forth shuffle with his rolling chair again. Detective Holloway leans forward.
“What happened after you bought the ticket, Aster?”
“After that, I turned her phone off and drove around for a while. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had to get her body out of the backseat. I wound up in Parrish Park. The gate was open; you’re not supposed to be there after dark, but it was New Year’s. It was totally vacant when I got there, though. It must have been close to 3:00 a.m. There was a motorboat on the shore, on the far side, by the Arling Windmill. I guess somebody had been partying there earlier, brought the boat and then left it. There were bottles and cans all over the grass; the place was kind of a mess.”
Detective Holloway and AD Massey exchange a look. They’re seeing that quite a few things worked out in Aster’s favor. There had been footprints and tire tracks all over the place, and besides, no one had thought to look for Zoe at Parrish Park. Everything is so agonizingly clear in hindsight.
“Tell us about the motorboat,” the detective says.
“It wasn’t really docked, just wedged halfway on the shore, halfway in the water. When I saw it, I knew what I had to do. That’s how it felt. Like this was the solution, the only way to make it all go away. I drove the car across the lawn, right