Martina says. She agrees to look it up before they end the call.
“I’m going to start recording now, okay?” Martina tries to keep her voice steady, calm. Professional. She digs her nails into her palm.
“Yeah. Yes.”
Martina draws in a deep breath. She had so much she’d planned to ask Anna today, but the autopsy news has blown everything out of the water.
“The answer is, I don’t know,” Anna says before Martina has a chance to speak. Then Anna laughs, a hollow, tinny sound funneled through the miniature speaker on Martina’s phone.
“What?” Martina is caught off-guard.
“Sorry, it wasn’t funny. It’s a quote from an old movie. They don’t have anything from this century in this place.” Anna clears her throat. “You were going to ask what really happened that night. Now that the autopsy results have come in. You were going to ask how Zoe died, if she didn’t fall from that balcony.”
“Right,” Martina says, regaining her composure. “Is there anything you can tell me? Anything you remember?”
“Honestly, no. I remember being on the balcony. With Zoe. I remember falling. I thought she fell.”
“And what do you think now, Anna?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’ve been here a whole month. I’ve had nothing but time to think.” A pause. Then, Anna starts to sing. “ ‘Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future!’ ” In the lilt of Anna’s voice, Martina detects a tinge of something that sounds like hysteria. She clears her throat.
“I should have it all figured out by now,” she continues, “but it seems like I never knew what I was talking about.”
Anna’s words are podcast gold. She just admitted to lying to police. Didn’t she? Martina makes an effort to steady her voice, to tamp the giddiness down. “Are you saying you weren’t responsible for Zoe’s death? Or that she didn’t die in the way you told police?”
There is a long pause, and for a moment, Martina wonders if she’s lost Anna. If she’s still on the other end of the line. When Anna finally speaks, she doesn’t answer Martina’s question.
“My lawyers say this is good news. They didn’t want me to do this interview, but I don’t really care. I need to know what happened. I really need to know. And I think you’re going to figure it out, Martina. I trust you.”
Martina steadies her palms against the desk. She’s glad she’s alone, that no one can see the way her eyes flash and shimmer, how she can barely force her feet to stay planted on the floor. She tries another angle.
“The night you spoke with Detective Holloway and Assistant Detective Massey, August fifth. Were you telling the truth?”
Anna draws in a deep breath. “I told them what I remembered, and those memories haven’t gone away. But I was under a lot of stress that night. More than I realized. Did you know I was in that interview room for seven hours? Eventually I just wanted the questions to stop. So I told them what I remembered, and my brain filled in the blanks. Or they filled them in for me.”
“What kind of blanks?”
“There’s this gap after the Windermere balcony. I don’t remember driving to Parrish Lake, or putting Zoe in that boat. I never remembered any of that. I remember being by the water, though, after. Knowing she was down there, that I could never get her back. I told the police I must have taken her body to the lake because it fit. Because they told me I must have done it. At the time, it seemed like the answer to a question I’d been chasing all summer.”
“Why did you confess, Anna?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. … I remembered feelings, scraps of things. I had all these scraps, and nowhere to fit them. And then, after what Caden said, suddenly they all shifted into place. It was the only story that made sense.”
“Did you kill Zoe Spanos?”
For a moment, the sound of Anna’s breathing is the only sign that she’s still there. That she hasn’t hung up like Martina still fears she might.
“I do not believe I killed Zoe Spanos, or concealed her body.”
Blood rushes to Martina’s head, and she focuses on her phone’s black screen. “And do you have any idea who did? Anything that could help the investigation move forward?”
“I think,” Anna says slowly, “it’s time for Caden Talbot to speak to the police.”
PART II The Stable
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still