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“I sat down on the floor in front of their bed and waited with my dad’s shotgun on my lap. Just in case.”
“Just in case,” Garrett said, walking to the jury box while still holding the shotgun. “Just in case the shooter came back?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the jury members. “The shooter never came back. But the McIntosh police showed up. I’m not sure which was worse.”
“Objection!” Bill Bradley yelled.
“Withdrawn, Your Honor. I have no more questions for Alexandra.”
“Mr. Bradley?” the judge asked.
Bill Bradley closed his eyes and shook his head.
PART II
The Escape
“We know where you are.”
—Laverne Parker
Fall 2015
Two Years Later
CHAPTER 7
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 Paris, France 1:35 p.m.
THE ESCAPE WAS FLAWLESS. THE FUNDS HAD BEEN TRANSFERRED TO A blind trust. The University of Cambridge had accepted her based on stellar high school academics and never questioned why she’d taken a gap year. The chartered flight cost a fortune, but she had plenty of money since winning her defamation case and she knew it was imperative to slip out of the United States without the press knowing about it. Each detail had been meticulously planned and skillfully executed. It was everything that happened afterward that went to hell.
Shipping Alexandra Quinlan to a foreign country—alone and so soon after the traumatic events of losing her family and enduring a very public and difficult trial—may have been necessary and the only way to protect her, but it was a flawed plan from the beginning. It held too many variables and came with a complicated set of assumptions. The first was that, after a tumultuous and psychologically traumatic two years, Alexandra Quinlan would fall in line with the rest of society and go with the flow. The second was that Alex would actually attend college, excel in the environment of higher education, and generally adjust to the new life she had escaped to. None of those expectations held because when the dust settled, so, too, did the guilt. The guilt of surviving the night her family was killed. The guilt of hiding while she watched her brother die. The guilt of spending the immediate months after the tragedy defending herself rather than in mourning. The guilt of attempting to move on with life rather than hunting for answers to why a still-unknown intruder had entered her home on a cold January night and killed her family.
Although the move to England had worked in the sense that it allowed Alex to escape the American media, it was the concept of school and classes and study that failed. The idea of dormitory life with a roommate was so unappealing that she had never considered it. Alex fled the United States to get away from her past. She escaped to Cambridge because it was a place where no one knew her or what had happened to her. It was a place where no one would make the connection to the notorious night when she was accused of killing her family. Had she opted to live in the dormitory with a roommate rather than alone in her own apartment, it would have brought probing questions about Alex’s life and her family. About her parents and brother. About what things were like “back home.”
To these questions, Alex would’ve had to hem and haw and lie through her teeth because she would never be able to properly explain that she didn’t have a home. Not since that night more than two years earlier when the figure in the long trench coat had invaded the place she once called home. After that moment, Alex had “places.” First it was Alleghany, the juvenile detention center where she spent two months after she was arrested. Next was the Lancasters’ home in Washington, D.C., where she secretly lived with Garrett and Donna and began gathering evidence and mounting an argument against the McIntosh Police Department and the district attorney’s office. After Alex won her defamation case against the state of Virginia, which concluded with Alex being awarded a small fortune in damages, the media fervently searched for her whereabouts. When things became too overwhelming, Alex fled to the Lancasters’ vacation home, which was tucked in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. But it was obvious by then that the reporters and true-crime fanatics would rest at nothing less than finding and questioning Empty Eyes about the heinous crimes they still, and would forever, believe she committed.
During her year in hiding, rumors frequently broke on true-crime websites that someone had spotted Empty Eyes at a particular hotel, and the freaks and geeks would flock there. News vans would roll to the hotel entrance and shoot footage of protestors holding signs and chanting their hatred toward her. Their favorite, and least inventive in Alex’s opinion, was: “Alex Q, it was you! Alex Q, it was you!”
While the media and the true-crime nuts breathlessly searched for her, Garrett and Donna kept her hidden. When the pressure built to the point of explosion, they hatched the plan for Alex to head overseas. Attending an American university was out of the question. In a foreign country she would at least have a chance at anonymity. So England it was. The University of Cambridge was where Alex was supposed to study for four years. It was where she was supposed to run and hide and catch her breath. It was where a fresh start was supposed to be found.
The myth lasted one year, although the charade was still ongoing today. Donna and Garrett believed school was going swimmingly well. Alex returned to the United States and spent the summer after freshman year hiding again at the Lancasters’ vacation home and lying to them about how well she was doing at school and how many friends she had made. About how Cambridge was becoming her new home, and how she couldn’t wait to go back for her second year. Why Alex had been unable to tell them the truth was something she could not fully explain. She owed Garrett and Donna so much for what they’d done for her. Coming clean about school felt like a betrayal. So, at the end of summer, Alex packed her things and jumped on a plane back to England under the ruse of starting her sophomore year.
Heading back to Europe had become imperative, but Alex was going for reasons other than education. She was hunting for answers to why her family had been killed, and as she boarded the train in the Paris Gare de Lyon for the four-hour ride to Zürich, Switzerland, she was following the only lead she had come across in more than a year of searching.
CHAPTER 8
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 Paris, France 1:45 p.m.
ALEX TOOK HER SEAT IN THE TRAIN’S FIRST-CLASS CABIN AND SPREAD the pages on the table in front of her. The documents had started her on this leg of her journey. They were the first real clue she had come across in a search that started more than a year ago. Alex studied the papers again, trying to understand the numbers. But no matter how hard she worked to decipher the information, she was missing a key bit of information. Alex hoped to find it in Switzerland.
“Boisson?”
Alex looked up to see a female attendant offering a menu. “Non, merci.”
When the server left to attend to the next passenger, Alex rested her head back and closed her eyes. After that fateful January night when Alex was led out of her home and into the hot lights of the television news cameras, and then in the months that followed, and especially during the landmark lawsuit she brought against the state of Virginia, the public had gotten to know Alexandra Quinlan. They knew her name. They knew her face. They knew her eyes. For a full year her image had been plastered across newspapers, tabloids, and nightly newscasts. The American public was so starved for morbid details about the tragic night the Quinlan family was slaughtered that they allowed an innocent teenager to become a caricature of a pop culture obsessed with true crime. To the public, Alexandra Quinlan was not a young girl who lost her family. She was the villain in a true-crime saga, and from that saga they wanted twists and surprises and bombshell revelations. They had gotten plenty of that during the bungled investigation, and even more during the lawsuit she filed against the state of Virginia, during which all the dirty details were laid bare. The entire ordeal culminated with a final plot twist no one saw coming—Alex’s disappearance from the public eye.
