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Almost everyone brought alcohol. The kitchen counter was laden with bottles of liquor and beer. Pieces of popcorn littered the floor like white confetti.
At some point in the night, someone, nobody ever knew who, poured cheap vodka into all the half-drunk bottles of soda in the kitchen. Not any vodka, either. It was a backyard moonshine that could strip paint off a wall. K drank several cups of soda. She had no idea that it was spiked. By the time she realized it, she was already drunk.
A lot of what I know about the party is taken from videos some of the kids posted on their social media feeds that night. In the videos that I’ve seen, K is unsteady on her feet. She pushes through the crowd in the living room, pausing to laugh and talk with friends. She looks visibly drunk. In the corner of the frame of one video, she can be seen losing her balance and stumbling into someone.
The person she bumped into was Lou Lowe. He’s a baseball pitcher on the high school varsity team. He’s tall, with freckles and strawberry blond hair. Lexi had dated him a few times. She considered him an ex-boyfriend. She would sometimes tell her friends that she wanted to get back with him. That he was the love of her life. Her friends say thatshe talked that way about all her exes. It was Lexi’s way of putting up a “no trespassers” sign.
Lou remembers that night well because of what happened afterward. Here’s what Lou Lowe said when I spoke with him earlier today.
“I had a training session real early the next morning, so I couldn’t drink. Not even a beer. I guess I was maybe one of the only people at the party who wasn’t drunk. I remember that she knocked into me and said something like ‘my bad.’ I made some joke about how she could bump into me any time. She thought that was funny and we started talking.”
After a while, Lou pulled the classic line. He told K that it was too noisy to talk over the music. He took her by the hand, supposedly to find somewhere quiet to talk.
K allowed him to pull her out of the throng of partygoers down the corridor. They went to the laundry room, where a glass sliding door led to an outdoor courtyard. Several people saw them disappear together. Word spread like wildfire. The rumors reached Lexi. She stormed through the house looking for them, furious that her best friend had disappeared with the boy who she had suddenly decided was the love of her life.
Lexi claims that she found them making out under the laundry line, between hanging bedsheets. She tore into K with a slew of accusations. Most of them were incomprehensible. Lexi was drunk and barely coherent.
Lou walked off in the middle of Lexi’s rant. He left K to take the brunt of her friend’s drunken fury. He feels bad about that now. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he’d stayed. By the way, he says it’s not true that they were making out. He insists that Lexi made the whole thing up to try to justify her actions afterward and to paint K in a bad light.
When Lexi ran out of insults, she went inside, locked the glass slidingdoor, gave K the finger, and for added measure pulled down the blinds. K was alone in the dark in Lexi’s backyard. It was cold out. Her jacket was inside, along with her backpack and her cell phone.
K walked around the house to the driveway, where she waited to catch a ride home with someone leaving the party. Nobody left. She stood in the cold as people gawped and laughed at her through the living room windows. Lexi moved among the onlookers, whispering her version of what had happened.
K was too proud to beg Lexi to let her in, or to ask someone to call her parents and deal with their questions when they picked her up. She’d get home by herself. She walked down the street toward the path she’d taken that afternoon. This time, it wasn’t dusk. It was nearly midnight. More dangerous than ever.
It’s a calculation women make all the time. Cat Girl, whom I mentioned in Episode 1, had to make the calculation, too. Should she walk home from the bar, or take a taxi? Should she cut through the park, or take the long way around? Should she speed-dial nine-one-one when she thought someone was following her? Should she…
Well, you could go on endlessly. Women, girls, we make these decisions all the time. Convenience versus safety.
Most of the time things work out fine.
Occasionally something terrible happens.
I’m Rachel Krall. This isGuilty or Not Guilty,the podcast that puts you in the jury box.
11
Rachel
Neapolis’s old cemetery looked more like a secret garden than a burial ground. It was surrounded by black cast-iron fences choked by overgrown ivy. As Rachel pulled her car into the empty parking lot, she knew it wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, taking the bait and turning up at the cemetery first thing in the morning. Curiosity was Rachel’s kryptonite. Always had been. Always would be.
Her mother used to warn her that her curious streak would get her into trouble one day. She was wrong about only one thing: it had done so not once but many times over the years. It was also the secret of Rachel’s success.
It was Rachel’s inquisitive nature that drew her to journalism, and it was her indefatigable curiosity that pushed her to investigate the case of a teacher jailed for murdering his wife on their second honeymoon. Rachel found new witnesses who were never contacted by police, and other evidence that strongly indicated the husband, a well-loved high school coach, had been wrongly convicted.
She turned it into the first season of her podcast. It brought her to national prominence and revived her flagging career just as she was contemplating quitting journalism and finding what she jokingly called a real job. It also caused a torrent of hate mail from people convinced she had helped a murderer go free when his conviction was vacated and he was allowed home pending a retrial.
That was why Pete was so concerned for her safety. He would have had a fit if he’d known she was at the graveyard alone. Going there was potentially reckless, Rachel granted as she turned the handle of the gate to enter the cemetery. But she couldn’t bring herself to stay away.
The gate creaked as Rachel pushed it open. She paused, still holding on to the handle as she surveyed shadowy tombstones covered with creepers. They gave the impression the cemetery was more alive than dead.
A sudden rustle of leaves startled her. The gate slipped out of her grasp, slamming shut behind her with a clang that sent birds flying into the overcast sky. Their panicked wings mimicked Rachel’s quickening heartbeat as she moved deeper into the cemetery. Tree branches interlocked into thick canopies, giving the place a dark soulfulness that might have been quaint under different circumstances.
The map flapped in her hands from the wind as Rachel walked along the cracked, cobbled path, trying to get her bearings. The crumbling ivy-covered gravestones were arranged in no particular order. The plots had been dug randomly in past centuries, before the practice of arranging the dead in neat, parallel rows. In the old days, the dead were buried in whatever patches of soil were softest and easiest to dig out. As a result, the cobbled path meanderedunpredictably into a series of dead ends. Rachel had to retrace her footsteps more than once.
The map listed a trail of notable graves, all marked with numbers that corresponded to a short historical description. Among them was the grave of an eighteenth-century cabin boy who served on the pirate Blackbeard’s ship and was captured and executed for piracy. He was buried in a rum barrel in lieu of a coffin.
Farther along were graves of local figures, a senator, a nineteenth-century industrialist, and a cousin of the Wright brothers who’d invested in the aviators’ early aeronautical adventures. There was also a section from the Civil War that included the graves of eleven members of an all-black battalion of Union soldiers.
