Mad Honey: A Novel (43 page)

INSTEAD OF TAKING
Asher alone to the conference room (since I am still persona non grata) Jordan leads a charge to the parking lot, bulldozing past reporters with a muttered
No comment, no comment.
I get into the driver’s seat and pull out onto the divided highway for about a mile before Jordan instructs me to stop on the side of the road.

In the rearview mirror, I see Asher’s wide, satisfied smile. “That was great, right?” he says, beaming. “I told you.”

Jordan twists in the passenger seat. “No, Asher, that was not great. In a single hour, you undermined my entire defense. The prosecution wants the jury to believe that you felt so humiliated when you learned Lily was trans that you killed her. As long as I could get them to think that she never told you, then you had a chance of being acquitted. But you literally just handed the State the information they needed on a silver platter.”

“But it’s the truth,” Asher says, confused.

“The truth has no place in a court of law, goddammit,” Jordan snaps. “And since the prosecution’s already painted you as an abuser and a liar, how good do you actually think your word is?”

None of us talk the rest of the way home.

THERE ARE A
whole host of things that can destroy a bee’s home: wax moth larvae, the hive beetle, Varroa mites. Bees can have their trachea infested with mites. There’s American foulbrood, nosema, black queen cell virus, sacbrood virus, paralysis viruses, deformed wing virus.

Another threat to honeybees is colony collapse disorder, where entire healthy colonies of bees disappear almost overnight. CCD has been blamed on everything from electromagnetic radiation to pesticides to GMOs to climate change. The only thing scientists agree upon is that stress on the bees from some source is the underlying cause.

When you see colony collapse disorder in a hive, it’s eerie. There’s honey and capped brood, but otherwise, it’s a ghost town. The workers and drones have vanished. The bees are gone.

Except for the queen, who stays behind, and dies alone.

ON FRIDAY,
we have the first stroke of luck in the trial: Judge Byers comes down with food poisoning and court is postponed until Monday. We find out when we are halfway to the courthouse in Lancaster, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the truck in uncomfortable silence.

Back home, we retreat to our respective corners. Asher is still refusing to speak to me, even after Selena’s attempt at intervention. Jordan huddles over the dining room table, struggling to find something he might have missed in the discovery or witness testimonies that could exonerate Asher, now that his defense strategy has been gutted.

After walking on eggshells for hours, Selena announces that the two of us are going drinking.

I can’t remember the last time I was at a bar. Selena drags me to the only one in town—a dive called Le Chez near the railroad tracks with cheap alcohol and sad décor and even sadder clientele.

“I am going to regret this in the morning,” Selena says, pushing me my third martini. I don’t even like martinis, but Selena says that right now my usual glass of wine isn’t going to cut it. She lifts her glass, the alcohol as clear and cold as a winter pond, and clinks it against mine. “Here’s to drinking instead of thinking,” she says.

“If you drink honey with your booze,” I say, my words a little slurred, “you won’t get a hangover.”

Selena laughs. “Where were you when I was in college?”

I shrug. “Hangovers are caused by ethanol,” I tell her. “Honey’s got potassium, sodium, fructose—all of which counteract that—and it makes the liver work faster to oxidize alcohol and sober you up.” I take a long gulp. “I fucking hate gin.”

She takes the glass from me, drains it, and summons the bartender. “My sister needs a vodka martini,” she instructs the woman. “What
doesn’t
honey do?” she muses.

“Get people acquitted,” I mutter, fishing the olive out of the empty glass and eating it. “My son is going to go to jail and he won’t even say goodbye to me.”

“Technically he’ll go to prison,” Selena says. “Jail’s when it’s for less than one year.”

I glance at her. “Not helping.”

“Right.” Selena leans her elbows on the bar. “You never know what a jury’s going to do,” she assures me. “They could acquit Asher just because he has nice eyes.”

“Maybe Jordan will find something,” I say. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

Selena doesn’t respond, and that’s answer enough. She is Jordan’s investigator; she knows the evidence better than he does.

I look Selena in the eye. “You know Asher. You’ve known him his whole life. Do you think he’s guilty?”

We both clam up for a moment as the bartender serves me my new drink. “I think you’re asking the wrong question,” Selena says,
when the woman moves away. “Good people do bad things all the time. Even Jeffrey Dahmer had a mother.”

“Again. Not helping,” I say.

“What I mean is that you’re going to support him, whether he’s living upstairs at home or in the state penitentiary. Even if he is convicted, Liv, he’ll still be your kid.”

She is right. I may not be able to brag about his achievements the way I used to when he was a hockey star; I may hear whispers everywhere I go from now on. I may have pictured a future for him that involved college, a job that brought out his artist’s eye, a woman he couldn’t live without, a house full of children. But just the fact that the arc of Asher’s life may turn in a different direction doesn’t mean I will stop loving him.

This makes me think of Ava, and I pick up my vodka martini and drain it. I signal the bartender for another.

I know, better than most people, what it means to make a colossal mistake. How you carry it with you; how it alters you at a cellular level. How, if you cannot forgive yourself for your transgression, you snap under the weight of your own flaws.

I also know what it’s like to start over.

Asher may not want me around right now, but he is going to need me.

The bartender brings a vodka martini for me, and a gin martini for Selena, although she hasn’t ordered one. When Selena starts to object, the bartender shrugs. “This one’s on the house,” she says.

Selena is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and I’m used to men and women falling all over themselves to flirt with her, even when Jordan is standing right at her side. I assume that’s what’s happening, again, par for the course, until the bartender gestures to Selena’s bare shoulder, where a dark bruise in the significant shape of a thumbprint stains her skin. “I had a boyfriend who used to hurt me, too,” the bartender says, sympathetically. “You should leave him.”

Her words shock me. I stare at Selena.

Selena glances down as if she has not even noticed the mark until now. When she sees the horror on my face, though, she says, “Olivia.
Your brother isn’t like Braden. He doesn’t lay his hands on me…unless I expressly invite him to.”

I recoil. “Ew,” I say, but, as intended, her words divert my thoughts from the path they were on.

She rubs her hand over her bare arm. “Fucking endometriosis. When they did my hysterectomy, they took out my ovaries, too, and put me on estrogen. Ever since then, I bruise if I just bump into something. I don’t even notice it anymore.” She laughs. “You didn’t think Jordan actually would…Jesus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him swat a fly.”

“I thought that about Braden,” I say quietly. “I thought that about
Asher,
but—”

“Holy fuck.” Selena slams down her martini glass. “I just thought of something. Estrogen is part of the hormone cocktail Lily would have taken as a trans woman, right? What if
that’s
why she bruised so easily?”

My head snaps up. “You mean it might have had nothing to do with—”

“Abuse. Rage.
Asher,
” Selena says. “All of the above.”

THIS WAS HOW
we wound up, at one in the morning, bursting into Asher’s bedroom. We woke him up and asked him why Lily wasn’t in school the day she died. Yes, she had been sick, but what were her symptoms? “Fever,” Asher said, disoriented, sitting up in his bed. “Headache, I think.”

Armed with that information, Selena whirled around and started down the stairs, furiously texting. I was left facing Asher, who took one look at me, and then rolled over and pulled up the covers.

By nine
a.m.
on Saturday, Selena has connected with a Harvard doctor, a pathologist she used to date before Jordan. He agrees to take a look at Lily’s autopsy report.
Lots of people fall down the stairs,
Selena explained.
But not everyone winds up dead. If there’s a way to plant a seed of reasonable doubt in the jury that Asher isn’t an abuser and
that Lily’s bruising—and death—had nothing to do with him, then Asher might have a fighting chance at acquittal.

On Sunday, Jordan gets a text from Selena in Boston: her pathologist will testify in court the next morning regarding his findings—which are different from Dr. McBride’s. It is a Hail Mary pass, but it’s all we have left. “Why are you frowning?” I ask my brother. “Isn’t this good?”

“She called him
her
pathologist.”

“Selena never looks at anyone but you.”

“I’m not worried about Selena.
He
took her out to dinner to reminisce about old times,” Jordan says. “I’m sick of everyone falling in love with
my
wife.” But late that night, he sends the doctor’s CV to the prosecutor, alerting her of this new expert witness. And he knocks on Asher’s door, presumably to tell him about these new developments.

I am not in the room.

Asher hasn’t spoken a word to me since Thursday, when he ordered me to leave. We have existed in a silent ballet, him choreographing his movements to elegantly avoid contact with me.

Jordan prepares his questions for the pathologist. Asher hides in his bedroom. I wander the halls like a restless spirit.

It’s lonely as hell.

If Asher is convicted, it’s something I will have to get used to.

But even if by some miracle he is acquitted, there’s no guarantee he’ll forgive me for believing the worst.

EARLY MONDAY MORNING,
we return to court. Once again, Jordan asks the bailiff to not bring in the jury, so that he can tell the judge he has a new unlisted witness for the defense. After an hour’s delay, so that the prosecution has a chance to interview the pathologist and prepare a cross-examination, Jordan calls Dr. Benjamin Oluwye to the stand.

His credentials are impeccable: a Harvard professor who studied
at Yale and Stanford Medical School and did his residency at UCLA. He practices as a forensic pathologist in the office of the chief medical examiner in Boston, and is also the director of the autopsy service at Mass General. I wonder if he knows Braden.

“Have you had a chance, Dr. Oluwye, to review the autopsy report of Lily Campanello and the slides from that autopsy performed by Dr. McBride?” Jordan asks.

“I have indeed.” His voice is deep, his eyes wise and focused.

Jordan presents him with the autopsy report, which has already been entered into evidence. “At the bottom of the last page of the report, do you see the opinion of Dr. McBride regarding the manner and cause of death of Lily Campanello?”

“Yes.”

“Do you share his opinion?”

“No,” Dr. Oluwye says. “Not quite.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“The autopsy indicates an extensive area of scalp hemorrhage, along the right temporal area extending from the orbital ridge, posteriorly to the parietal area—about ten by four-point-five centimeters. After the removal of the skullcap, the subarachnoid hemorrhage covered roughly forty percent of the right frontoparietal brain, with another focus of two centimeters in the right temporoparietal white matter.” He sees the faces of the jury and adds, sheepishly, “As you are looking at me the way my son does when I tell him that Dire Straits was the seminal band of the twentieth century, allow me to break that down. In layman’s terms, it means there was a surprising amount of blood in and around the brain. The amount of blood recorded would be consistent with a skull fracture, but the CT and X-rays didn’t show one. In the absence of that…it means something else is going on.”

“Without a fracture,” Jordan says, “what
would
you have expected to see in Lily Campanello’s autopsy?”

“A contrecoup injury. If she had actually died from the brain bouncing back and forth in the skull, she would likely only have had a tiny bit of bleeding on the opposite side of the brain.”

“Doctor, let me get this straight. Lily had more blood in and around her brain than was normal for someone who died because of a contrecoup injury, rather than a skull fracture?”

“That is correct.”

“What did that indicate to you?”

“That the deceased had some sort of blood disorder that contributed to her death,” Dr. Oluwye says.

“What do you mean by a blood disorder?”

“Anything that causes an abnormality in the way blood moves, clots, or generally behaves,” the pathologist explains.

“Like…hemophilia?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I think led to Lily Campanello’s death.”

“In your expert opinion…what did?”

“Were this my case, I would have signed the autopsy report out this way,” Dr. Oluwye says. “The cause of death was one: intracerebral hemorrhage due to blunt force trauma. Two: thrombotic microangiopathy, extensive, consistent with TTP.”

Jordan holds up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. English, please.”

“The deceased suffered a blow to the head that led to an excessive brain bleed due to an underlying blood disorder called TTP—thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. It’s a disorder where platelet clumps form in small blood vessels. As red blood cells pass by these clumps, they get sheared—imagine the hull of a boat scraping up against rocks. The result is that all those passing red blood cells get damaged and deformed and explode.”

“The red blood cells
explode
?”

“Yes, and it causes the person to have something called
hemolytic anemia
.”