Chapter 16
Denny’s was one of the few places in town that hadn’t been remodeled yet. My mother and I sat in a worn, red leather booth that I remembered from so many late nights in my youth. We ordered pancakes and coffee, then sat in silence.
“Mom,” I said, finally. “What are we doing here?”
She took a deep breath. “I wanted to talk to you about what the detective said. Privately.” She spoke quietly, not wanting anyone to overhear.
“Detective Pullman seems to be convinced that your sister …” Her eyes welled with tears.
“Well, that something very bad has happened to her.” I watched a tear slide down her cheek.
She was straining to keep it all in. I couldn’t help but feel pity.
She had said and done a lot of things over the years I didn’t agree with, but at her core, she was a mother who was missing her child.
“I know,” I told her, my defenses melting a bit.
“He said that to you too?” she asked, moving her wrinkled hand across her cheek.
“Yes. And I told him to eat shit.” I knew she didn’t like my language but this time she didn’t comment on it. Instead, she took a sip of coffee. I noticed that her hand was shaking.
“I don’t want to believe it,” she said, her voice cracking. “But your father and I are starting to worry that she isn’t coming back.”
“It’s only been a couple of days.”
She nodded. “I know that, and I am hoping and praying to god that this is all some big misunderstanding and she’s on her way home, but I also need to be realistic.
I need to be prepared, unlike last time.
I saw what the Hopelys went through, and what happened to us … and that will not happen to me again.”
“So you think someone killed her?” My lip starting to tremble despite my protests. I didn’t want to cry. Not in a Denny’s. Not in front of her.
She swallowed. “Someone has to have done something. Hazel wouldn’t just up and leave. You know that.” She held a napkin to her mouth to muffle a sob.
“What are you suggesting?” I asked, aware that a few tears had slipped down my own face.
My mom was crying fully now, her entire body heaving. “What if I was wrong, Rose? What if I was wrong about Will?”
My heart stopped. I couldn’t believe it. She was agreeing with me, that this was all too much of a coincidence.
The air around my head started to feel thick and warm. My thoughts slowed down like they were stuck in a syrupy pool. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to process.
My mother had believed in Will. She had loved Will.
We used to joke that Will was her favorite.
He was her firstborn, the eldest boy, and he could do no wrong.
He remembered her birthday and brought her flowers.
He took care of his younger three siblings.
He had a pretty girlfriend and was accepted into a competitive college. In her eyes, Will was perfect.
When they found Alexandria’s body, my mother had held Will in her arms as he sobbed. She’d cried as hard as he had. She pushed his hair off his face and whispered that it would all be all right.
She had brought him food in bed the next day and forced him to eat. She made him shower. She held the glass of water up to his mouth to drink. She took care of her baby when he was going through the most unimaginable, horrific pain and grief.
She’d held his hand and taken him to the police station when they asked to question him. She had been helpful and forthright about it all. Only when the investigation ramped up, and Will became a suspect, did she get angry.
Things had reached an all-time low when the semen came up. The fucking semen.
Ideally, a younger sister should never have to worry about where her older brother decides to blow his load. But I spent 2010, and the decade afterward, having to reconcile the fact that my life had fallen apart because of Will’s semen.
It was the lynchpin of the case, if you listened to armchair detectives and Redditors across the globe. It was the one conclusive, irrefutable piece of physical evidence that linked my brother to Alex’s murder. It was simple. Open and shut.
The day after their high school graduation, Alexandria Hopely was found dead in the woods between the Dearling and the Hopely houses at approximately 9:34 a.m. Her time of death was estimated to be somewhere between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. the night before.
She was wearing the outfit she had last been seen in the night before, but it was rumpled and in some places unbuttoned or hanging off.
The only thing missing from her body was the Tiffany necklace she had been given by Will the day before.
She had strangulation marks on her neck, and was found to have injuries consistent with rough sex.
She still had semen inside her. Semen that was later tested for DNA, and ultimately matched Will.
It had been unpleasant to read about. Reports of your brother describing the sex he’d had with Alex the morning of their graduation, how they stupidly hadn’t used a condom.
That was what undid him in the end. People preferred to believe that he’d raped her than think of sweet little Alex rawdogging her boyfriend mere hours before she walked in her graduation robe.
Well, his downfall was partly because of that, and also because the Hopely family lied through their teeth.
No one had taken it seriously when I reminded them that Alex and Will had been sexually active for years. It was much easier to believe that Will had forced her into it.
“What the hell were they thinking?” my mother had hissed in the kitchen at my father after the police took Will away.
“They’re teenagers!” my father shouted back, slamming a mug into the sink so aggressively that it shattered. “They have sex. Of course they do! How many times have you heard them in Will’s room? They’re eighteen years old. It would be weird if they didn’t.”
Tommy and I had been sitting in his room, door closed with the TV going, but we could still hear them.
“That doesn’t excuse the Hopelys for pursuing this,” my mother responded. “My son has done nothing but love and adore their daughter!”
“But their daughter is dead, Lyla,” my father reminded her. “What would you do? If it were us? If it were Rose out there? We might believe he didn’t do it, but he doesn’t have an alibi.” He was somber.
“No one has an alibi!” she shouted. “It was the middle of the night! We were all sleeping!”
My mother had stayed that defensive. She’d hired the best lawyer we could afford.
She’d gone out of the house with a kitchen knife whenever reporters clambered outside our door shouting at us.
When we went to the grocery store and someone made a snide comment, she snapped back, calling them “disloyal, gossip-hungry vultures.”
The trial took place two years later, when Will was twenty.
Tommy was in his first year of college. I was sixteen, and rebelling in every way I could.
Living in Loxahatchee had become hell. We hadn’t had a moment of peace since the murder, and the trial had riled everyone up again.
Will’s lawyer had done his best to prepare us for it.
We’d gone over testimony. The evidence. What the prosecutor was going to say.
We had thought we knew what to expect. But it had been so much worse.
The courthouse had been full every day. All five of the Hopelys sat front and center as the state pitched its case.
By then, none of the Hopelys would speak to any of us.
Cassandra had completely turned her back on me after I made it clear I believed Will.
She’d screamed at me one night that summer, in between our houses, in the middle of a downpour.
“How do you expect me to be friends with the sister of the guy who killed my sister!” she cried, rain drenching our small frames.
At the trial, the lawyers talked about Will and Alex, taking what had been a normal teenage relationship and turning it into a jealous, codependent, and abusive horror story.
They claimed that Will was possessive and controlling, that he pressured her.
They interviewed all three Hopely girls, who falsely claimed there had always been something off about Will.
They swore up and down that Alex and Will weren’t sexually active.
It was total bullshit, and they all knew it.
We knew it. We could see their parents and the prosecutors coaching them.
But the community had rallied behind Alex and her family.
Between a pretty dead girl and an accused murderer, it was easy to pick a side.
Our lawyer struggled to find anyone willing to say good things about Will.
The community was too small. And Will did himself no favors.
He refused to say a bad word about Alex or anything she had done in the weeks leading up to her murder.
His love for her was undying, apparently.
But that just made everyone believe in his guilt more. No relationship could be that perfect.
My mother stood by him, unwavering, until the day they showed the physical evidence.
They described what Alexandria had gone through in the woods. How she was bruised. How she had been shoved to the ground. How someone’s dirty hand had pressed down over her mouth, covering her face in dirt while their other hand and knees pinned her to the ground.