CHAPTER 67
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ASHLEY
Charlie was taken to the hospital for observation, so that left Nathan, Winnie, Jordan, and me to tell the whole sordid tale to the police.
The detective asked us to start at the beginning, so I told him about the fake audition, being sure to specify that I didn’t know it was fake. Yes, I’d read the words “Your aunt is dead,” but I’d also read other parts （“I never want to see you again,” “You killed my brother,” “I’m sorry but it’s over between us!”）。 “Louisa buried it,” I explained, “so I wouldn’t know that it was about her.”
We sat in Louisa’s living room—which was technically my living room now—at least for the time being. The detective asked why Louisa would cut her own children out of her will, so Winnie showed him the little room behind the kitchen and the machine she’d used to clean her blood. “She was sick and hated us because we wouldn’t help her,” Winnie explained. I wasn’t aware of Louisa’s illness, or the request she’d made of her children, but knowing about it sooner wouldn’t have changed anything. If anything it only made me feel less guilty for what I’d done. Because if she was that sick, she was probably going to die soon anyway.
Nathan and Winnie admitted that, upon discovering the recording was a fake, they had gone to the graveyard to see if Louisa was actually in her coffin. “We realized when we saw the empty casket that a crime had been committed,” Nathan explained, like the lawyer he was, “but it was one in the morning, and not exactly an emergency.”
Winnie chimed in that they were unclear what the crime even was—Murder? Body theft? Impersonating a dead person? “We had no idea what we were dealing with,” she said. “You can’t report a crime if you don’t know what it is!”
As for Marcela, once Nathan revealed that she had all but confessed to trying to off her husband and sister-in-law, they dispatched a unit to pick her up. Charlie would be given custody of the boys, and Winnie would support his single parenting as he supported her in her recovery.
The detective seemed confused as to why Charlie’s wife would want to kill him, and Nathan dropped the bomb that he’d been sleeping with her. He would never explain how he came to be involved with his cousin’s wife, and I would never ask, but suffice to say it made me less enthusiastic about the prospect of a second date.
The coroner later confirmed that Louisa had died from “asphyxia due to exhaustion of oxygen,” or “air hunger,” and her grisly final expression indicated it was not very pleasant for her. As Jordan put it, her lungs were literally screaming for oxygen. I felt terrible that she had suffered—I didn’t know it was painful for some people! But one might argue what she endured was in line with the abominations she had inflicted on others.
Winnie started to cry when she realized that if Jordan and I hadn’t come along when we did, she and Charlie would have suffered a similar fate. As for why Charlie passed out and Winnie didn’t, Jordan explained that different people have different reactions to low-oxygen environments, and while Winnie’s tolerance was higher, they both would have succumbed eventually. I never would have done it if I’d known Winnie and Charlie would go down there, but in the end, my insider intel is what saved them, so I took some consolation in that. I gave them the house and the lion’s share of the money （no court order required!） to make it up to them. They insisted I take a cut for my troubles, and we ultimately agreed on a cool million, which was a helluva payday for an acting job that, in the end, required very little acting.
When the policeman found the baseball in the air vent, the possibility that Louisa’s suffocation was not an accident chilled the room like a blast of cold air. I got a bit of a lucky break that Zander played the sport because if this turned into a homicide investigation, Marcela would be the obvious suspect. Even though of course I put it there.
The movie script Louisa and I had both read—her at the end of her career, and me at the beginning of mine—was called Over Her Dead Body. It was about—you guessed it!—a woman who fakes her own death, then hides in her basement while her family tears itself apart. It was in “preproduction” when my friend at CAA sent it to me, back when I was reading everything I could get my hands on in the hopes of ferreting out a casting. I had hoped to read for the “Winnie” role. In the original she was of course not called Winnie （“Scarlett,” I think?） and was quite vile, nothing like the warm, quick-witted redhead in Louisa’s adaptation. The studio wound up going belly-up, as studios do, and the town quickly forgot all about that script. I did, too. Until I heard my voice on Nathan’s phone. And the particulars of that “tense psychological thriller about a woman betrayed by her greedy children” came flooding back. There was no question Louisa had read it, too; a quick peek on IMDb confirmed that she had been the casting director on it.