It was very hard to explain what it felt like to be looked at as a liar. You could insist a million times that you hadn’t done anything, but people believed what they wanted, and everyone knows a criminal will deny the truth until the day they die. The cell was freezing cold, and always locked. It reminded Asher of home. The floor was made of white tiles, which left large red spots on Asher’s legs when he got up. He was in the company of a middle-aged woman, who looked like she could murder him without any effort at all.

Asher hadn’t killed his father. That’s what they all said, and he had no good alibi. The night of Orion’s death, Asher was in his bedroom, talking to Rowan on the phone, as he did every night. The next morning, he woke in Rowan’s bedroom, feeling tired and disoriented, with no memory of how or when he’d gotten there.

Though many people had wanted to kill Orion over the years, very few of them would actually have ever done it.

“You were acting really weird last night,” Rowan had said, “stumbling around and slurring your words. You seemed like you were drunk.”

He wasn’t really sure what had happened. He’d spent hours and hours trying to sort out how his DNA ended up around the cellar, and had come up with nothing. He was arrested from Rowan’s house very early in the morning, after a particularly bad anxiety attack. Asher knew nothing about the law or how to protect himself. Rowan’s mother, who was a lawyer, had taken on his case, though he wasn’t sure what to expect out of this.

“Hey, kid!”

It was early in the morning. Asher’s cellmate stared at him from the opposite corner, not at all concerned about the fact that she was in jail. It wasn’t really a jail. The trial was coming up soon. Asher had been held at the police station for questioning, and hadn’t really gone home.

“Who, me?”

The woman chuckled. “You see another kid around here?” He couldn’t tell if she was amused or annoyed. “What did you do?”

Nobody would believe him if he told the truth. It didn’t matter. It was lonely and intimidating. Even if Asher had tried to run, he felt as though all his body was made of jelly. “I didn’t do anything.” There were many theories. In the end, nobody really knew the whole truth. “I’m not a criminal.” He sat on the floor, sort of folded into himself. He’d never been in trouble before: not like this. With each second that passed, the pit of nausea in his stomach grew bigger.

There was a girl in the police station, speaking to a woman behind the counter. Asher’s cellmate grinned. “Right, yeah. Same here.” Winking, she guffawed, plopping back down onto the grey cell bed.

He missed Rowan. There was really nobody else to miss.

Rowan’s mother had promised to get him out of trouble. The problem was, nobody knew how Asher’s fingerprints had ended up at the crime scene if he hadn’t been there. It didn’t matter. Anything he said would be used against him.

“What do you think would be the best way to die?”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Hannah had stared at him, leaning her head over the side of her bed on the top bunk. They were about eleven years old, and had just learned about the passing of their grandfather. Asher didn’t know him well.

“I don’t know. Dying in your sleep. I wouldn’t want to feel any pain.”

He still believed this was the best way to go. Everyone wanted to live to old age, to die peacefully in their sleep. It had seemed like a promise when Asher was a child: he’d grow into old age, healthy and successful, without a second thought. Now it seemed like only the luckiest got to grow old.

“Why were your fingerprints at the scene of the crime if you weren’t there?”

"I don’t know! I told you, someone’s trying to frame me!”

Asher didn’t remember what happened that night. He’d gone upstairs to get a drink of fruit punch, and everything was fuzzy after this. He’d told Rowan’s mother everything he remembered, but she hadn’t seemed to believe it. Asher wasn’t a liar. He was cold and nauseous, and no one believed a word he said.

He hadn’t been home in weeks. His trial was coming up, and he’d been trying to avoid the thought of it as much as possible. Due to his foggy memory, Jane said she could use the argument that he’d been drugged, even though there was no evidence of this. When he arrived at the police station, he’d been fingerprinted and questioned while accompanied by Jane, who’d advised him against speaking without her there.

“But who could have drugged you?”

Asher remembered waking up feeling sick and confused. According to Rowan, he’d arrived almost ten hours ago, sloppy and uncoordinated, acting very strange in conversation. There was evidence against Asher: his fingerprints on the door of the root cellar and the back of Orion’s shirt, proving that he had been on the scene at the time of the murder. Most people, including his own siblings, believed he was lying about his inability to remember: but Asher was a bad liar, and attempting it made him feel too anxious.

“I don’t know. It had to have been someone with a key to the house. My dad always locked the doors when he went to bed.”

There were few people Orion trusted enough to allow free entry to his home. When his children moved out, they weren’t given a key, and Orion thought they would be bothered by this. There wasn’t any reason any of Asher’s siblings would return: and if they did, someone would let them inside. Father Roy had, at one point, a key to the farm. Orion had given it to him in case of emergencies - although Asher had never understood what sort of emergency would constitute this. You were supposed to blindly trust people in positions of power, and Asher had done this for most of his life. Asher was uncomfortable with the idea of visitors letting themselves in without warning. As a minor, he wasn’t entitled to privacy. If there was ever an emergency, an adult would need to get to him.

In the case of his father, he’d been arrested for second degree murder. Rowan believed his innocence, but no one else seemed to. Everyone expected a criminal to deny their crimes. According to the judge, he hadn’t planned to kill his father, but had an argument with him the night of his death which culminated in shoving his father down the cellar stairs. His lawyer said it would be unlikely to get his charges dismissed, but that she could argue that the whole incident had been an accident. It would have been easy, in an argument, to let your temper get the best of you, and to push someone in frustration. This was something that could have been done by Jacob, or Mosiah. Asher wasn’t a boy with a temper.

His mother had been found with rope burns on her neck, evidently strangled to death. No one quite knew who was responsible for this, but it was suspicious that Samantha had vanished shortly afterwards. A warrant for Samantha’s arrest had been released, although no one had seen her since the day of Lillian’s death. The farm had been searched and scoured for any evidence the investigators might have missed. They were complicated cases - and you could suspect all you wanted, but you couldn’t close a case without evidence. Asher knew little about the law. With nobody to vouch for him, it felt as though none of Jane’s arguments would have made any difference at all.