The Statement of Wren Ashcombe

Taken at the office of the district attorney, county of Mercy, on the sixth of November, in the presence of Deputy Marshal N. Ozer and of R. Varley, consultant. The deponent was advised of her rights and of the agreement then under negotiation, and declined counsel, and made the following statement in her own words. It is reproduced here by permission of the district attorney, with the names of two persons unconnected with the proceedings omitted.

My name is Wren Ashcombe. I am thirty-six years old. I was born in Ukiah and I have lived on this coast since I was nineteen, and I have been married to Emmett Scully for eleven of those years, and everybody in this county believes I am his sister, and that is the first lie, and it is the one I have been living in longest.

I want to say at the start that I am not going to pretend to be a victim, because I was not, for most of it. I knew he kept that animal. I knew he worked it at night, because for two years I helped him do it — I held the lambs in the pen and I called the dog in, and I want that written down, because if I leave it out then everything else I say is worth nothing.

It began as a project. That is how he described it and that is how it was, at first. He had lost the county post in 2001 and he had taken the refusal badly, and for a while he was just a man with a grievance and a telescope, and he spent twelve years learning the estate's history and mapping the western Drumble on his own money because the county would not pay for it — twelve years of it, nine of them under the permit he still holds and the last four on the holes in the clay at the old cutting, which nobody else had ever had a reason to map, and I thought he was the most interesting man on this coast and I married him, and for most of it I thought that the work was the marriage, and it was, but I had the order wrong. The work came first, and the land came second, and I was the third thing.

The dog he called Kurt. He bought the litter in 2021 from a kennel in the valley and he sold three of them and kept the one that was too big. He was not cruel to it. That is the part nobody will believe: he was not a man who beat an animal. He fed it better than he fed himself and it followed him around the yard like a dog in a book and he could put his hand in its mouth. What he did to it was worse than cruelty. He made it into a tool and then he kept the tool in the dark, and a thing that lives in the dark by itself and only comes out at night and is only ever asked to run at people is not a dog any more, whatever it says on a register.

The paint was new this year. Before that, the animal was just an animal that came out of the fog at night, and the county was frightened of it and the county told the old story, and he had worked out by 2024 that the story was not enough, because a big dog in the dark is a big dog in the dark and it looks like one, and he wanted the thing that people describe and cannot account for. He got the compound through the station's supply order and he told me it was a trail-marking paste for a bat survey. He mixed it in the workshop on the ninth of July. I watched him do it and I said nothing and I made supper.

In July he told me the whole of it. That is what I want the record to have. I was not guessing and I was not half in. He came into the kitchen on a Sunday evening and he sat down and he explained it to me the way he would explain the drainage, in order, with the parts of it lettered: the old man's heart, the nephew nobody in this county had ever seen, the trust a court would have to break, and the sentence he came back to twice, which was that if there is no body there is no heir to find. Then he said that when a family ends a court goes looking for the next of kin, and that the next of kin was him — the son of the son of Corbin Ashcombe, whose branch was written out of the family's book in 1889 and whose paper is still in a box upstairs — and he said it over the sink with a dish towel in his hand, the way a man reads out a total.

I said to him: what if the boy doesn't die. And he said the ground would see to it. And I said, what if I tell somebody. And he looked at me and he said, in the ordinary voice of a man remarking on the weather, "Then I will have to do it all at once and I don't want that."

That is when I understood what I had married. And I did nothing for three months. I want the record to have that too. I did nothing, and in October a man was killed on the path in front of my own house, and if I had walked down to the courthouse in Quillon in July and told a deputy marshal that my husband was planning to drive a man into a bog, then Denny Roux — who never did anything to anybody except hit a man in a bar in Eureka one time when he was drunk, who was living in a blackberry on a ridge with his sister feeding him out of a canvas bag — would be in a state facility right now, doing his six years, and alive.

What I did instead, when I finally did it, was this. On the Friday, in the afternoon, the day of the dinner, I came to the house and gave the doctor the note about dinner and I told him not to come, and I said two words which I hope were enough, and when he did not understand them I said a third thing that had exactly one possible meaning, which was that the young man would walk home on the lower path. I knew the animal would be on the lower path at ten because I had heard him on the telephone the night before telling the man at the hostel to take the boot out and be gone, and because the coat was in his truck. I knew it, and instead of telling Deputy Marshal Ozer, who was in the county that day and whose number is on a card on my own bulletin board, I stood at a window with my back to a stranger and said a sentence quietly, and I have told myself for a week that I did it because I was frightened, and that is true, and it is not the whole truth, and what is also true is that I did not want to be a woman who tells, and now I am one.

He chained me to the desk at eight o'clock on Saturday night. He did not hurt me until I tried to get to the telephone, and then he hit me once with the back of his hand and I went down against the desk and cut my face on the corner of it, and he put the webbing in my mouth and he said, "You will be found in the morning," and he went out and I heard the trailer go up the road, and I sat on the floor of my own office for three hours and listened to the fog.

There is one small thing I want in the record, because the doctor wrote it down and the marshal has it in her notes and I know exactly what it means. When my husband said the words ninety seconds in front of the two of them at the station that day, I looked at the floor. I looked at the floor because ninety seconds is the number. It is how long a man has on that ground if he goes off the flags, and it is how long a heart like the young man's can stand an arrhythmia, and he had said the number out loud to me in this office in July, in the middle of the lettered explanation, the way he said figures he was pleased with. I was standing thirty feet from a man who was being worked out on paper, and I was being introduced to strangers as his sister, and I looked at the floor.

I am not asking for anything. I have told the district attorney that I will testify at the inquest and in any proceeding that comes, and that I will not ask for immunity for anything I have done, and that if the state decides to charge me I will plead to whatever it charges me with and say what I have said here, because it is all of it true, and because I have sat in that office since Saturday night and worked out the arithmetic of the last eleven years, and the arithmetic is that I kept a dog in the dark and a man died on the path in front of the house, and then another man died in the cut, and I am the only person left alive who was standing between the two of them the entire time.

One more thing and I am done. The night he told me in the kitchen, I asked him why, and he said the thing he always said, which he had said to me for eleven years, at the end of every argument he ever won, and which I have heard him say in the shop and in the truck and at the fence: "Because it's my family's land." That is what he thought. He thought he was the family and the old man was the accident. And there is a portrait in the stairwell up at that house of a man in a long coat with a dog, and it is a Vandermeer, and the man in it has my husband's jaw, and the family that wrote him out of its book a hundred and thirty years ago would look at that picture and know him by the bone, and they would not let him in the door, and he knew it, and that is the whole of him.