Читать книгу Emma in the Night: The bestselling new gripping thriller from the author of All is Not Forgotten - Wendy Walker, Wendy Walker - Страница 12

They interviewed Cass Tanner for two hours after the forensics team left. She had given them more than enough to begin the search for the island where she and her sister had been held captive for nearly three years. She was physically and emotionally drained and had once again asked to rest.

Leo wanted her to go to the hospital for a thorough physical examination. Abby wanted to give her a comprehensive psychological examination. She had refused both, and because she confirmed there had been no sexual or physical abuse, because she had shown no signs of cognitive impairment, they let it go. For now.

Her parents had stood behind her on this and had already begun fighting over whose house she should be resting in. Abby and the agents agreed to return in a few hours so Cass could continue her story and work with a sketch artist on drawings of the Pratts, of the boatman, Rick, and of the man with the truck. It would take that long to get someone in from the city on a Sunday morning anyway. Still, a few hours would not pass quickly.

“It’s going to be in the details. In something she doesn’t even know is important,” Leo said.

They had retreated to his car to escape the swarm of agents and local cops—not to mention the Martins and Owen Tanner. A press conference was being planned, and after that, the house would be a circus.

The field offices in New Haven and Maine had already run searches through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, and the DMV, turning up nothing on Bill and Lucy Pratt. No land records, deeds, birth certificates, tax filings. No social security numbers. They would move on to utilities, credit cards, cell phone carriers—but this road was narrowing fast.

“They’re off the grid. Or Pratt isn’t their real name. Maybe both.”

Abby looked at the house from the passenger-seat window. “Fits the story. If these people were taking in runaway teens, it makes sense they wouldn’t use their real names.”

Leo turned the ignition so he could roll down the windows. “Do you mind? It’s so damn hot. And I’m so damn old. Can’t stand the summers anymore.”

Abby didn’t answer him.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She turned her gaze from the house to the dashboard. “We need to go back through the file. There’s no way this happened without a trace of anything—no calls or e-mails or text messages. Maybe there was some kind of code when she was making this plan. Maybe she told the father, whoever he is, and he was pressuring her. Maybe we’ll see it—now that we know what to look for.”

Leo shrugged. “I don’t know, Abigail. Or we could just spin wheels again.”

The story of the night the Tanner sisters disappeared had been shocking to hear. It explained everything—the shoes at the beach, the car. Why Cass left with nothing but also why nothing of hers was found at the beach or in the car with Emma’s. It explained the fight over the necklace and the car leaving late at night. And it explained why neither girl returned.

Still, the complete absence of any evidence of Emma’s pregnancy or her plan to leave home to have the baby was unsettling.

Cass had gone on from the story of that first night to explain why she didn’t try to leave, and why she didn’t know who the father was. Abby had hung on her every word, desperate to fill in the missing pieces after so many years of wondering. Everything had made sense while she was telling the story, but it had left Abby hungry for more.

“So Emma wouldn’t tell Cass who the father was or how she found the Pratts?” Leo asked, though the question was rhetorical. “That seems strange if they were so close.”

“It fits their relationship,” Abby answered. “Emma keeping secrets like ammunition. Cass treating Emma like an authority figure, like a mother. Not asking questions. Doing what she was told. Not demanding answers.”

She started to say more about this. How there is always the “chosen” child in families like this one, the one who becomes the target of the sick parent, leaving the other neglected sibling to turn to that chosen child for needs that should have been met by a grown caregiver. But all of this was tied to the theory of the case Abby had not been able to let go of—that Judy Martin was a narcissist, that her illness was somehow related to the girls’ disappearance. It was the theory that had caused the Martins to retreat and hide three years before. And the theory that had driven a wedge between Abby and Leo. None of that would be productive now. Still, Abby added it to her file.

Leo pulled out his phone. He had a sheepish look on his face. “I may have accidentally recorded the interview,” he said. It was against Bureau policy to record interviews with witnesses without their consent.

Abby smiled and pulled out hers. “I may have made the same mistake.”

Leo searched the recording of their session on his phone.

“Here it is,” he said, pressing play.

“She said if I ever left, I would tell the police who had helped her. And if she told me about the father, I would tell that, too, and then he would take the baby. She was scared. This wasn’t about her keeping secrets from me just to be mean, which she did a lot. And she was also right. If I had left the island, I would have told everything and anything I could to help find her and save her. And to punish the wicked people who wouldn’t let us leave. I’m doing that now. I’m telling you everything I can think of and I don’t care who gets in trouble.”

Leo stopped the recording. “She says later that she thinks the father was a boy Emma met in Paris that summer—at her summer program. The timing of that fits.”

“She had the baby in March. She was in Paris June and July. It does fit. But what about this mysterious person who links her to the Pratts?”

Leo found another piece of the interview to play.

“She just said it was someone she trusted. She said when she told this person she was pregnant and needed to leave home to have her baby, this person found the Pratts. Emma said it took nearly two weeks. That it had something to do with runaway teenagers. Emma said that the Pratts were not going to adopt the baby but were just going to help her take care of it until she could figure out what to do. I can’t even tell you how strange it was when we both saw Lucy get crazy, keeping the baby for herself, keeping Emma away from her own child, there was like this panic that grew so slowly, a little every day, from little moments that were just not right, but then what did we know about what was right? We had never raised a baby. We had never had a child. Maybe this is what people do when they help you like that.”

“That’s when she looked right at you, Abby? Remember?”

Abby nodded, her eyes fixed on Leo’s phone and the voice of Cass Tanner.

“When you don’t know something like that—like how to take care of a baby—but then the people who have taken care of you and pretended to love you are doing something that seems wrong, it can make you feel crazy. Like your thoughts about them being wrong are crazy because they’re saying all these things that sound right. And because there are these moments when it seems as though the love is real.”

Leo stopped the recording again. “Do you think she was trying to tell you something? Something she wasn’t able to say?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she thought I was the person in the room most likely to understand it because of my training.”

“Was she right?”

“Yeah. She was right.”

Cass did not have to explain any of this to Abby. The girls had been isolated with two parental figures—people whom they had reached out to for help. They had not been drugged and thrown in a trunk. They had not been abducted at gunpoint or brainwashed. They had sought refuge, from what exactly was still unclear, but they had been offered something truly generous. And then there had been many months of what appeared to be genuine affection coupled with family activities like board games, TV, and the daily tasks of making food, collecting wood for the fire, tending to the house and the laundry in conditions that were antiquated at best.

Cass was also given ballet lessons, something her mother had refused her.

“I told Lucy that I had always wanted to dance. Remember?”

Judy Martin had not remembered. Or maybe she just pretended not to remember. This was the first Abby had heard of it, so if Cass had wanted to dance, she did not tell anyone who had been willing to admit it three years ago, when every detail of Cass’s life was being investigated.

“She bought me two pairs of shoes and six leotards and Bill installed a barre in the living room. Lucy didn’t know about dancing, but we got a video and some books and I practiced every day for forty-seven minutes because that was how long the video was. And you know what else? After Emma had her baby, she started to join me and we danced together, sometimes to music that wasn’t very balletlike. And then we would laugh and Lucy would laugh with us. And in between times like that, Emma would cry to hold her baby and Lucy would scold her and tell her to go to her room.”