Nothing about Genevieve’s history fits with Savannah’s descriptions of her, but too many parts of her story line up for it to be false. Like the fact that there aren’t any pictures at Genevieve’s house of her doing the things she excelled at and enjoyed, but there are plenty of her beauty pageant photos. And I never noticed it before, but Genevieve rarely brings up Savannah in conversations about her family. She’s the same way with John. She talks about her family almost like it’s just her and Mason without anyone else attached to them.
I pull up Mason’s testing reports again. I’ve been through them so many times, but we’re missing something. We have to be. My gut’s screaming at me that Mason didn’t do this, and my gut is almost never wrong. People always ask how I’m able to connect with kids the way that I do, as if there’s a technique or a formula to follow, but there isn’t. At least not for me. Going to school gave me tools and all the latest research, but I just feel kids. It comes from my insides, and they’re telling me Mason’s innocent. My talk with Savannah has only strengthened the feeling.
I slowly scroll through the pages just to feel like I’m doing something, and as I go, a pattern slowly emerges from Mason’s IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. I was too busy searching for other things to notice it before. He’s had five IQ tests over a period of seven years, and his IQ scores are almost identical. Three of them are exactly the same—38. The others only one point off. I’ve never seen that much consistency among tests. I scroll to the end of the document, where all the testing protocols are attached. I only glanced at them before since all the scoring was finished.
This time, I make my way through each testing response booklet. I’ve given so many WISCs throughout my career I can practically do them in my sleep. At one point during graduate school, I think I did, so it doesn’t take long to notice a pattern. Mason gets all the same answers wrong and all the same answers right on each test. That’s really tough to do, but theoretically, not impossible. However, when I dig deeper, I discover that it’s not just that he gets the same answers wrong but that each wrong answer is identical. Alarm bells go off inside me.
Nobody consistently gives the same wrong answer to math problems. If someone doesn’t know how to add or subtract, they guess. Guessing is random. You can’t end up with the same answer. Not that many times. It’s the same situation on the working memory test, where he’s given a list of items and asked to repeat them back. This is usually one of the easiest tests for kids with ASD. Typically, their highest scores, but that’s not the case with Mason. He never gets past the third section. Not only that, he remembers things wrongly in the same pattern every time too. How’s that possible?
My heart speeds up as I print out the pages from his block-design answer sheets and lay them all out next to each other on the dining room table. Block design is the most basic cognitive test, and a low score drags down your overall IQ, so if kids do poorly on this one, it has an impact on their total score. And that’s exactly what Mason does. He fails out of block design over and over again. He fails the same way each time, making the exact same wrong design on each test. That’s not the most concerning part, though.
Block design is a timed test. Kids have to complete their designs within a specific limit. The evaluator records how long it takes them to finish each one and notes it in the scoring. In Mason’s case, it takes him the exact same amount of time on each test too. He does it in the same number of seconds when he’s eight years old that he does when he’s eleven.
Is it even statistically possible to give the same wrong answers across multiple testing times and situations like this? Was he just remembering how he’d done it before and then repeating? There’s no way to do that unless you’ve rehearsed and practiced the test multiple times. You’d have to spend hours studying it just like you would a regular exam.
The idea sneaks up slowly, then floods me.
“Oh my God,” I say out loud as the full impact of the realization hits me.
“Come in.” I pull Detective Layne inside and shut the door behind us. It felt weird inviting him to my house, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t explain any of this over the phone, and I couldn’t meet him anywhere because Harper’s asleep. Dad’s the only one who watches her, and he’s been asleep longer than she has, so I’m not waking him up, especially since he’s been taking care of her for me so much lately.
Detective Layne doesn’t look the least bit uncomfortable that I’ve called him over to my house at eleven o’clock at night, but then again, having to go to random people’s homes in the middle of the night probably comes with the job. He’s still in his uniform. Maybe he hasn’t even been home yet.
“Hi, I know it’s late, but do you want coffee?” I ask.
“Sure, coffee would be great,” he says and follows me into the kitchen, where the pot is freshly brewed. I fill a mug and hand it to him, then point at the condiments on the counter in case he’s changed his mind about sugar or cream since the last time we met.
“Guess you’re not planning on sleeping tonight either,” he jokes with a smile as we slide into chairs on opposite sides of the kitchen table. He keeps his chair back a bit so he doesn’t make contact with the table.
“Actually, I could probably drink half this pot and go straight to bed. All the years in graduate school trained me to sleep on caffeine. Anyway, I know it’s late, but I just couldn’t wait until morning for this. I’ve been obsessing over the case since meeting with Savannah today. I pretty much haven’t done anything else tonight except try to dig up things on the internet.”
He gives me a rather patronizing look. “Find anything my guys couldn’t?”
“I can’t imagine I found anything different than what they found. There’s practically nothing on Mason, but Genevieve Hill has always been the southern belle at every ball.”
He smiles at my use of words. “I like that. I might use it.”