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.”
Lucy had homeschooled them. There were textbooks that came in the mail and were delivered by the boatman. They studied every day, took tests and wrote papers. Lucy appeared to be highly educated and she had deep conversations about novels and history. All these things help forge a strong bond between the Pratts and the Tanner sisters. Of course there would be confusion when their interests became adversarial and the Pratts started to turn on them.
Abby remembered a small, insignificant piece of the story, which now felt more important. “She said something else—find the part where she talks about the books they read.…”
“Here…”
“My favorite book we read was The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It was so tragic. Lucy explained to us why Sarah Woodruff had lied about her life as the Lieutenant’s lover. How she knew that people be lieve what they want to believe. She explained everything so well and we both thought she was really smart and insightful.”
“People believe what they want to believe.” Leo repeated Cass’s words.
“So what is it we all want to believe?”
“I don’t know, kiddo. But this person who helped Emma find Bill Pratt—it had to be an adult. We can look for people who might have crossed paths with Emma back then—and who had affiliations with groups like that, or maybe worked with troubled teens. That narrows things down. Maybe we can go back through the file for that,” Leo said.
He kept talking when Abby didn’t answer.
“We’ll have the sketches of the Pratts and the boatman later today. He might be the key to this whole thing—the boatman. He shops and gets gas and lives on the mainland. We find him, he brings us to the island. Or we find where he lived, where he kept the boat, and we narrow the search to a few dozen of them. That’s all we need.”
Leo had already said this. Abby had already thought it. They all had. Cass had given them so much information yet so little to help narrow the search. They’d asked about the shape of the island, the size. The curvature of the land masses she could see in the distance. Marine life. Plant life. Animal life. She had seen many landmarks, lighthouses and topography, but nothing unique for coastal Maine.
And it was not like California, where everyone traveled everywhere up and down the coast. These towns that were nestled in the jagged inlets and harbors were isolated and insular. People traveled between them mostly by boat because there were few bridges connecting them, and the drive back to the thoroughfares was long and slowgoing. The locals kept their heads down and worked hard making a living from fishing and vacationers. The tourists came and went with the summer months, usually returning to the same place year after year. Many of the properties along the coast were second homes to people who wouldn’t know one town from the next. Reaching them with national media would be a challenge as well, and this would make the sketches less useful than everyone wanted to believe.
There was a chance someone from the Pratts’ former life would recognize them. A family member, neighbor, schoolmate. They were in their forties, so it was unlikely they’d been on that island and off the grid for more than a decade. They had to have worked, gone to school, accumulated the resources that now afforded them the luxury of hiding.
And there was also the story of the boatman.
“Go back to him,” Abby said. “Go back to the part about the boatman.”