The night we disappeared haunted me. Every detail played over and over and over. Regret lived inside my body, eating me alive. I had thought about how to tell them, how to explain it. There had been time, too much time, to construct the story in a way they would be able to comprehend. I had thought it through, then unraveled it, then thought it through again, self-doubt and self-loathing erasing and rewriting the script. A story is more than the recounting of events. The events are the sketch, the outline, but it is the colors and the landscape and the medium and the artist’s hand that make it what it is in the end.
I had to be a good artist. I had to find talent where none existed and tell this story in a way they would believe. I had to set aside my own feelings about the past. About my mother and Emma. Mrs. Martin and Mr. Martin. Me and Emma. I loved my mother and my sister in spite of my selfish, petty feelings. But people don’t understand any of that. I had to not be selfish and foolish. I had to be the person they wanted me to be. I had nothing with me but the clothes on my body. I had no evidence. No credibility except for the fact of my own existence.
I stood frozen in the woods, filled with terror that I would fail. And there was so much at stake. They had to believe my story. They had to find Emma. And to find Emma, they had to look for her. It was all on me, finding my sister.
They had to believe me that Emma was still alive.
TWO
Dr. Abigail Winter, Forensic Psychologist, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Abby lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating the extent of her defeat. It was six o’clock on a Sunday morning, mid-July. The sun was up, pouring light into her room through sheer curtains. Her clothes were strewn across the floor, shed in an effort to find comfort in the thick summer heat. The air conditioner had begun clanking again, and she’d chosen quiet over cool. But now even the sheets felt like a burden against her skin.
Her head pounded. Her mouth was dry. The smell of scotch from an empty glass turned her stomach. Two drinks at midnight had overpowered her restless mind and brought her a few hours of relief. And a hangover, apparently.
At the foot of the bed, a dog moaned and raised his head.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It was worth it.”
Three hours would get her through a day of catching up on paperwork. She had reports due on two cases and corrections to a deposition she’d given back in February—as if she would have any memory of what she’d said that long ago about anything.
Still, this was no victory over her mind—the mind that controlled her body, and sometimes seemed intent on destroying it.
The contemplation was interrupted by her phone ringing on the nightstand.
Her body ached as she reached for it beside the empty glass. She didn’t recognize the number.
“This is Abby.” She sat up and tugged on a twisted sheet to cover her body.
“Hey, kiddo—it’s Leo.”
“Leo?” She sat up straighter. Pulled the sheet higher. Only one person called her “kiddo” at age thirty-two, and that was Special Agent Leo Strauss. They hadn’t worked together for over a year. Not since he’d transferred to New York to be closer to his grandchildren. Still, his voice reached into her very core. He had been like family.
“Listen. Just listen,” he said. “I know it’s been a while.”
“What’s going on?” Abby’s face drew tight.
“Cassandra Tanner came home.”
Abby was on her feet, searching for clean clothes. “When?”
“Half an hour, maybe less. Showed up this morning.”
Phone pressed between shoulder and ear, Abby pulled on a shirt, then jeans. “Where?”
“The Martin house.”
“She went to her mother?”
“She did, not sure what that means…”
“Emma?”
“She was alone.”
Abby buttoned her shirt, stumbled to the bathroom. She felt the surge of adrenaline, her knees buckling. “I’m heading to the car … Christ…”
A long silence made her stop. She took the phone in her hand, braced herself on the bathroom sink.
“Leo?”
Abby had not forgotten the Tanner sisters. Not for one minute of one day. The facts of the investigation into their disappearance had lain dormant in the shadowed corners of her mind. But that was not the same as forgetting. They were with her, even after a year of being off the case. They were in her bones. In her flesh. She breathed them in and out with every breath. The missing girls. And the theory of the case that no one else would believe. One call and the dam was broken. All of it was flooding in, sweeping her off her feet.
“Leo? You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“They pulled you in from New York?”
“Yeah. You’ll get a call from New Haven with the assignment. I wanted to make sure you were okay with it first.”
Abby looked up into the mirror as she considered what to say. Things had not ended well when the case got cold.
“I’m working this case, Leo.…”
“Okay … I just didn’t know where you were at. They said you had some counseling.…”
Shit. Abby hung her head. It was still there, the anger or maybe frustration, or disappointment. Whatever it was, she could feel it stirred by the concern in his voice.
The Bureau had offered her counseling and she had taken it. “It’s normal to feel this way,” they told her. Yes, Abby had thought at the time. She knew it was normal. Some cases get under the skin.
Everyone agreed this case had been maddening. No one knew what to call it at the time. Murder, kidnapping, accident. They’d had an eye on the disappearance from the runaway angle as well—sexual predators, terrorist recruiters, Internet stalkers. Everything was in play. The car at the beach, the shoes of just one of the sisters left by the shore. They’d found nothing to suggest the younger one had been with her except Cass’s hair—which could have been left there on any number of occasions. There was nothing to suggest they had planned to run away together. And nothing to suggest foul play, either murder or abduction, of either one. There were no bodies, no suspects, no motives, no strangers on their social media sites or phone logs or text messages or e-mails. Nothing obvious had changed in recent years. The truth is, they might as well have brought in NASA and called it an alien abduction.
But this was not the reason Abby had seen the shrink. She had been doing this work since she finished her PhD nearly eight years ago. There had been other difficult cases. She could see them all when she summoned them. The brutal beating of a prostitute. The execution of a neighborhood drug dealer. The hanging of a dog on the branch of a tree. The list went on and on—cases that were never solved, or never prosecuted, the victims’ families, and sometimes the survivors, left choking on the injustice.
There had been relief in talking to another professional. Though Abby had never been a practicing therapist—“I don’t have the patience for patients,” she used to joke—that did not mean she wasn’t a believer. Talking could bring perspective. Talking could dull the edges of the blade. But even after a year of talking and talking, the endless talking, the Tanner investigation remained with her. That it cut less deep did not help wrestle the demons it summoned in the dark of night.
And now her sessions with the shrink were coming back to bite her.
“I’m working the case, Leo.…”
“Okay, okay…”
“What do we know? Has she said anything?…”