Cass nodded. “It was the beginning, yes. It took a long time for that to eat away inside him, but it did. And when it did, it left a void.”
“A void which you filled?” Abby asked. She already knew the answer. It was the next logical step in this plan of manipulation.
“Yes.”
“Were you intimate with him, Cass? Do you know what I mean by that?”
Cass nodded and looked up abruptly, her eyes sharp and focused, and directed at Abby. “Yes,” she answered.
Judy gasped and covered her mouth with her hand like she was horrified. “Cass!” she said. “How could you not tell us this right away?”
Abby ignored her. “How did this happen? And when? Can you tell us that?”
“It took me a long time, but I used that power, you know? With sex. Sex power. It’s how women get power over men, right?” She was looking at her mother then. The room grew quiet for a moment.
Abby wanted desperately to go down this road, but not now. Not with Judy here. So she moved on. “You created the void and then filled it with something new.”
“Yes. I filled it with something new. I filled it with pieces of me. And every time I gave him a piece, it would take me days to remember why I was doing it,” she said.
Abby nodded. “It must have been very hard to be with someone like that. For reasons that are not known to him, only to you.”
The room grew silent for a long moment before Leo pushed forward. “So when you were able to sneak out one night, he was there waiting. With the boat and the friend with the truck on the mainland?”
“Yes,” she answered again. “Like I said. It was not easy. And it took a long time. It took months.”
“And in all that time, there must have been conversations. Does anything stand out? Anything at all about where you were, where Rick was from, how he knew the Pratts, how they paid him—?”
Cass started shaking her head wildly. “No! Don’t you think I would have told you? He barely spoke to me. And if I had pushed him on anything like that, he would have stopped believing that he could trust me!”
“Okay, Cass. It’s okay. What about the truck driver? Did Rick say how he knew this man?” Leo was not giving up.
Cass shook her head.
Abby jumped in then. “Cass, we need you to see another doctor. An adult doctor.”
But Cass refused. “I want you to do that examination, the one my mother keeps asking for. The one that will prove I’m not crazy.”
“No one thinks you’re crazy, Cass,” Leo said.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Abby agreed.
“Okay.” Cass seemed relieved. “Are you still going to find them? Find the island? Find those horrible people, even though I did what I did with the boatman?”
Leo looked at Abby. She could see the father in him screaming to come out. This was one of those moments when Cass seemed like a child, and it stood in glaring contrast with the other moments when she was wise beyond her years.
All of this was alarming to Abby.
“We will find them,” Leo said with conviction. “And we will find your sister.”
Cass appeared neither surprised nor comforted by the reaction she had provoked. It was something else, something akin to satisfaction, which meant it was calculated.
Cass Tanner was taking them all on a journey, and the only way they would find Emma was to go along for the ride.
THIRTEEN
Cass
Our mother had taught us about “sex power” around the time when Emma was thirteen. It was just after Mrs. Martin had started having sex with Mr. Martin behind our father’s back, and so I think she was very pleased with herself because she had discovered that this power had not left her. Mr. Martin was very powerful, and my mother was getting older.
It’s not just about age and beauty, girls, she used to say with that smile I hated. It’s how you make them feel—like they’re the ones who are powerful! Like they make you melt like no other man. It’s a trick women play. Think of it like a game.
She gave us lessons like this whenever something came up that seemed relevant to her. A woman with big breasts and a low-cut shirt at the club—See how all the men are trying to talk to her? Things like that. Emma always listened but pretended not to. I always pretended to listen when I was actually blocking out the sound of her silly voice and her even sillier words.
When I first met Dr. Winter, I knew she had never used Mrs. Martin’s sex power on a man. I don’t know how I knew this. Maybe because she was still single. Maybe because she did not react to Mrs. Martin the way most women do, which is with a mix of envy and contempt because they wish they had her sex power but hate that they need it to get things in life. I think that when you see a woman who has sex power but chooses not to use it, she is someone you can trust.
I considered then the possibility of trusting Dr. Winter. I considered falling apart in her arms the way I did with my brother when I saw him the next day, and telling her about my mother and the things she had done. But I had learned my lesson years before with that woman from the court, and with my father. It’s like I keep saying—people believe what they want to believe, and I had no idea what Dr. Winter wanted to believe. I feared I had already told her too much with the story about Emma’s hair.
Sex power has its limits. I knew this because of the things that had happened at home before I left. I knew this again when I saw Hunter and his girlfriend. And I knew this from Mr. Martin and how he looked at Emma when Mrs. Martin was right there for the taking, every second of every day.
I knew this before the naked photos of Emma were posted on the Internet. So when I saw them, I knew who had taken them.
The IP address was traced to our Internet at our home, which meant they had to have been sent from the desktop computer we all shared, or Hunter’s laptop. Neither of them had any stored photos of Emma without her top, so it was also assumed that they had been deleted. We could have had the computers sent away to see if they could find traces of them in the deleted files, but Mr. Martin refused. He told my mother that because Emma was a minor, if a technician found traces of naked photos, they could all be accused of child pornography because the computer technician would have to turn the information over to the FBI. The technician confirmed this. He told Mr. Martin that this very thing had happened in divorce cases—a suspicious wife let him poke around the deleted files of her husband’s computer, and he found images of underage girls from sites that pop up when you’re surfing porn. The husband probably wasn’t looking for underage girls when he was doing his porn surfing, but that’s what he got, and once it’s on your computer, it never really leaves.
Mrs. Martin could not argue with that. I think she was relieved because she didn’t want to know anything about the photos.
So everyone assumed Hunter had taken them and posted them to the Internet. Witt punched him in the face. I asked to live with my father. And my mother cut off Emma’s hair.