Hunter, who had not moved since breakfast except to jump in the pool one time, got up from his chair and sat down on the edge of Mrs. Martin’s chair. I can do your back.
Mrs. Martin smiled curiously. Maybe even cautiously. I could see her calculating how to answer, and because of my knowledge, I now understand why. If she said no, then she was admitting there was something wrong with her stepson touching her bare skin, rubbing it with lotion. But if she said yes, then her stepson would touch her bare skin, and rub it with lotion. She was undecided in that split second before she answered, until she noticed the hurt look on Emma’s face.
That’s so nice of you, sweetheart.
Hunter smiled. He took the lotion, squeezed some onto his hand, rubbed it with the other hand and then put both hands on our mother.
That was all that happened on that trip. But it was more than enough. Hunter went back to school and we would not see him again until the summer, when the next battle would be waged, this time by Emma.
*
There was a knock at the door on day four of my return. I heard it from my bedroom. Then I heard Mr. Martin get up to answer it.
Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss were at the door, but they did not ask to come in. Instead, they offered to speak with Mr. Martin outside on the porch and alone. I could see them through the arched doorway between the living room and foyer, the gestures, the surprised shoulder shrug, the exit and the door closing. I did not know for sure that they had found out what I needed them to find out, but I became instantly hopeful. Mrs. Martin had been increasingly unnerved with every day the island was not found and every day that I was telling my stories and being believed. The hushed conversations with Mr. Martin were more frequent; the worry lines were starting to march across her face.
But it was not enough. None of this had been enough.
Until the fourth day.
The very next day, they would find where Richard Foley lived, and that would lead them to the island. But on day four, they had found the other thing that I had needed them to find. It had been worth the torturous waiting, the whole day with Mrs. Martin’s switch on love and treating me like a mental patient. It was worth her gloating and her arrogance. It was worth everything, even what it did to Dr. Winter.
SIXTEEN
Dr. Winter
On the evening of day four of Cass Tanner’s return, Abby and Leo were back at the Martin house.
They sat on the porch in wrought iron chairs. Jonathan Martin crossed his legs, leaned back and smiled like he was at a cocktail party with friends from the club.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
Leo smiled back. This was his show and he was an exceptional performer. But he was working with very few props. “Lisa Jennings,” he said.
Jonathan looked confused. “I’m sorry? Who?”
“The school counselor. From the Soundview Academy.”
“Oh, right. I remember now.”
Leo smiled wider. “She remembers you. Quite well, in fact.”
Jonathan dug in deeper. “Why don’t you just say what you want to say?”
“You had an affair with her. It was still going on when the girls disappeared,” Leo said calmly. “You met at an open house for the school. She’s quite attractive.”
“That’s absurd,” Jonathan insisted.
Abby studied his face as Leo laid out the evidence. After their meeting with Jennings, they had gone back to the file and the two years of records that had been collected from Jonathan Martin’s cell phone during the original investigation. The analyst who had gone over the records when the girls first disappeared had written a report, listing the phone numbers called and texted and the names of their owners. Dozens of calls and texts had been made to Lisa Jennings. Too much time had passed to obtain the content of the text messages between the two of them. There were no hotels or meals or travel. No doorman at her small walk-up who would have seen them coming and going. Essentially, they had nothing. Except her confession.
“I told you I was trying to help. That I was trying to get information from her,” Jonathan explained.
Leo had accepted his explanation back then—that he was calling with concerns for the girls. Lisa Jennings had also been extensively interviewed, with no red flags appearing. The focus at the time had been on strangers, outsiders—people who could have kidnapped or harmed the girls, not the relationships between the people who had been trying to help them.
Looking back at it now, through the lens of suspicion, it was strange that Jonathan had contacted anyone at the girls’ school. And now they knew why.
“We went back to see Lisa Jennings after we pulled the phone records, and that’s not the explanation she gave us. She told us all about the flirtation at that school function, the slow seduction over text messages, and then the afternoons in her apartment. It had gone on for several months before the girls disappeared. Your stepdaughters.”
Lisa Jennings had not held out for long. They explained to her about the lie she had told—hearing the story about Emma’s hair from Owen Tanner. Owen had not known. From there, they had the phone calls and text messages. She was a millennial, accustomed to the indelible footprints of social media, so it was not difficult to convince her that the text messages had been stored by her carrier.
She’d had tears in her eyes when she told them about her realization that he never loved her, about how easy it was for Jonathan to cut it off with a phone call. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. Of course it had to end, at least for while, during the search for the girls. The family, the school—they were under a spotlight. It was the fact that he felt nothing at all. No sadness, no longing, no empty spaces left behind. She had felt all those things. He had made her feel them—“I can see now that it was all a lie. All the tenderness in his eyes and the words on his breath—they were all lies. And he was very, very good at lying.”
“Well,” Jonathan said now on the porch. “She’s obviously very disturbed.”
Abby studied him while he and Leo did their dance. He was smug. He knew they could never prove that he’d slept with the young woman. But they weren’t putting him on trial. His feigned ignorance when they spoke her name confirmed the affair, and that was what they had come for. Confirmation.
Lisa Jennings had also told them about his obsession with his son. How he spoke of him like he was “God’s gift” even though she’d seen him and he looked like “a scrawny, self-entitled prick.” She said that even though she had believed he loved her, she always knew that Jonathan would give her up in a heartbeat to keep the family name clean.