She agreed to work with an agent in New Haven. To turn over her phone records. To take a polygraph to prove she had nothing to do with the girls’ disappearance—that it was an affair with their stepfather and nothing more. Soon, she would hire an attorney and probably do none of those things without immunity. But she would do them.
It felt like a lead. Jonathan Martin had told her things, confided in her about his wife and the girls and his son. Things could fall from her memory that seemed inconsequential but perhaps could lead them to the Pratts, or identify the father of Emma’s baby.
Leo would focus on that, on the connection between Lisa Jennings, Jonathan Martin and a possible link to finding the Pratts’ identity.
But Abby was curious about one other thing, and that was why Cass had given them the bread crumbs that led to this door. Cass had lied about Emma’s relationship with Lisa Jennings. That much they believed, which meant Cass had to have known about the affair—and wanted it exposed. Why else would she make up a lie to send them back there? She wanted them to question Jonathan Martin, and then question her mother so she would finally know. But to what end? Revenge for her terrible childhood? Or something else? Abby had no doubt that Cass knew exactly what they would find when they tracked down Lisa Jennings.
Leo was quiet for a long moment. Then he asked a question that they had not planned on. “Did you ever refer to Emma Tanner as Lolita?”
Jonathan Martin’s back straightened abruptly. He looked disgusted by the question, but it was overplayed. “That’s enough,” he said, getting up from the chair.
Lisa Jennings told them how Jonathan Martin talked about survival of the fittest, about how history had proved that the tribe was always the strongest force. That only when a tribe was infiltrated by outsiders was it conquered. He had numerous examples from history and he held extreme political views about how to keep this from happening. Lisa Jennings had asked him how this applied to his blended family, and he had spoken about the girls. Cass, he’d said, was no threat. She was weak. She was a follower. But Emma, she was trouble. She wanted power and didn’t know her place the way her mother did. He’d suggested that she was aware of her appeal with men and had started to use it. She said Jonathan had used that expression—Lolita.
Leo and Abby stood as well, Leo blocking Jonathan’s path back to the door.
“I find this all disgusting,” he said. “My daughter is missing and you’re wasting all of our time on this nonsense. I think you should leave now before you upset my wife.”
Leo stepped aside and let him pass. Abby waited until he was gone before letting out the breath she’d been holding.
She looked at Leo and smiled.
“What? You look surprised.”
She was surprised. He was asking questions about the family.
“What are you thinking, Leo? Lolita was a young schoolgirl who seduced an older man—”
“He didn’t go to Paris that summer, if that’s where you’re headed. Neither did the stepbrother, Hunter.”
“You ran that? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Leo motioned for them to walk farther from the house, down the porch steps to the driveway.
“Don’t go making too much of this. I look at that guy and I don’t think he cares one way or another about those girls. He came into their lives when they were both almost teenagers. Eleven and thirteen. Their half brother hated his son, and the girls adored Witt. Hunter was obsessed with Emma, which I’m sure made him blame her for being a temptation to a healthy young man with hormones—you know how that argument goes. But, believe me—when Cass said Emma was pregnant and wouldn’t say who the father was, I thought about it. I thought about Jonathan Martin and I thought about his son. That would be reason to leave, to be afraid of what would happen if she stayed and one of them was the father.”
“Except she’d been in France during the time she got pregnant, right? Cass said she had the baby in March. That puts conception in June, July at the latest. Emma didn’t come home until mid-August.”
“Right. So I made sure they weren’t in Paris, that’s all. Just closing the loop.”
“So what now?”
Leo shrugged. “We go at Judy Martin in an hour. It’s perfect—he denied it, so now we have cause to question her. Give him a narrow window to tell her himself.”
“Agreed.”
They walked farther up the driveway to Abby’s car. She pulled out her keys.
“I read your paper, you know,” Leo said.
Abby turned from the car to look at him. “When?”
“Last year. And again last night. I was lying in bed. Susan was dead asleep. She keeps a picture of the kids when they were little on her nightstand. I must look at that picture ten times a day because it’s right there, you know? And I was thinking about a mother cutting her child’s hair like that. Viciously. Vindictively. And to punish the other one.”
Leo paused. He was shaking his head and staring at his boots.
“The sibling stuff you wrote about. How the narcissist parent chooses one sibling as the favorite, and then does everything and anything to keep that child in line. Reinforcing the alter ego…”
“Emma,” Abby said. “That’s what she did to Emma.”
“And Cass, the other child, who looks to the favored one as a parent. A child raising a child when the parents are right there. It makes me sick.”
“Yes,” Abby agreed. She had no idea where this was headed, but having Leo understand, having him see the things she saw in this family—it meant everything in that moment.
“It makes me sick for them. And it makes me sick for you.”
Abby didn’t know how to respond. Cass’s words were there now—how she had described the conflict—the need to love and be loved but then knowing that “everyone you could ever trust could betray you.” Most people lived in blissful ignorance. But Abby’s mother had taken that from her. Judy Martin had taken that from Cass. And you can never get it back, this ignorance. Was that something to be sorry about? Or did it keep them safe?
A thought rushed in then. Abby grabbed Leo by both arms.
“What is it, kiddo?”
“Everyone can betray you,” she said.
Leo was confused. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what Cass wants her mother to know. That’s why she led us back to Lisa Jennings—to find out about the affair, to make her mother think, or know, that her husband betrayed her!”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know—”
“And why didn’t she just tell us? Why did she make us think it had something to do with Emma?”
“Because she has to be the one her mother can trust … and don’t ask me why, because I don’t know that yet either. I just know that she needs her mother to start trusting her, to believe her, and to stop believing in Jonathan Martin.”
“Abby, I don’t know what any of this has to do with finding Emma—”
Leo’s thought was interrupted by his cell phone buzzing in his jacket. He pulled it out to answer.
“Yeah…” he said; then he listened. His eyes grew wider.
Abby waited, watching his face change expression—surprise to excitement. He hung up and smiled, his words freezing time, impossible to believe.
“They found the island.”
SEVENTEEN