Abby and Leo walked to where she was and stared at the object in her hand.
Dangling from the white latex glove was a necklace. It had a thin silver chain and an angel medallion. The chain was broken, just as Cass had told them.
“Emma’s necklace,” Abby said in a whisper.
Leo looked at Abby, his eyes wide. “She left it behind.”
“Yes. Yes, she did,” Abby said.
“She hid it from the Pratts.”
“Yes,” Abby agreed.
Leo was confused. “Why didn’t she take it with her?”
But Abby already knew. “Because she wanted us to find it.”
NINETEEN
Cass
In the spring of Hunter’s senior year at boarding school, something terrible happened. It started with his acceptance to Hamilton College. Both he and Mr. Martin had been very puffed up about it since the letter arrived in late March—right after we returned from St. Barts. Mr. Martin went to college at Hamilton, and he talked about it like it was Harvard. Even now I feel annoyed by this. I was in eighth grade at the time. Emma was a sophomore, and at our school you have to start thinking about college very early. Between Emma and Hunter, our house was filled with talk of SATs and ACTs and APs and the summer grid. Even when Hunter didn’t come home for the weekend, Mr. Martin was obsessed with his son getting into college—Hamilton, in particular—and Mrs. Martin was then obsessed with Emma’s college choices because her children were just as important as his. If Mr. Martin had talked about Hunter joining the circus, Mrs. Martin would have taken Emma to tightrope classes.
She could not admit to herself that he was better educated or more sophisticated than she was, because then he might feel more powerful and he was only allowed to feel that way in the bedroom, even though he was both those things, and even though the bedroom was the only place he lost his power. And that just proves my point about this sex power women have and how limited and flawed it is. Even Mrs. Martin’s sex power paled beside Mr. Martin’s status and money power, and she knew it. She knew it in her bones.
Mr. Martin had to pay a lot of money to Hamilton for Hunter to even have a chance of getting in because his grades were not good and his scores were not good. And he was not good, overall. He did not have any varsity sports and he did not belong to any clubs or do any charity work. I don’t know how much money it cost to get that letter, but Mr. Martin worried and complained about it for months, so it must have been a lot. But it was worth it to him. Hunter was Mr. Martin’s only child. He was named after his dead grandfather, and he had lived full-time with Mr. Martin for his entire life. Everything Mr. Martin did and everything he was began and ended with his son. His sacred progeny. His legacy.
My mother didn’t go to college, but she spoke about Hamilton in a dismissive way when Mr. Martin was not around. She said it was a second-tier school and she told Emma she had better study and keep her grades up so she could do better. Our father’s family had connections at Columbia. Our father went there and so did Witt, although I know Witt could have gotten in on his own because he also got into Princeton and we don’t know anyone there. My mother had not known the difference between schools like Columbia and Hamilton until that year, when it became necessary for her power struggle with her husband. No one was better than she was. No child better than her child.
After the letter came, there was great relief in our house. Mr. Martin was full of pride. My mother was full of determina tion for Emma. I was full of annoyance. And Hunter was full of himself. He was so full, in fact, that he imagined himself invincible. He got arrogant. And careless. One weekend, he was so careless that he got caught doing cocaine on the campus of his boarding school.
Mr. Martin went on and on about how back in the day, such a thing would have gotten you a suspension. But not now. People had a different attitude about drugs, and schools that were not tough on drugs would not attract the best students and the parents with the most money. The school held a disciplinary hearing. It consisted of students and faculty members, who were allowed to question Hunter, hear his apologies, and watch him beg for leniency in his senior year. Mr. Martin wrote another check, this time to the boarding school. Another very big check.
None of that was enough. Hunter had not done himself any favors by being the kind of person he was, and most of the faculty and the students who were worthy of being on the disciplinary committee disliked him. Some hated him, it seems. They recommended expulsion, and after three years and seven months of paid enrollment, Hunter Martin was expelled from his fancy boarding school. Of course, Hamilton then withdrew its offer and told Mr. Martin that Hunter could apply again the following year, but that he would be “well advised” to pursue a meaningful endeavor during the year off, and turn his life around.
In May of that year, Hunter returned home. He enrolled in the public high school so he could earn a degree, which was deeply humiliating for him. He had to take exams for classes he hadn’t been in all year and he got very bad grades, even worse than he was getting before. Many of the kids there he knew from town, from partying in the summer, or from years before when he was in grade school with them. Hunter did not handle humiliation well. Neither did Mr. Martin. There were many phone calls in all directions, assigning blame and plotting a way out of the mess Hunter had created for himself and his family.
I understood Mr. Martin. He had spent a lot of money for Hunter to have the name of that school on his résumé. It was something he would have for the rest of his life. Anyone can graduate from public high school. They have to take you if you live in the same town. As Mr. Martin explained it to Hunter, at some point in life, your grades and accomplishments in high school don’t matter. All that matters is the name of it, and the name of the college it helped you get into. Then it would be the name of the place you worked, the company or the person or even the school if you became a professor. Names, names, names. It was no different from shopping for groceries. Will you buy Heinz ketchup or generic? If you can afford Heinz, you will buy Heinz. He was desperate for his son to understand.
Hunter could not defend himself, so he didn’t try. And also, he knew Mr. Martin had taken those pictures of Emma, so Mr. Martin was not exactly standing on high ground when it came to being a good person. He did his best to twist things.
You had everything at stake. Everything to lose. All you had to do was hold it together for seven weeks. That’s it. Seven fucking weeks! You could have come home to snort your cocaine. Did you want to get thrown out, just to spite me? But now, look what you’ve done. You’ve hurt no one but yourself!