I heard this explanation come from my mother’s mouth in a panicked voice after Mr. Martin asked, What happened, Judy! In the name of God, what happened here! Then they went back and forth with things like What do we do? What will happen to my son? They’ll find the baby inside her! They’ll find out who the father is! What will happen to him? What will happen to me? Dear God! What do we do? I was too scared to cry and could barely see through the haze of fear that covered my eyes like a white blanket. But I was able to see enough to notice the necklace that lay against the wall where my mother hung her treasured photos of us. It had broken from Emma’s neck and fallen into a little tangled ball between the wall and the edge of the carpet runner.
I grabbed the necklace, then ran back into my room. I could only hear whispering because they had calmed down and were deciding about what to do. And then I heard shuffling and huffing and moaning coming from my mother and Mr. Martin and then walking and then the mudroom door and then the garage door and then a car leaving from the driveway. Emma’s car. Then I heard the mudroom door again, and my mother’s crying and babbling to herself as she stood in the foyer where Emma had landed.
At some moment, she realized that she had not seen or heard me all afternoon. She walked up the stairs and down the hall and she came into my room. The light was off.
Cass? Cass, where are you?
I did not answer. I was hiding beneath my bed.
When she left to look for me in the rest of the house, I lay there for several minutes letting this new realization sink in. Of all the things I had come to understand and regardless of how grown-up and clever I thought I was, I had never, ever considered this before. I had never imagined that my mother might actually kill me.
Dr. Winter
Jonathan Martin dug for close to an hour. The earth moved easily because it was more like silt, but he was digging in very deep. By the time he stopped, Judy was no longer crying but in stead shining a light from her phone into the hole of soft dirt. She was staring into that hole with a blank expression. Jonathan reached down and pulled at something. It looked like some kind of bright green landscaping or lawn tarp. He used his hands to move the dirt away from it. He seemed frantic, like he wanted to get it over with, like he was desperate to move that earth and find what he was looking for.
Abby held Cass tighter because she already knew.
Cass
Something green came from the ground. Then there was more digging. I could not see well, but I could see enough. He dug and dug, on his knees, until finally he pulled something else from the hole he’d made. He held it in the air and then looked at Mrs. Martin long enough for her to understand that what he was holding were the bones of my sister’s hand.
When he drove away that night in Emma’s car, I had prayed that he was driving her to the hospital. Even though I had feared my mother might kill me that night when she came looking for me, I still would not believe Emma was dead. And even as I climbed from my bedroom window, without a coat or a purse or anything, climbed down from the roof and ran from that house, into the night, I did not believe it. Mr. Martin carried Emma to her car. That was the last thing I heard. And it was very possible he was taking her to get help.
I walked four miles to the train station. I hid on a train to New York and then I walked to Penn Station. I remembered going there once with our father and he said you can get a train anywhere from there. I saw an ad pinned to a wall along one of the passageways. It said to call if you were a teenager and if you needed help. I called the number collect the way it said to. A man answered. His name was Bill. He talked to me for a while and said he could help, but I said I wasn’t sure and I hung up. I did not know where I should go. I considered calling Witt. I considered calling my father. I fell asleep before I made a decision.
When I woke up, a man named Bill was sitting beside me. He had a cup of hot chocolate and a doughnut and a kind smile. There was a woman with him, and she looked nice. They asked if I was hungry. And I was. So very hungry.
Dr. Winter
When Cass saw Emma’s bones, she broke free of Abby’s hold and started to run toward the grave. Agent Strauss was barreling down the hill, gun drawn. He got to them first and got them to their knees. They were in shock, but Judy managed to start her defense right then and there, crying about how she had no idea her daughter was dead.
She would later claim that she also had no idea how Emma died. She would testify that she came home to find Emma at the bottom of the stairs, already dead, and that her husband insisted they hide the body because she was pregnant with his son’s baby and he did not want his son’s life to be destroyed. He drove Emma’s car to the woods and buried her, then left the car at the beach so everyone would believe she had drowned in the ocean. She would turn on him viciously to save herself, disclosing his obsession with his son, his emotional abuse of Judy herself, and his attraction to her daughter.
Jonathan Martin told a different story after conferring with his lawyers, the story that would eventually be believed by prosecutors and become the basis for a plea bargain. He told how he arrived home to find his stepdaughter dead. He admitted to being scared for his wife, who had killed her own daughter, and also for his son because of what Emma had said about being pregnant. He claimed he was overwrought with fear about what it would do to his son, so he hid the body and left the car at the beach to stage a drowning. He begged for understanding, for the compassion of fellow parents who do stupid things to protect their children.
Jonathan Martin passed a polygraph. Judy refused to take one.
An autopsy of Emma Tanner’s skeletal remains could not determine if she had ever been pregnant.
Cass
For days and weeks after I ran away, I watched any television show I could find as they reported about me and Emma and how we had disappeared. I talked to the Pratts about it, but I did not tell them the truth about Emma. I told them she had run away after fighting with our mother and that I couldn’t stay there without her.