by Wendy Walker
It took me a long time to understand their relationship. I was always willing to pay the price for her love, whatever price she decided to set. But Emma knew something I didn’t. She knew that our mother needed our love as much as we needed hers, maybe even more. And she knew that if she threatened to take it away, to raise the price on her affection, our mother would be willing to negotiate. Back and forth, they made their trades, resetting the terms almost daily. And always looking for ways to improve their power at the bargaining table.
I became the outsider. I may have been beautiful, as my mother said, but I was beautiful like a doll, like a lifeless thing people look at once before moving on. Emma and our mother had something else, something that drew people in. And so they were fierce competitors in their secret club, for each other’s love, for the love of everyone around them. And all I could do was watch from a distance, one short enough that I could see the escalation. Two nation-states in a constant battle for power and control. It was unsustainable. And so it continued, this war between my mother and my sister, until the night we were gone.
I remember the feeling I had the day I returned. Having made my way to Mrs. Martin’s house—to my house, I guess (though it did not feel like my house after being away for so long)—on a Sunday morning in July, I stood frozen outside in the woods. I had thought about my return relentlessly for three years. Memories had filled my dreams at night. Lavender soap and fresh mint in cold iced tea. Chanel No. 5. Mr. Martin’s cigars. Cut grass, fall leaves. The feel of my father’s arms around me. Fear had run away with my thoughts during the day. They would all want to know where I’d been, and how I came to be missing. And they would want to know about Emma.
The night we disappeared haunted me. Every detail played over and over and over. Regret lived inside my body, eating me alive. I had thought about how to tell them, how to explain it. There had been time, too much time, to construct the story in a way they would be able to comprehend. I had thought it through, then unraveled it, then thought it through again, self-doubt and self-loathing erasing and rewriting the script. A story is more than the recounting of events. The events are the sketch, the outline, but it is the colors and the landscape and the medium and the artist’s hand that make it what it is in the end.
I had to be a good artist. I had to find talent where none existed and tell this story in a way they would believe. I had to set aside my own feelings about the past. About my mother and Emma. Mrs. Martin and Mr. Martin. Me and Emma. I loved my mother and my sister in spite of my selfish, petty feelings. But people don’t understand any of that. I had to not be selfish and foolish. I had to be the person they wanted me to be. I had nothing with me but the clothes on my body. I had no evidence. No credibility except for the fact of my own existence.
I stood frozen in the woods, filled with terror that I would fail. And there was so much at stake. They had to believe my story. They had to find Emma. And to find Emma, they had to look for her. It was all on me, finding my sister.
They had to believe me that Emma was still alive.
TWO
Dr. Abigail Winter, Forensic Psychologist, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Abby lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating the extent of her defeat. It was six o’clock on a Sunday morning, mid-July. The sun was up, pouring light into her room through sheer curtains. Her clothes were strewn across the floor, shed in an effort to find comfort in the thick summer heat. The air conditioner had begun clanking again, and she’d chosen quiet over cool. But now even the sheets felt like a burden against her skin.
Her head pounded. Her mouth was dry. The smell of scotch from an empty glass turned her stomach. Two drinks at midnight had overpowered her restless mind and brought her a few hours of relief. And a hangover, apparently.
At the foot of the bed, a dog moaned and raised his head.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It was worth it.”
Three hours would get her through a day of catching up on paperwork. She had reports due on two cases and corrections to a deposition she’d given back in February—as if she would have any memory of what she’d said that long ago about anything.
Still, this was no victory over her mind—the mind that controlled her body, and sometimes seemed intent on destroying it.
The contemplation was interrupted by her phone ringing on the nightstand.
Her body ached as she reached for it beside the empty glass. She didn’t recognize the number.
“This is Abby.” She sat up and tugged on a twisted sheet to cover her body.
“Hey, kiddo—it’s Leo.”
“Leo?” She sat up straighter. Pulled the sheet higher. Only one person called her “kiddo” at age thirty-two, and that was Special Agent Leo Strauss. They hadn’t worked together for over a year. Not since he’d transferred to New York to be closer to his grandchildren. Still, his voice reached into her very core. He had been like family.
“Listen. Just listen,” he said. “I know it’s been a while.”
“What’s going on?” Abby’s face drew tight.
“Cassandra Tanner came home.”
Abby was on her feet, searching for clean clothes. “When?”
“Half an hour, maybe less. Showed up this morning.”
Phone pressed between shoulder and ear, Abby pulled on a shirt, then jeans. “Where?”
“The Martin house.”
“She went to her mother?”
“She did, not sure what that means…”
“Emma?”
“She was alone.”
Abby buttoned her shirt, stumbled to the bathroom. She felt the surge of adrenaline, her knees buckling. “I’m heading to the car … Christ…”
A long silence made her stop. She took the phone in her hand, braced herself on the bathroom sink.
“Leo?”
Abby had not forgotten the Tanner sisters. Not for one minute of one day. The facts of the investigation into their disappearance had lain dormant in the shadowed corners of her mind. But that was not the same as forgetting. They were with her, even after a year of being off the case. They were in her bones. In her flesh. She breathed them in and out with every breath. The missing girls. And the theory of the case that no one else would believe. One call and the dam was broken. All of it was flooding in, sweeping her off her feet.
“Leo? You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“They pulled you in from New York?”
“Yeah. You’ll get a call from New Haven with the assignment. I wanted to make sure you were okay with it first.”
Abby looked up into the mirror as she considered what to say. Things had not ended well when the case got cold.
“I’m working this case, Leo.…”
“Okay … I just didn’t know where you were at. They said you had some counseling.…”
Shit. Abby hung her head. It was still there, the anger or maybe frustration, or disappointment. Whatever it was, she could feel it stirred by the concern in his voice.
The Bureau had offered her counseling and she had taken it. “It’s normal to feel this way,” they told her. Yes, Abby had thought at the time. She knew it was normal. Some cases get under the skin.
Everyone agreed this case had been maddening. No one knew what to call it at the time. Murder, kidnapping, accident. They’d had an eye on the disappearance from the runaway angle as well—sexual predators, terrorist recruiters, Internet stalkers. Everything was in play. The car at the beach, the shoes of just one of the sisters left by the shore. They’d found nothing to suggest the younger one had been with her except Cass’s hair—which could have been left there on any number of occasions. There was nothing to suggest they had planned to run away together. And nothing to suggest foul play, either murder or abduction, of either one. There were no bodies, no suspects, no motives, no strangers on their social media sites or phone logs or text messages or e-mails. Nothing obvious had changed in recent years. The truth is, they mig
ht as well have brought in NASA and called it an alien abduction.
But this was not the reason Abby had seen the shrink. She had been doing this work since she finished her PhD nearly eight years ago. There had been other difficult cases. She could see them all when she summoned them. The brutal beating of a prostitute. The execution of a neighborhood drug dealer. The hanging of a dog on the branch of a tree. The list went on and on—cases that were never solved, or never prosecuted, the victims’ families, and sometimes the survivors, left choking on the injustice.
There had been relief in talking to another professional. Though Abby had never been a practicing therapist—“I don’t have the patience for patients,” she used to joke—that did not mean she wasn’t a believer. Talking could bring perspective. Talking could dull the edges of the blade. But even after a year of talking and talking, the endless talking, the Tanner investigation remained with her. That it cut less deep did not help wrestle the demons it summoned in the dark of night.
And now her sessions with the shrink were coming back to bite her.
“I’m working the case, Leo.…”
“Okay, okay…”
“What do we know? Has she said anything?…”
Abby heard a short sigh as she turned away from the mirror and headed back into the bedroom to find her shoes.
“Nothing, kiddo. She took a shower. Had some food. Now she’s resting until we can get there.”
“A shower? How did that happen?”
“It was her mother. She wasn’t thinking. She almost started the wash—”
“With Cass’s clothes? Before forensics? Christ!”
“I know … just get moving. Call me from the car.”
The phone went quiet again, but this time he was gone.
Shit! Heart racing now, she pulled on a pair of boots, called out to the dog, who followed her through the small ranch house to the kitchen. She poured some food into a bowl. Rubbed his neck. Opened the back door so he could go out.
“Keys, keys…” she said out loud, back in the living room, searching. She was frantic to get to the door. To get to her car. To get to Cassandra Tanner.
Her head felt light, her vision starting to blur. Chronic sleep deprivation had its side effects. She stopped and braced herself on the back of a chair.
No one had believed her theory three years ago, not even Leo, and he had been like a father to her. It was one thing to have a cold case. It was another thing to leave stones unturned.
The company shrink listened, but she did not hear. She said things like “I can understand how you feel that way.” Classic feeling validation. They taught that in undergraduate psych classes. She would ask what had not been done. She would let Abby ramble on and on about the family, the mother, Judy Martin, the divorce, the new father, Jonathan Martin. And the stepbrother, Hunter. Together, they had deconstructed every piece of the investigation and in a way that was meant to lead Abby to a place of comfort.
The shrink—“You did everything you could.”
Abby could still hear the conviction in her voice. She could see the sincerity on her face, even now as Abby closed her eyes to stop the spinning in her head. She took a long breath and exhaled hard, her hand clenched on the wood back of the chair.
Their analysis of the investigation had become Abby’s Bible, the verses giving her rambling, desperate thoughts a path to salvation.
Verse number one. The normalcy reported by the outsiders—friends, teachers, the school counselor. Cass envied her older sister. Emma was annoyed by Cass. Cass was quiet but determined. Emma was more free-spirited. Some used the word “undisciplined.” But she had been looking at colleges, filling out applications. Everything indicated that she was just biding her time until she could get out of that house.
The shrink—“All of that sounds pretty normal, Abby. They were on time for school. A very prestigious private school. The Soundview Academy. They spent summers at expensive camps, some in Europe. They did sports. Had friends…”
Abby had grown impatient with her.
Verse number two. Abby explained that whatever happened to them, they had been vulnerable to it. And that vulnerability had started at home. It always did. In spite of how these stories were depicted in the news, it was not a mystery what lured teenagers from their homes. An acute traumatic event. Chronic neglect, abuse, instability, dysfunction. The dark void of unfulfilled need. The vulnerability to sexual predators, terrorist groups, religious fanatics, antigovernment extremists. The perpetrator found a way to satisfy that need, to give it what it craved. The predator became a drug. The teenager, an addict.
So when the initial frenzy died down, when they realized the girls were long gone and that finding them would require a slow and methodical unraveling of their lives, Abby had turned back to the family.
When she opened her eyes, the room was still. Her keys were there, on the table next to the chair, and she took them in her hand. She walked to the door and let in the harsh sunlight and a burst of hot, oppressive air from the outside.
No one had objected then. In fact, the entire investigation turned inward, on the family, and on the Martin home in particular. Physical forensics were done at the house. Bank accounts, credit cards, phone records were collected and analyzed. Friends and neighbors were interviewed.
Abby could recall the conversations then, at the start of the investigation. “Yes, yes, this is all good information. All good.” Teenage girls had gone missing. Where there’s smoke, there must be fire—so they looked for the embers close to home.
The girls’ father, Owen Tanner, had been happily married to his first wife before they were born. He and his wife had a little boy, Witt. They had a nice house, family money. Owen worked in New York City at an import firm his family owned. They specialized in gourmet foods, which were his passion. He had a healthy trust and didn’t need the income, but his wife thought it was good for him to work. Ironically, that’s where he’d met Judy York, the sexy brunette with large breasts and a magnetic personality. Owen had hired her to manage the office.
After the affair, his divorce and the new marriage, Judy and Owen had the two girls in four years. According to Owen, Judy had not been an ideal caregiver to her young daughters. She was capable, he’d insisted. But she was not willing. Owen said that she slept twelve hours every night, then watched reality television and shopped for clothes all day. She would open a bottle of wine at five o’clock and finish it by ten when she went to bed, words slurring, that magnetic personality suddenly repulsive. She told him, allegedly, that she had done her part by giving birth.
This had been the first alarm bell.
With her Bible now open, the verses spilling out, Abby bounded to her car as if she could somehow outrun them. None of this would matter now. Because Cassandra Tanner was home. Because soon she would know the truth and whether she’d been right or wrong. Because soon she would know if she could have saved them from whatever it was that had happened.
Agent Leo Strauss had been the lead on the investigation. It had not been their first time working together, so there had been a rapport. He had been her mentor, in work and in life. His family had included her in holiday dinners. His wife, Susan, baked her cakes on her birthday. There had been a bond between them that made it difficult for Abby to hide what she was thinking. How Judy had seduced Owen Tanner. Neglected her children. Had an affair with a man from the country club. About the bitter custody fight. And about the toxic home Judy made for her daughters with Jonathan Martin and his son, Hunter.
Abby had thought the investigation would barrel down this freeway once they had the divorce file and, in particular, the report of the attorney who had been appointed to represent the children. The guardian ad litem, or GAL, as they’re called in Connecticut. It was right there in an independent record—the voice of Cassandra Tanner four years before she disappeared. Telling them all that something was not right in that house. Something with Emma and Jonathan Martin and Hunter. To Abby’s ear, it
was a ghost from the past telling them where to look.
That report had been the second alarm bell. But the forensics had not supported her theory.
Verse number three.
The shrink—“What did you think they would do with this report from the divorce file? After all the forensic evidence came up clean? The house, the phones, the money? All they found was one broken picture frame—isn’t that right? Which the mother said resulted from the girls’ fight over a necklace?”
She thought they would order psychiatric evaluations. She thought they would conduct more coercive interviews. She thought they would see what she could see.
The shrink—“The woman who wrote that report during the divorce—the GAL—she dismissed Cass’s concerns about the Martins, didn’t she?”
Yes, she did. But she was an incompetent hack. She dismissed the fears of an eleven-year-old girl, believing her mother instead—believing that girl was lying to help her father.
The shrink—“Because the father, Owen, was so devastated by the affair and the divorce, right? Parents do that in custody fights. Use the children…”
Yes, they do. But Owen agreed to settle, to spare the children. Anyone who’s worked in that field knows that the person who cares more about the children usually loses. And Owen lost. There was nothing to indicate he had told his daughter to lie.
Then there was the story about the necklace.
Verse number four.
The shrink—“This is when you decided to push for the psychiatric evaluations? When you found out about the necklace?”
Judy Martin told the story to the press. How she bought the necklace, a flying-angel medallion on a silver chain, for Emma and how Cass was bitterly jealous—and how they’d been fighting about it the night they disappeared.
Only that wasn’t the truth. Leo interviewed the woman at the store who sold Judy that necklace—a twenty-dollar trinket. The woman was the store’s owner, a small shop that catered to teenage girls with overpriced jeans, short miniskirts and trendy throwaway jewelry. She knew the girls and their mother. They’d been shopping there for years, and the mother never failed to express her disdain for the merchandise in a whispered voice that would carry throughout the store.