by Wendy Walker
Leo stopped the recording again. “Do you think she was trying to tell you something? Something she wasn’t able to say?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she thought I was the person in the room most likely to understand it because of my training.”
“Was she right?”
“Yeah. She was right.”
Cass did not have to explain any of this to Abby. The girls had been isolated with two parental figures—people whom they had reached out to for help. They had not been drugged and thrown in a trunk. They had not been abducted at gunpoint or brainwashed. They had sought refuge, from what exactly was still unclear, but they had been offered something truly generous. And then there had been many months of what appeared to be genuine affection coupled with family activities like board games, TV, and the daily tasks of making food, collecting wood for the fire, tending to the house and the laundry in conditions that were antiquated at best.
Cass was also given ballet lessons, something her mother had refused her.
“I told Lucy that I had always wanted to dance. Remember?”
Judy Martin had not remembered. Or maybe she just pretended not to remember. This was the first Abby had heard of it, so if Cass had wanted to dance, she did not tell anyone who had been willing to admit it three years ago, when every detail of Cass’s life was being investigated.
“She bought me two pairs of shoes and six leotards and Bill installed a barre in the living room. Lucy didn’t know about dancing, but we got a video and some books and I practiced every day for forty-seven minutes because that was how long the video was. And you know what else? After Emma had her baby, she started to join me and we danced together, sometimes to music that wasn’t very balletlike. And then we would laugh and Lucy would laugh with us. And in between times like that, Emma would cry to hold her baby and Lucy would scold her and tell her to go to her room.”
Lucy had homeschooled them. There were textbooks that came in the mail and were delivered by the boatman. They studied every day, took tests and wrote papers. Lucy appeared to be highly educated and she had deep conversations about novels and history. All these things help forge a strong bond between the Pratts and the Tanner sisters. Of course there would be confusion when their interests became adversarial and the Pratts started to turn on them.
Abby remembered a small, insignificant piece of the story, which now felt more important. “She said something else—find the part where she talks about the books they read.…”
“Here…”
“My favorite book we read was The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It was so tragic. Lucy explained to us why Sarah Woodruff had lied about her life as the Lieutenant’s lover. How she knew that people believe what they want to believe. She explained everything so well and we both thought she was really smart and insightful.”
“People believe what they want to believe.” Leo repeated Cass’s words.
“So what is it we all want to believe?”
“I don’t know, kiddo. But this person who helped Emma find Bill Pratt—it had to be an adult. We can look for people who might have crossed paths with Emma back then—and who had affiliations with groups like that, or maybe worked with troubled teens. That narrows things down. Maybe we can go back through the file for that,” Leo said.
He kept talking when Abby didn’t answer.
“We’ll have the sketches of the Pratts and the boatman later today. He might be the key to this whole thing—the boatman. He shops and gets gas and lives on the mainland. We find him, he brings us to the island. Or we find where he lived, where he kept the boat, and we narrow the search to a few dozen of them. That’s all we need.”
Leo had already said this. Abby had already thought it. They all had. Cass had given them so much information yet so little to help narrow the search. They’d asked about the shape of the island, the size. The curvature of the land masses she could see in the distance. Marine life. Plant life. Animal life. She had seen many landmarks, lighthouses and topography, but nothing unique for coastal Maine.
And it was not like California, where everyone traveled everywhere up and down the coast. These towns that were nestled in the jagged inlets and harbors were isolated and insular. People traveled between them mostly by boat because there were few bridges connecting them, and the drive back to the thoroughfares was long and slowgoing. The locals kept their heads down and worked hard making a living from fishing and vacationers. The tourists came and went with the summer months, usually returning to the same place year after year. Many of the properties along the coast were second homes to people who wouldn’t know one town from the next. Reaching them with national media would be a challenge as well, and this would make the sketches less useful than everyone wanted to believe.
There was a chance someone from the Pratts’ former life would recognize them. A family member, neighbor, schoolmate. They were in their forties, so it was unlikely they’d been on that island and off the grid for more than a decade. They had to have worked, gone to school, accumulated the resources that now afforded them the luxury of hiding.
And there was also the story of the boatman.
“Go back to him,” Abby said. “Go back to the part about the boatman.”
Leo found the story of Rick and his time in Alaska.
“I think Bill told us Rick’s stories because it made him and Lucy feel like they had saved his life and they wanted us to think that they were good people. I didn’t know how much about it to believe. They said he was abused by his parents, physically with beatings and stuff, and that’s why he used drugs and was violent with them. He left home and went to Alaska because you can get good jobs on fishing boats there and they don’t care how old you are. You can make around fifty thousand dollars in a few months, and you get to live on the boat and get free food so all that money you can just save and then live off of it for a while. But Bill said some of the men on those boats were bad men. Evil and violent and without any consciences or morals. They used to catch seagulls with their fishing hooks and then torture them to death on the deck. They had contests to see which one could cause the most screaming by the birds because birds can make a scream when they are in pain. Bill said it was from being out at sea for so long. He said it wasn’t normal and it destroyed their minds. But I thought, after hearing the story, that it probably had more to do with type of people who end up there. Don’t you think?
“Rick felt this way—like he was damaged. He told Bill that he started to think he was one of them. He felt like he belonged there because they were all living on the outside looking in at normal life, at love and families. None of them had that. Rick tortured the birds. He caught the fish. He ate the nasty food and drank a lot of cheap whiskey. But then something really bad happened. A woman from the state fishing office came on the boat for a week to monitor their catch and practices because I guess that has to be done for the law in Alaska and she just happened to have that job. She was in her forties, married with kids. Kind of ugly, and I guess very hard-looking from working with all these psycho fishermen. But she didn’t like what they were doing to the birds and so she told them to stop or she would report them to the police when they got back to shore. They didn’t like that. So one night, they went into her room and pulled her out of bed and up the stairs to the deck, where they took off her clothes, tied her up in fishing net and took turns having sex with her. Rick said the men who did this went into every fisherman’s bunk and made them come to the deck to watch or take a turn. He said more than seven men had a turn before they cut the net and let her go back to her room. Rick said he was not one of the seven but he was made to watch. He said he was afraid of what they would do if he refused. When it was over, he went back to his bunk and threw up all night.”
Cass went on with the story. She said the woman was trapped on the boat for nine days. She did not leave her room, not even for food. There was no way to get off the boat until the helicopter came on the day it was scheduled. They would not allow her to use the radio
to call for help sooner. She reported that she feared for her life. That she heard them sometimes through the walls, debating whether she would report the attack and if it would just be better to kill her and say it was an accident. There were a lot of ways to die on one of those boats. When the boat got back to port two months later, all the men were questioned about the incident. But they were not fired, and none of them was prosecuted. They stuck together with their story that she made it all up because she tried to have sex with one of the fishermen and was turned down. No one believed her.
“Rick came to Maine to work as a driver of a delivery boat. He started using heroin. When the Pratts hired him for a job and then got to know him and saw his addiction, they took him in, helped him get clean. Helped him make amends by telling the authorities what had happened on that boat. By then, the woman didn’t want to be involved. But the story was reported in the paper, and all of the men who had participated in the incident were named there.”
Leo stopped the recording.
“Cass said the boatman helped her escape, but she didn’t say how this story plays into any of that,” Abby said.
“We can ask her when we go back in. But I think we have enough to find this guy. How many gang rapes on a fishing boat in Alaska could be in the papers? We find the article, the reporter maybe, and we’ll know the town he lived in. That should be enough.”
Abby was quiet, thinking about this story.
“I know that expression, Abigail. Even after all this time. There’s nothing you could have done. We worked every lead we could find.”
Abby hesitated before telling him the truth. But then she did. “It was hard to be in the room with her.”
“Cass?”
“No—that felt like a miracle. To see her alive, even after what she’s been through. My God, compared to the things I’ve imagined. The things that have snuck into dreams…”
“I’ve never stopped seeing her face. Or Emma’s,” Leo said. “So it was seeing Judy that was hard? Even now? Even knowing she had nothing to do with their disappearance? I thought you’d be relieved.”
Abby looked away.
But Leo was not deterred. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?” Abby asked.
“About the fact that I didn’t push back hard enough against the Martins. That I didn’t bring it to the Assistant U.S. Attorney to get a warrant. That I thought the case was hitting close to home for you. Too close, maybe. We haven’t seen you all year. Susan missed baking a cake for you.”
Abby closed her eyes hard. She felt guilty about that. But she also felt betrayed, and that was hard to shake. “I know what that woman is, Leo. And it hit way beyond my home. She makes my mother look like Mother Teresa.”
“And that had to push buttons. I’m an old man and I’ve been at this a long time. Buttons get pushed and we start to mold things to make them fit. I couldn’t watch you go to war over a hunch that seemed driven by something other than the facts.”
Abby finally looked at him. He had said all of this before. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him. He had been trying to protect her from herself. That’s what he’d said. But he was wrong then. And he was wrong now. Even if Judy Martin had not been involved in her daughters’ disappearance.
“I’ve missed all of you. And I missed Susan’s cake this year. I’m sorry about that.”
Leo smiled and patted her on the knee.
Abby reached for the door. “I might go back in. Talk to Judy. Talk to Jonathan. See if I can get something more out of Owen on this person who might have helped Emma. I just—”
“Need to do something. I know. I’ll check in with New Haven. I got the sense from the forensic team that we may have to sell this a little.”
“I know. Emma’s a grown woman now. We’re going on Cass’s word that she couldn’t leave the way Cass did. Do what you can to get the bodies on this.”
“I will.”
Abby got out and closed the door behind her. As she walked toward the house, she sensed something familiar, something visceral like the creaking of floorboards in an old familiar hallway. Abby heard them—these echoes from the past, which had been here the very first time she met Judy Martin.
When she was in graduate school, she’d written her dissertation on narcissism, which was the colloquial name for narcissistic personality disorder. Her advisor was aware of her family history but agreed that this very history could benefit the work if she could remain objective. For two years, she read studies, interviewed doctors and compiled her own set of data from sources around the world. The disorder was relatively rare, affecting only 6 percent of the population. The majority of that 6 percent were men, so the data became increasingly limited as she focused on the issue that resulted in the paper—“Daughters of Mothers with Narcissism: Can the Cycle Be Broken?”
The paper was enormously successful. She received high grades from the examiners, but more important, the work was widely published and became the cornerstone of several Web sites seeking to help women impacted by the disorder. There were so many misperceptions. So much ignorance. Abby had broken with the formalities of her profession and written something that could be understood by anyone willing to take the time. In plain words, she described the symptoms: grandiose sense of self-importance; fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, brilliance; requiring excessive admiration; elevated sense of entitlement; takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends; lacks empathy; unwilling to recognize or identify needs and feelings of others.
She went beyond that to explain the pathology, and the cause. Contrary to our cultural perceptions, these people were not arrogant and self-centered. They did not truly believe they were exceptional to their peers. It was the exact opposite. They were so profoundly insecure, so fearful of being injured because of their perceived inferiority, that their minds had created an alter ego to protect them. This alter ego of perfection shielded them from their fear of being harmed, of being powerless, of being victimized. It was a fear so profound, it was unbearable. Unsustainable. And so the mind did something about it.
But it was not easy to support a fake alter ego. Narcissists had to become master manipulators. They surrounded themselves with people they could control and dominate—and they developed an eye for them. They learned how to be charming and appear confident so people would find them attractive, drawing near enough to be pulled into the trap. For men, it began with his wife and extended to subordinates in the workforce. Cult leaders were invariably pathological narcissists. For women, it often centered around her children.
Men chose submissive, codependent spouses. Women sometimes chose insecure men to dominate, but other times they sought out powerful men who were drawn to women for sexual promiscuity and deviance. Narcissistic women learned how to be enticing that way, and so they could lasso these powerful men and feed off their significance in the world.
She went on to address the most crucial question—how did these people get so profoundly insecure in the first place?
It began in early childhood.
She had tried to explain this to Leo: “It’s like a bone, self-esteem, self-confidence. We take it for granted, but it’s like anything else that develops after we’re born. There’s a time that it has to happen—in the first three years. From that first breath, a baby starts to learn that when she cries, someone feeds her, and when she smiles, someone smiles back, and when she babbles, someone replies. And she learns that she has power to get the things she needs to live—food, shelter, love. That’s the bone, that’s where it starts. And if that doesn’t happen, if the bone doesn’t develop, it never will. Everything done to remedy the defect is just a splint.”
Leo had pushed back. The Tanner sisters were not left to cry all day, or to starve. There was no evidence of abuse or neglect. “Those are the easy lines to draw,” Abby had responded. “But there’re not the only ones.”
Imagine the infant who one day cries and gets fed, and the next day cries a
nd goes hungry. One day smiles and is kissed and hugged. The next day smiles and is ignored. This is what psychologists called “preoccupied or unresolved attachment” with the primary caregiver—usually the mother. There was love one minute and disdain the next. Affection that was given in abundance for no reason and then taken away without cause. The child has no ability to predict or influence the behavior of the parent. The narcissist loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. So she will tend to the child only when it makes her feel good.
Without that bone, there was no way for that child to develop confidence within any other relationship, no foundation to build on when that child grew up. Without that inner confidence, love, friendship, intimacy—the things we can’t live without—that person always felt vulnerable. Only absolute dominance and control of other people could alleviate this perception. That was how the narcissist was created.
Abby had concluded from her research that these primary caregivers in the early years—again, almost always mothers—who were incapable of sustaining a healthy attachment to their children were often narcissists themselves. She matched the indicators of narcissism with the indicators of preoccupied or unresolved attachment—they fit like a lock and key. These were the cases that lived in the shadows. On the outside, these mothers appeared normal, exceptional even. Because the children were seen as an extension of the narcissist mother, they were not physically abused. They were not starved. They were, to the untrained eye, loved, adored, well cared for. But the narcissist does not experience real love or empathy, and desperately needs to keep the child in line—admiring the parent, worshipping the parent so that parent can feed her alter ego. So begins the unpredictable roller coaster for the child. Any deviation from this total admiration and love of the parent results in punishment—from the withdrawing of love and affection to acts of outright violence.
This was the final blow. The child of the narcissist becomes subjected to the same treatment that created her deeply flawed mother, ensuring the creation of another damaged soul.