by Wendy Walker
Mr. Martin, who has been very successful in business and supposedly very smart, asked me even more questions every time I gave an answer, especially about how Bill paid for things. Mr. Martin was very skeptical. How did they buy the island or pay rent? How did they pay the boatman? How did they pay for the gas that went into the generator and the food and the books for us to study? That required money. Money required a job. A job put you in “the system” he kept saying.
My mother had asked me about my clothes. I had shown up wearing jeans and a T-shirt from Gap. My shoes were hiking boots. I picked things out of catalogs, and the boatman would buy the clothes and bring them to the island. Or maybe they ordered them through the mail. He did not bring packages to the island. Everything was opened, envelopes gone. The address labels were always torn off the catalogs. Nothing came onto the island that had a name or an address. I knew the Pratts were called that name only because that’s what Rick called them. Mr. Pratt and Mrs. Pratt.
Mrs. Martin was obsessed with the fact that I had not been to a store myself since the night I disappeared. She had mentioned this to Dr. Winter the morning of my second day.
Dr. Winter, can you even imagine what it would do to someone to never leave a place? For three years … not being out in the world. Not shopping for your own food and shampoo, not going for coffee or lunch, not seeing movies? Not even shopping for your own clothes!
She said it like she felt sorry for me. But I knew what she was doing. She was trying to plant the seed that I had gone crazy because of what I went through. Can you imagine what it would do to someone?…
In the kitchen that third morning, after Mrs. Martin offered to buy me clothes and placed the banana bread on the counter, she walked to me and stroked my cheek. It made the others melt. I could see it on their faces. How nice this was, mother and daughter reunited. Mother caring for daughter. I looked at Dr. Winter. I searched her face for something, some sign of recognition. But I found nothing to comfort me that day. Mrs. Martin was very powerful and I could not forget that.
Dr. Winter was suddenly being very nice to her—and this was the third surprise. It was not a good one.
She told her it must have been very hard for me and Emma, and then she said something about how she liked to shop and would miss it very much, but anyone looking at Dr. Winter would see that she was not the sort of person who liked to shop for anything. She had worn the same jeans and the same boots and the same belt for three straight days. And her T-shirts were all the same type, as if she had found the kind she liked and then just bought a lot of them in different colors.
I didn’t like that she was being so nice to Mrs. Martin. It was making her calm, giving credence to her theory that I was crazy. I did not come back to make my mother calm. I came back to make her see what she had done to us, to make everyone see! I came back to find my sister, and time was not on my side.
There was some comfort for me that the forensic agents were all very skilled. Even on the first day, I could feel the importance of every word I said, every answer I provided. Imagine if the things you said resulted in federal agents taking to the streets and analysts scouring their databases—everyone in a large team of highly trained professionals jumping to a new task simply because you said the leaves turned orange in the fall or the air smelled of pine trees. After so many years of being powerless, of having no voice, of having no one hear me, I was overwhelmed.
Agent Strauss said he had been looking into agencies and crisis lines that claimed to help pregnant teenagers or had been investigated for illegal adoptions. And Dr. Winter told us that she had been working around the clock, tracking down her list of people from the past, people who might know something about the Pratts or Emma’s pregnancy. She had already spoken with some teachers and friends of both girls. They had all heard about Cass’s return and the desperate search for Emma, though so far none of them had anything to add that was helpful. They had been shocked to hear the truth about why we left home.
But despite all their skills, the FBI had no promising leads, even after searching up and down the Maine coastal region. There was no record of Bill or Lucy Pratt—not in the Social Security database or in any public documents they could find. They said most towns put things online now, but they were also looking at paper land records for islands, tracing ownership. They had even searched the public health records in Maine for birth certificates with the name Julia, or Pratt—girls born around the date I had given them. All of this was very time consuming and every day mattered. No one seemed to doubt that the Pratts would try to leave, and the worry this made me feel erased the relief from having all these agents working to find them. Worry, but also despair. Imagining this outcome, never finding the Pratts, never finding the baby, never finding Emma—I understood what my father had been through.
I told myself I would not be weak like my father. I would stay focused and help them in any way I could.
They had enlisted many local police to knock on doors in the villages. No one recognized the drawings that I had helped make with the sketch artist. No one could recall anyone fitting the descriptions of the Pratts or the boatman. And they had begun an investigation into the incident in Alaska, hoping to identify the boatman from his time on that fishing boat where the woman was raped.
“Having an age-progressed drawing of Emma could really help,” Agent Strauss said. People would notice an older couple with a young woman and child. More than just an older couple alone. And with my help, they could get close to a real photograph of Emma the way she looked now.
I agreed to help, of course, and went into the living room, where my mother had set out all her fancy photo albums, the ones with the brown leather bindings with the years engraved in gold. Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss followed. Agent Strauss had yellow Post-its and he said we should tell him when we saw a photo of Emma from each year since her birth—pick the best one, he said, or maybe two with one having her profile. Dr. Winter said she would do this with me while Agent Strauss and my mother went through her computer in her study for photos that were stored there. But that was just an excuse for Dr. Winter to be alone with me.
In fact, this entire project felt like an excuse. Three years was not that long. We had been almost grown when we left. How different did they think she could look? But I went along with it.
We looked at photos. We picked the best ones from each year. Dr. Winter asked a lot of questions as she saw changes in my sister. One of them caught her attention—it was the year Emma turned fifteen.
“Why did she cut her hair?” Dr. Winter asked me.
It caught me off guard and I sort of gasped and put my hand over my mouth. I had not expected her to ask me about Emma’s hair.
“Did she tell you anything, Cass? About why she cut her hair?”
Dr. Winter started turning the pages. She saw Emma with long, dark hair in the summer and early fall, and then the short cut just before the leaves were turning. It was above the ear, with severe angles and jagged corners.
“How did we not see these before?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “It wasn’t a secret.”
Dr. Winter’s face became curious. “This was the year those nude photos were taken, wasn’t it? Emma topless? Posted on the Internet?”
I was still silent, but I had forced my hand to drop back into my lap.
“Your brother told me about the photos. So did your father. Three years ago, during the investigation. How everyone thought it was Hunter. How Emma lied and said it was a friend goofing around, but then she couldn’t explain how Hunter got access to them.”
“Yes.” That was all I said.
“Did Emma feel so humiliated by the pictures that she cut her hair to feel better? Sometimes people do that, you know?”
I shook my head.
“Then why? Why did Emma cut her hair?”
“She didn’t,” I said finally.
Dr. Winter looked confused. “What do you mean?”
/> “Emma did not cut her hair,” I said more clearly.
“I don’t understand,” Dr. Winter said. She got up and moved closer to me. She placed a hand over my hand and squeezed it tight.
“No one told you about this? Before?” I asked. I never imagined this secret could be kept. Not with all the FBI agents and their skills and cunning. Somehow, Mrs. Martin had managed to do just that.
“No, they didn’t. Should someone have told us?”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me now?”
“That was the year of the photos. At the end of the summer. They got posted and my parents freaked out. They traced it back to our home computer, so everyone blamed Hunter.”
“Do you remember why they blamed him?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t know that much about it.”
I did not want them getting distracted by talking to Hunter. I didn’t want them to get distracted by anything. And I did not want them digging into the things that happened in this house.
Another curious look came across her face. “So, Witt punched Hunter and Hunter slashed his tires, right?”
“Yes. And after all that, I asked to live with our father. I thought that maybe that would finally be enough.”
“No one said anything about that—and I didn’t see any court filings. I went through the entire case history. Did your father ever file a motion for custody?”
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe they didn’t know. And now I would have to tell them and they would have to believe me.
“My father called the lawyer he had used in the divorce and she sent a letter to my mother’s lawyer threatening to file a motion to change the custody arrangements if she didn’t agree to it. My mother went crazy. I guess she started calling my father and making all kinds of threats, things she would tell the court about him that weren’t true. But he said he didn’t care. At least, that’s what he told me he said.
“We had been at his house for the weekend, me and Emma and Witt. We were all talking about it. I was relieved. Witt was sort of calm about it, like of course this was what had to be done. Emma seemed excited but in a nervous way. Like she knew it was going to incite our mother and she wanted it to but was also a little scared.”
“You weren’t nervous?” Dr. Winter asked. Her mind seemed busy. Thinking.
“Of course. But I thought that I had our father behind us that time.”
“So what happened?”
“We got back to our mother’s house. She was pleasant but also cold as ice. She made us a nice dinner and we all sat in silence. Hunter was gone, back to school, and Mr. Martin was in the city for some event. So the three of us just sat there, staring at our food, eating and not talking.
“I went to bed around eleven. I woke up at two thirty to the sound of Emma screaming. I ran into her room.” I stopped there. It was hard to tell this part. To remember it.
“What happened, Cass? What happened to Emma that night?”
“She was there. Mrs. Martin. She was in Emma’s bed, straddling her. She had a pair of scissors in her hand … she had cut off her hair … her beautiful dark hair that fell almost to her waist. Oh God.…”
I was shaking my head and staring at my folded hands, which were squeezed together so hard, my knuckles were turning white.
“Emma woke up after the first cut, but it didn’t matter. Mrs. Martin had managed to take off almost an entire side, right above Emma’s ear.
“I screamed, ‘Stop! It wasn’t her, it was me! I asked to leave, not Emma!’ But she didn’t stop. Emma was trapped under the blankets and Mrs. Martin’s legs, so she punched at her. She gave her a black eye. Mrs. Martin threw the scissors on the floor and got off the bed. When she was leaving, she looked at me and said, ‘That’s what you get for betraying me again!’
“Emma cried all night, cutting off the rest of her hair herself to make it even. I stayed with her but she wouldn’t even look at me. ‘This is all your fault!’ she kept saying. The next day, she pretended to go to school but walked into town and sat outside a hair salon until they opened. They tried to fix her hair the best they could. I didn’t go to school either. I went to see my father and I told him not to file the papers. I told him I’d made a big mistake and begged him to stop.”
Dr. Winter did not know what to say. If they had known this story, if anyone had known, maybe they would have looked harder for us, and in the right places. They had never seen or heard about Emma’s short hair. I knew then that this album had not been among the stack three years ago when they came to this house to look for us. It had already been buried in the trunk upstairs where I had found it the first night I returned, under piles of neatly folded blankets. I thought it should be here, with the other nice photos from our childhood, so I brought it down.
“Did you tell anyone? How did your father not figure this out?”
“Our father sees what he wants to see. We gave him an out and he took it. He’s not a fighter. He loves us, and he tries. But he’s not a fighter.”
Dr. Winter looked at me closely. “So who knew? Did you or Emma tell anyone, try to get help?”
I shook my head. “My mother told Mr. Martin because he heard the screaming and came out of their room. I don’t think any of us told anyone else.”
“Cass,” Dr. Winter said. She took my hand again. “I’m very sorry this happened.”
I wanted to squeeze it. I wanted to fall right into her and let go of everything I had been holding. But I would not be weak.
“That was the last time I asked to leave.”
“And how were things the next day? When Emma came home with her new haircut and the custody challenge had stopped?”
“We came home at the time school got out. Our mother was in the kitchen. She’d made us brownies. We all sat down together, ate the brownies, and she said something like, ‘Nothing will ever tear us apart. Do you understand?’ Emma and I nodded. And that was that.”
I must have been very bad at hiding my feelings because she asked me then, “Why did you come here, Cass?”
“This is my home,” I answered. But that was a lie. I came here because it was my only hope of finding Emma.
“You could have gone to your father. You could have gone to Witt. Don’t you see that I can help you, we can all help you if you let us? Don’t you want to find Emma?”
That was the moment I felt strong again. I looked at her calmly. “I am,” I said. “I am finding Emma.”
And then I said what I had been waiting to say with my mother gone from the room.
“Has anyone spoken to Lisa Jennings?”
“The school counselor? Yes. We interviewed her extensively three years ago. She didn’t have much to say that was helpful, though she felt she knew you girls somewhat. Why?”
“She talked to Emma a lot that fall. I had a class across the hall from her office, and three times I saw Emma come out of there. I bet there were a lot more times. Maybe she was helping Emma. Maybe she’s the one who found the Pratts.”
Dr. Winter was very surprised. “Why wouldn’t she tell us if she knew something that important?”
I thought it was obvious, but I spelled it out anyway. “Well, if she put Emma in touch with the Pratts, she could get in trouble, couldn’t she?”
It was then that Mrs. Martin came back in the room. She was suspicious because her back was very straight and her eyes very narrow.
“Did you find anything useful?” she asked.
Dr. Winter closed the photo album with the pictures of Emma’s short hair.
I looked at my mother and smiled, because she was about to find out that she was not the smartest woman in the world. And I had just raised the stakes in a game she didn’t even know she was playing.
TWELVE
Dr. Winter
Lisa Jennings. Abby heard the name inside her head. She could picture her notes from the original investigation. Lisa Jennings had not mentioned any meetings with Emma Tanner.
“Okay. And what about this incident with the hair? How did we not know about this?” he asked.
Abby shrugged and told him what Cass had just told her before her mother insisted she have a rest. “She doesn’t know. She assumed we’d seen the pictures and asked about it.”
The truth was, this was textbook behavior for a narcissist mother—finding a way to divide the alliance that was rising up against her, using violence and terror to bring her subjects back in line.
“All right,” Leo said. “I don’t like it, but let’s move on to the boatman, right?”
“Sure.” They had so many questions, so much ground to cover now. They were on the third day of the investigation. Abby was getting worried.
“I’ll go round up Cass. Maybe we can keep Mom away a little longer.”
Abby smiled. “Good luck with that. Cass doesn’t want to be more than a yard away from her.”
Leo left to find Cass. And Abby was left with the harrowing image of Judy Martin attacking her daughter while she slept, cutting off her hair with a pair of scissors.