Everyone Here Is Lying(24)

Jenna bites her lip and glances anxiously at her mother. “But you can’t ever tell Avery that I told you.”

“I won’t, I promise,” Gully says.

“Because if you tell her, she’ll kill me.”

“I understand,” Gully reassures her.

Jenna’s face turns pink. “She said she had a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend?”

Jenna nods. “He’s older than us.”

“How much older?” Gully asks.

Jenna shrugs. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me who he was.” She adds, “She liked to tease me like that.” Her skin flushes deeper. “But she said he did things to her. Grown-up things.”





Fourteen


When Michael hears his father come home, he creeps out of his room to listen unobserved, at the top of the stairs. He doesn’t know why the detectives came back for his father; he’d had his headphones on in his room and hadn’t even known the detectives were here, but his mother told him where his father was. He wonders if this is his fault, too, for telling the truth about his dad slapping Avery. It’s all his fault. He wants to run away. Be someone else. Anybody but Michael Wooler. But he’s been waiting, his headphones off, anxiously listening for his father’s return.

It isn’t hard to hear what his parents have to say, because they are raising their voices. He’s troubled to hear his father crying. He’s never heard his father cry. He’s even more troubled to hear him admit, through sobs, that he was home yesterday afternoon and saw Avery. That the police know. That they seem to think he had something to do with her disappearance.

“Did you?” his mother asks, in the coldest voice he’s ever heard. Michael almost passes out.

“What? Are you out of your mind?” his father rails. “Of course not! How can you even ask me that? I saw her, and I left again. We had an argument. I slapped her, that’s all. I felt terrible and I left. She was fine when I left her. I swear to you.”

“You lied to the police! You lied to me!” his mother screams. “How can I believe anything you say?” She turns the full force of her anger on him. “This is all your fault—you left her here, alone, and now she’s gone!” There’s a long, terrible silence, and then his mother cries, “What were you even doing here?”

His father says, his voice anguished, “There’s something else you should know.”

Michael wants to run back to his room and cover his head with his pillow. He doesn’t want to hear any more. But he can’t move; he’s frozen in place.

His father sounds utterly miserable. “I’ve been having an affair. The police know.”

Michael’s entire body is trembling as he sits through another long pause.

“Who is she?” his mother asks, her voice so full of venom it’s almost unrecognizable.

“I can’t tell you. But it’s over now. I was with her yesterday afternoon. She ended it. That’s why I came home.”

Michael hears a resounding smack; what can only be the sound of his mother slapping his father’s face. “Get out,” she cries. “Get out and never come back!”

Michael runs back to his room and puts his headphones on to shut it all out.



* * *



? ? ?

Detective Bledsoe looks back at her in disbelief. “Do you think she was making it up?”

“Who? Jenna or Avery?” Gully asks.

“Either.”

Gully sighs heavily. “I think Jenna was telling the truth. But Avery? I don’t know, to be honest. Avery seems to have a history of telling lies. But it could be true.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Look, she’s nine. She’s not allowed to walk home from school alone because there’s a busy street to cross, and she apparently can’t be trusted to wait for the light. But we know she’s allowed to play on the street, and in the woods behind the house, and at that tree house, unsupervised. It’s possible someone has been taking advantage of her. If so, it’s probably someone close by. She has so few friends—it makes her vulnerable.” Gully pauses, thinking about the lonely girl who had written in her diary. “It’s a lead we need to follow up.”

Bledsoe shakes his head. “Our priority right now is Wooler, and where he might have taken her. We’ve been trying to pin down his movements that day, now that we know he was at the house. He says he left at about four twenty. By the time his cell was back on shortly after five, he was here”—he points to a map on the wall— “on Route Nine. When his wife called him at five twenty, he was here”—he moves his finger south—“about twenty minutes north of Stanhope, not far from the Breezes Motel, actually, and we’ve confirmed he arrived home at five forty, so he went straight home after he spoke to his wife. If he killed her, he didn’t have much time to get rid of the body—an hour, roughly. We’ll shift our search to where he could have dumped her, given what we now know. That will narrow things down.” He looks at Gully. “They’ve already started, but I’d like you to get out there.”



* * *



? ? ?

Now, as night falls, the darkness seems to bring despair with it, Gully thinks. Avery has been missing more than twenty-eight hours. The search of the woods and fields and the immediate neighborhood near the Wooler house has ended. Now efforts are being concentrated in the area along Route 9, which William Wooler could have reached between when he left the house at approximately 4:20 and received his wife’s call at 5:20.