Everyone Here Is Lying(49)
And then, the rest of it. Gully asking him where he was that afternoon. She knows how it looks, Derek home alone in this house at the time Avery disappeared, right across the street. She knows what they must be thinking—that if Derek was molesting Avery, he might be the one to have harmed her. But that’s ridiculous. Even if he—for fuck’s sake, he’s not a murderer.
What about the witness who saw Avery get into Ryan Blanchard’s car? Why won’t that person come forward? Maybe because Avery never got into Ryan’s car at all.
And now Gully was just here, on her doorstep, saying they’re going to get a search warrant, and Alice doesn’t know what to do. Why would they get a search warrant unless they thought they might find something? What are they expecting to find?
And then it hits her. They think Avery might have been in this house that day, and that she might not ever have left.
She sinks into a kitchen chair as her legs collapse beneath her, her breathing ragged. For a long moment she can’t think at all. But then her mind clears. She must look, before the police do. She will search the entire house, and she will find nothing. Then she will know that Derek had nothing to do with this. He could not have killed Avery and disposed of the body anywhere else, because the search parties have been everywhere—except inside people’s houses. And then the police can come in and do their thing, and they will have nothing to worry about. And they will deny and deny and deny that Derek ever touched her. And chances are, Avery’s never coming back to say anything different.
Alice knows this is insane, but she’s going to do it anyway. She’ll start with the basement. She gets up and grabs a flashlight out of one of the kitchen drawers.
* * *
? ? ?
Midmorning, Erin Wooler is standing at her living-room window, dead-eyed, staring at the empty street, as if willing her daughter to come home. There’s no one else out there now; the reporters have all given up, gone away. Nothing happening here.
Erin hasn’t left the house since Gully brought her home after she attacked Ryan in the Blanchards’ house yesterday afternoon. She wonders where all the reporters have gone. Nobody else’s daughter has been kidnapped. She knows, because she watches the news religiously, hoping there will be a break in the case, fearing what it will be. Detective Gully has been good about checking in with her regularly, but she hasn’t spoken to Gully yet this morning. She watched her knock on Alice Seton’s door and talk to her briefly, but Gully didn’t come over and talk to Erin. Probably because there is nothing to report. She’d noticed another car take up a position on the street; she wondered what it was doing there.
Erin knows they are still looking for Avery—the TV reporters tell her so, many times a day. They still have search parties out, beating the bushes, looking in ravines and dumpsters; they are looking for her everywhere. But if they’d gotten anything out of Ryan Blanchard, he wouldn’t have come home. And she knows he came home—she saw the footage of him leaving the police station last night on the television. Maybe the reporters are now stationed in front of the Blanchards’ house, farther down the street. She goes to the front door and steps outside, looking down the street. Yes. There are reporters clustered outside their house. She slips back inside.
She feels so alone, so powerless. She wishes she had someone to talk to. She doesn’t know what happened to her daughter. Perhaps William had nothing to do with their daughter’s disappearance. But she will never forgive her husband for his other, grievous sins—for slapping Avery; for then leaving her home alone to come to harm, if that is what he did; for lying about it. For his affair. She believes it’s Nora Blanchard he’s been having an affair with; of course it would be her. She’s so beautiful. And William is so shallow.
She picks up her phone and calls her husband’s new cell. He picks up immediately. When he answers, she says, not bothering to hide her hostility, “It’s Nora Blanchard you’ve been sleeping with, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t deny it. She waits for him to say something, and when he doesn’t, she hangs up the phone.
Thirty-one
We’re not aware of any complaints of that kind about Derek Seton,” the school principal, Ellen Besner, says.
Gully nods.
“If anything like that had come to the attention of one of the staff, they would have had to bring it to me,” the principal says, “so I don’t think it’s necessary for you to ask each of them directly.”
Gully agrees. She doesn’t want to do any unnecessary damage, and she knows that teachers are required to report any suspected abuse. She will leave it at that. She knows that teachers gossip, like everybody else. She has tried to be discreet, but she knows how people talk—even school principals. If Derek is innocent, she doesn’t want to cause him any harm.
“Thank you for your time,” Gully says, rising. As she does, her cell phone buzzes. She leaves the principal’s office and answers. It’s the plainclothes officer she’d had stationed outside of Alice Seton’s house. “Yes?” Gully says.
“Alice left the house, driving her car out of the garage a little while ago. She drove to the grocery store. I’m in the parking lot now watching her load groceries into her open trunk.”
“Okay. Thanks,” Gully says, ending the call. Alice Seton isn’t disposing of a body, obviously.