Everyone Here Is Lying(53)
Marion knocks on the door to the bedroom and calls, “Avery?”
Thirty-three
Ryan stands up, his legs trembling beneath him. None of this feels real. He’s afraid to look his attorney in the eye in case he doesn’t believe him. Ryan knows he didn’t pick Avery up in his car. He’s innocent. But what really frightens him is that the truth doesn’t seem to matter. He knows that innocent people get convicted all the time of crimes they didn’t commit. For a moment he can’t move, even though his lawyer is urging him forward.
He stumbles, putting one foot ahead of the other. His parents are waiting outside this room, down the hall. Will he see them before they take him away? In handcuffs? He wants to see them, he wants his mother to hug him and tell him that everything’s going to be okay, that he’ll be home soon, that she’ll make everything better. He wants his dad to fight for him. But he doesn’t want them to see him like this. He’s afraid he’ll blubber like a baby.
His parents are there in the waiting area when they bring him out. His mother looks like she’s been sitting at the bedside of someone who is dying. His father is clearly frightened. Ryan wonders if they actually think he took Avery Wooler and killed her. How could they believe that of him? He made some stupid choices. He wishes he’d never done the drugs, that they’d never lost faith in him. He made one mistake, and now the whole world is prepared to believe the worst of him.
They let his mother and father hug him. His mother won’t let go. She causes a bit of a scene, and he’s grateful, because it takes attention away from him and his unstoppable tears. He meets his father’s eyes one last time as he’s taken away.
An officer brings him downstairs, and as the door closes behind him and they descend he can still hear his mother’s wails. In the basement are the cells. At the moment, they’re empty. Stanhope doesn’t have a lot of crime.
“The drunks will come in later,” says the officer directing him from behind, “especially on Friday night.” He pushes him into a cell, releases him from the handcuffs. Checks for a belt and removes the shoelaces from his sneakers. He locks him in and walks away, the sound of his steps on the concrete fading. Ryan looks at the cell as if he’s looking into the future. He lies down on one of the beds curled into the fetal position and stares at the wall, too stunned to keep crying. Waiting for morning, and what will happen to him next.
* * *
? ? ?
Avery had heard the front door open upstairs and then footsteps crossing the house to the kitchen, then coming down the stairs to the basement. She listened carefully, fully alert; it sounded like only one set of footsteps, and she relaxed.
“Avery?” Marion says, on the other side of the bedroom door, pushing it open.
“Where have you been?” Avery demands, sitting up straighter on the bed. Avery had heard the police officers come to the door, hours ago. She couldn’t hear much of what they said, but she knows that Marion spoke to them and then they left. Marion had gone out afterward and had been gone a long time.
“I had to do some shopping,” Marion says. “I needed to get a few things.”
Avery asks, “What did the police want, earlier?”
“They’re just asking everybody the same questions over and over again, hoping they might have remembered something.”
Marion couldn’t have said anything. If she had told the police that Avery was hiding in her basement, she wouldn’t still be sitting here, would she?
“Don’t you trust me anymore?” Marion asks.
Avery ignores the question. “What did they ask you?”
“The same things as before. Did I see anything unusual, any strangers or strange cars in the neighborhood around the time you disappeared or in the days preceding.”
“What did you say?” Avery asks. She wants to know everything.
“I told them I was home, in the house. That I didn’t see anything unusual that day.” She adds, “They didn’t get anything out of me.”
Avery slumps down again on the bed. Things are not going her way, not anymore. She’d watched on the small television across from the bed as her father was taken in and out of the police station, looking like he didn’t know what had hit him, looking like he was going to be arrested. It was very satisfying. She wanted him to suffer. She watched the news on TV and read the newspapers that Marion brought her, holed up in her basement. Avery was a celebrity. She would be even more of a celebrity when she turned up again, having survived a kidnapping, with her unknown kidnapper still out there somewhere.
She’d enjoyed it when she found out that her father had lied about being home that day—liar—and that he now seemed to be living in a hotel. It looked like he was going to be arrested, that he would learn his lesson and she could reappear and go home. But then suddenly they were interested in Ryan Blanchard. She didn’t even know him. Then it was on the news that the police had an anonymous witness who said they’d seen Avery get into his car. It wasn’t true. “I’ll make us something to eat,” Marion says. “I’ll bring it down here and we can watch the seven o’clock news.”
* * *
? ? ?
Marion moves around the kitchen, boiling water for pasta and grabbing a jar of sauce out of the cupboard. Soon it will be time to put an end to this. It’s been three days.