Everyone Here Is Lying(70)

At last William arrives and crouches down beside his wife, crying and studying his daughter closely. It seems neither parent can quite believe that their daughter is alive.

Bledsoe finally steps up and gently asks Erin and William if he can speak with their daughter. They pull away, nodding. Avery seems reluctant to release her mother from her grasp.

“Avery,” Bledsoe says, squatting down beside her. “Can you tell us what happened?”

Gully moves in closer to hear.

Avery nods. They help her sit up. She seems to struggle to speak at first, but when she gets the words out she sounds hysterical. “She locked me in the basement. She was going to kill me but I pushed her down the stairs!” The girl is hyperventilating now.

“It’s all right, Avery. She can’t hurt you now,” Gully says. “She’s dead.”

Gully glances up at the parents. They both appear to be in shock. She says, “It was Marion Cooke.”



* * *



? ? ?

William must fight a wave of nausea. Marion Cooke did this. Marion Cooke had his daughter all along. He can’t believe it. How could she be such a monster?

He stares at his traumatized daughter. Marion is dead. It sounds like she died in the fall down the stairs. It takes a moment for that to sink in. His little girl has killed someone. He doesn’t want to imagine it. He tells himself that her life was at risk, and that excuses anything.



* * *



? ? ?

Erin watches her daughter, her happiness at finding her again marred not at all by the revelation that Marion is dead. Avery pushed her down the stairs, and it killed her. Erin recalls her visit to this house the evening before. Avery must have been in the basement the whole time she was here. She feels like she might be sick.

Avery did what she had to do. Her daughter is a survivor. She didn’t give up. She’s like her mother that way. But what she doesn’t understand is, why did Marion Cooke take her daughter?



* * *



? ? ?

Gully watches them load Avery into the ambulance. There is now a crowd gathering on the street, press and bystanders, all agog. She and Bledsoe will speak to Avery officially after she has been thoroughly examined at the hospital, but now they have work to do. Gully glances at Bledsoe as he reaches for his phone and calls in the crime-scene team.

She turns and walks heavily into the house. She’d missed this. They had all missed this. It will go down as the biggest gaffe of her career. Why had they not looked more closely at Marion Cooke earlier? She’d seemed a credible witness, saying she’d seen Avery get into Ryan Blanchard’s car. And the whole time Avery had been held captive in her basement. It might all have turned out quite differently if Gully had arrived just minutes earlier.

They’d been assuming a sexual motive, because the vast majority of these cases are sexual in nature—young girl is taken by a man, assaulted, and murdered. It had not occurred to her—to anyone—that Marion Cooke might have taken the girl.

Bledsoe is pulling on latex gloves and she does the same.

Gully considers what all this might do to Avery—the ordeal of being kidnapped, of killing another human being in order to survive. Maybe they will have to add PTSD to her other diagnoses.

The living room looks undisturbed, and they head for the kitchen. Bledsoe immediately spies the empty package of sleeping pills on the kitchen counter. “Look at this.”

Gully says, “She was drugging her.”

Bledsoe nods, glances around the kitchen. They both see the open door leading down to the basement. They see the body lying at the bottom of the stairs. Slowly they make their way down and stand over Marion Cooke in silence, not getting too close, not wanting to disturb anything.

“Jesus,” Bledsoe says.

Gully takes it all in, sees the rope on the floor. “Looks like Marion drugged her, maybe meant to strangle her.”

Just then they hear a sound from upstairs. The crime-scene team has arrived.





Forty-seven


Erin Wooler is at the hospital. It’s the hospital where her husband works, where Marion Cooke worked. She waits for the doctor and nurse to finish examining her daughter.

She is so grateful to have her daughter back, alive and apparently unharmed—at least, not harmed in the way she most feared. But she will be damaged by this, terribly damaged, and Erin will have to be there for Avery and work diligently to help her through it. She wonders if William will be around to help their daughter too. Their marriage is finished, but he is still Avery’s father. He must do his part, although she has always done the lion’s share of raising the kids, especially their difficult daughter. She has her arm around Michael as they sit on the plastic chairs in the waiting room. Michael seems to have had an enormous weight lifted from his shoulders.

She lifts her eyes to look at her husband, who is sitting across from her in an identical row of plastic chairs; he’s got his elbows on his knees, and is leaning down, staring numbly at the floor. The big-shot doctor, reduced to sitting in a waiting room while his colleagues do their jobs. She stares at him as she tries to make sense of it all, tries to figure out why Marion Cooke would take their daughter.



* * *



? ? ?

William can feel his wife’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. Marion is dead. She can’t tell them what she was thinking.