Everyone Here Is Lying(73)

“Avery,” Bledsoe begins, “I know this is difficult, but it’s important that you tell us everything that happened, from the beginning, on Tuesday afternoon. Can you do that?”

She nods bravely and takes a deep breath. “Okay. Ms. Burke sent me home from choir.” She stops.

“Did you come straight home?” Bledsoe prods. She nods. “Can you speak for the tape, please, Avery?”

“Yes. I was supposed to wait for Michael, but I didn’t want to. Mom and Dad haven’t given me my own key yet, but there’s a key under the front mat. Michael told me.” She continues. “I went into the kitchen.” She pauses again.

It’s almost like she’s dragging things out slowly for effect, Gully thinks. She tries to dismiss the uncharitable thought, but now that Avery is in front of her, rather than an idea of a girl she’s trying to find, she realizes she’s not warming to the real girl. There’s something about her. From what she’s briefly observed, Avery seems to have her mother, father, and older brother wrapped around her little finger. They seem to be completely in her thrall. It’s an odd family. She didn’t think so until Avery returned, just that they had problems, like everybody else.

Bledsoe prompts her, “You went into the kitchen, and what happened then?”

“My dad came home.” She glances at her father.

Gully notes that William seems to go still and can’t look at his daughter. They all know he slapped her. She senses that Avery is being deliberately dramatic.

“He was upset to find me home,” she says. “He asked me what I was doing there.” She stops again.

“And then?” Bledsoe prompts.

She asks, “Do I have to tell the truth, even if I don’t want to?”

“Yes, of course, you must tell the truth,” Bledsoe says.

Avery says, “He hit me so hard he knocked me to the floor.”

Gully hears Erin gasp, and she watches William stare at the floor, denying nothing.

“And then he begged me not to tell my mom,” Avery says. There’s an awful silence at this. “And then he left.”

“And then what?” Bledsoe asks.

“I was crying. I went out the back door and through the gate to the woods behind our house, and along the fence line to Marion Cooke’s house. I knew her. We were friends.”

“You were friends?” Bledsoe interjects in surprise.

She nods. “Yes. She saw me in the woods one day last summer and invited me in for cookies.” She hesitates. “After that, I would go over there sometimes. She asked a lot of questions about my dad.”

Bledsoe says, “Go on.”

“So that day I went over to her house and knocked on her back door. She was in the kitchen, and she saw me and let me in. I told her what happened. She gave me a snack. I woke up in the basement in the bedroom. I felt really out of it.” She pauses for a moment, looks at them watching her.

“And then?”

“I tried to get out of the basement, but the windows were barred, and the only way out was through the door at the top of the stairs into the kitchen, but it was locked. I banged and banged on the door, but she wouldn’t come.” She stops.

“That must have been very frightening,” Bledsoe says.

“It was,” Avery agrees gravely. “I was terrified. I couldn’t understand why she was keeping me prisoner. Until she told me that she was in love with my dad, and that he’d been having an affair with Nora Blanchard and she was going to make them pay.”

She stops—almost as if to gauge everyone’s reaction, Gully thinks.

Avery continues. “She saw them making out at the hospital.” The words are coming faster now. “Marion hated her. She said she acted so superior, and she was just a volunteer. She said she got everything she wanted because she was so beautiful, including my dad.”

So Marion was carrying a torch for the handsome doctor, Gully thinks, glancing at Erin, who has been rigid throughout, but has now gone a pale, sickly color. It’s all starting to make a hellish kind of sense. She can’t believe what goes on in this town.

Avery continues. “There was a TV in the room, and she would sit with me on the bed and let me watch the news sometimes, so I knew what was going on. She told the police that she saw me getting into Ryan Blanchard’s car so that he would be arrested. I begged her to let me go. I promised I wouldn’t tell.” Now tears begin to form in Avery’s eyes. “I realized that she was going to kill me so that he would be blamed.” Avery takes a deep breath. “She was bigger and stronger than me. I figured the only way I could escape was to surprise her at the top of the stairs when she opened the door. So I waited there today for her to open the door. And when she did, I pushed her as hard as I could down the stairs, and then I ran out of the house.” She adds, into the silence, “It all happened so fast.”

Now Avery seems like a tragic heroine, pale and trembling, overwhelmed by what she has suffered and what she has done.

Gully and Bledsoe observe the girl. Her parents are also watching her closely, her mother with a terrible pity, her father with—Gully’s not sure, but it might be dismay.

Avery’s face darkens. “I never meant to kill her. I just wanted to get away.”





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