“How would you describe your dad, Michael?” the detective asks.
They think Dad did it, Michael worries. They’re wrong. Dad wasn’t there. He’s telling them the truth. Finally, he says, “He’s good. He’s a good dad.”
“Does he ever lose his temper with you?”
Michael shakes his head slowly. “No.” The detective waits; he wants more. Michael doesn’t want to say anything more. He wants this to end.
“Does he ever lose his temper with your sister?”
Now Michael can’t look at his mother, he can’t bear to. He doesn’t know how to answer. He can feel time passing, until his silence is the answer they’re looking for and it’s too late.
“What did he do when he lost his temper with your sister?”
Michael swallows and says, “Sometimes he’d yell at her.”
Bledsoe nods slowly. “Did he ever hit her?”
“Not really.”
“It’s a yes-or-no answer, Michael.”
“He just slapped her sometimes, to calm her down.”
“To calm her down,” Bledsoe repeats.
“She deserved it,” Michael says in his father’s defense.
The two detectives shift their eyes to stare at his mother.
Ten
Gully follows Bledsoe, Erin, and Michael out of the interview room. They are all silent. They’re done, for now. The revelations arising from these short interviews are disturbing. The father has no alibi. The father has a temper, has a history of losing it with his troubled daughter. He’s been known to slap her on several occasions. This has caused friction between the parents, has soured the marriage, something the mother finally—reluctantly—admitted.
Bledsoe is a better interrogator than Gully expected. She was impressed. She can tell he thinks that William Wooler may have done something to his daughter. It’s certainly possible. But she worries that Bledsoe will develop tunnel vision, fail to consider other possibilities. She’s seen it happen before, with other detectives she’s known. She will have to make sure that doesn’t happen here.
* * *
? ? ?
Nora comes down to the kitchen to find Al and Ryan already there, eating breakfast and drinking coffee. She’s usually the first one downstairs, but this morning she slept later than usual—she’d been awake most of the night, managing to fall asleep only in the darkest hour before dawn.
Now she pours herself a cup of coffee from the carafe. “Good morning,” she says.
They both grunt back a reply.
Al has his laptop open on the kitchen table beside him, while Ryan scrolls on his phone. She hates having technology at the table, but today is different. She wants to scroll her phone, too, but she doesn’t want to look too eager, and they know she never looks at her phone before breakfast. She doesn’t quite know how to act, what the appropriate level of concern should be.
“What’s the latest?” she asks, sipping her coffee, sitting down beside Al. Faith will be getting up soon.
Al looks up at her. “They haven’t found her.”
Nora’s heart sinks.
“They’re treating the Woolers’ house as a crime scene,” Al says.
“What?”
“Look,” Al says, pushing the laptop toward her. The sight of the yellow tape across the Woolers’ front porch—and what it signifies—distresses her. There are no further details. But it must mean they no longer believe that William’s daughter was snatched on the way home from school. Nora’s thoughts riot in her head. Did someone come into the house and take her? It defies belief. Nothing like this has ever happened in their town.
“I don’t understand,” she says stupidly.
“It’s pretty clear,” Al says. “They think something happened to her in the house. They probably think the dad did it.”
She looks up at him in disbelief. “That’s ridiculous,” she says.
“Is it?” The look he gives her is hard to interpret.
Ryan quickly glances up at the two of them. Nora rises from the table and puts some bread in the toaster. But she does it for something to do; she doesn’t know how she’ll be able to force it down.
Al and Ryan leave the table and get ready to join the search—they’re somber, tired, not as eager as the night before. Nora can’t wait for them to leave. Once they’re out the door, she searches for any other news on Al’s laptop, but there’s nothing else. She thinks of what Al said. She wonders if the police consider William a suspect. They always suspect the parents, don’t they? She feels a chill of fear. He’s a doctor, and highly respected in Stanhope. Well liked. It seems impossible that they might think him capable of doing his daughter harm.
She can’t shake her feelings of guilt, that she and William are being punished for what they’ve done. She’s terrified that the police will find William’s secret phone. Of course they will, now, if they’re treating the house as a crime scene. Collateral damage, that’s what she will be. She and her family, destroyed. And then she’s ashamed, because a little girl might be dead and she’s thinking about how it will affect her.
She gets ready, with shaking hands, for her volunteer shift at the hospital, while Faith gets ready for school, which is sure to be dreadful. There will be lots of tears at school today, perhaps additional support for Avery’s young classmates, to help them deal with it all.
Usually, Faith walks to school by herself. But today, Nora walks with her. She wants to hold her daughter’s hand, the way she used to, but refrains. They walk past the Wooler house at the top of the street, with its heavy police presence, the crime-scene tape, the curtains drawn—and she thinks of him in there, with his wife, their world collapsing around them. She wonders if he thinks of her at all.
* * *
? ? ?
It’s not quite nine o’clock Wednesday morning when Gully and Bledsoe finish with the Woolers. The family is being taken back to the hotel by a uniformed officer to retrieve their things; the technicians will soon have finished with the house, and they can return. They still have fingerprints to process, but they’ve found nothing of interest, no sign that the little girl was harmed inside the house, no evidence of blood hastily cleaned up. William’s car has been transported to the crime lab, but they have left Erin’s car there. They know Erin was at work until after Avery went missing. They have to hope they will find her somewhere, soon, Gully thinks, and still alive, but with each passing hour, that outcome becomes less likely. It’s disappointing that the search has turned up nothing; even the sniffer dogs have come up empty.
Bledsoe says, “We have to consider the possibility that she may have been killed inside the house—strangled or smothered—and the best way to remove her body without the risk of being seen in broad daylight would be through the garage—in the trunk of the car, with the garage door closed. They’ve got a lock on the garage and an automatic garage-door opener—so the only ones who could have done that are the parents. And we know where the mother was.”
Gully nods slowly. It’s certainly a possibility that the father killed her and removed her from the house that way. She says, “If someone took her out the back and through the woods, our team would have found something.”