But none of the officers doing the door-to-door have found anyone who saw Wooler’s car entering or leaving the garage. No one seems to have seen anything the previous afternoon. No one saw Avery come home from school, or outside the house at all, alone or with someone else. There are no cameras in the area. No cameras in the intersections of the streets that lead to the Woolers’ house. No one has seen anybody unusual hanging around the house or neighborhood, or a strange vehicle in the area. The tip line set up last night has resulted in nothing useful so far. If Avery got into a car, she could be anywhere by now. They have her description out across the state and the entire country. Everyone has their eyes out for Avery Wooler.
They’ve arranged with the parents to do an appeal, with them appearing on TV. They will bring them back to the police station for that at noon today. Maybe that will yield something, Gully thinks. She hopes so. Because so far they have nothing. Except for doubts about the missing girl’s father.
* * *
? ? ?
William can feel the heightened tension between him and his wife and son. It fairly crackles in the silent police car as they are driven back to the hotel. When they arrive, he tells Michael to gather his things in his room. He wants to talk to Erin, and he doesn’t want Michael there.
Once inside their room he turns to her, his voice lowered so that Michael can’t overhear from the adjoining room, and says, “What did you tell them?”
She looks at him, frightened, angry, and fires back a question of her own. “Where were you yesterday afternoon? Why weren’t you at work?”
He doesn’t know what to tell her. How long can he keep spinning the lies? Surely they’re going to find the phone any minute now, if they haven’t already. Someone from the motel might come forward. But he’s a coward—or maybe he’s a ridiculous optimist, he doesn’t know which. “I was burned out. I didn’t feel like being at work—I went for a drive.”
“For three hours?” she exclaims. “My God! They think you did something to Avery!”
“I didn’t!” he says, remembering how his blow knocked Avery off her feet, and then deliberately blocking it all out.
She looks at him, her demeanor cold, almost detached. “They know that you lose your temper, that you slap Avery sometimes.”
“You told them that?” Now he’s angry at her, feels betrayed. He does lose his temper, he’s not proud of it. He’s ashamed of it. He’s slapped his daughter on several occasions, but it was nothing like what his own father did to him. And unlike his own father, he was immediately swamped with remorse and guilt. And unlike his own mother, who did nothing to intervene, Erin instantly turned on him every time, more furious with him than with their rebellious, uncontrollable child.
And then somehow the problem always shifts; it’s no longer a problem between the two of them and Avery, because of something she’s done, or not done, it’s a problem between him and Erin and it becomes not about Avery’s behavior, but his. In the end, his wife always makes excuses for Avery, but never for him. She always points out with an annoying air of superiority that he is the adult. Avery is what has come between them; they both know it. The constant strain of dealing with her has set them at odds, pulled them apart. It has entrenched resentments, caused untold damage to their marriage. It’s ruined them. Erin is more progressive, more patient; he’s old-school and flies off the handle. They seldom agree at all anymore on how to handle Avery. They argue about it all the time, nurse resentments and grudges. They both worry about someone finding out, about Avery telling someone at school that her dad hits her, about the impact of it all on Michael. And now the police know their ugly little secret.
Now she’s angry too. “Of course I didn’t tell them! I’m not stupid. I know how it would look.” She takes a deep breath and says miserably, “They put Michael on the spot. He had to tell them the truth. I couldn’t call him a liar.”
William feels like he’s had a blow to the stomach. “Fuck,” he says.
“Don’t blame our son for this,” his wife hisses. “This is on you.”
Eleven
William walks up the driveway with his wife and son, past the shouting, surging journalists, past the yellow police tape. When are they going to take that down? he thinks angrily to himself.
He feels a stab of fear as he steps inside. The crime-scene team has been here all night. They can’t have found the phone or they would have said something. But they’ve taken his car away, and they’re going to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. What is he going to do when they find it? He will have to admit to the affair. He hates what it will do to Erin, especially now. How it will distort everything. And he doesn’t want Nora dragged into it either. He will keep her name out of it. They used their phones sparingly, never addressing each other by name in their texts. He should have gotten rid of the damn phone.
They enter the house and find Detective Gully in the kitchen. William doesn’t want to meet her eyes, now that she knows how dysfunctional this family is, now that she knows what kind of father he is.
“They’ve finished up. We can take the tape down,” she says. “But there’s something we need to discuss.”
William’s heart is in his throat. He glances at his wife, knowing that this will be what finishes them.
“The television appeal. It will be difficult, and we need to prepare you,” Gully says.
* * *
? ? ?
Gully has arranged these things before. It’s always stressful for the parents, and it shows. Erin is as white as a sheet and looks considerably worse than she did the previous day, Gully notes. Despite her natural stoicism, the strain is getting to her—that, and perhaps the fact that her husband’s movements can’t be accounted for. William seems agitated, distracted.
They hold the press conference at noon inside a room in the police station, with plenty of seating for the reporters, but still they spill out the door into the corridor. The distraught parents will take turns reading from a prepared statement, which they have formulated with Gully’s help, with Michael standing quietly beside them. It will be televised, with photos of the missing girl on the screen and the tip line number running along the bottom. It’s a bit of theater, to engage the interest and the help of the public. It’s something they do to shake things up, see if anything falls out. It enables the parents to feel like they are doing something to help.
But it’s also something they will be judged on. People will have opinions, and they won’t hesitate to share them. Social media has made everything exponentially worse. Gully knows that people handle stress and grief in different ways. Some parents cry. Some can’t cry because they’re in shock. And some of those watching will interpret shock as coldness, as lack of feeling. What can you do? Gully thinks. A certain proportion of the public is always going to automatically think the parents had something to do with the disappearance of their little girl and interpret whatever they see in the parents’ behavior as confirmation. And they don’t know the half of it, Gully thinks to herself, remembering their interviews with Dr. Wooler, his wife, and his son earlier that morning.