Bledsoe says, “An untraceable phone, so carefully hidden. You have a lot of secrets, Dr. Wooler.”
“I was having an affair,” he says bluntly.
“With who?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
The detectives wait, staring him down. At length, Bledsoe says, “That car of yours—the Infiniti G37 sedan—it’s new, isn’t it?” William nods. “The burner phone was unexpected. I can understand how it was missed in the initial search of the car in your garage. There’s a secret compartment in the rear-seat armrest, something put there by the carmaker, but not widely known. It’s there if you google it. You obviously knew about it. Is that why you bought that car, Dr. Wooler?”
William denies it. “I didn’t know, I discovered it by accident.” It’s a lie. He did know. It was one of the reasons he bought that particular car. He was just beginning his affair with Nora. He remembers how excited he was the day he drove it off the lot.
“What we’re seeing here, Dr. Wooler,” Bledsoe says, “is a pattern of deceit.”
“I didn’t hurt my daughter,” William protests. “I was having an affair. That’s why I had the phone. That’s where I was yesterday afternoon, before I went home. I was in a motel, with another woman. I wasn’t driving around, like I said. That’s why I lied—I didn’t want my wife to know.”
“What motel?” Bledsoe asks.
“The Breezes Motel, on Route Nine.”
“What time did you leave the motel?”
“About three forty-five. I came home, saw my daughter briefly, and left again. She was fine when I left her.”
“What time was it when you left your house?”
“I don’t know exactly, about four twenty.”
“And where did you go after you left your house?” Bledsoe asks.
William swallows. “Then I really did go for a drive.”
“And your cell phone records will confirm that?” Bledsoe says.
He’d turned off his cell phone when he met Nora at the motel. He always did—he didn’t want them to be disturbed. He had his pager if the hospital needed to get hold of him. And he turned off his burner phone, too, once he’d texted Nora the unit number of the motel and she’d replied. He hadn’t turned his cell back on until shortly after five. He knows how it will look. There’s nothing he can do about that. He swallows and says, “I turned my phone off.”
A long pause develops, stretches out. At last, Bledsoe says, “Did you now?”
Thirteen
Nora returns home from her shift at the hospital midafternoon. She’s been scrolling through the news throughout the day whenever she can. But now she turns on her laptop and discovers footage of William being led out of his house by the detectives, surrounded by the press, of his being taken into the police station for questioning earlier that afternoon. It’s alarming. She learns that it’s the second time he’s been questioned at the police station that day. Why? Why are they focusing on William? It’s been almost twenty-four hours since Avery went missing, and there is no sign of her. The police obviously seem to think William had something to do with it. Nora knows that can’t be true. She can’t imagine what he must be going through. Terrified for his missing daughter. And suspected, maybe accused.
Her husband and son return home shortly after her, cold and hungry after long hours of searching. They sit down at the kitchen table while she makes them sandwiches to tide them over till supper. She prepares the food as if in a trance. Ryan is quiet, but Al tells her what it was like, prodding the ground with sticks, looking for freshly turned earth in the woods—the sign of a shallow grave—the mood growing more hopeless as nothing is found. “She must be dead by now,” he says. “That’s what everybody thinks, you can tell. They think the father did it—and him a doctor.”
She turns on him. “What? What do you mean?”
He looks at her as if in surprise. “It’s all over the news,” he says. “They’ve taken him in for questioning again. My guess is they’ll arrest him soon. The sick bastard.”
And as he looks at her, there’s something different in her husband’s eye, a gleam of something, something nasty she doesn’t like. There’s something in his expression. Where is this coming from? Her heart suddenly seizes—Does he know? About her and William? Is he enjoying her suffering? Maybe he’s not as oblivious as she assumed. Had he followed her, seen them together at the motel? She feels the tension, suddenly thick in the room. Does he know that William is her lover—is that what’s going on here?
She’s becoming paranoid—it’s been creeping up on her and now the paranoia is overwhelming her. It’s only a matter of time before the police knock on her door because they know about her and William and it all comes out.
She can’t bear to look at her husband any longer and turns her attention to her son. Ryan’s a million miles away from her—she hardly knows her boy anymore, and they used to be so close. She studies him now, bent over the kitchen table, eating his sandwich. She wonders what’s going through his mind.
* * *
? ? ?
While William is at the police station for the second time that day, Erin waits. She can’t eat, but her anger gives her nourishment and an energy she hasn’t had since Avery went missing. William was seen, here—entering the garage—around four o’clock yesterday. They know Avery was in the house. She’s terrified that she is about to learn the truth about what happened to her daughter.
It’s like she’s split in two, holding two contradictory ideas in her mind at the same time. Part of her simply can’t believe it, but another part of her can. She’s seen how angry William can get at Avery, how he strikes out at her. She understands it because Avery pushes her to fury sometimes too.
She remembers a birthday party for one of Avery’s classmates when she was six years old. Erin took her, anxious about how it might go, because Avery was often difficult, especially around other children. She didn’t share well. She didn’t seem to know how to get along with other kids. Avery started causing problems right away, pushing another girl roughly in a game of musical chairs and being accused of cheating. Erin was mortified. It got worse from there. She can still remember the embarrassment she felt at the other women’s pinched smiles, one woman saying, “Somebody’s having a bad day.” When the birthday girl started opening her presents, and Avery was grabbing them from her, Erin decided it was time to leave. But Avery refused, throwing a tantrum and hitting her mother. Erin managed to apologize to everyone and keep her cool as they left the house. But once she’d physically carried a squirming, hitting Avery to the car and strapped her in, Erin drove around the corner, pulled the car to the side of the street, and wept uncontrollably, out of frustration, embarrassment, and fury.
Avery’s behavior hurts Erin too. It’s worn her down, destroyed her confidence as a mother. But the difference between her and William is that William lashes out at their daughter, and she doesn’t. What if he’d had enough? And she wasn’t there to stop him for once? She can imagine it, she can see it happening—William hitting Avery, or shaking her so hard her neck snaps. Maybe he pushed her, and she struck her head. It would have been an accident. He wouldn’t have meant it. He would have tried to save her. He would have felt terrible. He would have lied about it. Maybe William has lied to her, lied to the police. What other lies has he told over the course of their marriage? Now she is terribly afraid that Avery is dead, that her husband might have killed her in an uncontrolled moment, and she doesn’t know how she and Michael will ever manage to go on.