His father sounds utterly miserable. “I’ve been having an affair. The police know.”
Michael’s entire body is trembling as he sits through another long pause.
“Who is she?” his mother asks, her voice so full of venom it’s almost unrecognizable.
“I can’t tell you. But it’s over now. I was with her yesterday afternoon. She ended it. That’s why I came home.”
Michael hears a resounding smack; what can only be the sound of his mother slapping his father’s face. “Get out,” she cries. “Get out and never come back!”
Michael runs back to his room and puts his headphones on to shut it all out.
* * *
? ? ?
Detective Bledsoe looks back at her in disbelief. “Do you think she was making it up?”
“Who? Jenna or Avery?” Gully asks.
“Either.”
Gully sighs heavily. “I think Jenna was telling the truth. But Avery? I don’t know, to be honest. Avery seems to have a history of telling lies. But it could be true.” She takes a breath, lets it out. “Look, she’s nine. She’s not allowed to walk home from school alone because there’s a busy street to cross, and she apparently can’t be trusted to wait for the light. But we know she’s allowed to play on the street, and in the woods behind the house, and at that tree house, unsupervised. It’s possible someone has been taking advantage of her. If so, it’s probably someone close by. She has so few friends—it makes her vulnerable.” Gully pauses, thinking about the lonely girl who had written in her diary. “It’s a lead we need to follow up.”
Bledsoe shakes his head. “Our priority right now is Wooler, and where he might have taken her. We’ve been trying to pin down his movements that day, now that we know he was at the house. He says he left at about four twenty. By the time his cell was back on shortly after five, he was here”—he points to a map on the wall— “on Route Nine. When his wife called him at five twenty, he was here”—he moves his finger south—“about twenty minutes north of Stanhope, not far from the Breezes Motel, actually, and we’ve confirmed he arrived home at five forty, so he went straight home after he spoke to his wife. If he killed her, he didn’t have much time to get rid of the body—an hour, roughly. We’ll shift our search to where he could have dumped her, given what we now know. That will narrow things down.” He looks at Gully. “They’ve already started, but I’d like you to get out there.”
* * *
? ? ?
Now, as night falls, the darkness seems to bring despair with it, Gully thinks. Avery has been missing more than twenty-eight hours. The search of the woods and fields and the immediate neighborhood near the Wooler house has ended. Now efforts are being concentrated in the area along Route 9, which William Wooler could have reached between when he left the house at approximately 4:20 and received his wife’s call at 5:20.
Gully joins the search that spreads out along the highway. There’s a mix of commercial properties, empty lots, dumpsters, and housing, petering out to empty land, much of it wooded, on either side of the highway. The river lies close by to the west. He might have dumped her in a field, in the woods, or in the river. Efforts are redoubled.
As Gully searches, she finds herself hoping that William Wooler is innocent, because if he isn’t, Avery’s body is likely out here somewhere. She hopes desperately that Avery is still alive, that she’s just a runaway, that she’ll turn up, that they’ll find her in time. But she knows the awful statistics—that about 75 percent of children who are abducted and killed are murdered within the first three hours of when they were taken, 88 percent within twenty-four hours. She knows the odds are against them.
* * *
? ? ?
Alice Seton had told her husband about the detective coming to their house. She’d called him at work as soon as the detective left and Jenna was busy in her room. He didn’t like it at all. That made two of them.
Now Pete is home, Jenna and her brother are in their bedrooms, and they’re discussing it in quiet voices in the living room. She tells him again what Jenna said, about Avery having an older “boyfriend.”
Her husband shakes his head and says, “That’s sick.”
She agrees; she feels the same revulsion.
“I don’t like that they’re friends,” Pete says.
And then they both feel uncomfortable, because Avery is missing, possibly dead, and a friendship between the two girls is probably not something they’re going to have to worry about now. He amends, “I just mean I don’t think she’s a good influence, if she was saying things like that to Jenna.”
Alice nods. She knows what men are like, how they prey on women and girls. Pete’s a good man, of course. Lots of men are. But there are plenty of bad ones out there. And she really fears that one of them may have been taking advantage of Avery, and it’s horrible, just horrible, even to think about.
Alice says, “Someone might have been molesting her. That’s obviously what the detective thought.” He looks back at her, his face filled with disgust. “And what if whoever it was took her? What if he has her right now—locked away somewhere?” Alice says. “It scares me. It makes me afraid for Jenna. What if it’s someone from around here?” Pete puts his arm around her shoulders. Alice hesitates and then says, “There’s that boy down the street.”
“What boy?” her husband asks.
Fifteen
Ryan isn’t working this evening either. After spending most of his day volunteering in the search for Avery, he spends the rest of his time holed up in his room. Most of his friends recently left for college. He’s at loose ends. He wishes he’d been able to go away to school this year too.
He thinks about what was going on between his parents, earlier, in the kitchen. His dad seemed almost to be toying with his mother somehow, when he was talking about Dr. Wooler. It was weird, the way his dad was looking at her—as if he were trying to hurt her. Why would he do that? He keeps worrying at it like a sore tooth, but the only reason Ryan can think of is that his father thinks something is going on between Dr. Wooler and his mother. Something more than that they just work at the same hospital. The idea upsets him.
But it might explain the way his mother’s been acting ever since Avery Wooler went missing.
* * *
? ? ?
Al Blanchard watches the eleven o’clock news in the living room with his wife. He doesn’t usually watch the late news, but he wouldn’t miss it tonight. He keeps a furtive eye on Nora, slumped against the arm of the sofa, deliberately ignoring him. She doesn’t seem to want him here. There’s a new coldness between them, an overt animosity, a change from the usual indifference. She didn’t like what he said earlier about the missing girl’s father. Well, she wouldn’t, would she?
He knows what William Wooler is to her. He realizes he’d been waiting for this all his married life. A beautiful woman like her; he couldn’t believe his luck when she’d married him. He should have paid her more attention, shouldn’t have taken her for granted. He should have addressed the restlessness in her somehow before she’d found a lover, before she’d crossed the line. He’s pretty sure that Wooler has been the only one, and that it started last summer. She’d been a good wife up until then. A good wife and a good mother. He himself has always been faithful, has never so much as looked in another woman’s direction. In their marriage, she was the one who seemed to have a midlife crisis, perhaps afraid of losing her youth, her attractiveness. If it had been him, he would have just bought a new, sportier car. What is the women’s equivalent? Surely they don’t all have an affair when they start to fear their youth and beauty are leaving them. He’s just lucky, he thinks bitterly.