Gully feels her spirits flagging. She’s had very little sleep. “The boyfriend angle,” she begins. “I might have a lead.” She tells him what Michael told her about Jenna’s brother, Derek. “We know that Avery liked to go to the tree house. They’ve already searched it, but there was no obvious sign of Avery coming to any harm there.” She pauses and adds, “They found some discarded condoms beneath the tree house. Apparently it’s a place kids go.”
Bledsoe nods tiredly. “You’d better talk to this kid Derek.”
“I’d like to take a closer look at the tree house first,” Gully suggests.
* * *
? ? ?
Erin stands at the living-room window, staring out from between a crack in the curtains. It’s midday, broad daylight. There are still some reporters out there, although fewer than before. Let them take her picture, a terrified mother—the ghouls. She doesn’t care anymore. She knows that some of them have left and are staking out the hotel where William is staying. She’d seen them on the news.
Her phone rings, but she doesn’t recognize the number. She answers.
It’s William. He speaks quickly. “Someone is claiming they saw Avery getting into Ryan Blanchard’s car on Tuesday afternoon,” he says. His voice is stressed, almost unrecognizable.
“What?”
“There’s an anonymous witness. I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
“How do you know?”
He doesn’t answer her question. “I got a new phone this morning. You’ve got the number now, if you need me. I have to go,” he says then, and quickly disconnects.
She sits down, stunned by this new information. Would Avery get into Ryan’s car? Why would she? She doesn’t really know him. Unless . . . unless she does know him. Maybe he’s the older boyfriend that Gully is looking for. It’s too much. Erin runs to the kitchen and retches into the sink. She stands over the stainless steel, heaving, but there’s nothing in her stomach.
She wants her daughter back, that’s all. Even if William’s innocent, she’s done with him. She just wants Avery back, safe and sound.
She drifts back to the front window and stares at the Setons’ house across the street. Her stomach curdles. What if it’s true? What if someone was molesting Avery, abusing her, and she didn’t have a clue? It sickens her. What kind of mother is she, not to know? Not to be able to see that something was wrong? She knows Avery doesn’t tell her everything; they aren’t close that way. Avery has always had a core of resistance in her. She’s hard to connect with on an intimate level, except on the very rare occasions when she lets her guard down. Erin remembers Avery sobbing to her some months ago, telling her that she was lonely and had no friends. It had broken her heart. Her immediate response was to try to fix it somehow. Arrange playdates? Try getting Avery to join a sport, a club? But all those things had already been tried repeatedly, and had failed repeatedly. In the end she did nothing—just offered support and gentle suggestions on how to make and keep friends. It was the last time Avery had confided in her. She’d let her down. And maybe because she was lonely and vulnerable, someone was able to take advantage of her.
The grief and guilt are becoming too much for her to bear. She hadn’t protected her daughter.
Maybe William is telling the truth about slapping her and leaving her alone in the house. That is his way—he loses it and then retreats in shame. Maybe someone else took Avery. She thinks again about the Blanchard boy. William says someone saw Avery getting into his car on the afternoon she disappeared—if that’s true, then William is innocent and Ryan is the guilty one. She knows the Blanchard boy’s had trouble with the law before. She wants to go over to the Blanchards’ house and get Ryan in a room alone and shake him violently until the truth spills out.
And Jenna’s brother, Derek—could Derek have been molesting Avery? She’s always thought Derek was a nice enough boy. But he would have seen Avery more than anyone, whenever Avery spent time over at their house.
She hates hiding inside, waiting. She must do something to find her daughter.
Twenty-two
The sodden ground squelches beneath Gully’s boots as she walks through the woods on her way to the tree house. She has an off-duty police officer with her, one who was involved in the search of the area; he knows where to go. As she follows him deeper through the trees, cold water drips off the branches and down her neck beneath her jacket, giving her a chill.
They soon come to a small clearing, and the officer in front of her stops. An enormous oak tree rears up in front of them. Its leaves are almost gone, fallen to the ground, so the tree house is clearly visible. It sits in a notch of the tree, made from salvaged, mismatched wood. It has four walls and a rusted tin roof and a door with hinges. A crude window is cut out of the side facing them. There’s a rope ladder hanging down the broad trunk. One that could be pulled up by the people inside if they didn’t want to be discovered, Gully thinks.
The officer says, “As you know, it was thoroughly searched. No obvious sign of the girl, her clothes, anything.”
Gully walks around the tree, observing it from all sides. Then she says, “I’m going up to have a look.”
Gully is fit and athletic, and she climbs the ladder with relative ease. When she arrives on the platform in front of the door, she pauses and gazes down below. Heights have never bothered her. The vantage point is good from here—you could see someone coming, probably hear them too. She opens the door—there’s a small piece of wood nailed to the tree house that you twist to open the door. Inside, she sees a dirty futon, some soda cans. Gully stands there for a while trying to imagine what went on in here. Avery was here, with Derek Seton. The two of them, alone. Michael discovered them. He says they weren’t doing anything. But how would he know? He said they dropped the ladder for him, so it must have been pulled up. They had time to stop whatever they were doing. What was fifteen-year-old Derek doing with a nine-year-old girl?
But even if someone like Derek—or Adam Winter, or anyone else for that matter—was molesting Avery in the tree house, it’s unlikely she was killed here. There was no sign of a struggle here. There was no sign of her body or her clothing found in these woods, no indication of her having been dragged or transported through here. What would the killer have done with her?
Where the hell is Avery Wooler?
Gully climbs back down. Avery could have been molested in the tree house. With the ladder pulled up, there would be plenty of privacy. She’d better talk to Derek Seton. As they turn away from the tree house, Gully gets a call. It’s Bledsoe. “What’s up?”
“She’s willing to come in, the witness who saw Avery getting into Ryan Blanchard’s car.”
“Jesus, that changes things,” Gully says.
“It does.” She can hear the excitement in Bledsoe’s voice.
Bledsoe tells her that the woman hadn’t given her name on the call but had said she was coming to the station to tell them what she knew and that she’d be there in half an hour. Gully’s excited now—this could be the first real break in the case.
“With any luck,” Bledsoe says, “we can pick up Ryan Blanchard this afternoon. Have another go at him.” He adds, with obvious satisfaction, “Wipe the smirk off his attorney’s face.”