And now it’s her turn to fall apart. She gives in all at once to her reeling emotions. They overwhelm her. “This is my punishment, mine and William’s, for what we did. His daughter is missing, and we’ve been found out.” She feels her voice rise with her hysteria. “The police think Avery got into Ryan’s car, that he took her.” She stares back at her husband—he is the only one she can say this to. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “What if he did?”
“How can you even suggest that?” he whispers back harshly.
“If he knew, and he wanted to hurt William—”
“No! He didn’t know. And he wouldn’t do that,” Al insists.
No, she can’t believe that her son would ever want that kind of vengeance. He doesn’t have it in him. But she wonders again if Al might. What if Al took Avery, in an act of revenge, and this is his punishment, the police thinking his son is guilty of the father’s crime? Oh God—is she losing her mind? They are churchgoers. Al is devout, but she is unsure—sometimes she believes, and sometimes she doesn’t. But she knows that if God does exist, He is not always benevolent, and He works in mysterious ways.
Twenty-nine
Gully drives back to the station in the dark, drained by the events of the last two days. She’d like nothing better than to go home and get some much-needed sleep. But Avery is still out there. The ticking clock inside Gully’s head allows her no rest. She thinks about her interactions with William Wooler, the Blanchards, and now Derek. Everyone here is lying, she thinks.
She’s troubled by her conversation with Derek Seton. She doesn’t know what to make of him. He was rattled. He might have done something to Avery in that tree house. He could be the older boyfriend. But she doesn’t think he took Avery Wooler. How could he have? Even if he’d seen her on the street after her father had left the house, and lured her into his own empty house and assaulted her, what would he have done with the body?
She almost goes through a red light. What would he have done with the body? If he was molesting her, and no one was home, could he have invited her in? He was right across the street. Might he have strangled her, if she threatened to tell? Avery could be in the house. He could have panicked and shoved her in a crawl space until he got the chance to move her, later, perhaps into the woods, or the river, after the searches were called off. It’s a large house, it probably has hiding places. His mother didn’t get home with Jenna until shortly after five.
Gully pulls over and reaches for her cell phone.
* * *
? ? ?
Ryan lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling. He knows his parents are talking in the living room about what happened at the police station. His dad has turned up the volume on the television, like he does when he doesn’t want them to be overheard. Like he used to do when Ryan was going through his drug problems and his parents had to talk. Ryan can’t hear anything but the tinny, distant buzz of the television. They’re worried about him. They don’t trust him. Why would they? The police think he took Avery. Even his own lawyer seems to think he might have done it. He’s scared shitless.
Ryan thinks about running away, disappearing. Changing his name somehow, never seeing any of them again. But they’d probably find him, and running away would amount to a confession. All he can do is wait it out, trust Oliver to do his job and protect him. He turns over and cries silently into his pillow.
* * *
? ? ?
Gully arrives back at the station and makes her way directly to Bledsoe. He shakes his head at her. “We’d never get a warrant to search the Seton place,” he says. “We don’t have enough. So he was in a tree house, once, weeks ago, with the missing girl—we can’t search the house based on that.”
Gully nods tiredly. “I know.” She pauses. “Maybe I’m losing it. I need some sleep.” She rubs her eyes.
He nods at her. “Go home, Gully.”
But her mind is still working. “I could ask them if they’d consent to a search, without a warrant.”
“There’s no way they’ll say yes to that.”
“They would if they believed their son.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Bledsoe says. “Christ, do you really think he could have done it?”
“I don’t know. There was something about him,” Gully says. “I’m not convinced he hadn’t been doing something inappropriate with her in that tree house.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Let’s say Avery’s father is telling the truth—he hits her then leaves the house at four twenty or thereabouts. What if she leaves the house again—she goes out the front door, onto the street. Let’s say the witness who says she saw Avery get into Ryan Blanchard’s car is lying—maybe she saw Avery on the street, without her jacket and her hair in a braid, but didn’t see her get into Ryan’s car, and made that up for some sick reason—maybe even because she saw her with Derek and wants to protect him? The Setons’ house is right there, across the street. Derek was home by then. He could have seen her, seen that she was alone. If he was molesting her, he could have coaxed her into his empty house. His mother was out, his dad at work. What if he knew his mother was going to pick up his sister at four thirty and take her shoe shopping, and that they probably wouldn’t be home until after five? They wouldn’t have had much time. But maybe she threatened to tell this time, and he panicked and had to shut her up. But he can’t get rid of the body—he doesn’t have time and has no way to do it. He’s only fifteen; he can’t drive. So he has to hide the body somewhere in the house until he can get rid of it later. She could be there still.”
“It’s been two days,” Bledsoe says. “If that’s what happened, any chance the parents know? That he told them and they got rid of the body?”
Gully considers, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t think so. Both parents seemed genuinely shocked when I was over there. But you never know.” She adds, thinking it through, “If he confessed to his parents, they could have put the body in the trunk of their car while it was in the garage with the door closed and driven her out right under our noses, while we had police all over the Wooler house across the street.”
They stare at each other for a long moment.
“We’re not going to be able to search that house unless we get more,” Bledsoe says finally, throwing himself into a chair. “Let’s look deeper into this boy—any younger girls at school complain about him? Find out. In the meantime, we should have preliminary forensics back on Ryan Blanchard’s car sometime tomorrow. They didn’t find anything in the house, besides his mother’s hidden phone.”
“They’re really something, these small towns,” Gully can’t resist saying. Bledsoe gives her a wry look. Gully remembers how she was concerned, in the beginning, that Bledsoe would focus solely on William Wooler and willfully blind himself to anyone else. To his credit, that hasn’t happened; he has proved to be more thoughtful, more open-minded than she expected. What they have instead is too many suspects and no real evidence. Gully says, “I could pay Alice a visit in the morning, after the kids go to school and the husband goes to work. See if she’ll let me look around, see if I can get anything more out of her.”