She paces the living room, thinking about Detective Gully. She wouldn’t tell her who the witness is—she’s obviously afraid to, after what happened with Ryan Blanchard. It must be someone close by, to have seen what they claim to have seen. To know Ryan’s car. To recognize Avery. It must be someone on this very street. She thinks of all the people on Connaught Street. She knows many of them by sight, and some to chat to, but she doesn’t know all of them. She could go, now, to each house, and ask point-blank if they called the police about Ryan Blanchard. Surely whoever it is will tell her the truth, if she promises to say nothing about who it is? She is the mother of the missing girl. Most of the people on the street are parents themselves. She will shake the truth out of them if she has to.
Erin returns to the living-room window and looks out. She must know. She must know what happened to Avery. She can’t stay trapped in this house, which has become like a tomb, waiting for something to happen. She goes upstairs once more to her son’s room and knocks on the door.
When she opens it, she sees Michael back in his usual place on the bed, staring at his laptop. At least he’s eaten something. She wonders what he’s looking at but doesn’t ask; she doesn’t really want to know. It could be a game, or it could be something about Avery. He looks so lonely, so lost; she can’t bear it. She realizes that at some point, they will have to talk about his father, about what’s going to happen to them as a family. Maybe it will be just the two of them. But not now.
“I’m going out for a bit,” she says.
“Where?” he asks, looking up from his screen.
She considers a white lie but remembers what happened last time, when she told him she was going to see his father at the hotel, and the journalists printed all those photos of her standing over Ryan Blanchard in his living room.
“I’m going to talk to the neighbors,” she admits, “about Avery.”
He doesn’t try to dissuade her, as she expected. “Do you want me to come?” he asks.
That surprises her and nearly breaks her heart. He’s worried about her. He wants to protect her. She realizes that she might be all he has left; she cannot go to pieces on him. “No. I think someone should be home, in case . . .”
He says, “Okay,” and turns back to his screen. Everything about him seems hopeless.
She closes his door and makes her way back downstairs. In the vestibule she grabs her jacket and stands for a moment, staring at the empty spot where Avery’s blue-jean jacket had been hung, before it was taken away by the crime-scene team. Then she steps outside. There is no one there. The press has gone. She stands alone in the silence for a moment, feeling as if everyone has abandoned her. It’s dark and quiet. She locks the door behind her and decides to start across the street, at Alice Seton’s house. Because it has occurred to her that if Derek Seton has been molesting Avery, she wouldn’t put it past Alice Seton to call in a tip about someone else, true or otherwise.
Thirty-nine
Alice Seton hears the knock at the door and goes still. She has grown wary of knocks at her door. Her heart begins to pound. She doesn’t want to answer it. She looks at her watch. It’s almost nine at night. She’s not expecting anyone. What if it’s the police? The knock comes again. She gets up off the sofa, where she’s been trying to read a book, and answers it with dread.
She’s surprised, and discomfited, to see Erin Wooler standing on her doorstep. Erin looks how you might expect a woman whose daughter is missing to look. Unkempt, grieving, almost unhinged. “Erin,” she says. She doesn’t know what else to say.
“Can I come in?” Erin asks. She sounds reasonable enough. Alice remembers uneasily how this woman barged her way into the Blanchards’ home the day before and physically attacked Ryan Blanchard. And then she remembers that it was Erin’s son, Michael, who saw Derek in the tree house with Avery and accused Derek. Alice steps back, suddenly apprehensive. Why is she here? She doesn’t know what Erin is going to do. She glances over her shoulder, as if hoping to find her husband right behind her, but he’s upstairs.
“I’d like to talk to you—and your husband—if you don’t mind,” Erin says quietly.
And really, what can Alice do? She can’t turn the poor woman away. Their daughters used to play together, and Erin seems mostly calm at the moment. She gestures her inside, closes the door quietly, and leads her into the living room. She knows Derek is in his room on his computer with his headphones on; he can’t hear anything. Peter and Jenna are both upstairs. “Pete’s on a work call upstairs right now,” she says. But she knows that if she screams, her husband will come running.
She signals for Erin to sit on the sofa and sits across from her in an armchair, the solid coffee table between them. “I’m so sorry,” Alice says, “about Avery. How are you holding up?” A stupid question, but she’s uncomfortable, and it makes her stupid.
“As well as can be expected, I guess,” Erin says, with a trace of bitterness. There’s an awkward pause. Then Erin says, “I wanted to ask you—as one mother to another—if you are the one who saw Avery get into Ryan Blanchard’s car?”
Alice is taken completely by surprise. “Me? No. Why would you think that?”
“Or perhaps it was your husband?”
“God, no. It wasn’t us,” Alice says.
Erin must believe her because her face seems to collapse in disappointment. “I don’t know who this witness is,” Erin says. “And the detectives won’t tell me.”
“Why not?”
Erin shakes her head. “I don’t know. Detective Gully told me there’s a good reason, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. I just need to know who it is and whether they’re telling the truth.”
Alice can see the tears starting in the other woman’s eyes, and feels her own eyes begin to well up in response. It’s terrible, what this woman must be going through. She begins to relax—relieved that Erin doesn’t seem to be here about Derek after all. “Of course you do,” she says sympathetically. “I mean—if it’s true Avery got into Ryan’s car . . .” She trails off awkwardly. She says, “The police must believe it, or they wouldn’t have arrested him.”
Erin makes a face that seems to indicate that she doesn’t think much of the police. “I’m going to every house on this street to find out who called in that tip,” Erin says. “And when I find them, I’ll know if they’re lying.”
“How will you know?” Alice asks doubtfully.
But Erin doesn’t answer. Instead, she says, “The police questioned Derek, didn’t they?”
Alice bristles. “Yes, but it was just routine,” she says defensively.
Erin looks her straight in the eyes. “They think he might have been inappropriate with my daughter.”
“No. He wasn’t,” Alice says with heat.
“I can understand how that upsets you,” Erin says, with heat of her own. “Imagine how I feel.” She rises from the sofa. “We don’t know our own children as well as we think we do. We don’t know what they’re doing every minute of the day.” Her face is bleak. “We can’t.”