Six
Ryan Blanchard pulls his jacket up higher around his neck under the rain poncho and pulls the hood of the poncho farther forward. It’s dark, it’s raining steadily, and the temperature is dropping. He’s already soaked, and he can hardly see anything. He glances at his watch: 8:06. The volunteers fan out in a ragged line, about six feet apart, slow-moving shapes wielding flashlights pointed at the ground. They started at the beginning of the woods behind the houses on Connaught Street and are working their way to the river.
Ryan moves forward in step with the others, eyes trained on the uneven ground in front of him, sweeping his flashlight back and forth. It feels ominous in the woods. As they progress, he has to push back wet ferns and brambles, weave around trees. He can hear branches snapping, and the footsteps of the searchers on either side of him, smell the damp, fecund earth. A bird flushes out of a tree ahead, startling him.
He should be working at the plant right now. He’d be halfway through his shift, getting tired, looking forward to his day off tomorrow. But his shift had been canceled—production has been cut back—and now he is out here in the pouring rain helping to look for a missing girl. They’ve been told that she may have gone into the woods and gotten lost or fallen and hurt herself. But he knows what everybody here is thinking—that she was snatched on her way home from school and what they’re looking for is her body. Still, the leaders shout out regularly, calling her name across the night.
He doesn’t want to think about Avery Wooler. He tries to distract himself with thoughts of the future. Next year for sure he will get out of this place, go away to college. The itch to get out of Stanhope grows stronger every day.
His father is moving alongside him, to his right, his bulk familiar, comforting. Ryan wonders what his father is thinking as he sweeps his flashlight back and forth, intent on his task. He seems grimmer out here than he was at home, with his glib assurances. But everyone here is grim. It’s more real now, out here in the cold rain, not just something on the television.
He and his father are not as close as they once were. They’ve grown apart. They have nothing in common since he learned to ride a bike, to camp, to play baseball. They don’t spend any time together. This, searching for Avery Wooler, is the first thing they’ve done together in ages, Ryan realizes, as he plays his flashlight over the sodden ground. His mother is the heart of their family—they all know it. His father is on the periphery, there but not there. His dad is . . . detached. But Ryan isn’t as close to his mother these days either. There’s a chasm between Ryan and both his parents, and Ryan knows it’s his own doing. He hasn’t turned out to be the son they thought he was.
* * *
? ? ?
Nora has the television on in the living room and waits anxiously as the night wears on. There is no new information online or on the television, and with every passing hour her dread increases. She desperately wants Avery to turn up safe and sound. She imagines her husband and son out there scouring the woods in the cold rain. Will they find anything? Will they stay out there all night? Perhaps Avery is being held captive somewhere or is already dead. Her head swirls. She worries about William. She wishes now she had not told him it was over. Where had she found that strength? It’s left her now.
She doesn’t dare text him. She thinks of her second, secret phone, so carefully hidden behind the air vent in the bedroom she shares with Al. She must not contact him, not now. The police are in his house. They will find his phone.
There is going to be fallout from his daughter going missing, and she’s going to be part of it. She must brace herself, think of what to do. They will be found out. She grows wilder in her thoughts.
Nora does something she almost never does. She gets down on her knees and prays, for all of them. She wonders if what has happened to Avery is punishment sent by God for what she and William have been doing. Maybe she has that little girl’s blood on her hands.
* * *
? ? ?
The waiting is unbearable, the tension inside the house palpable. Erin Wooler moves restlessly between the living room and the kitchen, her body tensing whenever one of the detectives takes a phone call. But so far, nothing. It’s as if Avery has vanished off the face of the earth. The school has been thoroughly searched, but they haven’t found her. The team sent to the tree house has reported that there are no obvious signs of Avery having been there or of foul play, and they are not treating it as a crime scene.
Michael is distraught. She has done her best to comfort him, to reassure him. But inwardly she is deeply distressed that her son sent Avery home by herself once before and told her about the key. Her heart had almost stopped when he’d told them. She’d had to assure him that it’s not his fault. She doesn’t blame him—he couldn’t have known what would happen—but still, it’s hard. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t think of the what-if—what if he hadn’t done that? Avery probably would have been waiting for him on the bench outside of choir practice. She’d be here with them right now, instead of these detectives. But she mustn’t think this way. She feels William could have been more demonstratively supportive of their son. But he seems to be in shock.
She sits on the sofa and watches her husband now, as he stares out the living-room window into the dark, all nerves. Beyond the raw, visceral terror they both feel about Avery—Where is she? What is happening to her?—there is another fear running alongside. What if she isn’t found quickly—what will happen then? The detectives will look at them. They will tear away at all the careful layers they’ve constructed in their family and expose them for who they are. William won’t come out of it particularly well.
Bledsoe disconnects from another call, glances meaningfully at Gully, and asks William to come back and sit down. Erin’s heart falters; he has something to tell them. William complies and falls back against the sofa as if exhausted. He looks awful. She must look the same; she feels like she’s aged years since her son phoned her at work that afternoon.
“We’re treating the house as a possible crime scene,” Bledsoe says carefully.
Erin looks back at him, trying to grasp what he means. She glances at Gully. “What?” she says.
Bledsoe explains. “We now have confirmation that Avery has been accounted for at school all day today—she was in detention over the lunch hour and present all day in class. She could not have returned to the house and left her jacket here at any time except after school, after she left choir at three forty-five. She would have arrived home at around five after four.”
“We know this,” William says impatiently. “She must have come home, used the key under the mat to get in, and gone back out again and forgotten her jacket. And someone took her.” He’s grown visibly agitated.
“Try to remain calm, Dr. Wooler,” Bledsoe says.
Erin watches her husband, feeling frightened.
“The thing is,” Bledsoe says carefully, “we don’t think Avery was alone in the house today after school.”
“What are you talking about?” Erin says, her stomach turning over.
Gully says, “We think someone was here, inside the house with her, after school today.” She adds, “That’s why we need to treat the house as a crime scene. We’re going to have a forensics team come in and go through the house thoroughly, as soon as possible. We will need your cooperation on this.”