Page 11 of Everyone Here Is Lying
She watches him slip into the bathroom and falls back against the pillow. No one has come to tell them that Avery has been found, alive and well. Erin grabs her cell phone from the night table—it’s barely six o’clock, her daughter has been missing for about fourteen hours—and starts scrolling. She’s sickened by what she reads. The news stories say their house is being treated as a crime scene. There’sa picture of it, with yellow crime-scene tape across the front porch. How damning. There’s nothing about the jacket, about how it was hung up out of reach by a person unknown. The detectives told them last night that this information is being held back, in the interests of the investigation, and asked them not to share it with anyone. They also said they haven’t changed the original description given out, which included Avery wearing the jean jacket. Often, keeping information from the general public can help police. She stares at the photograph of their house with the crime-scene tape and thinks that the detectives might just as well have told the media that the parents are the prime suspects. She feels her trust in the detectives eroding, a new fear sprouting.
“Have you seen this?” she asks William, holding up her phone when he comes out of the bathroom.
“Yes,” he says, barely glancing at it.
“How dare they!” she says, shaken and furious.
He starts getting dressed. He breathes out heavily and looks at her. “I think we have to brace ourselves,” he says carefully.
“But—putting crime-scene tape across the house—was that really necessary? It makes it look like they think we did something to her!”
“Maybe that is what they think,” William says.
“No.” She shakes her head back and forth. “No. They can’t think that. If that’s what they think, they’ll stop looking for her. They can’t stop looking for her!”
He grasps her firmly by both arms, looks her in the eye, and says, “We will not let them stop looking for her.”
At that moment there’s a tentative knock at the door. “Are you up?” It’s the female officer’s voice, the one who’s been here all night,in a chair outside their rooms. Even so, she probably slept more than they did.
“Yes, we’ll be out in a minute,” William calls out.
Erin goes to Michael, asleep in an adjoining room. She shakes him awake, pulls him into her for a hug. “Come on. Put your clothes on, Michael. We have to get going.” She returns to her own room and hurriedly gets dressed. As she opens the door to the hallway, William right behind her, she sees Detective Bledsoe and Detective Gully stepping out of the elevator and coming toward them. They are grim-faced, and for a moment she is stricken with fear, terrified of what they might tell her. They’re both in fresh clothes, but as they approach, Erin can tell that they’ve barely slept either.
William steps past her into the hall, sees them, and blurts out, “Any news?”
Bledsoe shakes his head. “I’m afraid not.” He looks at each of them and then at Michael, as he appears in the corridor beside them. “We’d like to ask you some more questions.”
William glances quickly at her before turning back to the detectives. “We’ve already answered all your questions,” he says impatiently.
Bledsoe adds reassuringly, “We’re doing everything humanly possible to find Avery. We’d like you to come down to the station with us, if that’s all right.”
“What?” Erin says, her stomach curdling.
Bledsoe doesn’t answer, just steps back so that they can follow Gully to the elevators. But Erin doesn’t move.
“Why did you tell the press our house was a crime scene?” she asks.
“We didn’t tell them anything,” Bledsoe answers. “They draw their own conclusions.”
•••
William grabsa muffin and take-out coffee in the almost empty hotel dining room, and coaxes Erin to do the same. Michael gets a muffin and a carton of juice. None of them are enthusiastic about eating, though, and the muffins remain in the paper bag. The uniformed officer who spent the night outside their door has been sent home. Soon William finds himself with his wife and son in the police station downtown. He’s never been inside the police station before, never been insideanypolice station, for anything. This one needs paint and smells of sweat and stale coffee.
Gully and Bledsoe lead the Woolers behind the reception area and down a hall to another, smaller waiting area. Here, William and Erin are told they will be taken into different interview rooms, while Michael waits. He will be interviewed later, with a parent present.
William starts to feel afraid. His heart begins to pound. He can see a similar fear in his wife’s eyes, the anxiety and confusion in his son’s. His wife is guilty of nothing. She could never harm their daughter—surely they will see that. William looks back over his shoulder at his son and sees his troubled face as his parents are led away.
The interview room is small and plain, with a metal table and four chairs. He sits down on one side, Bledsoe and Gully sit side by side on the other. William wonders if he should ask for a lawyer. But he’s worried about how that will look.
“We won’t be long,” Bledsoe says. “This is purely voluntary, just to cover all the bases. You can leave at any time.”
William isn’t sure he believes him. “Sure, anything I can do to help. I just want you to find Avery.”
Bledsoe nods. He sits back in his chair, relaxed. “We’d like to get some basic things out of the way. For instance, if you could tell us where you were yesterday afternoon, before you arrived at home at five forty. It seems you weren’t at your medical practice, or at the hospital, from about two o’clock on.”
So they’ve already checked. He tries to keep his voice steady. “No, I wasn’t.”
“So where were you?” Bledsoe asks.
