Page 19 of Everyone Here Is Lying
“I don’t know exactly, about four twenty.”
“And where did you go after you left your house?” Bledsoe asks.
William swallows. “Then I really did go for a drive.”
“And your cell phone records will confirm that?” Bledsoe says.
He’d turned off his cell phone when he met Nora at the motel. He always did—he didn’t want them to be disturbed. He had his pager if the hospital needed to get hold of him. And he turned off his burner phone, too, once he’d texted Nora the unit number of the motel and she’d replied. He hadn’t turned his cell back on until shortly after five. He knows how it will look. There’s nothing he can do about that. He swallows and says, “I turned my phone off.”
A long pause develops, stretches out. At last, Bledsoe says, “Did you now?”
Thirteen
Nora returns home from her shift at the hospital midafternoon. She’s been scrolling through the news throughout the day whenever she can. But now she turns on her laptop and discovers footage of William being led out of his house by the detectives, surrounded by the press, of his being taken into the police station for questioning earlier that afternoon. It’s alarming. She learns that it’s the second time he’s been questioned at the police station that day.Why? Why are they focusing on William?It’s been almost twenty-four hours since Avery went missing, and there is no sign of her. The police obviously seem to think William had something to do with it. Nora knows that can’t be true. She can’t imagine what he must be going through. Terrified for his missing daughter. And suspected, maybe accused.
Her husband and son return home shortly after her, cold and hungry after long hours of searching. They sit down at the kitchentable while she makes them sandwiches to tide them over till supper. She prepares the food as if in a trance. Ryan is quiet, but Al tells her what it was like, prodding the ground with sticks, looking for freshly turned earth in the woods—the sign of a shallow grave—the mood growing more hopeless as nothing is found. “She must be dead by now,” he says. “That’s what everybody thinks, you can tell. They think the father did it—and him a doctor.”
She turns on him. “What? What do you mean?”
He looks at her as if in surprise. “It’s all over the news,” he says. “They’ve taken him in for questioning again. My guess is they’ll arrest him soon. The sick bastard.”
And as he looks at her, there’s something different in her husband’s eye, a gleam of something, something nasty she doesn’t like. There’s something in his expression. Where is this coming from? Her heart suddenly seizes—Does he know? About her and William? Is he enjoying her suffering?Maybe he’s not as oblivious as she assumed. Had he followed her, seen them together at the motel? She feels the tension, suddenly thick in the room. Does he know that William is her lover—is that what’s going on here?
She’s becoming paranoid—it’s been creeping up on her and now the paranoia is overwhelming her. It’s only a matter of time before the police knock on her door because they know about her and William and it all comes out.
She can’t bear to look at her husband any longer and turns her attention to her son. Ryan’s a million miles away from her—she hardly knows her boy anymore, and they used to be so close. She studies him now, bent over the kitchen table, eating his sandwich. She wonders what’s going through his mind.
•••
While Williamis at the police station for the second time that day, Erin waits. She can’t eat, but her anger gives her nourishment and an energy she hasn’t had since Avery went missing. William was seen, here—entering the garage—around four o’clock yesterday. They know Avery was in the house. She’s terrified that she is about to learn the truth about what happened to her daughter.
It’s like she’s split in two, holding two contradictory ideas in her mind at the same time. Part of her simply can’t believe it, but another part of her can. She’s seen how angry William can get at Avery, how he strikes out at her. She understands it because Avery pushes her to fury sometimes too.
She remembers a birthday party for one of Avery’s classmates when she was six years old. Erin took her, anxious about how it might go, because Avery was often difficult, especially around other children. She didn’t share well. She didn’t seem to know how to get along with other kids. Avery started causing problems right away, pushing another girl roughly in a game of musical chairs and being accused of cheating. Erin was mortified. It got worse from there. She can still remember the embarrassment she felt at the other women’s pinched smiles, one woman saying, “Somebody’s having a bad day.” When the birthday girl started opening her presents, and Avery was grabbing them from her, Erin decided it was time to leave. But Avery refused, throwing a tantrum and hitting her mother. Erin managed to apologize to everyone and keep her cool as they left the house. But once she’d physically carried a squirming, hitting Avery to the car and strapped her in, Erin drove around the corner, pulledthe car to the side of the street, and wept uncontrollably, out of frustration, embarrassment, and fury.
Avery’s behavior hurts Erin too. It’s worn her down, destroyed her confidence as a mother. But the difference between her and William is that William lashes out at their daughter, and she doesn’t. What if he’d had enough? And she wasn’t there to stop him for once? She can imagine it, she can see it happening—William hitting Avery, or shaking her so hard her neck snaps. Maybe he pushed her, and she struck her head. It would have been an accident. He wouldn’t have meant it. He would have tried to save her. He would have felt terrible. He would have lied about it. Maybe Williamhaslied to her, lied to the police. What other lies has he told over the course of their marriage? Now she is terribly afraid that Avery is dead, that her husband might have killed her in an uncontrolled moment, and she doesn’t know how she and Michael will ever manage to go on.
But they have been married for almost fifteen years. She can’t believe that he would do this. It’s impossible. Maybe the detectives are making it up about his being seen, trying to trap him in some way.
Erin watches from the living-room window, behind the curtain. She doesn’t want to be seen by the reporters outside. As time passes, she knows that one of two things will happen. Either William will come home with a reasonable explanation—perhaps the detectives will admit they invented the witness, to rattle him—or the detectives will come and tell her that he has confessed, and she will know what happened to her daughter.
A police cruiser pulls up in front of the house. She watches William get out.
•••
Gully has spokento the officers who interviewed Avery’s teachers at the elementary school. They all agreed that Avery is very bright, but there were behavioral problems, challenges. She was defiant. She told lies. The staff was pretty sure that an act of vandalism—stuffing a toilet in the girls’ bathroom with paper and causing a flood—was done by Avery, who claimed she’d seen another girl do it. But other than getting a better picture of what Avery was like, they got nothing. None of her teachers had noticed anyone hanging around the school that day or in the preceding days. No strange men skulking outside the school fence, following her home. No strange vehicles on the street. No one taking an interest in Avery.
In any event, they now know Avery’s father was in the house with her yesterday afternoon, that he was the one who hung up her jacket. If he’s telling the truth anddidn’tharm her, then she must have left the house again and met with foul play. Gully knows Bledsoe thinks William Wooler killed his daughter and got rid of the body. But she’s trying to keep an open mind—at least until forensics is finished with Dr. Wooler’s car.
She’s just been to the Breezes Motel and discovered that the security cameras there haven’t been in working order for some time. They don’t know the identity of William Wooler’s lover. No one at the motel remembers ever seeing her, just him. The desk clerk recognized him. He used a different name and paid in cash. He was there yesterday afternoon, as usual, but the clerk didn’t know when he left. It would be good to talk to this other woman, Gully thinks, if only to learn more about William Wooler, his state of mind that day. Maybe his lover knows more than his wife.
Now she heads back to the Woolers’ neighborhood. Maybe she’ll learn something from Avery’s only friend, Jenna, who lives across the street. She must be home from school by now.
Gully parks outside the Wooler residence and walks across the street to the Setons’ house. She rings the doorbell and waits, thinking about what’s going on in the Wooler house behind her. She imagines William telling his wife what he told them. She can’t begin to imagine what Erin Wooler will feel then.
The door is answered by a woman in her late thirties, with a pretty, pleasant face. “Mrs. Seton?” The woman nods. Gully pulls out her identification and introduces herself. “I’m investigating the disappearance of Avery Wooler.” The woman’s face becomes serious. A girl with long dark hair approaches and stares at Gully from beside her mother. “And you must be Jenna,” Gully says, smiling warmly at her. The girl nods.
“Come in,” the woman says, opening the door wide. She leads her into the kitchen, and Jenna sits down at the table. “The police officers were already around and spoke to all of us yesterday. Unfortunately, none of us saw anything.”
