there was fresh bread but no names. They came in brown paper bags. The milk brand was Horizon. We had all kinds of brands. Land O Lakes butter. Thomas’ English muffins . . .”
“How about fruit, fish?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember any names. Just green boxes with berries, blueberries in the summer. Small ones. And lots of fish. Wrapped in white paper. Emma hates fish. Even lobster and shrimp. But there was a lot of fish.”
“White fish?”
“Yes. It was white. Like in fish and chips. Only they didn’t like to fry things, Bill and Lucy. They said it wasn’t healthy.”
Abby sat in a chair, her hands clasped together tightly. This was all useful to locating the island, but it was moving them away from the story, from the answer she’d been waiting for, to the question that had tortured her.
They asked Cass about bills, mail, boats that went past. Did she remember any of their names? “No,” she answered. Boats never got that close to them, because of the rocks and the current, and many of them were small fishing boats. The boat that came to the island was called Lucky Lady. They ran the name. There was a Lucky Lady in nearly every harbor. But the fishing boats . . .
“What did they look like, these fishing boats?” They showed her pictures from the Internet.
She identified lobster boats, which supported her belief that the island was in Maine.
She told them, too, how the island smelled of gasoline sometimes because of the generator, and they told her this was helpful.
Judy Martin kept interrupting and asking the same questions. “But how did you make it there three years ago and then make it home now without knowing where you were? It doesn’t make sense, Cass! How did you not leave for three years? You’re all asking the wrong questions! Trees and goddamn blueberries!”
One of the forensics pulled out her phone. “Did any of them sound like this?”
She played a recording. She said it was a Maine accent. She explained about the added r and the long a and e, which sounded like “ah” and “eh.” And Cass told them the boatman talked like that.
“Emma used to say he sounded like a hick, which was not very nice, but Rick was not very nice. That’s part of the story. Rick is how I escaped.”
“Yes, yes! The escape. Let’s talk about that.” Mrs. Martin threw her hands into air.
Cass told them that she escaped in the Lucky Lady.
“It wasn’t easy. Rick depended on the Pratts for everything, and they did not want us to leave. . . .”
“Go back to the boat . . . how far did it take you before you reached land?” they asked.
She told them how the boatman brought her to a dock inside a harbor. She didn’t keep track of the time it took to get there, but it felt like a while. It was pitch-black and hard to tell which way they were going. Then a friend of his let her ride in the back of his truck.
“How long did you ride in the truck? Did you notice the time, the roads, the direction? Street signs, highway names, anything?”
She told them that she stayed under a blanket until they got to Portland so no one would see her. They stopped for gas and she saw a sign. It said Rockland. They stopped one other time for gas and another time on the side of the highway so she could go to the bathroom in the woods.
“It took three hours and fifteen minutes to get to Portland. The roads were slow and curving. We were going south. I saw that sign! Isn’t that enough?” Cass’s voice was shaky again.
“Maine has over thirty-five hundred miles of coastland and close to five thousand islands, and off the coast near Rockland there are hundreds,” one of the forensics explained. “So anything else you give us would be helpful.”
Judy jumped in, impatience seeping from every pore. “Why, Cass, did you wait all night to get back here? Why didn’t you go straight to the police from the shore so they could find this island?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think it would be so hard to find it. The driver of that truck asked me where I wanted to go and I said the first thing I thought of which was here. Home.”
She started to cry again.
“I just wanted to come home.”
Abby heard footsteps bounding up the stairs; then the door opened. She was sitting in a chair by the bed when Owen Tanner burst in like a tornado. He didn’t greet her, though Abby doubted he’d forgotten who she was. He was simply overwrought. He ran to the bed, hugged his daughter. He was crying, moaning like he was in pain. He was thin and gaunt, as though he’d been slowly disappearing these past three years. She hadn’t noticed it during the investigation, because she had seen him frequently, even after they had concluded their interviews. He would come once a week or more to the field office in New Haven, demanding updates, requesting access to their reports and the list of calls to the hotline. She thought then that his pain had been a parasite, feeding on him all this time. And nothing could bring back the parts of him that had been eaten away. That was what she could hear in his cries as he held his child.
Owen pulled away, his face wet and contorted with despair. He began his own inquiry about Emma, to know where she was. He had a million questions and he shot them out as if no one else in the room had thought of them before he arrived and “My God!” Emma was at the end of one of them and why couldn’t Cass just tell them where to go and get her?
When he had finally exhausted his questions on that front and came to accept that finding Emma was not going to happen that moment, he sat down on the edge of the bed, almost on top of his daughter, blocking Judy from her sight. It was then he asked Cass the other question, which Abby knew had tortured him the most since the night he lost his daughters.
“Why? Why did you and Emma leave with these people?”
Owen had told Abby during the first investigation that she was wrong to look at the family history. He told her that he understood why teenagers left to join jihads and cults and got lured by perverts. He said in one of his interviews with her, “Those kids were not normal kids. I’ve seen them on the news. Maybe no one saw it before it happened, but after it was all perfectly clear why they’d left. Right? There’s nothing like that with my girls. I’m not sitting here thinking that this all makes perfect sense because of this thing or that thing. Do you understand? There is nothing to find here. Nothing at all!”
“Why did you leave with these strangers?” Owen asked again, looking for confirmation.
Cass finally answered him, a hint of anger in her voice that surprised Abby. But it was her answer that surprised them all.
“We left because Emma was pregnant.”
My father squeezed the breath from my body when he first saw me again. He barreled past Dr. Winter, Special Agent Strauss and
