“Find Emma!”
Everything stopped when Abby heard those words. Heart, lungs, limbs, all still. Frozen. She could not take her eyes from the young woman on the bed, the woman who had been just a girl when she disappeared. Abby had studied her face from every stage of her life. Photos, home movies, social media posts—not only the features but the expressions as well had been painted onto a canvas that became the Cassandra Tanner Abby believed she knew.
Her hair was darker. It was longer as well, with waves that had not been there before. It fell around her shoulders, the silk bathrobe and the pillow that was tucked behind her head. The features of her face were sharper, cheekbones and brow bones. Hazel eyes set deeper beneath full brows. Abby could not look away, mesmerized by the figure before her and the one piece of the puzzle that had just been revealed. Emma was alive.
“Cassandra … where is Emma? Where can we find her?” Leo asked.
“She’s still there!” Cass cried out, frantic now.
“Where, Cass? Where is Emma?” Leo repeated. His voice was calm and it drew Cass in. She looked at him cautiously while she forced a long breath in and out. Then she told them about Emma.
“The island,” she said. “She’s still on the island.”
“What island?” Leo asked.
Cass looked at her mother. Judy Martin had probably changed a great deal, but all Abby could see was everything she had seen before. She was a woman consumed by her appearance. Even now, there was fresh makeup and the smell of hair spray. She let the thought come and go. But she filed it away.
Cass looked to Abby then, which was strange since Leo had asked the question.
“What island, Cass? Do you know where it is?” he asked again.
Cass shook her head and started to cry.
Judy removed her hand from her daughter’s hair and pulled her body away so they were no longer touching.
“You have to find it! Please! Find the island. Find my sister!”
Leo looked at Abby then, then back to Cass, cautiously. “Is Emma in danger? Is she being held against her will?”
Cass nodded. “They wouldn’t let us come home. For three years. I had to leave her behind. It was the only way, but now you have to save her!”
“Get forensics back,” Abby said. She wanted to hear the story—from start to finish—but if Emma was in danger, they needed to run it from every angle. Leo agreed and texted his colleagues to return from the first floor.
Cass went on to tell them about an island, and a man named Bill who lived there. She told them, too, about his wife, Lucy, and how they had both “taken us in” and “given us a home” and how everything had been “really good until it turned bad.” Without hearing the story in order, it was impossible to understand how it came to be that their refuge “became a prison,” and how only Cass was able to escape. And how “Emma is still a prisoner there.” And why she didn’t know exactly where it was or how to find it “because of how I got there and how I left.” And why she left. God, how Abby wanted the answer to that question.
But she sat calmly even as the urgency pushed against the thin walls of her patience.
Judy Martin kept asking questions. She was standing now, and pacing the room. “What do you mean Emma is there, on this island? What are you talking about? This is crazy! How do you not know where it is? How can you not tell them? None of this makes sense, Cass! Dr. Winter, don’t you see how crazy this is? Is she well? Maybe she’s not well? You need to examine her!”
“I do know things!” Cass yelled into the room. “It’s in Maine! It’s north of Portland!”
The forensics team was back in the room, and they wanted to get the physical description so they could start to run an analysis.
They asked Cass about the seasons there. The foliage. They spoke to each other about the soil in her shoes. The pollen and mold and dust on her clothing. Other people’s hair on that clothing, maybe on her body. There could be DNA evidence that they could try to match in their system. Then there were the less tangible things, like what she had smelled in the air and the kind of food she ate. People who came and went, what they sounded like. Their accents and the words they chose.
Cass worked with them for nearly an hour. She tried to explain why it had been impossible to leave.
“The water was very cold, even in the summer. Lucy was always warning us about hypothermia. We only saw one person other than Bill and Lucy. His name was Rick and he drove a boat to and from the island to deliver groceries and gas for the generator. There were no lines to the island. No cables, like for a phone or television or electricity. But we had a satellite dish. I could see other land from three sides of the island. It was miles away. The fourth side faced the ocean, like we were at the very edge of some kind of inlet or harbor, but it was enormously wide. You couldn’t see houses or people or anything like that on the other land, and it was very hard to get to our dock. There were rocks underneath the water, and you could only see them during low tide.”
Her voice grew steady. Her composure sound.
She told them about the current, and how strong it was on that one side that had the dock, the south side, and how it pulled everything to the west. She described the storms that rolled in, and how severe they were. How she could see them for miles and miles before they reached the island, like a wall of wind and water pouring from the sky, creeping toward her. There would be a few seconds of sprinkles, shooting sideways on the wind, before the downpour would arrive.
She told them about the sky and how seeing it like that, unbroken, from left to right was like being inside “one of those glass snow globes.”
“That was how it felt to be there under such big, open skies, but unable to leave.” Her description was almost poetic. She sounded educated far beyond her one year of high school.
Then she told them about the trees, and how they were the same as in Connecticut, except there were more that stayed green during the winter.
“Conifers?” they asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Pine trees, Christmas trees…”
“Yes, like that. Like Christmas trees. But taller and thin at the bottom…”