Courtney
When we arrive at the police station, Detective Evans doesn’t take us into an interrogation room as I imagined he would. Instead,
he gets me coffee with sugar and cream, and we speak at his desk. Cass and Mae take the two small chairs for themselves. Detective
Evans offers to pull up another chair for me, but I say that it’s fine, that Wyatt and I can stand, though Wyatt wanders away
and finds somewhere else to sit.
I look back at Detective Evans, who’s watching me.
“I was looking on my husband’s iPad this morning. I found something.”
“What did you find?” he asks.
I clear my throat. “Some recent searches about Pearl Lake,” I say, “and a Facebook post he made to that Help Find Kylie Matthews page a few days ago.” I pull up the post on my own phone. I set it on the desktop for him to see, watching as he brings the
phone closer to his eyes.
I’m standing behind Cass’s and Mae’s chairs. I have a bird’s-eye view of them so it’s hard to miss Cass nudge Mae under the
table. As she does, I start to pay closer attention.
Mae looks at Cass. From her profile, her little chin starts to quiver. Cass looks carefully, almost negligibly back. Their
eyes meet. Cass shakes her head so subtly I almost don’t notice, before she lowers her own eyes to the desk and Mae follows
her lead.
Mae brings her hands under the table. From behind, I see her breath start to hitch, her shoulders undulating like a wave as she fights tears.
Beside her, Cass is stoic. She sits tall and quiet with her hands in her lap, unnaturally still as if—if she doesn’t move—we’ll
forget she’s even there. Until she notices Mae starting to cry and she lightly kicks her under the chair, her foot sliding
gradually over, weaving around the legs of the chair, pressing into her.
The more Mae tries not to cry, the more she does.
Detective Evans notices and looks up from the phone. “You okay there?” he asks Mae, unsurprised that Mae is upset because
her parents are dead; why wouldn’t she be? She nods, wiping her nose on the sleeve of a shirt.
Except that something is starting to register. I’ve picked up on an idea, my mind latching on and trying to disentangle it.
These aren’t tears of sorrow. They’re tears of guilt.
Cass isn’t supposed to use Elliott’s iPad without asking. But sometimes she does. Sometimes she sneaks it when he’s not paying
attention and goes on it anyway.
The night that Reese disappeared, they were on Elliott’s iPad. They had gone back to the cottage from Nolan and Emily’s place,
and were alone with it for hours. I remember how I went up to the loft to turn the TV off in the middle of the night and slipped
the iPad out from under Cass’s arm. I left it on the counter to talk to her about in the morning. But by morning, Emily and
Nolan were dead and I wasn’t thinking about the iPad anymore.
It’s not just that.
I think of the way age progressed was misspelled on the Facebook post, with only one s. Anyone could have done it. Anyone can misspell or mistype a word. But it’s something two ten-year-olds are more likely to
do.
My mouth falls open.
“Why would you do this?” I ask, my voice hollow and numb.
Detective Evans looks up. I feel his eyes on my face, though I’m looking down at Cass and Mae.
Cass doesn’t even try to deny it. Instead, she says, her eyes jerking up all of a sudden to mine, throwing her gaze back over
her shoulder to where I stand, “We didn’t know. It was a joke. We thought it would be funny.”
Funny.
They don’t understand the gravity of it. They don’t understand the million reasons why what they’ve done is wrong. Not only
were they toying with two grieving parents, dangling a carrot in front of their eyes, but they used Elliott’s iPad without
asking, they used his Facebook account to post something under his name. Nolan and Emily are dead because of them. Reese is
missing because of them.
“Can someone catch me up? What am I missing?” Detective Evans asks.
“Tell him,” I say to Cass. “Tell him what you did.”
Cass shakes her head, her hair falling in her eyes.
“No. You,” she says.
I’m short of breath as I tell him, “They made the Facebook post. They used my husband’s iPad to go on Facebook, to share that
picture of Reese, to pretend she’s that missing girl and to tell everyone where she is. Did you take that picture of her?”
I ask, thinking how I was so certain that Elliott had done it, that Elliott had sat there on his pool chair taking surreptitious
pictures of our teenage niece and that Reese had caught him and flicked him off.
Cass nods. It wasn’t Elliott taking the pictures. It was Cass and Mae.
“How? How did you even know how to do all that?”
Cass shrugs. It was easy, her body language says.
They’re ten, but so much more internet savvy than me.
Years ago, I let Cass set up her own Instagram page on my phone just for fun, telling her she had to ask permission before following anyone or accepting friend requests, and that it was for family only, to follow her cousins, aunts and uncles, things like that.
You’re supposed to be much older than she was at the time to have your own Instagram account, but how hard is it to lie about a birthdate?
It didn’t go as planned. I blamed myself for not paying better attention to what she was doing online, for not realizing that
Cass had, at some point, made her page public. She said it was an accident, but I wasn’t so sure. Either way, by the time
I figured it out, Cass had over five hundred followers, was following close to a thousand accounts and was DMing strangers.
So much for asking permission to follow people. I made her close the account down. I thought our troubles with the internet
were done then. I thought she’d learned something from that experience, but it turns out that I was wrong.
“What did you think was going to happen?” I ask.
Cass says it again, how they thought it would be funny.
“You didn’t think someone would go looking for her and believe that Reese really was this missing girl?”
She shakes her head. “No. She doesn’t even look like her.”
Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t.
But who’s to say what a grieving parent sees when they want so badly to believe?
Detective Evans digs into it for all of five minutes.
The Facebook page, he tells me, is owned by Sam and Joanna Matthews.
They started it shortly after Kylie went missing, because word spreads quickly on the internet.
Their reach was so much greater than simply hanging posters around town.
There are billions of active users on Facebook and over a thousand following their page, though it’s had less and less activity over the past year, other than the celebration of sad milestones like Kylie’s birthdays and anniversaries of the day she disappeared.
Until one night less than a week ago when someone claimed to have found Kylie alive.
Detective Evans pushes his chair abruptly back, the legs scraping across the linoleum floors, and stands up from the desk.
“Where are you going?” I ask, watching as he runs his hand over the gun in his hip holster as if to make sure it’s there.
He reaches onto the desktop for his keys.
“To speak with the Matthewses,” he says.
“Then I’m coming with you.” I look back over my shoulder, meet Wyatt’s eye. “Wyatt can stay here with the girls.”
Detective Evans shakes his head. “I can’t have that, Mrs. Gray. You need to stay here, to sit tight,” he tells me firmly,
leaving no room for debate. “If she’s there, I’ll bring her back to you.”