Courtney
After Detective Evans leaves, I manage to get a hold of Elliott, who’s been driving around town, searching for us, certain
that after he left for coffee, someone broke into the motel room and took us.
I tell him to come to the police station. I tell him I’ll fill him in on everything when he gets here, feeling guilty for
thinking he could have done this. He left the cottage at five o’clock to go fishing, like he said. He didn’t kill Emily and
Nolan. He didn’t take Reese.
Cass and Mae still sit on chairs beside Detective Evans’s desk.
They’re playing tic-tac-toe on scraps of paper they find, because they’re bored and have nothing else to do, and I wonder how long it will take for them to come to terms with what they’ve done.
There will be no punishment for them, nothing in the legal sense.
Impersonating someone on Facebook can be a crime, but at their age I can’t imagine they’ll get anything more than a slap on the wrist (if anyone will take the blame, it will be Elliott and me, for not keeping a better eye on them).
I wonder how long it will take for the weight of what they’ve done to sink in, if it will happen days from now or if it will be years before it happens, when they’re older and their prefrontal cortexes are finally fully developed.
Maybe then they’ll realize they’re culpable in two murders, if not three.
Reese.
I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t stop wondering if she was in Sam and Joanna’s house when I was there.
I think of what Joanna said to me that night as she, Sam and I sat around their kitchen table talking, about how Kylie and
Reese, with their similar hair and eyes, must be Daniel’s type. She looked me right in the eye that night and pleaded, her
voice desperate, The police need to find him, Courtney. He needs to pay for what he did to our girls.
Our girls.
Except Daniel didn’t do anything to Reese, which she knew. She intentionally misled me.
I can’t stop wondering if, when I was there, Reese was in a closet or the basement somewhere. If she heard my voice and my
footsteps, but if she was gagged and unable to scream.
Or maybe she was already dead.
Because it would have been a liability for Sam and Joanna to keep her alive, if and when they realized she wasn’t Kylie.