Lucy had homeschooled them. There were textbooks that came in the mail and were delivered by the boatman. They studied every day, took tests and wrote papers. Lucy appeared to be highly educated and she had deep conversations about novels and history. All these things help forge a strong bond between the Pratts and the Tanner sisters. Of course there would be confusion when their interests became adversarial and the Pratts started to turn on them.
Abby remembered a small, insignificant piece of the story, which now felt more important. “She said something else—find the part where she talks about the books they read.…”
“Here…”
“My favorite book we read wasThe French Lieutenant’s Woman.It was so tragic. Lucy explained to us why Sarah Woodruff had lied about her life as the Lieutenant’s lover. How she knew that people believe what they want to believe. She explained everything so well and we both thought she was really smart and insightful.”
“People believe what they want to believe.” Leo repeated Cass’s words.
“So what is it we all want to believe?”
“I don’t know, kiddo. But this person who helped Emma find Bill Pratt—it had to be an adult. We can look for people who might have crossed paths with Emma back then—and who had affiliations with groups like that, or maybe worked with troubled teens. That narrows things down. Maybe we can go back through the file for that,” Leo said.
He kept talking when Abby didn’t answer.
“We’ll have the sketches of the Pratts and the boatman later today. He might be the key to this whole thing—the boatman. He shops and gets gas and lives on the mainland. We find him, he brings us to the island. Or we find where he lived, where he kept the boat, and we narrow the search to a few dozen of them. That’s all we need.”
Leo had already said this. Abby had already thought it. They all had. Cass had given them so much information yet so little to help narrow the search. They’d asked about the shape of the island, the size. The curvature of the land masses she could see in the distance. Marine life. Plant life. Animal life. She had seen many landmarks, lighthouses and topography, but nothing unique for coastal Maine.
And it was not like California, where everyone traveled everywhere up and down the coast. These towns that were nestled in the jagged inlets and harbors were isolated and insular. People traveled between them mostly by boat because there were few bridges connecting them, and the drive back to the thoroughfareswas long and slowgoing. The locals kept their heads down and worked hard making a living from fishing and vacationers. The tourists came and went with the summer months, usually returning to the same place year after year. Many of the properties along the coast were second homes to people who wouldn’t know one town from the next. Reaching them with national media would be a challenge as well, and this would make the sketches less useful than everyone wanted to believe.
There was a chance someone from the Pratts’ former life would recognize them. A family member, neighbor, schoolmate. They were in their forties, so it was unlikely they’d been on that island and off the grid for more than a decade. They had to have worked, gone to school, accumulated the resources that now afforded them the luxury of hiding.
And there was also the story of the boatman.
“Go back to him,” Abby said. “Go back to the part about the boatman.”
Leo found the story of Rick and his time in Alaska.
“I think Bill told us Rick’s stories because it made him and Lucy feel like they had saved his life and they wanted us to think that they were good people. I didn’t know how much about it to believe. They said he was abused by his parents, physically with beatings and stuff, and that’s why he used drugs and was violent with them. He left home and went to Alaska because you can get good jobs on fishing boats there and they don’t care how old you are. You can make around fifty thousand dollars in a few months, and you get to live on the boat and get free food so all that money you can just save and then live off of it for a while. But Bill said some of the men on those boats were bad men. Evil and violent and without any consciences or morals. They used to catch seagulls with their fishing hooks and then torture them to death on the deck. They hadcontests to see which one could cause the most screaming by the birds because birds can make a scream when they are in pain. Bill said it was from being out at sea for so long. He said it wasn’t normal and it destroyed their minds. But I thought, after hearing the story, that it probably had more to do with type of people who end up there. Don’t you think?
“Rick felt this way—like he was damaged. He told Bill that he started to think he was one of them. He felt like he belonged there because they were all living on the outside looking in at normal life, at love and families. None of them had that. Rick tortured the birds. He caught the fish. He ate the nasty food and drank a lot of cheap whiskey. But then something really bad happened. A woman from the state fishing office came on the boat for a week to monitor their catch and practices because I guess that has to be done for the law in Alaska and she just happened to have that job. She was in her forties, married with kids. Kind of ugly, and I guess very hard-looking from working with all these psycho fishermen. But she didn’t like what they were doing to the birds and so she told them to stop or she would report them to the police when they got back to shore. They didn’t like that. So one night, they went into her room and pulled her out of bed and up the stairs to the deck, where they took off her clothes, tied her up in fishing net and took turns having sex with her. Rick said the men who did this went into every fisherman’s bunk and made them come to the deck to watch or take a turn. He said more than seven men had a turn before they cut the net and let her go back to her room. Rick said he was not one of the seven but he was made to watch. He said he was afraid of what they would do if he refused. When it was over, he went back to his bunk and threw up all night.”
Cass went on with the story. She said the woman was trapped on the boat for nine days. She did not leave her room, not even for food. There was no way to get off the boat until the helicoptercame on the day it was scheduled. They would not allow her to use the radio to call for help sooner. She reported that she feared for her life. That she heard them sometimes through the walls, debating whether she would report the attack and if it would just be better to kill her and say it was an accident. There were a lot of ways to die on one of those boats. When the boat got back to port two months later, all the men were questioned about the incident. But they were not fired, and none of them was prosecuted. They stuck together with their story that she made it all up because she tried to have sex with one of the fishermen and was turned down. No one believed her.
“Rick came to Maine to work as a driver of a delivery boat. He started using heroin. When the Pratts hired him for a job and then got to know him and saw his addiction, they took him in, helped him get clean. Helped him make amends by telling the authorities what had happened on that boat. By then, the woman didn’t want to be involved. But the story was reported in the paper, and all of the men who had participated in the incident were named there.”
Leo stopped the recording.
“Cass said the boatman helped her escape, but she didn’t say how this story plays into any of that,” Abby said.
“We can ask her when we go back in. But I think we have enough to find this guy. How many gang rapes on a fishing boat in Alaska could be in the papers? We find the article, the reporter maybe, and we’ll know the town he lived in. That should be enough.”
Abby was quiet, thinking about this story.
“I know that expression, Abigail. Even after all this time. There’s nothing you could have done. We worked every lead we could find.”
Abby hesitated before telling him the truth. But then she did. “It was hard to be in the room with her.”
“Cass?”
“No—that felt like a miracle. To see her alive, even after what she’s been through. My God, compared to the things I’ve imagined. The things that have snuck into dreams…”
“I’ve never stopped seeing her face. Or Emma’s,” Leo said. “So it was seeing Judy that was hard? Even now? Even knowing she had nothing to do with their disappearance? I thought you’d be relieved.”
Abby looked away.
But Leo was not deterred. “Do you want to talk about it?”
