Abby flipped through her notes again, stopping on a random page. “Right, I remember that. Judy Martin cut her hair to punish the girls for wanting to live with their father. That must have been very difficult. It’s a shame they didn’t confide in you.”
Lisa Jennings held her palms to the sky. “Teenagers…”
“I remember being one,” Abby said. She smiled and touched the woman’s arm warmly. “Do you remember who told you about that—I mean, if the girls didn’t say anything?”
“Oh,” Lisa said. She was taken aback, then struggled to regroup. “You know, I think it was their father, Owen. Strange I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
Abby smiled. “Yes, it was.”
“And I’m sure you did everything you could,” Leo said. “You know what they say about hindsight.”
They said their good-byes. Abby rushed down the hall and out the door. Leo was right behind her. Neither of them spoke until they were outside, barreling down the stone steps to the parking lot.
“Holy shit,” Leo said.
“I know.” Abby was out of breath. Her heart was pounding. They stopped on either side of the car, looking at each other over the roof.
“What did Cass tell you about that story?”
“That only four people knew that it was Judy who cut off Emma’s hair.”
“Cass, Emma, Judy—”
“And Jonathan. Jonathan Martin.”
“Which means Owen Tanner could not have told her. No way Judy told her. And she would have remembered if one of the girls had told her.”
“She said she never met with the girls,” Abby continued.
“Which means Jonathan Martin told her. But why?”
Abby could see her thoughts playing out across Leo’s face. “The same reason she just lied about it.”
FIFTEEN
Cass
After my visit with Witt, I returned to Mrs. Martin’s house and began my mission to prove myself sane. It was day four of my return.
Mrs. Martin was beside herself with happiness. I had finally submitted to that psychological examination she wanted Dr. Winter to give me. It didn’t matter that it came back “normal.” What mattered was that my emotional state, my sanity, was now being discussed and examined along with the search for Emma.
When I first heard the words “psychological examination,” I imagined having to lie on a table with electrodes connected to my brain. I imagined it would be physically painful somehow, like shock therapy. But it had nothing to do with my brain. It was just a lot of paperwork, 567 questions on a form called the MMPI 2, whose answers were meant to indicate one thing or another. I could see the conclusions they would draw from the different answers. “I have bad thoughts more than once a week,” for example. Why would anyone answer yes to that? “Evil spirits possess me”? “I have acid in my stomach most of the time”? “If someone does something bad to me, I should pay him back”?
The questions jump around because they are trying to catch people who think they can trick the test. There were a few questions about sleep and other physical symptoms of stress or anxiety but then a question about self-esteem, for example. Some of them were very tricky, asking about authority figures and whether you sometimes feel alone in the world. No one understands you. I could see that if I answered them in a way to appear perfect, the test would flag me as being a liar. No one is perfect. And we all feel alone sometimes.
It was not hard to answer the questions and be found sane. It was not hard to also alert Dr. Winter to the extreme emotional stress I was under, both from my experience on the island and my obsession with finding my sister. “I have trouble sleeping.” “I can’t stop thinking the same thought over and over.” “I have trouble concentrating.” These were all answered with a yes.
Mrs. Martin was not only happy because the professionals were looking into my sanity; she was also happy because she was able to trust me again. I could see it on her face and from the amount of time and attention she gave me that afternoon. We went shopping for clothes. We got manicures. We went out to lunch. She talked more about town gossip and I pretended to care about all of it. She talked to me about being a woman, about my future and the things we needed to do for me, like getting a tutor and taking a vacation together, maybe to a spa in Florida. And at random moments, she would stop what she was doing and stare at my face. Her hand would cup my cheeks and she would shake her head and say how gorgeous I had become and how lucky she was to have me back.
And in everything she did and said to me, there ran an undercurrent of sympathy. I was crazy. Poor, crazy Cassandra.
Mrs. Martin has a switch. It goes on and off depending onhow she feels about you. If you adore her and are on her side, and if you make her feel good or look good to others, she trusts you and so she loves you. If you are a threat to her in any way, or competing with her for anything she wants or needs, she despises you and will dedicate herself to destroying you. In between, there is a neutral position in which she is indifferent. You have been fully neutralized, meaning you can never harm her. And you have nothing to offer her that she wants or needs. You cannot make her appear good or bad. You cannot make her feel good or bad.
It was easy to see the position of her switch with my father. After the custody fight, after she’d won, it was in neutral. My father would always love and desire her. He could not take anything from her. And she had beaten him publicly and won her daughters. She did not think at all about my father, except for that brief incident when I tried to leave her house and live with him. She took care of that with a pair of scissors—cutting off Emma’s hair to punish me, and I was punished because when Emma had to go to school like that, I felt her humiliation way down in my stomach, worse than if my own hair had been cut off. I always wanted my father to find a beautiful woman and marry her just to see my mother flip her switch to loving him again. She would have loved him to death, or at least until she won back his desire and could trust him again. But he was too close to see any of this.
It was very different with Mr. Martin. My mother never rested in her efforts to keep his desire, because it was always in jeopardy. Emma was a constant reminder of this, and as she got older, it got worse and worse. Mrs. Martin didn’t really love anyone, not the way I think of love. So I use that word more to describe how she acted toward people. Her switch for Mr. Martin was always on love.
With Emma, she could go back and forth in a matter of minutes. Emma made her feel proud because she was so desirable. The love switch was on. But then she would catch her husband looking just a little too long at Emma, and especially Hunter and Emma when they were together, and the switch flipped to hate. Emma was a proficient operator of Mrs. Martin’s switch. She had studied the circuit board for years and it came to her like her first language. It was effortless. Maybe even subconscious.
