Jonathan dug in deeper. “Why don’t you just say what you want to say?”
“You had an affair with her. It was still going on when the girls disappeared,” Leo said calmly. “You met at an open house for the school. She’s quite attractive.”
“That’s absurd,” Jonathan insisted.
Abby studied his face as Leo laid out the evidence. After their meeting with Jennings, they had gone back to the file and the two years of records that had been collected from Jonathan Martin’s cell phone during the original investigation. The analyst who had gone over the records when the girls first disappeared had written a report, listing the phone numbers called and texted and the names of their owners. Dozens of calls and texts had been made to Lisa Jennings. Too much time had passed to obtain the content of the text messages between the two of them. There were no hotels or meals or travel. No doorman at her small walk-up who would have seen them coming and going. Essentially, they had nothing. Except her confession.
“I told you I was trying to help. That I was trying to get information from her,” Jonathan explained.
Leo had accepted his explanation back then—that he was calling with concerns for the girls. Lisa Jennings had also been extensively interviewed, with no red flags appearing. The focus at the time had been on strangers, outsiders—people who could have kidnapped or harmed the girls, not the relationships between the people who had been trying to help them.
Looking back at it now, through the lens of suspicion, it was strange that Jonathan had contacted anyone at the girls’ school. And now they knew why.
“We went back to see Lisa Jennings after we pulled the phone records, and that’s not the explanation she gave us. She told us all about the flirtation at that school function, the slow seduction over text messages, and then the afternoons in her apartment. It had gone on for several months before the girls disappeared. Your stepdaughters.”
Lisa Jennings had not held out for long. They explained to her about the lie she had told—hearing the story about Emma’s hairfrom Owen Tanner. Owen had not known. From there, they had the phone calls and text messages. She was a millennial, accustomed to the indelible footprints of social media, so it was not difficult to convince her that the text messages had been stored by her carrier.
She’d had tears in her eyes when she told them about her realization that he never loved her, about how easy it was for Jonathan to cut it off with a phone call. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. Of course it had to end, at least for while, during the search for the girls. The family, the school—they were under a spotlight. It was the fact that he felt nothing at all. No sadness, no longing, no empty spaces left behind. She had felt all those things. He had made her feel them—“I can see now that it was all a lie. All the tenderness in his eyes and the words on his breath—they were all lies. And he was very, very good at lying.”
“Well,” Jonathan said now on the porch. “She’s obviously very disturbed.”
Abby studied him while he and Leo did their dance. He was smug. He knew they could never prove that he’d slept with the young woman. But they weren’t putting him on trial. His feigned ignorance when they spoke her name confirmed the affair, and that was what they had come for. Confirmation.
Lisa Jennings had also told them about his obsession with his son. How he spoke of him like he was “God’s gift” even though she’d seen him and he looked like “a scrawny, self-entitled prick.” She said that even though she had believed he loved her, she always knew that Jonathan would give her up in a heartbeat to keep the family name clean.
She agreed to work with an agent in New Haven. To turn over her phone records. To take a polygraph to prove she had nothing to do with the girls’ disappearance—that it was an affair withtheir stepfather and nothing more. Soon, she would hire an attorney and probably do none of those things without immunity. But she would do them.
It felt like a lead. Jonathan Martin had told her things, confided in her about his wife and the girls and his son. Things could fall from her memory that seemed inconsequential but perhaps could lead them to the Pratts, or identify the father of Emma’s baby.
Leo would focus on that, on the connection between Lisa Jennings, Jonathan Martin and a possible link to finding the Pratts’ identity.
But Abby was curious about one other thing, and that was why Cass had given them the bread crumbs that led to this door. Cass had lied about Emma’s relationship with Lisa Jennings. That much they believed, which meant Cass had to have known about the affair—and wanted it exposed. Why else would she make up a lie to send them back there? She wanted them to question Jonathan Martin, and then question her mother so she would finally know. But to what end? Revenge for her terrible childhood? Or something else? Abby had no doubt that Cass knew exactly what they would find when they tracked down Lisa Jennings.
Leo was quiet for a long moment. Then he asked a question that they had not planned on. “Did you ever refer to Emma Tanner as Lolita?”
Jonathan Martin’s back straightened abruptly. He looked disgusted by the question, but it was overplayed. “That’s enough,” he said, getting up from the chair.
Lisa Jennings told them how Jonathan Martin talked about survival of the fittest, about how history had proved that the tribe was always the strongest force. That only when a tribe was infiltrated by outsiders was it conquered. He had numerous examplesfrom history and he held extreme political views about how to keep this from happening. Lisa Jennings had asked him how this applied to his blended family, and he had spoken about the girls. Cass, he’d said, was no threat. She was weak. She was a follower. But Emma, she was trouble. She wanted power and didn’t know her place the way her mother did. He’d suggested that she was aware of her appeal with men and had started to use it. She said Jonathan had used that expression—Lolita.
Leo and Abby stood as well, Leo blocking Jonathan’s path back to the door.
“I find this all disgusting,” he said. “My daughter is missing and you’re wasting all of our time on this nonsense. I think you should leave now before you upset my wife.”
Leo stepped aside and let him pass. Abby waited until he was gone before letting out the breath she’d been holding.
She looked at Leo and smiled.
“What? You look surprised.”
She was surprised. He was asking questions about the family.
“What are you thinking, Leo? Lolita was a young schoolgirl who seduced an older man—”
“He didn’t go to Paris that summer, if that’s where you’re headed. Neither did the stepbrother, Hunter.”
“You ran that? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Leo motioned for them to walk farther from the house, down the porch steps to the driveway.
