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 wayage progressedwas misspelled on the Facebook post, with only ones. 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 Cassset 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?
