Melissa wasn’t sure if her mother had been holding her for five seconds or five minutes. In recent years, Melissa had noticed how much smaller her mother had gotten with age, but at this moment, Nancy Eldredge felt as solid as an oak tree.
Only yesterday morning, she was excited with the anticipation of welcoming her mother to her new house, proud that she and Mike had worked together to make the cottage feel like home. She allowed herself to be wrapped in the security of her mother’s embrace, knowing that when she let go, she would have to return to the awful truth.
She finally brought herself back to reality when the police officer who had drawn her blood coughed to get her attention. He had packed up his kit and needed to walk past them to leave the cottage.
Through the front window, she watched her SUV being pulled away by a tow truck. She knew from the warrant they had served upon her that her car would be impounded at the police station for a complete forensic search. Her thoughts flashed to the list of items specified in the search warrant: latent fingerprint evidence, hair, blood—including inside the trunk. The thought of it was horrifying.
“How in the world could those people possibly suspect you of harming Riley?” Her mother’s usually gentle voice sparked with anger.
Mike’s brow furrowed as he looked at their mother with grave concern.
“I’m sorry I upset you, Mom,” Melissa said. “I shouldn’t have been so dramatic. I’m sure I’m not really a suspect. The police are just being thorough, checking all the boxes.”
Mike was already in the kitchen, heating a kettle on the stove, reaching in the cupboard for the herbal tea that had been part of their grocery run only forty-eight hours earlier. “Melissa’s right,” he said. “Those detectives practically did a stakeout on me last night until they realized I was looking at boat outfits all afternoon with two locals.” He tried to deflect their mother’s worry with a light chuckle, but the attempt at levity fell flat.
“The two of you are treating me like some kind of geriatric invalid, and, frankly, it’s insulting. I will never forgive myself for leaving you alone in the yard that day, even for a few minutes, and I know all too well the harm you suffered as a result. But I think you forget what I went through. Do you know that I dove into the ice-cold lake, frantically grasping for you beneath the water? When I couldn’t find you, I was convinced you had drowned and I would never find you. Your father found me on the freezing sand, my sopping clothes clinging to me. I was clutching your little red glove to my cheek, Melissa. At first, the police were supportive. Sympathetic. Even compassionate. But once they learned my true identity—that I was the notorious Nancy Harmon—everything changed. They were convinced that when I found out my secret was going to be exposed, I had a psychotic break and did the same thing to the two of you that I supposedly did to Peter and Lisa.”
Psychotic break, the same term Marino had used.
Melissa had never heard her mother speak so candidly about what she experienced when they were abducted. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “We both know this must be terribly traumatic for you.”
“Stop it!” her mother snapped. “You’re such a bright woman, Melissa. The teachers all said you are literally a genius. But you are missing my point entirely. I, of all people, know damn well what was going on at this house when we got here. I could sense it immediately from the way the detectives looked at us when you opened the door. Did they even bother to comfort me about the fact that my granddaughter is missing? No. They couldn’t get out of here fast enough, because they probably see me as some frail little old lady, too, and didn’t want me to know the truth. So stop trying to protect your mother.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Mike reappeared with a cup and saucer, the tea bag still steeping. “May I give this to you, or are you too gangster for herbal tea now?”
Their mother accepted the drink with an amused eye roll. “Now, both of you, sit down and tell me everything.”
For the next half hour, Melissa forced herself to step outside of her own body and recite the bare facts as if she were a lawyer summarizing a case for a colleague. It wasn’t until she heard the evidence in her own words that she realized why she was the natural, predictable, even inevitable suspect.
What had the detectives called it? Coincidences stacked upon more coincidences. Melissa was the last person known to have seen Riley, the only one entrusted with her care that day, and the doors of the house were locked when Mike came home to find Riley missing. Her lifestyle had suddenly morphed from that of a single professional to a woman juggling a career, social life, husband, and toddler. She had spent months researching an unsolved case where police suspected that an unhappy woman murdered her young stepchild so she could have freedom beyond the confines of caretaking. She was recorded on her podcast agreeing that the stepmother never would have even been a suspect if she had been smart enough to leave her cell phone at home when she drove, as police suspected, to a nearby island to get rid of the body.
And then, the piece of evidence that probably explained both the search warrant for her car and the many unanswered phone calls to her own husband—the videotape of a woman driving a child to a nearby island in an SUV that looked just like hers, and then returning to the South Fork alone.
At some point during her monologue, the protection of her unemotional, lawyerly objectivity had failed her. She pressed her face into her hands and squeezed her temples as if she might literally control the direction of her thoughts. Why hadn’t she seen it earlier? She knew from her own work that people who had never even gotten a traffic ticket could commit horrible acts under intense psychological pressure. Many of them were so shocked by their own conduct that they repressed the crimes entirely from their consciousness, claiming to have experienced either amnesia or a blackout.
How many times had Mike warned her that she couldn’t keep ignoring the damage that had been done to them? He warned her that the trauma would find a way to make it to the surface. Those terrible nightmares were her subconscious’s way of telling her that the illusion of normalcy she had so carefully constructed over the years was beginning to crumble. She remembered the look of worry—no, she thought in retrospect—the look of pity on Charlie’s face when he found her in the middle of the night, wrapped in a towel, staring at the water gushing into the empty tub. And just two days earlier, she had wandered out to the beach before dawn, crying out like a toddler for her mother, with no memory of how she got there.
What else had she blocked out?
She finally realized where the flashes of thoughts were leading. “What if—” She removed her hands from her face, but couldn’t bring herself to look at her family. Her arms began to tremble involuntarily as if her very bones were trying to tell her the truth about what had happened in this house the previous day. “Oh my God, what if… they’re actually right? This is all because of me. I tried so hard to make the past go away—like, poof, it never happened. Happiness is a choice? How arrogant and stupid I was. But it’s exactly what you said, Mike. Eventually that trauma is going to find a way to express itself. What if, what if… Poor little Riley. Oh dear God, no. Please don’t let it be possible.”
Beside her, her mother placed her cup decisively on the table and then shifted on the sofa to grab Melissa’s hands. “Look at me, Melissa.”
Melissa’s gaze remained on her lap as she shook her head. In a weak voice she barely recognized, she said, “Maybe if I go to Shelter Island, something will look familiar. Maybe I’ll remember. I just need to remember. If I did this, I have to tell them—”
Her mother’s voice grew even more firm. “Please, my beautiful, compassionate, generous, brilliant, and very stubborn daughter. I need you to look at me right now.”
Melissa complied as instructed.
“I have been where you are. You and your brother didn’t want me to know the truth about what’s going on because it would dig up all that pain I suffered—that we suffered—forty years ago. Well, you were right, and that’s exactly why you need to listen to me. Everything you said just now, I heard in my own voice. Back when I was in California—before you were born, before I met your daddy, when I was being held for trial after Peter and Lisa were killed, I used to pray every morning and every night in my jail cell. Peace… give me peace. Let me learn to accept. I knew there was no way I could have hurt my children. They were me. I felt like I died when they died. And yet my prayer to God was to help me accept that they were gone, and to also accept my punishment, because I blamed myself. Did I ever tell you that I’ve listened to the tape recordings with Dr. Miles?”
Dr. Lendon Miles was an esteemed psychiatrist who had been deeply in love with Nancy’s mother before she died in what police initially believed was a tragic car accident shortly after meeting Nancy’s new fiancé. After Mike and Melissa were kidnapped, Dr. Miles was determined to help the family of the woman he had never stopped loving. When their mother claimed not to recall the events surrounding her children’s abduction, he questioned her under an injection of sodium amytal to relieve her of what he suspected was a form of amnesia resulting from a psychologically catastrophic experience.
“When I agreed to let Lendon give me the injection,” her mother said, “it was out of desperation. I would have done anything to help find you. But once the drug took effect, I fell into a manageable state of calm, at least compared to the state of shock in which I had spent the rest of the day. Does that make any sense? It felt like a sudden awakening.”
“Are you suggesting I find a psychiatrist to help me remember what happened yesterday?”
“No, because I don’t think you repressed anything at all. When the injection Lendon gave me wore off, I felt a newfound certainty. Your father said he’d never heard me sound so forceful. I was absolutely confident that I could help the police get you back home. After hours of wallowing, I got myself off that sofa and out of my bathrobe. I never would have had the strength to pull you from Carl’s arms as he fell from that balcony if I hadn’t made a decision to believe in myself. That little voice of doubt that you’ve allowed to whisper in your ear? What if I did something awful? That’s not because you did anything wrong, Melissa. It’s because you love that little girl like she’s your own heart.”
Melissa had been trying to identify the helix of emotions she’d been spiraling through for the last two days. Fear. Anger. Helplessness. But one feeling remained constant and overwhelming: guilt. Deep in the pit of her gut she knew that she was responsible for Riley’s disappearance and any other harm that came to her. “I feel paralyzed by this crushing pressure of guilt. What if it’s my subconscious telling me that I actually did something bad while I was blacked out?”
“There would be something wrong with you if you didn’t feel guilty,” her mother said. “I think you feel just like I did after I left Peter and Lisa in the car while I ran into the market, only to find them missing when I returned. And then I swore when your father and I decided to have children that I would never, ever, ever take the smallest risk at your expense. But that’s impossible, don’t you see? That horrible day, I took my eyes off the two of you for the tiniest moment when you were playing in the yard. Part of me will never forgive myself, but I have learned that I didn’t belong in prison for it. Carl Harmon did, and he eventually paid the ultimate price. Now, you know you can tell me anything in the world, and I will still love and stand by you without conditions. Do you really think there’s any chance at all you did something to hurt Riley?”
Melissa pressed her lips together and felt a rush of blood to her face. She shook her head, grateful for what felt in that moment as an unquestionable and fundamental truth. “Never,” she said. “It’s absolutely impossible.”
“Okay, then. Consider that to be my equivalent of Dr. Miles’s truth serum, the clarity you needed. Now, we need to get to work finding Riley.”
Melissa placed three more back-to-back calls to Charlie. His outgoing voice message announced that the mailbox was full.
She moved on to another call to Mac and was surprised when he actually answered. “Hi.”
That’s it? she wanted to scream. HIIII?!
Instead, she thanked him for answering. “I don’t know how much they’ve told you, but I need to talk to Charlie. Where are you guys?”
“As of right now, I’m in your mom’s driveway. Can I come inside?”