Emma in the Night: The bestselling new gripping thriller from the author of All is Not Forgotten. Wendy Walker
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they disappeared.
Only that wasn’t the truth. Leo interviewed the woman at the store who sold Judy that necklace—a twenty-dollar trinket. The woman was the store’s owner, a small shop that catered to teenage girls with overpriced jeans, short miniskirts and trendy throwaway jewelry. She knew the girls and their mother. They’d been shopping there for years, and the mother never failed to express her disdain for the merchandise in a whispered voice that would carry throughout the store.
The woman recalled two encounters with Judy Martin and the necklace. In the first, Judy, Cass and Emma stopped to browse while shopping for school clothes. The younger girl, Cass, picked up the necklace and sighed. She asked her mother to buy it for her. Judy Martin took it from her hands, told her it was “cheap garbage” and that she should learn to have better taste. The girl asked again, telling her mother how much she loved it. The angel reminded her of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan—and that had been her favorite book when she was little. Apparently, her father had read it to her every night. Peter Pan. This did not help her cause. Judy Martin admonished her even more harshly, and then started walking away. Both girls followed. The older one, Emma, bumped shoulders with her sister, making her trip. She held up her hand to her forehead in the shape of an L. Loser.
The next day, Judy Martin returned and bought the necklace. The woman remembered smiling because she thought the mother was buying the necklace for the girl who’d asked for it—the younger one. Leo asked her, holding two pictures in his hands—“Are you certain it was this girl, Cass Tanner, and not this girl, Emma Tanner, who picked out the necklace?”
The owner was certain. “When I saw that interview, the one with the mother, Judy, I couldn’t believe it. She was saying how she’d bought the necklace for the older daughter, Emma. And I guess she did—right? Gave the necklace to Emma and not to the other sister, who wanted it?”
Emma had worn the necklace every day. Friends confirmed it. Her father confirmed it. The school confirmed it. There was no doubt that Judy Martin had gone back to the store and bought the necklace for Emma. Not Cass.
The shrink weighed in. “Maybe the clerk was mistaken, Abby.”
That’s what Leo had thought. And that’s what the department had said when they dismissed her theory about the family after the evidence came up with nothing solid—and after the family had started to push back with lawyers and tears in front of cameras.
But Abby knew the truth. This is what they do, people like Judy Martin. They are masterful in their deception. They are relentless in their manipulation. Abby had not only studied these things; she had lived them, too.
Verse number five.
The shrink—“Was she ever diagnosed? Your mother?”
No. Never. And Abby had been the only member of the family to know there was something that needed to be diagnosed. Not her father. Not her stepmother. And not even her sister, Meg, who to this day still thought of their mother as “overindulgent” and “free-spirited.”
The shrink—“Do you think that’s why you went into this field? Why you wrote your thesis on the cycle of narcissism in families?”
And what did that prove? It had not been a conscious decision, studying psychology. But when Abby had first read about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, the adrenaline had rushed in so hard and fast, it sent her to her knees. Right there in the library at Yale. Right there in front of her roommate, who thought she’d had a stroke. Abby had wanted to curl up on the floor and swim in it—the understanding that was seeping from the words in that textbook.
It was an illness that everyone thought they understood, assigning the label “narcissist” to every girl who looked twice in a mirror and every guy who never called. Books and films labeled every selfish character a “narcissist,” but then there would be redemption, reconciliation, seeing the light. Few people really knew what this illness was. What it really looked like. There was never redemption. Or reconciliation. There was no light to be seen. It was the combination of these things—misperception and overuse—that made this illness so dangerous.
Verse number six.
The shrink—“Let’s play it out. Let’s say they did push harder—went to court to get orders for psych evals, battled the local media, which was squarely behind the grieving parents. Let’s say they found that Judy had some kind of personality disorder. And maybe Owen Tanner had depression. And maybe Jonathan Martin was an alcoholic and his son ADHD. On and on—let’s just say they found the mother lode of psychiatric conditions. That does not mean they would have found the girls.”
And there it was—the lifeboat. Abby had climbed into it, and it had saved her. Anytime she fell out, when she thought about that necklace, the third alarm bell that had convinced her beyond doubt that the family was involved in the girls’ disappearance—she would climb back into that boat and keep herself from drowning.
“It may not have saved them.”
It may not have saved them.
This verse, this lifeboat, had saved her. But it had not brought her one moment of peace.
As she peeled out of her driveway, the sun’s light piercing her eyes, she turned to the last page of the Bible, the one verse that had been left blank. The one that called out for words. For answers. And she couldn’t stop herself from hoping that now, finally, it would be written.
Ilay in the bed with my mother’s arms around me. My hair was wet and I could feel water bleed into the pillowcase and turn cold against my cheek. She was crying. Sobbing.
“Oh, Cassandra! My baby! My baby!”
I have already said that I had imagined this moment for three years. And after all the time I had to prepare, I was, still, shockingly unprepared.
Her body felt frail to me, and I tried to remember the last time I’d felt it. She had withdrawn much of her physical affection after the custody fight, but not all of it. There were hugs on special occasions, her birthday and Mother’s Day especially because our father gave us money to buy her gifts. I did not remember it feeling like this. Hard bones.
“My baby! Thank you, God! Thank you!”
What I had not been prepared for, and what I had not imagined even one time during my years of imagining the moment of my return, was the expression on her face when she first saw me again on her front porch less than an hour before.
I had stood there for ninety seconds before ringing the doorbell. I was counting them in my head, which is something I have done for as long as I can remember. I can count seconds perfectly, and from there, minutes and even hours. I had to ring the bell four times before I heard feet bounding down the hard wood stairs from the second floor. It is an above-average-sized house where we live, but where we live, the average house costs over a million dollars. It was built in the 1950s, a traditional white colonial, with three additions, including the porch, and multiple renovations. Mrs. Martin did more work after we were gone. I could see a sunroom and study where there had once been a small garden. We also have nearly five acres of property, a pool house, a tennis court and lots of woods to get lost in. Land is very expensive here. So while the house was small enough that I could hear my mother coming down the stairs, she was coming down stairs of a very costly estate. She would want me to make that clear.
As I heard the lock turn, I felt the ground give way beneath my feet. I had been through the same door thousands of times, behind Emma, looking for Emma, calling for Emma. Every face my sister ever wore, changed by mood and growth and the weathering of time, came before my eyes as though they were warning me while the door slowly opened. I almost said her name. I could feel it in my mouth. Emma. I wanted to fall to my knees, bury my eyes into my