Emma in the Night

by Wendy Walker

  I was lying on the ground in those woods, the hand over my mouth, staring into the eyes of Dr. Winter as I remembered the sound my sister made when she fell over that railing, over that balcony, and hit the ground below, as I remembered the sight of my mother staring at her still body, hands covering her mouth and finally silent.

  Dr. Winter

  When Cass saw who was holding her, she stopped fighting. Abby put a finger to her lips to tell her that they needed to be quiet and she nodded. She sat up then, beside Abby, and they both watched as Jonathan Martin dug into the ground with his shovel with Judy standing beside him sobbing like a small child.

  Agent Strauss was on the hill, crouched behind a wall of bushes, watching them dig.

  Cass

  I scurried like a quiet little mouse back into my room that night. I was shaking. I couldn’t think. I heard Mr. Martin come inside, and I peeked out the door enough to see him. He cried out in shock when he saw Emma lying on the ground, not moving. I did not see her with my own eyes, but I know she must have been still. I know there was no blood because they tested for blood all over our house when we disappeared and found none. But from the urgency in their voices, I knew it was bad.

  Mrs. Martin screamed from up above that it was an accident. That they’d been fighting and Emma pushed her and she pushed back and then she just fell!

  Mr. Martin sat beside Emma. Call 911, for Christ’s sake! Why are you just standing there? Oh, God!

  Mrs. Martin rushed down the stairs. Emma had told our mother that Hunter had raped her and that she was now pregnant. She said she was going to have the baby and that Hunter’s life would be ruined because he would go to jail and be a sex offender for the rest of his life. She said she was going to tell everyone whose baby it was so the world would know what kind of house this had become.

  I heard this explanation come from my mother’s mouth in a panicked voice after Mr. Martin asked, What happened, Judy! In the name of God, what happened here! Then they went back and forth with things like What do we do? What will happen to my son? They’ll find the baby inside her! They’ll find out who the father is! What will happen to him? What will happen to me? Dear God! What do we do? I was too scared to cry and could barely see through the haze of fear that covered my eyes like a white blanket. But I was able to see enough to notice the necklace that lay against the wall where my mother hung her treasured photos of us. It had broken from Emma’s neck and fallen into a little tangled ball between the wall and the edge of the carpet runner.

  I grabbed the necklace, then ran back into my room. I could only hear whispering because they had calmed down and were deciding about what to do. And then I heard shuffling and huffing and moaning coming from my mother and Mr. Martin and then walking and then the mudroom door and then the garage door and then a car leaving from the driveway. Emma’s car. Then I heard the mudroom door again, and my mother’s crying and babbling to herself as she stood in the foyer where Emma had landed.

  At some moment, she realized that she had not seen or heard me all afternoon. She walked up the stairs and down the hall and she came into my room. The light was off.

  Cass? Cass, where are you?

  I did not answer. I was hiding beneath my bed.

  When she left to look for me in the rest of the house, I lay there for several minutes letting this new realization sink in. Of all the things I had come to understand and regardless of how grown-up and clever I thought I was, I had never, ever considered this before. I had never imagined that my mother might actually kill me.

  Dr. Winter

  Jonathan Martin dug for close to an hour. The earth moved easily because it was more like silt, but he was digging in very deep. By the time he stopped, Judy was no longer crying but instead shining a light from her phone into the hole of soft dirt. She was staring into that hole with a blank expression. Jonathan reached down and pulled at something. It looked like some kind of bright green landscaping or lawn tarp. He used his hands to move the dirt away from it. He seemed frantic, like he wanted to get it over with, like he was desperate to move that earth and find what he was looking for.

  Abby held Cass tighter because she already knew.

  Cass

  Something green came from the ground. Then there was more digging. I could not see well, but I could see enough. He dug and dug, on his knees, until finally he pulled something else from the hole he’d made. He held it in the air and then looked at Mrs. Martin long enough for her to understand that what he was holding were the bones of my sister’s hand.

  When he drove away that night in Emma’s car, I had prayed that he was driving her to the hospital. Even though I had feared my mother might kill me that night when she came looking for me, I still would not believe Emma was dead. And even as I climbed from my bedroom window, without a coat or a purse or anything, climbed down from the roof and ran from that house, into the night, I did not believe it. Mr. Martin carried Emma to her car. That was the last thing I heard. And it was very possible he was taking her to get help.

  I walked four miles to the train station. I hid on a train to New York and then I walked to Penn Station. I remembered going there once with our father and he said you can get a train anywhere from there. I saw an ad pinned to a wall along one of the passageways. It said to call if you were a teenager and if you needed help. I called the number collect the way it said to. A man answered. His name was Bill. He talked to me for a while and said he could help, but I said I wasn’t sure and I hung up. I did not know where I should go. I considered calling Witt. I considered calling my father. I fell asleep before I made a decision.

  When I woke up, a man named Bill was sitting beside me. He had a cup of hot chocolate and a doughnut and a kind smile. There was a woman with him, and she looked nice. They asked if I was hungry. And I was. So very hungry.

  Dr. Winter

  When Cass saw Emma’s bones, she broke free of Abby’s hold and started to run toward the grave. Agent Strauss was barreling down the hill, gun drawn. He got to them first and got them to their knees. They were in shock, but Judy managed to start her defense right then and there, crying about how she had no idea her daughter was dead.

  She would later claim that she also had no idea how Emma died. She would testify that she came home to find Emma at the bottom of the stairs, already dead, and that her husband insisted they hide the body because she was pregnant with his son’s baby and he did not want his son’s life to be destroyed. He drove Emma’s car to the woods and buried her, then left the car at the beach so everyone would believe she had drowned in the ocean. She would turn on him viciously to save herself, disclosing his obsession with his son, his emotional abuse of Judy herself, and his attraction to her daughter.

  Jonathan Martin told a different story after conferring with his lawyers, the story that would eventually be believed by prosecutors and become the basis for a plea bargain. He told how he arrived home to find his stepdaughter dead. He admitted to being scared for his wife, who had killed her own daughter, and also for his son because of what Emma had said about being pregnant. He claimed he was overwrought with fear about what it would do to his son, so he hid the body and left the car at the beach to stage a drowning. He begged for understanding, for the compassion of fellow parents who do stupid things to protect their children.

  Jonathan Martin passed a polygraph. Judy refused to take one.

  An autopsy of Emma Tanner’s skeletal remains could not determine if she had ever been pregnant.

  Cass

  For days and weeks after I ran away, I watched any television show I could find as they reported about me and Emma and how we had disappeared. I talked to the Pratts about it, but I did not tell them the truth about Emma. I told them she had run away after fighting with our mother and that I couldn’t stay there without her.

  At first, I prayed that Mr. Martin had driven her to the hospital and that I would wake up to see news of that—of an accident in a home and the girl recovering nicely. When I heard ab
out the car being left at the beach, I knew they had staged her disappearance and used my own running away to give it credibility. And even then, I hoped beyond reason that I was wrong—that she was safe somewhere. That Mr. Martin had paid her to go away and never come back and that it was enough money for Emma to do it. Maybe she thought she could always come back for more and more and torture them all forever. Or maybe she had moved somewhere exotic and was living with a handsome native, or worshipped by an entire island of natives, and finally being happy. It was crazy to think this, but it was enough to keep me from going home, to hide in the train station so I could think of what to do. It was there that I met Bill and Lucy. I got in Bill’s car and rode all the way to Maine. And then got on Rick’s boat and felt free and powerful as we crossed the harbor to the most beautiful place I had ever seen.

  I returned after my escape to find my sister. I was still holding hope that she was alive somewhere—I gambled that I could make them bring her out of hiding. Or that the press would make her surface. I didn’t know the outcome. But I knew if I could make my mother doubt her husband, make her believe he had lied to her all this time because he had also cheated on her and because everyone was believing me that Emma was on the island, that she would break. Summer would become winter inside her mind and she would threaten to reveal what they had done that night, whatever it was, and that Mr. Martin would be forced to show her proof. That is what happens when we lose faith in a person. We have to see the evidence. Words and promises are no longer enough.

  I knew if I could do that, if I could break her, the truth would be set free.

  I ran to my sister’s grave, to my mother and my stepfather. I ran to Emma, finally, after all those years.

  Mr. Martin and my mother were on their knees with Agent Strauss holding a gun to them. They looked up when they heard me, and Mrs. Martin started pleading even harder for everyone to believe her about that night. Mr. Martin was silent. He had the good sense to wait for his lawyer.

  And with all this going on, all I could really see were the lifeless bones of my sister’s hand coming out from the ground. And all I could really hear was the scream inside me, echoing into the darkness.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Dr. Winter

  Finding Emma Tanner was not the end of the story. It was only the beginning.

  The investigation was taken over by local authorities. Detectives and prosecutors descended upon Cass, the Martin family and the Bureau as they attempted to piece together the events of the past three years.

  On the other side were two teams of defense attorneys, one for Judy Martin and one for Jonathan Martin. They aligned briefly for an offensive strike, going after the Bureau, Agent Leo Strauss and Dr. Abigail Winter. They made a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds of entrapment, seeking to dismiss the evidence and testimony from that night when the Martins led them to the body of the dead teenager. It was a frivolous legal argument because the Martins had not been coerced into committing any crime, but rather leading authorities to evidence of a prior crime. But the claim had to be defended.

  Leo was steadfast in his testimony at deposition. “We do it all the time. We lie to suspects about things we know and things we’ve found. We had a hunch and we went with it.”

  He did more than that. When pressed about where this hunch had come from, he mentioned the inconsistency with the location of the bedrooms. “Abby figured out that Emma had not been on that island, and she knew that Cass was saying things that didn’t add up. No—we did not know what had happened to Emma Tanner. We just knew that she had not been on that island and that someone in that house could have the answer.” He did not elaborate. But he took full responsibility for their tactics. He said it had been his idea. This was his case. He was the lead investigator and he made the call to run this lead without involving anyone else on the team—except, of course, for Dr. Winter. “Why? Because she knew that family better than anyone. Because I needed her.”

  Abby had weighed in on the reasons Cass had told them things that were not true with a theory that made it impossible for them to charge her. “I believe Cass Tanner was in a state of profound emotional stress, which caused her to have short-term dissociative disorder. It’s common in cases of severe stress like this. It is my opinion that the trauma of her escape and the return home, where she relived the death of her sister and faced the extreme conflict of being home with her mother but also knowing what her mother had done, were too much for her to handle. She created a false reality to cope. A reality where her mother was not responsible for her sister’s death and was therefore a safe place for her to be. She needed to feel safe again.”

  She went on from there, on the pathology of short-term dissociative disorder and her opinion that Cass was now well—that she had a full recollection of what happened to her sister and understood now that her sister was dead. She had insisted that the other stories about the island were true, that they had happened to her, and that she had no idea how Richard Foley died. She had come to remember meeting Bill and Lucy Pratt at Penn Station, how they offered her hot chocolate and then, after learning she’d run away, a place to stay.

  And the story about the beach, the one described with meticulous detail right down to the moonlight and the sand groomer—well, that was all just part of the delusion. Her mind could not dismiss the facts of Emma’s disappearance, so it incorporated them into the fantasy.

  Of course, none of this was true. Cass knew exactly what she was doing when she told that story. She had crafted it perfectly—fitting the details to the factual findings so the Bureau would believe her, letting her mother spin theories about what had really happened that night after her husband drove off with Emma’s body.

  No charges were brought against Cass. Her attorney used public sympathy and Dr. Winter’s testimony to weigh on the prosecutor and block every effort to have Cass evaluated again. Other than one visit to her pediatrician, Cass evaded physical examinations as well.

  In the end, they rolled Jonathan Martin with a plea deal for obstructing justice in exchange for his testimony. A forensic autopsy confirmed a broken neck—Emma had been dead on impact. They used Abby’s theory to explain Cass’s behavior and convince the jury that she was sane. Both testified against Judy Martin, who was, in the end, convicted of federal obstruction charges. But without more of a motive, without the truth about what had gone on in that house, and with two possible theories about how Emma fell—at the hand of Judy Martin or the hand of Jonathan Martin—the jury was hung on the charge of manslaughter.

  Abby and Leo had not been in the same room until the day of sentencing nearly seven months after finding Emma’s body in the woods. They had to be careful about appearances. But Abby had met with Cass to help with the evaluation of her mental state. And Leo had written reports, given depositions, and met with the higher-ups at the New Haven field office to walk them through everything that had happened.

  The investigation had not ended, even after the conviction of Judy Martin. There was the death of the boatman, Richard Foley, which was being investigated by the Maine state police in conjunction with the Bureau. The working theory had it pinned on the Petersons. Their rowboat was found in a wooded area near the water’s edge in nearby Christmas Cove, confirming their hasty departure from the island. The couple had not been found. The Bureau was heading up the search for them—Carl and Lorna Peterson, a.k.a Bill and Lucy Pratt—and possibly one unidentified child whose clothes were found in the dresser drawers.

  There were two pieces of the puzzle that had fallen through the cracks. The first was the child.

  Other than one book of lullabies, some clothing in a drawer and a crib found in the basement of the house on the island, there was no evidence of a child. Dishes, drains, linens were initially examined for biological evidence, but the search came to a screeching halt after Emma’s body was found. With Abby’s guidance, Cass was able to process what had transpired and soon reported that the child had, in fact, been part of
her delusion. The working theory was now that the clothing and crib and the book were keepsakes from the child the Petersons had lost years before—although that child had been a two-year-old boy, and the clothes belonged to a two-year-old girl. Still, there was no reason to expend additional resources on forensic evaluations until they found the Petersons and had some kind of crime to prove.

  The second piece was composed of the family dynamics that preceded the fatal incident on the balcony of the Martins’ home. They had some idea that Emma and her mother had a volatile relationship. Owen Tanner testified about the fighting between them. So did Witt. But Owen could not bring himself to accept that Judy had killed their daughter. He bent his testimony to cast the doubt on Jonathan and Hunter. The defense introduced evidence about the nude photos, which gave Jonathan Martin a motive, undermining his credibility. Hunter Martin, likewise, was offered as a witness by the prosecution to support his father’s testimony and cast the doubt back on Judy. He told of Emma’s promiscuity and Judy’s jealousy of her—things he observed merely as an innocent bystander. He denied getting Emma pregnant. And while Cass recounted the story about Emma’s hair and, of course, what she recalled about the night her sister fell to her death, her testimony came under fierce scrutiny. After all, she had been delusional. She had told everyone, in great detail, about her sister’s being alive and having given birth to a child that was never born.

  Wasn’t there anything else? The prosecutors had begged her for more stories about her childhood with Judy Martin—anything that would help the jury leap the hurdles they were asking them to clear to find Judy guilty over her husband. But Cass insisted she had nothing. And so the jury remained uncertain and unable to convict her of more than the obstruction charge, and a panoply of smaller crimes related to the removal and burial of the body.

  “There’s more. I know there is.”