The Long Way Back, page 12
“We both have,” Charlie admits, the pit in her stomach expanding to a gaping black hole. “Nothing too serious. We always blocked them immediately.”
“Have you ever met one of them in person?”
There were so many accounts that they flagged and messages they deleted without reading past the very first line. But they had also come face-to-face with people who would do them harm. Charlie thought of Majestic Island. Of the shrill troll who thought it was her God-given job to track them down. And the guy who somehow figured out they were at the rodeo in Cody, Wyoming. Nothing serious had ever happened—praise the Lord—and they’d always felt safe enough. Truthfully, their life on the road didn’t seem much riskier than a run-of-the-mill existence. The statistics are well known: most car crashes happen close to home; most violent crimes are committed by someone who intimately knows the victim. Still, Charlie and Eva put themselves out there in a way that opened the door to danger. She knew it.
“Yes,” Charlie says carefully. “We met some weirdos. But we were never hurt. We never had to file a restraining order or anything.”
“Lucky for you.”
Charlie wants to glare at Detective James, but she knows her every movement is being recorded. She tips her head so the bill of her baseball cap obscures her eyes and fights to keep her expression neutral. He’s trying to get under her skin and doing a damn good job.
After a beat of silence, Charlie says: “The Instagram account has been more or less defunct for six months. And even if we were posting every day—even if we thought that Eva had an active stalker—what are you suggesting? That someone kidnapped her off the boat while I was sleeping in the cabin? I mean, come on.”
“How long were you sleeping?” Agent Turner tents his fingers on the table and leans forward. “I’ve listened to the nine-one-one call, and you say that you went belowdecks to nap. How long would you say you were down there?”
Longer than she would like to admit. Forty-five minutes? An hour? It could have been more. “I don’t know,” Charlie says, because she’s ashamed. But then she offers: “Half an hour?”
“That’s a long time. Long enough for a life raft to float completely out of sight?”
“I don’t know.” It’s true, she has no idea. But all at once she can picture Eva taking the raft out of the seat compartment and pulling the red handle. It would inflate in seconds, snapping to life like a kernel of popcorn over a campfire. Did it hit her in the head? Knock her out and then toss her overboard? Most important: Why? Why in the world would Eva inflate the life raft on a beautiful spring day with her mother only steps away?
Charlie wrings her hands beneath the table where the recording device can’t document it. “We need to focus on the raft. If it’s gone, she had to have taken it. I put it in the seat compartment myself just a couple of weeks ago. I know it was there.”
“We found the raft,” Agent Turner says without warning.
It’s the empty moment before an explosion, the second of nothingness before the world detonates into a million pieces. Charlie can’t breathe—for a single heartbeat she can’t even see—and then reality comes rushing at her like a tidal wave. “You found the raft?” she cries, her voice breaking. “What about Eva? I mean, was there evidence that she was there? Where did you find it? What does this mean?”
“It washed up onshore several miles northeast of your last known location. The coast guard didn’t expect to find it there, which is why we were so surprised when a hiker came across it this morning.” Agent Turner leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest, watching Charlie thoughtfully. He obviously thinks she knows more than she’s letting on.
“I don’t understand. How did it get there?” Charlie is hyperventilating but trying to sip tiny breaths through her mouth like Frank taught her so many years ago. She must be doing okay, because neither of the men move to help. Even Agent Turner is distant, cool and austere as unanswered questions trouble the air between them. If they found the raft and Eva wasn’t in it, how would they ever find her? “Do you think…?” She can’t finish.
“Do you have a good relationship with your daughter?” Detective James’s inquiry is abrupt and jarring. Charlie feels as if he has jerked her in an entirely new direction.
“I love Eva. She’s everything to me.”
“That’s not what I asked. I want to know if you have a good relationship. Can you talk? Do you share things with each other? Does she trust you?”
He can’t know how much these questions hurt in light of the last several hours. Before going to Piper Berkley’s house and meeting with Peter Cole, Charlie would have answered without pause. Yes. Definitively. Charlotte and Evangeline Sutton, unstoppable mother and daughter duo, are the best of friends and confidantes. They know everything about each other and share their innermost thoughts and feelings. They traveled the country—and beyond—together, and shared some of the very best and worst experiences of their lives. But Charlie is so confused by everything that’s happened and all that she’s learned, that she stalls for a moment. Detective James swoops right in.
“Were you on bad terms with your daughter? It’s our understanding that you were at odds about Eva Explores. Did you fight yesterday?”
“How do you know—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Agent Turner says. “Just answer the question.”
Charlie slides back in her chair, as far from the men across the table as she can get in this small, suddenly suffocating room. “I wanted to be on the road for one more summer,” she says as simply as she can. “Eva didn’t. We worked it out. When we took out the Summer Moon yesterday, we were in a great place.”
“We’ve been conducting interviews. Multiple sources confirm that Eva was not actually in a ‘great place’ lately.” Detective James swipes through several screens on his phone, and then lifts the fingers of his left hand into air quotes to read: “ ‘Eva was frustrated with her mom. She was counting down the days until college.’ ”
Charlie’s mouth goes dry. “Who told you that?”
“And: ‘Eva mostly keeps to herself, but everyone knows that her mom is kind of controlling.’ ” Detective James waggles the phone at her. “Would you like me to read more?”
The tear that slides down Charlie’s cheek is hot and humiliating. She does not want to cry in front of these men, but her heart is ravaged. Not just because Eva said those things—thought those things—but because Charlie didn’t know it. How could they have drifted so far apart? How could the young woman who had once lived inside her body, and then willingly spent two and a half years in a vintage Airstream trailer with her mother, hide a hurt so big from the person who loved her most?
“I didn’t know,” Charlie whispers. “I didn’t know that she felt that way. That she resented me so much.”
“Did you make a lot of money running Eva Explores?”
Once again, Charlie is whiplashed by Detective James’s interrogation. “What?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“Not at first,” she manages. She’s so numb, the words tumble as quickly as her tears. She doesn’t do anything to stop either of them. “The first year was really hard. But then we landed a couple of big accounts. Our trip to Maui changed everything.”
“Ballpark it for me. Would you say you made six figures annually?”
Charlie considers, nods.
“That’s a lot of money for a couple of women living in a camper.”
“We saved most of it. Put it away for Eva’s college tuition. She wants to be a writer.”
“Like mother, like daughter.” Agent Turner doesn’t sound like he’s mocking her, and when Charlie glances up, his mouth is a thin line, but there’s something in his eyes that looks like compassion.
“So would you say,” Detective James goes on, “that quitting Eva Explores was a huge financial hit? And that if you continued with the account, your income opportunities would have likely increased? I mean, you were on the road—pardon the pun—to true Instagram fame and fortune.”
“We didn’t do it for fame. Or the money.”
The detective grins at her. “That was just the cherry on top, right?”
“What are you saying?” Charlie finally brushes the backs of her hands over her cheeks, wiping the evidence of her grief away.
“The raft was slashed, Charlotte.” Agent Turner puts his palms on the table, on top of all those pictures of Eva, and levels Charlie with a look so intense she can’t tear herself away. “Someone punctured it with a knife. If Eva was in that life raft, she didn’t survive.”
Charlie dies a little at his words. But even as despair spreads through her, she fights it.
“You think I did it,” she says. She’d considered the similarities between Eva’s disappearance and that old murder case, but it was so ludicrous. So far-fetched. “You think I slashed the life raft and put Eva in it.” Charlie feels as if she has floated away from her body and can see the situation from the perspective of these officers. They’ve just established motive. She was the only person with means and opportunity, and now the motive is crystal clear. People kill for money and for love. But murder? Do they really think that she put her daughter in a ruined lifeboat and left her to die on Lake Superior? Because she was so enraged that Eva wanted to give up their burgeoning social media fame?
“Don’t stop looking for her,” Charlie says, suddenly frantic. “You can arrest me if you want to, but please don’t stop looking for Eva. I don’t know what happened, but she’s out there somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sure you know exactly what happened to Eva,” Detective James says, standing. “And in light of the fact that you’re a flight risk…” He reaches for his duty belt and rests his fingers lightly on the pouch that holds a pair of handcuffs.
“Flight risk?” Charlie chokes.
“You snuck out of your house and borrowed a neighbor’s truck so we wouldn’t know you had left the property.”
“I did that because I didn’t want to drive past the camera crews. I wasn’t running.”
“And lying to law enforcement is obstruction of justice.”
“Lying?” Charlie can hardly breathe. “But—”
“I’m not sure cuffs are necessary, Mitchum.” Agent Turner’s voice is clipped and professional. “She’s not exactly a threat.”
“Eva’s out there,” Charlie jumps in, trying to make them listen to reason. “I didn’t hurt my daughter. I have no idea why the life raft was taken or how it wound up on the beach. I swear to you, I didn’t do anything to it.”
“Keep talking, Sutton.”
Charlie knows it’s a warning, but she keeps going anyway. “Eva has a boyfriend—someone I didn’t know about until an hour ago. Maybe he has something to do with this. Find him. You have to talk to Lennon at Mugs. Here…” she slides her hand into the pocket of her jeans and takes out the tattered scrap of paper with Lennon’s phone number scrawled on it. Thrusting it at Agent Turner, she tries again. “I don’t know why she didn’t tell me about him, but I think Eva was keeping a lot of secrets.”
Agent Turner takes the paper and gives Charlie a tight smile, but he doesn’t try to stop Detective James when he steps around the table.
A knock on the door pulls him up short and irritation melts across his features. She can tell he’s taking pleasure in this—Detective James truly believes that Charlie is capable of hurting her daughter—and a part of her can’t blame him. She, too, would hate anyone with the capacity to harm a child. She just doesn’t know how to make him believe that she’s not someone who could.
While Charlie stands in awkward, strained proximity to Detective James, Agent Turner opens the door and has a hushed conversation with whoever is on the other side. Charlie can’t see the new arrival because he or she is hidden behind the door, but after a quick exchange, Agent Turner swings the door wide.
“Mitchum,” he says, leveling a look at his provisional partner, “you should hear this.”
Officer Mia Grady is standing on the threshold, looking like she hasn’t slept a wink since Charlie last saw her. Her ponytail is crooked, there are dark hollows beneath her eyes, and her uniform is wrinkled—Charlie wonders if she even bothered to change it after spending the night in the Morrows’ driveway. The young policewoman seems nervous to be interrupting her superiors, and her eyes widen when she clocks the tension in the room.
“I didn’t—” she mumbles, but trails off when Agent Turner steps out of the way so that a second person can shuffle in.
Charlie immediately recognizes the Landing High School guidance counselor, a fresh-from-college, striking Latina woman in a khaki pencil skirt and a white blouse. She was welcoming and incredibly helpful when Eva rejoined the public school system, and Charlie can’t help but give her a wan smile, even though she can’t begin to guess at what Elena Alvarez is doing here.
There are a few beats of wrought silence, and then Agent Turner introduces the two women. “Ms. Alvarez has something she thinks we should see.”
Charlie can tell that Detective James is itching to get out of this room and throw her in a cell where she belongs, but he crosses his arms over his chest and raises a single eyebrow. It’s the closest they’re going to get to a greeting.
“You sent us to the school after our night shift,” Officer Grady begins, addressing Detective James. “We talked to the principal and to some of Eva’s teachers, just like you told us. And we searched her locker. No computer.”
“What about the Cloud?” Agent Turner asks.
“Eva changed the password to her school account. They can’t access the files yet, but they will.”
Agent Turner nods, encouraging Officer Grady to go on.
“So, when Ms. Alvarez heard that we were looking for Eva’s laptop, she showed us something.”
“Right,” Ms. Alvarez says, picking up the thread and sliding the strap of a messenger bag off her shoulder. She goes to set it on the table but can’t seem to bring herself to cover up all the printed pictures of Eva. Instead, she rests the leather satchel on a chair and unzips it. She lifts a black, one-inch binder from the depths of her messenger bag and clutches it to her chest for a moment, seemingly wrestling with herself. “These are all of Eva’s college application essays,” she explains. “She missed the early application cutoffs because of her time on the road and is focusing on schools with rolling admissions and late deadlines. Eva really wants to get into a school with a strong creative writing program, and she’s using the essays as a sort of practice for her future portfolio. It’s been a great exercise for her, but I also think it’s been… cathartic.”
“How many essays are in there?” The question slips from Charlie’s lips. She knows she should remain silent, but the thought of Eva’s words in that binder is haunting. Charlie doesn’t consider herself a great writer, but she has a lot of experience—and a steady stream of requests for articles from popular magazines and websites to prove it. She’s asked Eva dozens of times to let her help with the college essays, or at the very least, proofread them. Eva hasn’t shared a single one.
“Fifty,” Ms. Alvarez says.
“Fifty college application essays?” Detective James scoffs. He’s clearly skeptical about what relevance Eva’s musings may have to his open-and-shut case.
“She talks about a lot of things in here.” Ms. Alvarez pats the binder. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, she told me that she wasn’t sharing them with you. I tried to encourage her to show you a few of the more… interesting essays, but she said she wasn’t ready yet.”
“And you think her writing will shed some light on her disappearance?” Agent Turner reaches for the binder, and she hands it over with an air of reluctance.
“It’s not just that. There’s this.” Ms. Alvarez peels a Post-it Note off one of the essays and hands it to Agent Turner. “This note was on the last essay she turned in on Friday afternoon—just a couple of days ago. I didn’t see it until today because I hadn’t had a chance to read the essay yet. When I found out Eva was missing…” Ms. Alvarez trails off and gives Charlie a small, sad smile.
But Charlie can’t tear her gaze from Agent Turner. As he reads the note, something shifts in his face. It’s subtle but obvious—a tightening of his jaw, a hard gleam in his eyes.
“What does it say?” Charlie breathes.
Agent Turner doesn’t answer.
PART II Eva
COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAY #1
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth or a new understanding of yourself or others.
Everyone loves a good rags-to-riches story. The miraculous transformation, the exciting shift from one thing to another. There’s poetry in the metamorphosis, a sort of savage delight as we observe the journey through the chrysalis. What we often forget is that when a caterpillar magically transforms into a butterfly, it emerges from the cocoon exhausted, shivering, and wet. Beautiful, but fragile.
I am that trembling butterfly, the proverbial ugly duckling turned stately swan. Mine is a redemption story, and if you believe everything you read, a happily ever after. But before we get there, we have to start here.
When I was in eighth grade, a group of classmates cornered me in the girls’ bathroom during lunch. There were eight of them, and one of little (big) old me, and when they circled up, I was sure that they’d taunt me from their overused playbook. You know, toss a few hateful names my way (Miss Piggy, Solid Sutton, Evangeline the Blubber Queen—my perennial favorite), and pinch handfuls of the rolls around my waist until I cried. It was a thing we did. Fun times.
Unfortunately, my tormentors were feeling creative that day, and instead of the same old, one of the girls grabbed the overflowing garbage can from the corner and set it in front of me. (Did I mention our janitorial services were seriously lacking?) I thought they might make me crawl inside the stinking heap of paper towels and trash, but they had a better idea: Since I was such a fatty fatso, I needed to eat my way through whatever I could find among the used tissues and balled up sanitary pads. Dear reader, I found seven wads of chewed gum, a stale granola bar, a bruised apple, a half-eaten and very soggy sandwich, an empty foil bag of potato chips (they made me lick it out), and a bottle of cloudy, half-drank Gatorade to wash it all down.
