The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [62]
Ree’s gaze went up. D.D. swore to God the child looked right through the one-way mirror to her father’s face. “Mommy said, ‘I still love you.’ Mommy said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Then everything went crash, and I didn’t listen anymore. I covered Lil Bunny’s ears, and I swear I didn’t listen anymore, and I never, ever, ever got out of bed. Please, you can believe me. I didn’t get out of bed.”
“Am I done?” the child asked ten seconds later, when Marianne still hadn’t said anything. “Where’s my daddy? I don’t want to be in the magic room anymore. I want to go home.”
“You’re all done,” Marianne said kindly, touching the child softly on the arm. “You’ve been a very brave little girl, Ree. Thank you for talking to me.”
Ree merely nodded. She appeared glassy-eyed, her fifty minutes of talking having left her spent. When she tried to rise to her feet, she staggered a step. Marianne steadied her.
In the observation room, Jason Jones had already pushed away from the wall. Miller made it to the door just ahead of him, opening up the room to the brilliant fluorescent wash of hallway light.
“Miss Marianne?” Ree’s voice came from the interrogation room.
“Yes, honey.”
“You said I could ask you a question …”
“That’s right. I did. Would you like to ask me a question? Ask me anything.” Marianne had risen, too. Now D.D. saw the interviewer pause, squat down in front of the child, so she would be at eye level. The interviewer had already unclipped her tiny mic, the receiver dangling down low, in her hands.
“When you were four years old, did your mommy go away?”
Marianne brushed back a lock of curly brown hair from the girl’s cheek, her voice sounding tinny, far away. “No, honey, when I was four years old, my mommy didn’t go away.”
Ree nodded. “You were lucky when you were four years old.”
Ree left the interrogation room. She spotted her father waiting for her just outside the door, and hurled herself into his arms.
D.D. watched them embrace for a long time, a four-year-old’s rail-thin arms wrapped tautly around her father’s solid presence. She heard Jason murmur something low and soothing to his child. She saw him lightly stroke Ree’s trembling back.
She thought she understood just how much Clarissa Jones loved both of her parents. And she wondered, as she often wondered in her line of work, why for more parents, their child’s unconditional love couldn’t be enough.
They debriefed ten minutes later, after Marianne had escorted Jason and Ree out of the building. Miller had his opinion. Marianne and D.D. had theirs.
“Someone entered the home Wednesday night,” Miller started out. “Obviously had a confrontation with Sandra, and little Ree believes that someone is her father. ’Course, that could be an assumption on her part. She heard footsteps, assumed they had to be from her dad, returning home from work.”
D.D. was already shaking her head. “She didn’t tell us everything.”
“No,” Marianne agreed.
Miller glared at the two of them.
“Ree totally got out of bed Wednesday night,” D.D. supplied. “As is exhibited by the fact she went out of her way to tell us she didn’t.”
“She got out of bed,” Marianne seconded, “and saw something she’s not ready to talk about yet.”
“Her father,” Miller stated, sounding dubious. “But at the end, the way she hugged him …”
“He’s still her father,” Marianne supplied softly. “And she’s vulnerable and terribly frightened by everything going on in her world.”
“Why’d he let her come in, then?” Miller challenged. “If she came into the bedroom Wednesday night and saw her father fighting with her mom, he wouldn’t want her to testify.”
“Maybe he didn’t see her appear in the doorway,” D.D. suggested with a shrug.
“Or he trusted her not to tell,” Marianne added. “From a very early age, children get a feel for family secrets. They watch their parents lie to neighbors, officials, other loved ones—I fell down the stairs, of course everything is fine—and they internalize those lies until it becomes as second nature to them as breathing. It’s very difficult to get children to disclose against their