The Sleeping Doll

by the sound track of breathless sobbing.
    “Tare.” Dance rose and handed her a wad of tissues as the girl cried hard, though quietly, the sobs like hiccups.
    “It’s okay,” the agent said compassionately, gripping her arm. “Whatever happened, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”
    “I . . .” The girl was paralyzed; Dance could see she was trying to make a decision. Which way would it go? the agent wondered. She’d either spill everything, or stonewall—in which case the interview was now over.
    Finally she said, “Oh, I’ve wanted to tell somebody. I just couldn’t. Not the counselors or friends, my aunt . . .” More sobbing. Collapsed chest, chin down, hands in her lap when not mopping her face. The textbook kinesic signs that Theresa Croyton had moved into the acceptance stage of emotional response. The terrible burden of what she’d been living with was finally going to come out. She was confessing.
    “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault they’re dead!”
    Now she pressed her head back against the couch. Her face was red, tendons rose, tears stained the front of her sweater.
    “Brenda and Steve and Mom and Dad . . . all because of me!”
    “Because you got sick?”
    “No! Because I pretended to be sick!”
    “Tell me.”
    “I didn’t want to go to the boardwalk. I couldn’t stand going, I hated it! All I could think of was to pretend to be sick. I remembered about these models who put their fingers down their throats so they throw up and don’t get fat. When we were in the car on the highway I did that when nobody was looking. I threw up in the backseat and said I had the flu. It was all gross, and everybody was mad and Dad turned around and drove back home.”
    So that was it. The poor girl was convinced it was her fault her family’d been slaughtered because of the lie she told. She’d lived with this terrible burden for eight years.
    One truth had been excavated. But at least one more remained. And Kathryn Dance wanted to unearth this one as well.
    “Tell me, Tare. Why didn’t you want to go to the pier?”
    “I just didn’t. It wasn’t fun.”
    Confessing one lie doesn’t lead automatically to confessing them all. The girl had now slipped into denial once again.
    “Why? You can tell me. Go on.”
    “I don’t know. It just wasn’t fun.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, Dad was always busy. So he’d give us money and tell us he’d pick us up later and he’d go off and make phone calls and things. It was boring.”
    Her feet tapped again and she squeezed the right-side earrings in a compulsive pattern: top, bottom, then the middle. The stress was eating her up.
    Yet it wasn’t only the kinesics that were sending significant deception signals to Kathryn Dance. Children—even a seventeen-year-old high school student—are often hard to analyze kinesically. Most interviewers of youngsters perform a content-based analysis, judging their truth or deception by what they say, not how they say it.
    What Theresa was telling Dance didn’t make sense—both in terms of the story she was offering, and in terms of Dance’s knowledge of children and the place in question. Wes and Maggie, for instance, loved the Santa Cruz boardwalk, and would have leapt at the chance to spend hours there unsupervised with a pocketful of money. There were hundreds of things for children to do, carnival rides, food, music, games.
    And another contradiction Dance noted: Why hadn’t Theresa simplysaid she wanted to stay home with her mother before they left that Friday and let her father and siblings go without her? It was as if she didn’t want them to go to Santa Cruz either.
    Dance considered this for a moment.
    A to B  . . .
    “Tare, you were saying your father worked and made phone calls when you and your brother and sister went on the rides?”
    She looked down. “Yeah, I guess.”
    “Where would he go to make the calls?”
    “I don’t know. He had a cell phone. Not a lot of people had them then. But he did.”
    “Did he ever meet anybody there?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    “Tare, who were these other people? The ones he’d be with?”
    She shrugged.
    “Were they other women?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    Theresa was silent, looking everywhere but at Dance. Finally she said, “Maybe. Some, yeah.”
    “And you think they might’ve been girlfriends of his?”
    A nod. Tears again. Through clenched teeth she began, “And . . .”
    “What, Tare?”
    “He said when we