"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 simply said 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?"
&nbs
p; "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 got home, if Mom asked, we were supposed to say he was with us." Her face was flushed now.
Dance recalled that Reynolds hinted Croyton was a womanizer.
A bitter laugh escaped the girl's trembling lips. "I saw him. Brenda and me, we were supposed to stay on the boardwalk but we went to an ice cream place across Beach Street. And I saw him. There was this woman getting into his car and he was kissing her. And she wasn't the only one. I saw him later, with somebody else, going into her apartment or house by the beach. That's why I didn't want him to go there. I wanted him to go back home and be with Mommy and us. I didn't want him to be with anybody else." She wiped her face. "And so I lied," she said simply. "I pretended I was sick."
So he'd meet his mistresses in Santa Cruz--and take his own children with him to allay his wife's suspicion, abandoning them till he and his lover were finished.
"And my family got killed. And it was my fault."
Dance leaned forward and said, "No, no, Tare. It's not your fault at all. We're pretty sure Daniel Pell intended to kill your father. It wasn't random. If he'd come by that night and you weren't there, he would've left and come back when your dad was home."
She grew quiet. "Yeah?"