Abigail tells Bret about Robert’s past

Abigail tells Bret about Robert’s past in a private meeting at La Scala Boutique, turning Bret’s suspicions into a more complicated account of bereavement, accusation, and prolonged stalking. She confirms that Robert was with Katherine Latchford at a Westwood movie theater in May 1980, but also gives Bret reason to question his assumptions about the crimes: Robert’s aunt says someone else left the poster that had seemed to implicate him. The meeting ends without resolving whether Robert was involved in the violence Bret fears; instead, it exposes how little either character can know from the fragments available to them.

A Meeting Arranged in Secret

Abigail initiates the conversation after Robert tells her that Bret had confronted him. In a message on the answering machine, she asks Bret to meet and says there is something about Robert that needs clarification. She is careful to keep the meeting from Robert: she asks Bret not to tell him she called, requests that he not leave a message if he calls back, and suggests meeting after school at La Scala Boutique. The secrecy establishes Abigail’s purpose as a difficult disclosure rather than a casual conversation.

At the restaurant, she begins with Robert’s account of the previous night: he had said Bret accused him of something he denied knowing about. Bret claims he meant the confrontation as a joke, although he knows he is lying. Abigail does not take the bait or simply challenge him. Instead, she says Robert had spoken of Bret repeatedly since the first day of school, and had described Bret seeing him at a movie more than a year earlier and following him afterward. Bret denies following Robert and offers his own version, in which Robert followed him into the Sherman Oaks Galleria. Their competing accounts make the meeting an inquiry into memory and motive as much as a revelation of family history.

The Movie Theater and the Missing Poster

Abigail confirms the fact that has stayed with Bret: Robert was at the Westwood theater on a Saturday in May, watching The Shining. She says he was there with Katherine Latchford. Robert had told Abigail that someone at Buckley recognized him from that day, and she understands that the sighting mattered to him. For Bret, the confirmation connects the striking memory of seeing Robert to Katherine, the girl whose later disappearance had become part of his investigation.

Abigail then distinguishes what Robert told her from what Bret suspects. Before Katherine disappeared, she had reported anonymous calls and signs that someone had entered her bedroom and gone through her belongings. She also thought Robert had left a poster as a gift. Abigail insists that he had not: someone else had left it. Bret identifies it as a Madness poster for One Step Beyond, a detail that ties the private conversation to a clue associated with the wider case while weakening the inference that Robert placed it there. The disclosure does not identify the person responsible or explain the poster’s purpose.

Stalking, Suspicion, and Robert’s Account

Abigail recounts a pattern of fear that Robert described during the summer Katherine was missing. After Katherine disappeared, Robert believed that someone had begun following him. He received silent calls on his private line and felt watched in public. According to Abigail, the sense of an invisible presence continued in Los Angeles; Robert sometimes joked about it, but the experience did not end. He said it stopped while he was in Chicago, then returned when he came back to Los Angeles for the holidays. Anonymous letters with no return address and renewed hang-up calls accompanied the recurrence, and Abigail says Robert began to break down. Katherine’s body had been found in August, but she does not say that Robert understood the connection between the stalking and the murder.

Bret challenges Abigail directly: he asks whether she believes Robert had nothing to do with Katherine’s disappearance and whether Robert was capable of harming her. Abigail responds that this kind of suspicion is precisely why Robert did not go to the police. She also says he was panicked when he learned that a Buckley student had seen him with Katherine, although he did not remember seeing Bret and had been looking for Katherine after her mother dropped her off. Her defense does not settle the question of Robert’s guilt; it makes the competing interpretations explicit. The same concealed or partial information can look like evidence of culpability to Bret and evidence of vulnerability to Abigail.

When Bret raises a timeline connecting Robert’s presence in Los Angeles to Katherine’s and other girls’ disappearances, Abigail cannot resolve it. She does not recognize the name Julie Selwyn. Bret presses her about what happened in Chicago and why Robert was sent to a facility, while Abigail cautions that she knows only what she heard and that there were differing versions. Her limited knowledge becomes part of the scene’s substance: she is not presenting a complete explanation, and the conversation leaves gaps intact.

Family History and the Limits of the Disclosure

Abigail traces Robert’s instability to events that began before his arrival in Los Angeles. After Carol Mallory died in April, Robert was found at the scene, though Abigail says he had not been home when she died and that her death was classified as an accident despite irregularities. Robert’s father, William, assumed things about him, Abigail says, and those assumptions intensified Robert’s paranoia. After about a month living with his father, Robert was not allowed to remain in the household because William alleged that something inappropriate was happening between Robert and his twelve-year-old stepsister, Ashley. Robert then came to Los Angeles to stay with Abigail in the summer of 1980.

Abigail also recounts the later conflict involving Ashley. She had developed a rash and blamed Robert, alleging that he had told her to shave and implying that he had behaved sexually toward her. Robert denied the allegation. Abigail says he overdosed, perhaps in an effort to make William feel guilty for believing Ashley; William then arranged for Robert to be placed in a Jacksonville facility for sobriety and psychiatric evaluation. Robert was sent there a week after returning to Chicago, and after his release the family decided he should move to Los Angeles. Abigail presents this history to explain why she believes Robert has been treated unfairly, not as proof that every accusation against him is false.

Bret answers with his own evidence and fear. He tells Abigail that Robert was with Matt Kellner during the week Matt disappeared, says he has a tape recorded on the night Matt died, and believes the other voice is Robert’s. He describes his theory that Robert drugged Matt, took him to Crystal Cove, assaulted him, and brought him back. These are Bret’s allegations, not conclusions established by Abigail’s account. He insists that his suspicions have not changed and identifies the immediate consequence of his fear: he is worried about what Robert may do to Susan Reynolds. Abigail’s disclosures therefore do not exonerate Robert in Bret’s eyes; they give the confrontation a personal history while leaving Bret’s central danger unresolved.