WE KNOW THE CAMBRIDGE police received a 911 call about a person down in the park, and that would indicate the girls had access to a phone. But if they literally don’t own the phone in question, then that might suggest they used one that belongs to someone else.

To this equation I add my earlier observation when I briefly looked at the bicycle on the path. The phone holder on the handlebars is empty. If the woman I met earlier was Elisa Vandersteel, as I suspect, then I saw her clamp her iPhone into the holder before she rode off across Quincy Street and into the Yard. So what happened to her phone after that? I might know, and if I’m right it could explain why Anya and Enya are swearing they don’t have a phone.

Maybe they don’t—not one of their own. They claim they didn’t call the police, and very possibly they couldn’t have. Not literally if the phone didn’t belong to them—not if it was locked and they didn’t have the password. They absolutely couldn’t dial the Cambridge Police Department. They couldn’t even call 911 without getting past the locked screen, and I doubt they’d know how to do that in emergencies unless someone had shown them.

I propose this to Enya in yellow. I ask her if she knows what an iPhone is, and she does. It would seem her mother has one, and yes she understands about swiping the locked screen to the right, to the password keypad. At the bottom on the left side is the word emergency. All you have to do is touch it and you’re given a dial pad that allows you to enter your country’s emergency three-digit number, which is 911 in this case.

So neither Enya nor Anya dialed the Cambridge Police Department’s general number. One of the sisters pressed EMERGENCY, and then entered 911, afterward pressing SEND. Literally, that’s what Anya in pink—not Enya in yellow—admits to having done.

“How’d you know to do something like that?” Marino acts impressed.

“Mom showed us,” they say in unison.

“She showed you how to use her phone in case there’s ever an emergency?” I suggest, and they nod.

“If we need to call an ambulance,” Anya adds.

“Is that what you thought you were calling? You thought you were asking for an ambulance?” I ask, and they verify that was their intention.

“Then you didn’t think about the police,” Marino picks up where I leave off. “You didn’t know the police would come if you called for help. That’s not who you were asking for.”