Beneath Devil's Bridge(21)

“I think it’s people she wished were her friends. Sort of like . . . a vision board. She could pretend.”

“Why are some of these faces circled in red?”

Pratima remains quiet.

I glance at her.

She inhales again. “I don’t know. All that I do know is Leena wanted to be like those particular girls. She wanted to belong.”

I frown and take a closer look, noting who all has been circled in red. Beth. Maddy. Cheyenne. Amy. Seema. The popular girls.

Twin Falls has only one elementary school and one high school. One class per grade. Most of the town’s children who met in the kindergarten class have moved up through the grades with the same cohort. They all went to the same birthday parties. Shopped in the same stores. Attended the same sporting events and community barbecues. Such is the nature of small towns. And it strikes me that it must truly be hell if you don’t fit in, or feel you can’t belong. Or if you are disliked. Because there is just no escape.

I moisten my lips and say, “Is there anyone you know—any one of these kids in these photos who was a tiny bit closer to Leena than the others? Someone who might be able to help us figure out what happened to her between the point she was last seen at the bonfire to when she ended up in the river?”

“If there was, she never told me.” A pause, and Pratima’s big, dark eyes glisten. “We think we can keep them safe if we order them what to do, if we control them. We think that if we keep them busy with sports, they can’t get into trouble. But we’re wrong.”

Suddenly I catch a glimpse of a little dark head peeping around the door. Ganesh. The six-year-old’s eyes are wide. He’s watching. Listening. Learning.

His mother spins around to see what I am looking at.

“Ganesh! Out!” She points. “Get out. How can you stand there listening like that?”

The child scurries away down the hall. I hear a door slam. Pratima slumps onto her daughter’s bed and drops her face into her hands. She starts to sob.



As Luke and I walk back through the biting wind to our unmarked cruiser, I feel watched. I glance back at the house. Upstairs in a lit dormer window there’s a small shadow. Ganesh again. Observing us detectives. I stare up at him and feel a bolt of sadness. What must the boy be thinking? What did he hear us say? What does he comprehend about the death of his big sister, and how will this forever change him?

I raise my hand to wave, but he vanishes. And I see Luke regarding me from the other side of the car. I lower my hand and climb into the driver’s seat. Without meeting Luke’s eyes, I put on my seat belt and start the engine. It begins to rain as I drive up the road that will take us to Amy Chan’s house. She’s the girl who reported seeing Leena on Devil’s Bridge around 2:00 a.m. on the morning of November 15.

“We got a call from the lab while you were upstairs,” Luke says. “The journal pages have been dried. The ink is legible. They’re sending copies over to the station.”

I nod. Tense. “Leena stole things,” I say. “Pratima feels the address and poetry books, the makeup, the locket—it all could have been ‘borrowed’ from other kids. She says Leena shoplifted as well.”

“So that’s what Pratima was holding back from her husband downstairs?”

“Looks like.” I turn onto the boulevard that leads up the mountain and into a high-end subdivision. We’re heading for the Smoke Bluffs—a granite ledge upon which the Chan house stands like a columned white wedding cake amid similarly ornate homes. “The locket is a common-enough trinket, right?” I glance at him. “Could belong to anyone.”

“We’ll bring the kids in for questioning again,” he says.

“Do you have any children?”

“Never really got around to it. Then our marriage collapsed, and it was too late.”

I throw him another glance. “You’re divorced?”

“Married to the job. Always have been.” He laughs. “It’s an occupational hazard, especially in homicide. My ex, understandably, grew tired of playing second fiddle. It was a fairly amicable separation in the end, as far as these things can be amicable.”

Rain suddenly begins to drum down heavily. An autumn monsoon. Water runs in a sheet down the steep road, and raindrops squiggle up my windshield as I drive, as though they are racing to rejoin each other in the sky. Normally the incessant fall monsoons are background noise in my life. Today it feels different. The raindrops splatter with an urgency, an insistence, as if they have something to say.

I think of loss. Of the everyday gaps left behind. Leena’s Nike shoe. Her bloodied sock. Her wet backpack and book of poems lost between rocks on the riverbank. The floating pages of a journal. A girl full of dreams. Gone. Her plans silenced.

“This Darsh Rai, do you know him?” Luke asks as I turn into the Chans’ street.

“Yeah. Good-looking guy. About twenty or twenty-one years old. Works at the pulp mill across the water. Never been in trouble with cops. From all accounts a nice person. Smooth dresser. Passion for restoring old sports cars. Girls flock around him.”

“We’ll need to speak to this gift-giving cousin Darsh.” Luke checks his watch. “We should pay him a visit this evening, after we’ve talked to Amy Chan. Before word gets around that Leena drowned.”