Beneath Devil's Bridge(34)

I climb off my bike and wheel it over to the tree. I prop it against the trunk, and we put our heads close together. We fake-grin with wide-open mouths, like we’re doing something way cool. Eileen makes a rock-on sign with her index and pinkie fingers raised as she clicks.

“It should say, ‘Caution, jaguars in the area,’” I say as she pockets her smartphone. “Because we ain’t no cougars.”

“You mean panthers. Isn’t it panthers for over sixty?”

I laugh and straddle my bike. Slowly I begin to cycle back toward the trail while Eileen mounts her bike. My thoughts turn to the photograph I kept in my box, of our two daughters and their friends at the bonfire that night twenty-four years ago, and I think how different it was in those days before every kid had a cell phone. Before everything was captured or recorded for social media. How much easier it was to hide things.

“Does Maddy know?” Eileen calls out from behind me.

“Yeah,” I yell over my shoulder. “I told her on my way here.”

We fall silent as we pedal harder and the incline grows steeper and the switchbacks sharper. I know Eileen is wondering if Beth and Tripp, her son, know. And Johnny.

I, too, wonder if Johnny knows—whether Granger has informed his son. Or if he’d even bother, since clearly Granger believes Trinity and Clay Pelley are wasting our energy.

Whether we like it or not, Trinity Scott is going to dredge up bad memories. Her podcast is going to be like a big rock hurled into a still pond, and the impact will ripple through people in this town who thought they’d moved on. As the pitch grows steeper and I pedal harder, I wonder just how big those ripples could get.





REVERB


THE RIPPLE EFFECT


NOW


re·verb

/'rēv?rb, ri'v?rb/

noun

To a producer or a sound engineer, reverb—short for reverberation—is an acoustic phenomenon, or audio effect. Put simply, reverb happens when a sound or signal bounces off various surfaces in a room, causing numerous reflections to reach the listener’s ear so closely together that they cannot interpret them as individual delays. This result is magnified in larger rooms, where it appears that the sound continues long after the source has stopped . . . But in true crime podcasting, reverb can also refer to the story itself.

—Gio Rossi, Toronto Times interview

When you investigate a crime in real time, on air, you have this problem of reverb. The reporting you do today will influence the interviews and responses you get tomorrow, because your subject will have heard your episode, and will know your doubts, and suspicions, and theories, and thoughts. They will know what others have told you. And it will influence what they in turn tell you. That’s fine for fiction, but it’s a serious problem from a journalistic standpoint, the telling of a story influencing the story as it’s unfolding. It’s bait and switch. It’s unfair to the listener. You have your footprints and fingerprints all over the story in a very postmodern way. The risk with that—the reason news organizations don’t do it—is that you’ll find inconsistencies. You’ll find people lied to you. You’ll find you overlooked a piece of information, and you may have to reassess or revamp your story. I’m not saying it’s unethical per se, just that there are these potential pitfalls.

—Mark Pattinson, journalism professor, on the ethics of true crime podcasting Thursday, November 18. Present day.

Maddy is in her home office. She fingers the business card her mother left on the kitchen counter as she listens to the first podcast episode. The sound of the voice she once knew sucks her down, down, down, into the past, back into her schoolgirl persona . . . all the way back to that night of the Ullr fire.

CLAYTON: What I want the world to know, Trinity Scott, is yes, we all have our darkness. That shadow. Even you. But I did not sexually assault Leena Rai. And I did not kill her.

TRINITY: If . . . if you didn’t, who did?

GUARD: Time’s up, Pelley. Come on, let’s go.

CLAYTON: Whoever did, her killer is still out there.

THE SOUND OF A DOOR SHUTTING. MUFFLED LAUGHTER.

Mr. Pelley’s words echo in her head, bouncing back louder each time.

Her killer is still out there.

Her killer is still out there.

Her killer is still out there.

“Maddy?”

She jumps, spins her chair around. Darren is in the room. Standing just inside the doorway. He’s been listening. The look in his eyes makes her scared.

“What if he didn’t do it?” Darren says. His voice sounds strange. “And like Trinity Scott says, if he didn’t, who did?”

“This is stupid!” Maddy flings her arm toward the speaker. “This is so fucking stupid. It’s gratuitous. It’s exploitative. He’s flat-out lying, and that Trinity woman—she knows it. She has to know it. And she’s making a story out of his lies, sensationalizing it all. And I’ll tell you what—she got one thing right. It’s Criminal is criminal. Her whole bloody podcast is criminal. You shouldn’t be allowed to do shit like that. It’s defamatory. Libelous.”

“She hasn’t defamed anyone if—”

“Not yet. But she’s laid the groundwork for new theories on who did it, all based on a sociopath’s lies. And in so doing, she’s going to start raising unfounded suspicions about people in this town. People we know. People who still live here.”