Beneath Devil's Bridge(41)

“Yeah. I saw Leena that night. Army surplus jacket. Camouflage pants. She was with a guy. Don’t know who he was. There were quite a few people from out of town—skiers and boarders. Older local kids no longer in high school. Guys like Darsh who work at the mill.”

I think again of the photograph of the girls, Seema in it.

“Anyone take photos of your group?” I ask.

She shakes her head. And I write in my notebook: Why are they lying? What are they hiding?

Seema recognizes the address book in the photo as Beth’s. “Leena stole things,” she says. “She took some makeup from me once, when I left my bag on the bench in the locker room to take a shower. One of the other girls saw her taking it. We confronted her, and she gave it back. That was about two months ago.”

“Why would Leena take the address book?” Luke asks.

“I don’t know. She did stupid things, for, like, attention, you know, and it usually backfired. Maybe she wanted to phone Beth’s friends and talk smack about her, or call some of the boys. She’d do stuff like that.”

“How about the locket—recognize that as belonging to anyone?” Luke says.

I watch her face carefully. She pulls her mouth sideways, frowns. Scratches the back of her hand, shakes her head.

“Are you certain?” I say.

“I don’t think I’ve seen it before.”

As Seema exits the room, Luke says, “And of course she doesn’t know who started the rumor, either.”

“Remarkably consistent,” I say.

“Suspiciously so.”

Nina Petrov’s statement is also consistent. And her account meshes with Darsh’s—he drove Nina and her older sister, Natalia, back to the group home early.

Jepp Sullivan, a senior like Tripp, is very tall. He has broad shoulders, olive-toned skin, and tightly cropped dark hair. His eyes are a pale green in contrast. He dwarfs the seat he takes in front of us. Jepp confirms the version of events put forth by Amy, his girlfriend. No, he didn’t notice Leena on the bridge, although Amy did tell him that she’d seen Leena. And yes, they went to Ari’s Greek Takeout for donairs. He chatted to Darsh while there. He didn’t even think to mention to Darsh that Amy had seen his younger cousin alone on Devil’s Bridge.

“It wasn’t like . . . a deal. Not at the time anyway. I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry we didn’t realize it was a big deal.” Jepp appears anguished by the fact that maybe, just maybe, he could have saved a girl’s life if he’d said something, or gone back to check if Leena was okay, or to see if she needed a ride.

“See? That’s the thing,” Jepp says. “No one really cared about Leena. She . . . It’s like she did these things to herself, and now it’s gotten her killed. I’ve spoken to other students, girls, who said they would never have ended up alone on that bridge, wasted like that, but it’s not true. They all get as wasted. But Leena was there by herself because . . .” He breaks our gazes and looks at the floor. “She was lonely.”

Cheyenne Tillerson echoes the exact same refrain as the other girls. When Cheyenne, an attractive redhead with freckles, leaves the room, Luke says, “Definitely feels rehearsed. Like they’ve gotten their stories all lined up. Question is, Why? What are they covering up?”

Maddy is next, and when she enters and sees me, her lips purse tightly. She plops herself into the chair and sits, sullen.

“Maddy, this is Luke O’Leary. He’s with the RCMP and is helping us with the investigation.”

She nods at Luke.

I remind myself to keep my mouth shut and to take a back seat as a mother in an observer role. This is tricky ground. In fact, it’s all tricky ground in a small and tightly connected town. You can’t turn around in the supermarket, or the hardware store, or the post office without being connected to some thread that weaves through the fabric of Twin Falls.

“Yeah, I saw Leena. I saw her on the log.”

“With a male?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know who he was, Maddy?”

She says nothing.

My pulse quickens.

“Maddy?” Luke says calmly, voice deep.

She doesn’t meet his gaze. She looks unusually pale. Tension coils in my gut.

“You need to tell us if you recognized the male, Maddy. Leena disappeared after that rocket went through the sky. The next time anyone saw her, she was dead. Floating in the river. Sexually assaulted, murdered. If—”

“It wasn’t all just kids there.”

“What do you mean?”

She looks up and meets the intensity in Luke’s gaze. “There . . . there were adults, too.”

“Which adults?” Luke asks.

She inhales shakily.

“Maddy?”

“I . . . I . . . Before the rocket came, I needed to pee. I’d had a fair bit to drink, and . . . I didn’t want to miss the rocket, so I hurried into the woods, along the trail to the outhouses. When I passed around the back of the fire, Leena wasn’t there anymore. When I reached the outhouses, there was a group of people waiting to use the facilities, and I really needed to go. Plus I didn’t want to miss the lights in the sky. I had my headlamp with me, so I put it on, and I went a bit deeper into the woods along a smaller trail that leads away from the washrooms. And as I crouched down to pee in some bushes, I heard . . . things.”