Beneath Devil's Bridge(49)

She hesitates, just fractionally, then says, “Of course not. I agreed to talk. You sure you don’t want a coffee?”

“I’m sure.” I click my digital recorder on, reach forward, and set it on her glass desk. “Feel free to chat casually. We’ll edit out any extraneous chitchat.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“Are those your kids?” I nod to a frame on her glass desk, trying to set her more at ease.

She smiles. “Douglas and Chevvy. Doug is six, and Chevvy is four. They’re with my mom today.”

“Nice to have helpful family close.” I smile and angle back to my purpose. “Dusty said she never really got a sense of who Leena was, other than she was an outsider and picked on. No one really understood her, apart from, perhaps, your teacher, Clayton Pelley?”

“Which is weird. I mean, Mr. Pelley—Clay—did seem to like her, and he acted to protect her from meanness, so knowing that he did what he did, assaulted and killed her . . . it’s a real shocker.” She pauses, her eyes going distant. “I guess we never really can know people, can we? Then again, another part of me was not surprised, I suppose.”

“How so?”

“Clay was a charmer. He had a way of making us girls feel . . . special. When he singled one of us out with a flattering comment, it’s like we were the chosen girl for the day. Like some golden light had been shined on us. He was sexy. Experienced. I . . . I suspect every one of the girls might have dreamed about being with him.”

“So it was a surprise to see him with Leena?”

“You mean the sex? Well, I didn’t see them in the act. Maddy did, and she came running up to me at the bonfire to tell me. She was flushed and horrified-looking, her eyes wild. She’d been to the bathroom, and had come across them off the trail, in a tiny clearing. She hurriedly told me what she’d seen, and I ran with her down the path to go look. We got there in time to see Mr. Pelley helping Leena up off the ground, and he was buttoning up his shirt and zipping his jacket back up. Leena’s clothes were also all in disarray. He helped her zip up the coat she was wearing. He then put his arm around her and started leading her along a trail that led up to the logging road where his car was parked. She was wobbling because she’d been drinking a lot.”

“So if you heard the first podcast episode, you heard Clayton Pelley denying that he raped Leena and that he killed her?”

She nods.

“Is it even vaguely possible, in your mind, that he could be telling the truth now?”

She thinks for a long while.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I really don’t know anymore. He said he did it—killed her. So we all believed he did. And he had all those details about exactly how she died.”

“Tell me about Bart Tucker.”

Her eyes flash wide, and her gaze locks on mine. She tenses. “What about him? Why?”

“He was one of the handful of cops on the case. Did he ever harass you when you were a student?”

She swallows, glances at the digital recorder. “Can we turn that off?”

“Must we?”

She says nothing.

I reach forward and click it off.

“Tucker—we all call him Tucker—he’s the police chief now.”

“I know.”

“He was young and totally handsome back then. He looked cool in his uniform. I’d seen him about. I . . . Some of us girls used fake IDs to get into a club once, and he was there. Out of uniform. Kind of tipsy, having a good time. He showed an interest in me. I told him I was nineteen. I was all dressed up, and I could pull it off. We . . . kissed, and stuff. And in the following days, he tried to see me. Then he learned how old I really was, but I still caught him driving slowly by my house once or twice. One night he parked across the street, watched my window when I was getting undressed. I saw his car out there, and I yanked the drapes shut. Another time he followed me slowly in his car when I was walking home one night. He rolled down his window and asked if I wanted a ride. I agreed. I thought he was going to try to kiss me again when we got to my house, but my dad was arriving home on his motorbike from the club, and I panicked and got out of the car.”

“It was a small town—he truly didn’t recognize you as a fourteen-year-old from school?”

“Twin Falls had a population of around fifteen thousand back then. Not everyone knew all the kids and which grades they were in. And I was totally dressed up. Full makeup, high heels. It was dark in the club. Like I said, he was a bit drunk. I believed at the time I was pulling it off that I was nineteen.”

“Did Tucker ever get pushy? Aggressive in his interactions with you, or anyone else?”

“Maybe . . . maybe a little. But that was a long time ago. I’ve never heard anything else weird about Chief Tucker. And I confess I did go all out to seduce him that first night. He was a man who wore a uniform. And I mean, I did lie to him about my age.”

“He still stalked you, watched you. That’s problematic, and his behavior is not your fault.”

“I know that now, of course, and yes, it makes me angry. But . . . back then, I confess it was a kind of thrill.”

When I leave Beth’s salon and climb back into the van, I say to Gio, “This is good. Really good.”

“So why do you look so grave?”