Beneath Devil's Bridge(75)

She slides the envelope toward me. “Take a look.”

I open it and extract a dog-eared photo with tape still stuck to the corners. It’s creased. Old. It shows a man in his twenties with wild sandy-brown curls. A broad grin crumples his boyishly handsome face. His eyes are aflame with life. He stands in front of a thundering waterfall that sprays mist up around him. Nearby is an orange Westfalia camper van. The man is holding a tiny baby in a pink woolen hat. It punches me in the gut. There is a second photo in the envelope. It’s similarly dog-eared and creased, and it shows a man and a woman with the same baby. The couple are smiling. They look happy, in love.

It’s the same photo I saw on the bookshelf in Clay Pelley’s office at Twin Falls Secondary School that day Luke and I interviewed him. Memories slam through me—Clay Pelley striding down the corridor to greet us. Clay showing students into the classroom to be interviewed. Me and Luke arresting Clay on that cold, wet night. Clay in our interrogation room smelling of sweat and old liquor.

“These were taken at the Twin Falls Provincial Park,” I say quietly. “At the campground below the falls.”

“The guard told me Clayton had them on his wall. Above his bed.”

I bite my lip as I stare at the photos. The same little baby I held. Janie. Lacey looking happy. The Before Lacey.

“Turn it over—the one with my dad holding me.”

I do, and on the back—freshly written, it seems—are the words:

I always knew where you were, Janie. I kept track of you and your mom. You can get any information you need on the inside. I got updates all the time.

I look up and meet her eyes.

“He hired a PI,” she says. “The guard told me. Like you said, it was easy to find us if you were looking.”

“So he knew?”

She regards me. Uneasy. Unsure. And nods. “Yes,” she says softly. “My father knew. But he didn’t let on to me. Perhaps he was waiting for me to reach that conclusion via the interviews. Perhaps he wanted me to meet him, and to first learn who he was, and to try to understand. Maybe he just wanted to get to know me. Or explain how he’d tried to protect me and my mother by confessing. He took a rap for murder so we could go free, so we could go somewhere else to start new lives.”

“When did you find out who your dad was?”

She glances away, out the window again, and watches the leaves blowing across the parking lot. Flecks of rain start to speck the window.

“For nearly my whole life, I was led to believe I was someone else,” she says without looking at me. “A kid with a different dad. A dad named James Scott, who was good and faithful, and who was killed in a tragic hit-and-run when I was a baby in Terrace. That’s the story I was told by my mother when I was old enough to hear it. There were photographs of my father, sure. When I asked.” Trinity looks down at the images on the diner table.

“Those were two of them. My gran had copies. My mother had none. My gran showed me these in secret. She said it was too painful for my mom to have photos on display, so that’s why these were boxed away. That was her story. My gran said it was to be our secret that I’d seen them. She said talking about my dad was painful for Grandpa, too. So ‘let’s not talk about it, shall we?’ And all the while I thought that man in the photos was named James Scott.”

Trinity falls silent for a moment. I believe she’s telling me the whole truth here, and my heart hurts for her. This poor kid. This baby Janie whose diaper I once changed. Who watched me with big, round tear-filled eyes while sucking on her pacifier in a room with only a crib, a changing table, and a crucifix on the bland wall.

“I was always a big reader of mysteries,” Trinity says. “Stories about detectives who solved crimes. And my gran loved true crime. She had all of Ann Rule’s books on her shelves. And so many others. And when I spent summers with my gran and gramps, while my mom worked, I started to devour the true crime books on her shelves. Moving on to criminology, stories about FBI mind hunters. Then on to books on abnormal psychology. And all the while I could see my gran watching me in a certain way as I read them. Gramps and her had a big fight one night after he caught me with one of her books on ‘killer minds.’ I heard them at night. Gramps raging on about her filling my head with ideas. And what if things ran in families. Which started wheels turning deep inside my mind. It did seem odd, given my grandparents’ devout faith, yet my gran loving these deviant stories of horrible, evil deeds. The irony is, those true crime books, I think, were my gran’s way of trying to understand the mental pathology of her son-in-law, the man her daughter married. My father. But it turned me into a true crime aficionado.”

“And that led you into true crime podcasting?”

She nods. “I joined a true crime book club. That led to an online cold case group. We’d pick an unsolved case each month, study it, and then all try to solve it. That led to me cofounding It’s Criminal. And while I was casting about, looking for old cases to cover—Canadian ones, specifically, because we were planning a Cold North Killers theme—I ran across the 1997 Leena Rai murder. The fact that she was sexually assaulted and killed so violently by her teacher, who was also her guidance counselor, and tutor and basketball coach to boot, well, that was a riveting candidate. It had all the feels. Young schoolgirl. Small and closely knit mill town in the Pacific Northwest. The great big thundering waterfalls, and that mountain that looms like a tombstone over the town. And this killer who’d confessed but had never, ever spoken about what he did. It was like there remained a lingering secret. Something worse, darker. And this could be my narrative angle. So I started digging more. And when I opened up an old newspaper article, I . . . I nearly passed out. There was a photo with the news story, and it was him. Clayton Jay Pelley was the same man in my gran’s photographs. I was sure of it. So I found more photos. And then there was no doubt in my mind I was looking at the same man.”