Beneath Devil's Bridge(90)

My ass.

“Is . . . is it true what Clay said, on the podcast, Maddy? Did he abuse you?”

Tears leak down her pale cheeks. “I thought I loved him. I thought it was daring, and that I had the most cool secret in the entire world. I thought it made me so special, that he was interested in me like that. I’d have done anything for him. And yes, I was with him in the bushes that night. But Leena came looking for him, and she found us. Doing it.” She sucks in a shuddering breath. “It makes me so ill to think about it, how I was emotionally manipulated by a trusted authority figure, and how I could never bring myself to talk about it, to tell you. And the longer I’ve held on to it, the sicker it’s made me in my head, in my soul. It . . . it made me lash out at everything, including you. Mostly you. And I am so sorry. But . . . what Clay said on the podcast was—is—true, Mom. I ran back to the bonfire, while he began taking Leena up the path to his car.”

She falls silent. I glance at my watch. Tension torques in my chest. The cops will be here soon. I am weighted down with the realization that I have completely failed in my role as a mother. I wasn’t there for my child in the way I should have been. I didn’t save her from a very sick man. I wasn’t home enough or present enough to realize she was growing troubled. I didn’t look hard enough. Until it was too late.

“Maddy,” I say very softly, “what made Clay target you? What made you vulnerable to this predator?”

She wipes tears from her cheeks. Her hand trembles. “I didn’t think I was a victim at the time. Like I said, I felt I was special to be selected for his attention. It . . . it started when I went to him because I was . . . I was having trouble with things at home.”

My throat closes in on itself. My words come out husky, strained. “What trouble, Maddy?”

“You. You and Dad. You always working. Trying to prove to everyone you were going to be a good police chief and fill Granddad’s shoes.”

My eyes pool with tears. I turn my head and stare out the window. She takes my hand.

“Mom. Look at me, Mom.”

I swallow and face my child.

“I am a mother, too, now. Sometimes . . . sometimes . . .”

“Can you forgive me, Maddy? Can you find it in your heart?”

“I can’t forgive myself, Mom. For what I did.”

“Did . . . did you tell Beth, the night of the bonfire, what you did with Clay?”

She closes her eyes again. “No,” she whispers. “But Beth spied us when she went to the washroom. She lost it. She was furious. But in the end we both lied—she lied for me. It was the start of the end of our friendship.” She holds my gaze. “You see, it was Beth who invited Clay to the bonfire, who told him about it. I realized—when she got so enraged with me—that she actually thought she might seduce Clay that night. She thought she was Clay’s ‘special girl.’”

“Maddy, the locket—”

“I was wearing it on the night of the bonfire.” Her gaze locks with mine. “But you know that. Because you stole that photo Liam shot of us girls. The one from my bedroom drawer, where you can clearly see the locket around my neck.”

“How did it get in Leena’s hair?”

She turns her head on the pillow, away from me.

“Maddy?”

“We waited under the bridge for Leena to come,” she says softly. “Me, Beth, Darren, Cheyenne, Dusty, Seema. Dusty was super amped up, and she was accustomed to violence. She experienced violence at home. She’d been violent herself. She struck Leena first. Hard. Across the face. We . . . we all beat her, and kicked her, and Darren stomped on her back. And Dusty and Cheyenne burned her with their cigarettes.”

I wince, thinking of the dead girl on the autopsy slab in the morgue that day. “Darren . . . has size-eleven feet.”

She nods. “He was wearing his work boots, the same brand as half the guys in town wore.”

“Including Clay Pelley.”

She nods. “It was so horrible. The group beat her so badly. I hit her once with my fist, and in the whole struggle, my locket got ripped off my neck, and it must have gotten tangled in Leena’s hair.” My daughter falls silent for a long while. Her eyes take on a haunted look. It’s as though she’s seeing back through a tunnel of time to that cold night under the bridge. I sense the clock ticking. It’s growing lighter outside. Tension winds tighter in my chest.

“Go on, Maddy,” I say quietly.

She inhales. “Beth tore Leena’s backpack off her back and opened it, looking for her address book.”

“But she didn’t find it,” I say. “Because it was in the side pocket of Leena’s cargo pants.”

“We didn’t know that. Beth dumped everything out of the backpack, and stuff fell between the rocks. She found Leena’s journal, opened it, and began reading with her headlamp, and Leena, who was bleeding, struggled to grab it away. And some of the pages ripped out.” She takes another sip of water, coughs. “I said that was enough. I tried to stop them. They carried on hitting her, and I told them I was leaving. I marched away. I couldn’t take it anymore. Darren tried to stop me, but I shrugged him off and kept going. I walked along the road, alone, to Ari’s takeout. I threw up along the way. The others caught up with me—Cheyenne, Dusty, Seema. They told me that Darren and Beth were following behind them. I didn’t know that Darren and Beth had gone back after Leena. When I heard her body had been found . . . I thought Leena must have stumbled back over the bridge and then died from the injuries we’d all inflicted, and that I was also partly responsible for her murder. Which is why I lied about my locket. Why we all lied about things. Then Mr. Pelley confessed that he’d killed her. I . . . I couldn’t quite put it together, but assumed he must have found Leena on the north side of the bridge and drowned her there, and that’s what he’d meant when he’d told me he was going to ‘take care’ of her after she’d spied on us in the bushes.”