Hairpin Bridge Read online

  Now, every second she waits is lost time. If she turns on her engine and resumes running, she can still preserve some of her lead. If her cover is already blown, why wait? Why let her time burn away like a lit fuse? She watches the cop car slow further at the junction as a voice in her mind races: He saw you. He’s going to turn left. He’s going to turn left and follow you.

  The Charger glides to a complete stop.

  Silence.

  Well, that’s unexpected.

  Her fingers are clenched around the Toyota key now, just a single twist from awakening the engine. Tight enough to imprint a pattern into her palm. Her knuckles ache with pins and needles. She relaxes her fingers, just a little.

  He’s parked now, right in the center of Highway 200, about a hundred yards from her. Just a few paces from the gate. His engine idles, a low growl. Lights on.

  She watches through her rear window. Still afraid to move. Her lungs bloat inside her chest like hot balloons. She’s getting dizzy, her thoughts starting to swim, but she won’t allow herself to breathe. She can’t. It’s nightmare logic: if she breathes, he’ll see her.

  For another torturous moment, nothing happens.

  Then the Charger’s door swings open, silent but startling in its swiftness, and Cambry coughs her breath out. She gasps, as if surfacing from deep water.

  The cop steps out. He’s a black silhouette against his headlights. Even from a distance, she can discern the same details she remembers: The brim of his hat. His ram shoulders. His barrel chest. He’s a big guy, almost a bodybuilder, and he looks even bigger in profile. It chills her blood, to be chased by a man with the proportions of the Incredible Hulk.

  She’s hidden, she reassures herself. He can’t possibly see her in the dark without night vision.

  Does he have night vision? Infrared?

  The cop leaves his door ajar and strides to the back of his vehicle. He’s in a hurry. He pops the trunk and leans inside. His dark form ducks into the red glow of his taillights, as red as a demon, before he disappears from view again.

  He doesn’t see her. He can’t.

  Right? The flatlands are lumpen darkness. Sporadic trees and spotty foliage. She wishes she could sink into it. Just melt downward, car and all, like slipping under dark mud.

  The cop reappears. Again passing through the red glare of his brake lights, again looking like a muscle-bound devil. He carries a weapon now. Cambry is no expert on firearms. This year, she shot Blake’s pocket pistol a few times, just enough to be believably threatening if they were ever mugged at a campsite. But she’s certain, even across a great distance, that what Raycevic is carrying is an assault rifle.

  He carries it lightly, like a broomstick. He stops by his ajar door. He looks left, then ahead. Left, then ahead. He’s staring at the locked gate—maybe he sees the sapling she took out—and supposing which direction she fled. His movements are clipped, twitchy. Nervous.

  He’s not sure.

  Cambry remains frozen in her car. Her Toyota key still tight in her fingers. One twist is all it will take, and then her driving lights will snap on and she’ll light up like a Vegas billboard. She can’t open her door and escape on foot, either—the dome light will go off. She’s trapped inside her car.

  The adrenaline of hiding, of being hunted, stirs in her stomach. It’s not an entirely bad sensation. She remembers being the little girl who dominated at hide-and-seek. Even indoors. She’d slip off her shoes and tread silently in her socks. She’d evade Lena and the other kids for what felt like hours at a time, changing positions, sliding out of closets, creeping from room to room of her cousins’ house like a wraith. There’s something exhilarating to not being found.

  Meanwhile, the cop scans the distance for her. Too dark for binoculars. He holds that sinister rifle to his shoulder as he searches, ready to fire. Thank God he doesn’t have night vision.

  He has to decide, she realizes. One or the other.

  Stay on the highway or take a left onto the closed road? He has a fifty-fifty chance of choosing correctly. Cambry has a fifty-fifty chance of breaking contact and escaping. It all comes down to a coin flip, under an anxious black sky. The air builds with electric charge. She can feel it in her teeth.

  The Toyota keys rattle in her fingers. Her hand shakes. The apprehension of it is killing her nerves, and it must be killing Raycevic’s, too. He’s losing time. He knows it. She knows it. It all comes down to his choice.

  Please choose wrong. She hopes.

  Please stay on the highway.

  The realization comes to her now. Now, of all times. It comes in on tiny crawling legs, like an insect under a door. She understands now. This cop, Raymond Raycevic, was destroying a body out on that remote property. The four campfires, caged in pyramids of stone, were designed to hold heat. Like little furnaces. To bake human bone into powder. He was cremating a body, one chopped piece at a time.

  Cambry’s stomach writhes. Acid in her throat.

  This cop, Corporal Raymond Raycevic, is a killer. And she stumbled across his evidence disposal site. She witnessed him in the act. So now he desperately needs to eliminate her before she tells someone else and blows his secret. That’s it. That’s the only realistic explanation for what’s happening.

  He sets his rifle on the seat and climbs back inside his Charger. He slams the door with clear anger. The sound reaches her a fraction of a second later, a dry clap delayed by distance. The patrol car’s driving lights change as he shifts into gear. This is it. The moment of truth.

  Please stay on the road.

  The vehicle lurches forward toward the junction, and Cambry wants to cover her eyes, wants desperately to look away.

  Please-please-please—

  And Raycevic continues straight down Highway 200. Past the white sign, past the road, past the smashed sapling and the locked gate. Past Cambry’s hiding spot. She doesn’t believe it at first. She can’t.

  Yes. He’s leaving.

  Watching him go, she cries out, half a scream and half a gasp. So much tension, let out as suddenly as a punctured balloon. A rush of blood to her skin. A seizure of joy in her throat. Yes, it was a coin flip, all right, and she called tails, and he called heads, and thank God, she just won—

  Lightning crosses the sky.

  A jagged bolt leaps east to west, fracturing the sky into cracks of silent fire. For a microsecond, every inch of the prairie lights up, as if every rock and every tree is X-rayed in a double flash. Even the interior of Cambry’s Corolla ignites as bright as daylight for a single horrible instant.

  On the highway, the cop slams on his brakes. His tires squeal.

  As he skids back around to turn at the gate and rejoin the chase, it takes a full, disbelieving second for Cambry Nguyen to comprehend what happened. What just happened, against all odds. She twists her key, starting the engine again.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

  Chapter 8

  Lena

  “You’re hiding something,” she told the cop.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, Ray.”

  He just stared. Caught flat-footed.

  “And you know what? It’s okay. Because I haven’t been entirely honest with you, either.” Lena glanced at her sister’s car. The Shoebox recorder on the hood, its white cassette spokes turning. She felt the temperature change, the sun dimming behind a wall of dirty smoke, and chose her words carefully, because they couldn’t be taken back: “Something doesn’t sit well with me. It hasn’t. For three months. That’s . . . part of the reason I tracked you down, Ray. And arranged this meeting.”

  “The investigation—”

  “Doesn’t add up,” she said quietly.

  For a long breath, Corporal Raycevic didn’t speak. He regarded her in the unforgiving daylight, but distantly, like he was running through a checklist in his mind. Finally, with a squint, he spoke. “Walk me through it, Lena. I’m not a detective, but outline everything that’s bothering you.”


  “You first. You haven’t explained Bob the Dinosaur.”

  “I already did. Not everyone I detain is cuffed. Kids, they draw things in the vinyl—”

  “How did Cambry’s dinosaur get there?”

  “You’re making me say this?” He pulled off his black Oakleys and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “I don’t want to say this, because I’m going to sound like a jerk on your tape—”

  “Little late for that, Ray.”

  “I’ll be as delicate as possible. Have you heard of an old Nickelodeon show called Rocko’s Modern Life? There’s a green chameleon character. I forget his name. But that’s exactly what it looks like. Some fourteen-year-old shoplifter in Polk City scratched a supporting character from a Nickelodeon show into my seat five years ago, and if it looks like Bob the Dinosaur to you, that just means your sister’s character wasn’t original. Sorry.”

  “You have a pretty good memory.”

  “I was making an example.”

  Don’t give him room to breathe.

  She pointed to her sister’s Corolla. “See the big dent on Cambry’s bumper? Like she rammed it through a small tree or something?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That wasn’t on it when I last saw her.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “When was that, Lena?”

  This landed like a dagger between her ribs. She didn’t answer—because the answer was over a year ago. Thirteen months. At a family barbecue. They’d barely spoken. Cambry had been sullenly drunk, and Blake (Terrible Guy #17, or maybe #18) had been embarrassingly grabby. Moreover, cars get damaged all the time. A dent proved nothing.

  Raycevic studied her. He knew he’d drawn blood.

  Twins are supposed to be close, right? Inseparable, sharing DNA, like little mirror images. But Lena and Cambry had been trapped birds inside that tiny thousand-square-foot house, and when age eighteen hit, they’d exploded out into the world in wildly different directions.

  “There’s no conspiracy,” Raycevic continued with a strut. “The investigation ran its course. It was a weekend, so the M.E. was late ruling it a suicide, and Homicide was already hard at work going through my laundry, dusting every square inch of her vehicle—and mine—for suspicious fingerprints, signs of a struggle, foreign hairs or fibers, anything at all—”

  “The brake pads were worn.”

  “She drove it to Florida—”

  “The brakes were mentioned on the report. Remember?”

  “Look, Lena.” He looked pained. “This is getting above my pay grade. I don’t have the report in front of me. And as much as I wish I was, I’m not a detective—”

  “Recent wear on vehicle’s brake pads,” Lena said. “Quote, unquote. As if she’d slammed on her brakes, because she was being chased and evading someone—”

  “Or she saw a coyote.”

  “I think I know why you’re not a detective,” she said.

  No wind or ambient sounds filled the uncomfortable silence. So Lena pressed on and filled it herself, with something she’d been aching to say all day: “I don’t believe my sister killed herself.”

  “You need to accept that she did.”

  “She wouldn’t.” She fought a tremor in her voice. She hated it. It made her sound childlike, on the verge of tears. “I know Cambry. I know my sister. On a cellular level.”

  He was close enough now to touch her arm. “Lena, she—”

  “Stop calling me Lena. You don’t know me.”

  He froze. As if bitten.

  She caught her breath. She hadn’t meant to snap—raising her voice had always felt like an admission of weakness. Strength is quiet, insecurity is loud, and her voice had echoed crisply over the valley. But she couldn’t stop now. She was just getting started.

  “Another thing. Only one of Cambry’s notebooks was found in her car. She was on the road for nine months, from Seattle to Fort Myers and almost back again. So there should have been hundreds of sketches—in ink, pencil, everything.”

  “Maybe her boyfriend took them.”

  “They separated in Fort Myers. The missing drawings are after Florida—”

  “You studied every page?”

  “You’re goddamn right I did.” She looked at Raycevic head on. “They were California, Texas, Louisiana. The Santa Monica Pier, Mitten Buttes, oil derricks, alligator heads—”

  “She stopped drawing after Florida. Or she tossed the notebooks—”

  “She would never do that.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Positive?”

  “She would never toss her drawings, Ray.”

  “Okay.” He sucked on his lower lip. “Because she did toss herself.”

  Silence.

  She studied him, paying special attention to his eyes—waiting for another flash of horror, regret, apology. Jokes can misfire. This wasn’t a joke. He was smiling. It was designed to hurt. It did.

  That’s how it’s going to be, she thought. Fine.

  She forced a smile, too, hard as granite. “You know what clinches it, Ray? What seals it in my mind, that you know more than you’re telling me?”

  He waited.

  “This bridge is haunted. According to the internet. Sometimes called the Suicide Bridge. It’s famous for four or five jumpers, back in the eighties—”

  “You told me this.”

  “I did. Thirty minutes ago. And you told me you’d never heard of it. But in your written report, you named it as the Suicide Bridge. Your exact words. You added some bullshit little flourish about the bridge’s tragic history, and how you sincerely hope it’s the last life ended here.”

  His expression didn’t change.

  “Good performance,” she said. “But you overdid it.”

  He didn’t blink.

  “You lied to me. Again—”

  “I haven’t lied to you once today,” he hissed. A shocking snarl to his voice, like a wounded animal, and Lena edged back a half step. “Am I . . . am I supposed to remember every single local legend? There’s a portal to hell in the Magma Springs Cemetery. Johnny Cash allegedly took a shit in our mini-mart restroom once. I forgot about a bridge that I have a passing familiarity with, over a quarter of a year ago—”

  “You pulled her over,” Lena whispered. “An hour before her time of death.”

  “Do you have something to say?”

  “And then the next day, you found her body—”

  “Do you have something to say, Lena?” He bristled, blocking the sun. “Because if so, you’d better say it outright. I don’t have the patience for this mysterious chickenshit.”

  She looked back at him. The words were there, on the tip of her tongue. But uttering them would change everything. There’d be no coming back from it. The entire situation could unravel. She’d rehearsed this moment for weeks. Months. She’d practiced in front of mirrors, in the shower, on the road, and now here she was, tongue-tied and blank-eyed.

  He was closer now. “Say it.”

  She could smell his breath. Strawberry antacids. And a sweet, goatish odor, like bacteria on his gums. She could see the tartar on his teeth.

  “Say it, Lena.” Even closer. His tone had changed, bullying now.

  Still, the words stuck in Lena’s throat.

  “Say it—”

  * * *

  He killed her.

  I am sure of this. Beyond sure. I have never been more certain of anything in my entire life, dear readers.

  Corporal Raymond Raycevic, a highly decorated seventeen-year veteran of the Montana Highway Patrol, murdered my sister Cambry Nguyen on June 6 of this year. He threw her body off Hairpin Bridge to make it appear to be another in its curious line of suicides decades ago. He couldn’t conceal the coincidences—like the fact that he pulled her over shortly before her death—but he managed everything else. Her soft tissue was pulverized on impact with granite at free-fall velocity. There was no forensic evidence recovered in her car, nothing incriminating in he
r barely used flip phone, and no signs of foul play. Just another runaway, low on gas in the middle of nowhere, ending her life on a tragic impulse. The cover story worked on everyone—except me.

  He. Killed. Her.

  Yes, dear readers. That’s what this entire post is about. It was never about Lights and Sounds, or me, or my grief, or the whispering ghosts of the Suicide Bridge.

  It’s about Cambry’s murder.

  My sister did not kill herself on the last leg of her cross-country trek, in a random leap off a semifamous bridge. Her alleged mental illness is neither a motivation nor an excuse, as it so often is when troubled people are the victims of crime.

  As for her suicide text message? Fake, I believe.

  Yes. Fake.

  Here’s a screencap—1384755.jpg. Received at 12:48 a.m. on June 8. Mom and Dad and everyone struggled to find sense in it, and no one questioned the authenticity of her last words. But as the fog of grief thinned, I started to think about it more critically.

  Please forgive me, she texted me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.

  Excuse me, but what the fuck?

  There’s a lot of weirdness to unpack here. I don’t even know where to start.

  It’s not Cambry’s voice. It’s not even a decent imitation of Cambry’s voice. I know my sister. This was written by someone else. Someone pretending to be a twenty-four-year-old woman—and failing hard.

  It’s cliché. Take it from a voracious reader and hopeful (someday) author. The first two sentences are the blandest, least imaginative swing at a suicide note ever attempted. All it needs is a So long, cruel world.

  It’s specially designed to let “Officer Raycevic” off the hook.

  Yeah.

  Let me explain that last part.

  If you allegedly found a woman’s body under a bridge, but you were also on record as the last person to see her alive at a traffic stop, you’d be suspect #1. What better way to cloud that suspicion than to reframe the narrative and have the victim personally name you as trying (and failing) to help? Sorry, Officer Raycevic, you didn’t realize I was about to kill myself, but you tried!