“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 her 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.
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!
Then you’re no longer a suspicious party—you’ve recast yourself as a tormented hero now cursed to live with guilt. You missed your chance, Ray. You could have helped save the life of a suicidal woman on that remote highway if only . . . IF ONLY . . . you’d been more perceptive to the signs. Eh?
As cover-ups go, I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or idiotic. Maybe a little of both. It worked, after all. On everyone else.
Yes, dear readers: that means Corporal Raymond Raycevic himself typed the suicide note on Cambry’s flip phone. He fabricated that little Robert Frost masterpiece, found my number in her address book, hit send, and let it sit there in her outbox for later.
Bottom line?
She.
Did.
Not.
Kill.
Herself.
People who commit suicide go to hell, I remember our mom telling us once after one particularly brutal marathon of Sunday school. I don’t know if she still believes it—that her daughter is burning in a lake of fire right now. But it gives my mission a powerful and crystalline urgency: I’m going to rescue Cambry from hell.
I will catch her killer tomorrow.
I know what I’m up against, and I know the severity of making this charge. By all accounts, Corporal Raymond R. Raycevic has a valorous record. Last year he rescued two children from a burning trailer. He heroically shot a fugitive in a gunfight on I-90, where he’s credited with saving a deputy’s life. Back in 2007 he jumped into the Sun River and pulled an elderly woman out of a wrecked truck. On paper, he’s basically Officer Jesus (if Jesus shot one guy). And I have to admit, when I called him, Raycevic sounded like a decent guy over the phone. Genuine, even. If he’s a walking, talking insect, he’s got the human act down pat. I imagine he’s quite lovely until he peels off his skin.
Why should he fret, anyway? The case is closed, history is written, Cambry’s body is cremated, and he’s still working his beat (or highway, or whatever state troopers patrol). Tomorrow I’ll see him in the flesh, and I’ll ask him the questions that have been burning inside me for months. He doesn’t know I know. He has no clue he’ll be walking into my trap tomorrow. He’s in for a surprise, dear readers.
I’ll make him confess to Cambry’s murder on that bridge.
I have a plan.
* * *
Something occurred to him. “You’re recording me.”
“No shit, Ray.”
He blinked. A surprised flutter, like he was processing new information. He must have forgotten about the Shoebox recorder studiously logging every word, every breath, every pause. Had he incriminated himself yet? Hard to say. But he’d sure come across as a bullying asshole.
Because she did toss herself.
That was a career ender. It could go viral all by itself, but Lena was after bigger revelations. And it delighted her to see the big man off balance. He’d underestimated her, all right, and now he was paying dearly for it. She stepped back, giving herself more room. She didn’t like allowing him so close to her, his fetid strawberry breath in her face. Close enough to grab her throat.
Her calf bumped something—the bumper of her Corolla.
No. Cambry’s Corolla, always and forever.
She maneuvered around it and lifted the Shoebox recorder. She held it protectively to her chest.
“You’re recording me,” Raycevic said, “because you believe I had something to do with your sister’s death. Is that right?”
She nodded. “That’s correct.”
Somehow this felt like an anticlimax. For months she’d daydreamed of accusing him powerfully, articulately, like a prosecutor leveling a scathing charge before an enthralled courtroom. She’d wanted the microphone to hear the conviction in her voice. But she’d lost her nerve somewhere in the moment, and he’d taken control of the conversation. He’d been so close to her. So big.
He still was. He slurped his tongue over his teeth, as if he were chewing tobacco. He glanced at her—she tried to look stoic, like the heroine in an action movie—and then down at the recorder. “Turn it off,” he said finally. “Then we’ll talk.”
“No.”
“Turn it off.”
“Still no.”
“Turn it off, please.”
“Did you really think saying please would help?”
“I’m making you an offer,” he said. “I will tell you what you want to know, if you turn that thing off. What I’m about to tell you has to be off the record.”
“Non-negotiable,” Lena said. “The mic stays on.”
The cop held out a calloused palm. “Can I at least . . . look at what you’re taping me with?”
“You must think I’m stupid.”
“If you want the truth—”
“Hey. That’s close enough.” He’d been creeping closer again. He halted midstep, like they were playing freeze tag. His eyes glowered.
They stood six feet apart. To an uninvolved party, they’d look like a state trooper pulling a civilian over for a traffic violation, and perhaps exchanging a few testy words. Lena repositioned and moved around her car. Giving herself a few more paces of distance. And an open escape route, if he attacked and she needed to suddenly backpedal.
He watched her move.
It was all in the open now. Her intentions, his. She caught her breath. The recorder listened against her chest, its spokes quietly turning. She already wished she’d worded it better, made it more of an accusation. More of a spectacle. Not a simple admission to his question: That’s correct. It was her big moment, Cambry’s big moment, recorded forever for court and history, and she’d succumbed to stage fright and ceded control to him. Like a scared little girl.
Chickenshit, he’d called her. That was public record now.
Nothing happens like you plan it.
Last night in her Seattle apartment, she’d dreamed about Cambry. A real dream, not a nightmare. No guts, no gore, no horror—just a face-to-face moment. To Lena it felt desperately important. There was so much to ask. So much to say. This was her chance to tell her sister she loved her, that she’d always loved her and admired her across all the distance between them, and that she was sorry for everything she’d done—
But in her dream, Cambry sat on her hands and refused to even look at her. She turned away, blinking away tears. Sullen, heartbroken, cold. As if embarrassed.
Lena, go.
When Lena tried to touch her arm, she flinched away. No eye contact.
Go, she hissed. Go, please.
Lena didn’t understand.
Just go.
It made no sense to her. Why go? Why now? They were finally reunited for a blurry moment, but somehow Cambry and her furies didn’t want to be there. Her sister was always restless. Even in death, she would rather be somewhere else.
You have to go now. Her voice hardening. Go.
No love. No warmth. Just cold urgency.
You’re running out of time—
Then it ended.
The dream evaporated.
Lena awoke alone in the darkness before sunrise in frustrating dismay. Leaden heartache. She felt rejected. Like this was the spiritual equivalent of Sorry, I dialed the wrong number, and Cambry didn’t really want to talk to her. Even now. Even as a ghost.
Even in Lena’s imagination.
Before she’d left, she’d typed the dream into her blog, and then swallowed it like a pill. On the drive to Montana, she’d sculpted the dreamy nonsense into a narrative. Cambry wasn’t being cold; she was just ashamed of something. Guilty, maybe, for leaving her family without closure? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Lena assured herself the dream was her sister’s troubled spirit urging her forward (Lena, go), out the door to Hairpin Bridge (You’re running out of time) to confront her killer and avenge her.
And now here she was.
Here he was. He still watched her across their uneasy standoff. Something darted between them, gray and flecked. Like a windswept snowflake.
It was ash.
He looked at the recorder in her arms and sighed. “It’s true.”
“What’s true?”
“I followed your sister. On June sixth.”
Her stomach twisted.
Corporal Raymond Raycevic licked his dry lips and spoke slowly, making every syllable distinctly clear for the recorder. “I stopped her, Lena. But not for speeding.”
He paused, letting it sink in.
She loathed him. She loathed his power over her. She loathed herself for submitting to it.
“Cambry saw something she shouldn’t have seen,” he said. “When I stopped her vehicle, I asked her to come with me so I could protect her. But she didn’t trust me. I was trying to calm her down. I didn’t want to use force to restrain her, but I was getting ready to. I told her I’d count to three, and then she agreed to come with me and get in my vehicle.”
She didn’t, Lena knew. She wouldn’t have.
“She looked me in the eye and said yes, that she would get out, if I took a step back to give her room to open her car door. I did.” His lip curled with annoyance. “She floored it and sped off.”
Now that’s the Cambry I know. For a moment it was like her twin sister was alive again, revealing new surprises, and Lena’s heart clenched into a painful fist.
“I chased your sister, but I’m not the bad guy, Lena.” Raycevic softened and looked almost hurt now. “You never really considered that, did you?”
More flakes of ash drifted between them, like dead pollen.
“You admit you chased her?” she asked.
“Yes. Trying to save her.”