“Well,” Moretti said, clapping her hands together decisively as Kensington spluttered. “I think we’re done here. Kensington, you get to notify the families.”
*
Back at the station, Saffy let the buzz expand. Until then, her rotation had included robberies and domestic incidents, nothing especially contentious—it was a new exhilaration, the thrill of catching a good case, and as she followed Moretti through the bullpen, even the troopers could not bring her down. She ignored the usual, a whispered joke concealed behind a hand, a laugh so muffled she could not track it to the source. All her life, strangers and teachers and peers and colleagues had made her feel acutely aware of her dark skin. It never seemed to matter that she had grown up here, that she had never been to India, a place she yearned for idly—as a child she had traced the country’s shape, a reverent finger on the map, outlining its careful borders. Next to the hordes of tobacco-chewing boys, muddy boots propped on their desks, Saffy would always feel outcast.
“We’ll set up here,” Moretti directed. The backroom conference table was littered with the half-solved cases still in rotation: the Saranac robbery, a series of Y2K conspiracy threats, a child abduction Kensington had been working for months.
“I’m putting you on the old files,” Moretti said. “Kensington and I remember too much. You’re completely fresh—I want you reading through everything.”
“What exactly am I looking for?”
“Anything that puts us near that forest.”
On the television in the corner of the room, the press conference blared. The captain’s face was somber as he monotoned a careful statement, glancing only sparingly at the audience of reporters. When the camera panned to the photographs, the girls looked younger than ever. Izzy and Angela smiled in front of blue backdrops in staged high school portraits—Angela wore a shirt embroidered with yellow polka dots, and Izzy had a spattering of acne across her cheeks. Lila didn’t have a school photo; her boyfriend had provided that single known photograph, back when she’d gone missing. Lila stood on a sidewalk overgrown with weeds, red backpack flung over her shoulder, head twisted back to smile at the photographer.
“You’ll be okay?” Moretti asked, a half question. Moretti had not forgotten. Lila had been a beacon, that night in Travis’s trailer, guiding Saffy directly here. This very case, pulling her into the light.
The old files appeared then, a distraction and a relief—four dusty boxes, lugged in by a disgruntled trooper, sweat stains blooming in the pits of his uniform.
“I take it these are mine now?” Saffy said.
Moretti winced, apologetic. “I’ll grab us lunch.”
When Moretti had gone, Saffy lined the bulletin board with new photographs from the crime scene. The forensics team had uncovered the girls’ belongings, in various states of decay. Shoes, earrings. Lila’s backpack, Angela’s purse. Izzy’s mother had been the first to notice—a beaded barrette was missing, Izzy’s favorite. Her mother was certain she’d been wearing it that night. Angela’s mother mentioned a pearl bracelet, a family heirloom her daughter never took off. Moretti was convinced the jewelry had gotten lost in the brush, and besides, nothing of Lila’s had been taken. But, Saffy pointed out, Lila didn’t have parents. No one had been watching. Trinkets, Saffy had suggested to a tight-lipped Morettti. Maybe he took souvenirs.
Saffy crouched on the fraying carpet. The first of the four cardboard boxes contained the witness interviews—the base had collapsed, sagging with the sheer number of reports. She would have to track them all down again, take new statements.
At the very bottom of the stack, Saffy found the original print: Lila’s photo. It had been shot on a disposable camera, dusty and faded, Lila’s smile bleached and pallid. Saffy thought of Kristen then—Kristen, with her stable job at the salon, where her clients told her she looked like Jennifer Aniston, how her clothes hung easily on her thin, lithe frame. Kristen, who had always known she was bound for something better, who had worked for stability and then accepted it without question. Saffy studied the photo of Lila, a girl reduced to a discolored snapshot, and wondered if she would always feel like this: a pendulum swinging between the two of them, never sure of what she might have become.
Beneath Lila’s photo, there was a bag. A hunk of dark hair lay limp in the clear plastic, evidence an officer had found at the bottom of the driveway where Izzy disappeared. As Saffy leaned against the backroom wall, Izzy’s hair in her lap, she was transported into a hallucination that had stalked her for years now, a parallel universe that felt sickening, nearly fatal in its limitlessness.