TOM: The water was icy. The visibility was almost nil. At times I couldn’t even see my hands in front of my face. The two of us were basically diving blind, just carefully inching our way forward and feeling with our hands through the thick murk, touching things—slimy reeds, silt, rocks, bits of metal, old tins, broken bottles, shopping carts, a bicycle—hoping all the while that we wouldn’t cut ourselves on something sharp. We desperately wanted to find the girl, but at the same time you don’t want to find her under there. The whole time while I was looking, there was this fear that her face would suddenly come up against mine—that I’d swim into it before I realized it. That her eyes would be right there, in front of mine. Open. Looking at me. Her skin pale, luminous like a ghost in the dark water . . . You never quite get rid of that anxiety, that edge of tension . . . And then I did touch her. With my fingertips. Her hair was floating out around her head. Long. And it got in my face, across my goggles. I thought it was weeds before I realized it was her long hair. She had nothing on, apart from her bra and the camisole tangled around her neck.
SILENCE
TRINITY: How did you decide where to begin the underwater search?
TOM: We figured if she went into the river below the bridge, where her belongings had been found, she couldn’t have gone far. Leena was heavier than an average female drowning victim, so with the river depth at around twenty-five feet, and the slowness of the current, we figured she’d be heavy enough to resist much movement. Basically, if a diver can swim easily against a current, it’s unlikely that a drowning victim will be moved far. So you generally begin at the point last seen. And then you adjust your buoyancy so you are negatively buoyant, and you let yourself sink to almost the bottom, and you hang there, prone, just above the bottom, and then work your way forward. We found her not too far from the bridge trestles. She’d gotten caught up in the eelgrass.
TRINITY: And you found items of her clothing.
TOM: Yes. Her cargo pants and panties. No jacket was found. And when Sergeant Walczak asked us to go down again, I was thinking maybe we’d find a baseball bat, or a tire iron, or something heavy that could have been used to deliver that kind of blunt force trauma . . . I mean . . . I . . . She looked like victims we’ve found who’ve gone over bridges in car wrecks.
TRINITY: That’s what the pathologist also said.
TOM: Yes. But because we were looking for a weapon, when I saw the loose journal pages just hanging there, waving softly to and fro in the watery gloom, like three ghosts, I was . . . sort of spooked. And when we brought them up, the pages appeared pretty pristine. The words were still there. Ink is generally permanent, and if the pages have not been in water too long, and if the water is cold like it was, when they’re dried out, the writing is legible. Most words survive.
TRINITY: They were from a journal?
TOM: They looked like they’d been ripped from a journal, yes.
Gio starts feeding in the theme music softly. I take another bite of pizza, thinking as I listen.
TRINITY: Jaswinder and Pratima Rai confirmed the writing was their daughter’s. They said Leena liked to write, and that she wanted to be a writer someday, possibly even a foreign correspondent. I received copies of the torn pages along with the other case evidence. And here is Leena, in her own words:
MUSIC INCREASES SLIGHTLY IN VOLUME
TRINITY: “We spend most of our lives afraid of our own Shadow. He told me that. He said a Shadow lives deep inside every one of us. So deep we don’t even know it’s there. Sometimes, with a quick sideways glance, we catch a glimpse of it. But it frightens us, and we quickly look away. This is what fuels the Shadow—our inability to look. Our inability to examine this thing that is in fact our raw selves. This is what gives the Shadow its power. It makes us lie. About what we want, about who we are. It fires our passions, our darkest desires. And the more powerful it gets, the greater we fear it, and the deeper we struggle to hide this Beast that is us . . .
“I don’t know why He tells me these things. Maybe it’s a way of obliquely bringing out and addressing his own Shadow. But I do think our Shadows are bad—his and mine. Big and dark and very dangerous. I don’t think our Shadows should ever be allowed out.”
The other two pages, seemingly torn from random places in the journal, have a few jotted lines of thought in this vein. In one place, Leena wrote this:
“He believes in me. It’s the one thing that keeps me holding on. He makes me feel smart, and real, and valuable, and I love him. He loves me, too.”
And in another line she wrote these words: “He told me it’s all very well to want to leave, but I need an exit plan that is more than just an exit. I think I have one . . .”
The last phrase in the ripped pages is this: “He told me about a military term today. MAD. Mutual assured destruction. Like when two powers hold nuclear weapons that would totally annihilate the other side, and it keeps each side in check. He said that’s what keeping big secrets is like. He meant huge, dark secrets. Like knowing-the-truth-of-someone’s-Shadow kinds of secrets. Secrets that become nuclear weapons. A form of deterrence. And each side is scared into silence. Until they aren’t. Until they both act, and implode the relationship. Total mutual destruction.”
And that’s it. That’s where the page ends on a rip. That’s all that remains of Leena Rai’s words. So far. For the rest of the diary has never been found.
MUSIC GOES LOUDER.
So who was the “He” that Leena loved? Was it the man who ended up in prison? Or was it someone else? Someone closer in age to Leena? Someone who perhaps still lives in town? Someone with a shadow, a truth so dark it got Leena killed for knowing it?
Why were the ripped pages floating in the river with her body? Why were they ripped at all?
And where did the journal go?
Loose pages. Loose ends. They leave too many unanswered questions. Questions the detectives on the case dropped. A trail we will follow.
DISSOLVE TO THEME SONG.
I swallow my mouthful of pizza. “I think maybe we should introduce the clip we recorded this morning on murder being entertainment,” I say. “Can you play that one for me again?”
Gio finds the clip, clicks.
TRINITY: Murder and the legal process that follows is a kind of theater, a theater of the macabre. The act of murder forces a spotlight onto the pathologies in our communities. We are drawn to watch because murder reveals elements about ourselves, things we can’t look away from. We recognize the various murderers’ vices buried deep within each and every one of us—deviant desires, mental illness, urges toward violence, righteous rage, prejudice, racism, frustration, malevolence, greed, envy, cruelty . . . All of this is the stuff of high drama. And to understand a society’s murders is to learn a great deal about the tensions that lie beneath the surface of a town. Murder also reveals the authority of a government and the ultimate power it holds over the lives of its citizens. The power to take away freedoms, to lock someone away. To punish. And to even kill in retaliation in the form of capital punishment. But sometimes the authorities get it wrong.
Sometimes it’s left to a citizen journalist to find the truth. And sometimes uncovering the truth can start out like the divers underwater, in the murky darkness, just feeling their way, inch by inch, until their fingers touch something.