—
Rhiannon’s mother wasn’t difficult to locate with the details Richard had given me. Her hyphenated surname had been in the papers, and it wasn’t a common one. When I did a social media search, she showed up as the third hit down—her profile picture was of the same smiling teenage girl I’d seen in the newspaper articles, but the other images on her page were of an adult woman with deep lines on her thin face.
Only fifty but I’d have pegged her as more than a decade older. Grief and anger left marks.
Her location was listed as Auckland…and there, on her profile, was a link to a website:Justice for Rhiannon.
When I clicked through, I found myself on a badly designed site that I could tell hadn’t been updated on the back end for some time. But someone was still writing a post on it every year on Rhiannon’s birthday.
I began to read one at random.
My sweet girl would’ve been twenty-one today if only she hadn’t had the bad luck to fall in love with a psychopath. Everyone tells me I shouldn’t say these things, but I don’t care. It’s the truth and the truth needs to be spoken. Maybe they’ve gagged me with their rich people lawyers against saying his name, but I know. You all know.
My girl could swim like a fish. And you’re telling me she drowned on a clear day when the sea was all but smooth? I saw him after. He’d been swimming, too. Said it was with his sister, but he was a teenage boy, didn’t want to be hanging around with his kid sister.
He drowned my Rhi, my sweet girl. She was such a strong swimmer that he had to have held her under or done something else to her. She used to swim out to that far buoy and back without problem.
His sister was an adorable thing, though. Rhiannon loved her, used to make a special batch of cookies for her right before we went down each summer. “For my little Dee,” she’d say. “My adopted baby sister.”
I don’t know how one child in a family could be so sweet, and the other a monster. I still have the letters that little girl wrote to my girl after each summer. She loved that Rhiannon was a dancer and would always be excited for Rhiannon to teach her new steps.
He was always around them, though. Always watching. I should’ve known, but who thinks these kinds of things about a kid? Who could know that he was a murderer?
Sarita and Rajesh.
The answer to the writer’s final question.
After baby Ani, how could they not know? But I couldn’t ask them. Rhiannon’s mother, however, was alive—and Andrea Smithy-Carr had listed her personal phone number on the website, in case anyone had information about her daughter’s death.
I considered whether to call ahead, decided against it. I didn’t want her to talk herself out of it during my drive. It had been more than ten years, after all—and I was Bobby’s in-law. Better to call once I was within Auckland’s borders, give her less time to overthink.
The GPS told me the drive to Auckland would take roughly three hours. If I left now, I’d get there before five. Even if I ended up spending a couple of hours with her, I could still make it back to Rotorua tonight.
Stiff muscles were a small price to pay for critical information.
I wasn’t the least surprised when I spotted a police cruiser an hour into my drive to the country’s biggest city. I made sure to stay exactly at the speed limit no matter if traffic was flowing faster and kept passing me. But whichever cop Ackerson had asked for a favor suddenly put on their lights and siren anyway; I was getting ready to pull over when the cruiser raced past me, on its way to respond to an incident.
If another cop was shadowing me during the drive, I didn’t see them.
I made only one stop—for gas, and to use the toilet. As a result, my muscles were already tight when I pulled over at the southern border of the sprawling city of Auckland to call Andrea in the hope of getting her address. If it ended up being on the far northern end of the city, then I wouldn’t make it back to Rotorua till aftermidnight—rush hour had already begun, and Auckland was like LA in the sheer spread of its borders.
It was only as I input Andrea Smithy-Carr’s number that I realized I’d been stupid in my desperation—the number on the website could’ve long ago been disconnected.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice.
“Is this Andrea? Rhiannon’s mother?”
A long, long pause. “Who is this?” A harsh edge now.
Relief kicked me like an angry horse. Dropping my head against the headrest, I said, “I want to talk to you about Bobby Prasad.”
She sucked in air. “That bastard is finally dead.” Her voice held nothing but contempt and satisfaction.
“Yes,” I agreed even though I wasn’t too sure of that, “but he still hasn’t paid for Rhiannon’s death. Have you seen how they’re memorializing him in the papers? Smart young businessman, employed hundreds of people, brilliant member of the community.”
“It’s all lies.”
“Could we meet and talk? I think you’ll be interested in what I have to say.”
