Harry said that you could pull apart Graham’s versions of the story—he’d been swept out with her in the beginning; he’d been able to stay in the kayak and tried and failed to save her—but there was no way to know what really happened, or at least what Harry and Cy believed happened: Graham tried, and when she turned him down, he’d thrown the preserver in a thicket and beaten and raped her. At some point, together again in the kayak, he struck her arm and her head with his paddle, knocking her into the water. The wounds on Ariel’s arm and head were consistent with the edge of a paddle. Their futile search for a branch on the east side of the river—there had been no branch. There had been Graham, losing his temper a second time after whatever had happened on the island, or perhaps Graham, thinking about how Ariel would accuse him of rape. Or maybe she only failed to feed some fantasy with a loving, postcoital look.

“He kept her on that island for a long time,” said Harry. “He said he waited to be rescued, but really it was Ariel who waited.”

A girl says no, I don’t want to. Or: No, I don’t want you. I don’t love you. Or the final shot: I love someone else.

Polly saw the paddle slicing through the air.

Cy let Graham go without charging him, though he would bring him in for questioning every day for a week. There was nothing to charge him with. Cy talked to prosecutors in Park and other counties, to a lawyer for the statewide battered women’s network, and to the FBI, but no one knew of a successful prosecution on such grounds, not for manslaughter or rape or murder. They could question Graham again and again, but it was hard to see how it would change. The evidence just wasn’t there.

There’s always a true story, whether or not anyone knows it. Ariel would have tried to be nice about it with Graham, thought Polly. She might have said that it wasn’t about him, just that she loved someone else. He must have tried—asked?—as soon as they’d gotten to the island, before she took the preserver off. She said no and he hit her, took her down, and a few minutes later she would have been trying to think her way out of the situation, with a bleeding face, a bruised back and vulva. She could get into the kayak with him, or he would do more. She must have thought there was a chance of surviving if she climbed into the kayak in front of him; she must have believed she would at least get home. She had no good choice, but she chose wrong.