“What’s going on?” I asked the patrolwoman when she approached my car. Sensing she was about to tell me to move along, I took my shield out of my jacket and flipped the holder open.

Her face relaxed a little from its hard-set position, but she didn’t take off or even push down her mirrored shades, so that I saw my own face in them, distended as if by a fish-eye lens. I read her nameplate: OFFICER MOORE.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Moore said. Then, in answer to my question, she said succinctly, “Jumper.”

“Where?” I said. I saw Moore’s partner, now standing out on the train tracks mid-bridge, but no one else.

“She climbed down on the framework,” Moore said. “You can kind of see her from here. Just a kid, really.”

I craned my neck and did see a slender form on the webwork of the bridge, and then the flash of sunlight on dark-gold hair.

“A girl? Like, around fourteen?”

“Yeah, she is,” Moore said.

“Where can I park?”

The trip out onto the railroad bridge kept taking me through sun and shadow, sun and shadow, not just from the bridge’s overhead structure, but also from the sun dipping behind a cloud and then back again. It was a day of broken cloud.

“I thought we radioed for the water patrol,” Moore’s partner said in greeting, mildly perplexed, as I neared him.

I knew him by sight but couldn’t quite remember his name. Something with a V. He was a few years younger than me, 25 or so. Handsome and olive-complected.

“Nobody sent for me, Officer Vignale,” I said, my memory delivering the name to me before I had to read his tag. “I was just passing by. What’s going on?”

“She’s still down there, Detective…”

“Pribek,” I said. “Sarah Pribek. Have you tried to talk to her?”

“I’m afraid to distract her. I don’t want her to lose her balance.” I turned, leaned against the railing, and looked down. Sure enough, the kid was right there, standing with her feet braced and her hands up on a diagonal strut. The mild breeze ruffled hair exactly the color and texture of Ellie Bernhardt’s.