The Girl in the Moss

by Loreth Anne White

“It was easier, better, for me to pretend it never happened. I don’t expect you to understand. Not talking about it, keeping that journal to myself, made it go away.”

  Like Jasmine went away . . . A new thought slammed Angie. Her mouth turned dry as she held Shelley’s gaze. “If this diary contains incriminating information about your husband, wouldn’t it have made more sense to get rid of it, burn it or something?”

  “Probably. But a part of me wanted collateral. Some control over it all. Something I could use as a bargaining chip with Garrison if I ever needed it.”

  “You wanted leverage in case he ever hurt you again?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “He’d never want Claire to know, Angie. I . . . if I threatened him with showing Claire—”

  “You’d do that? You’d show Claire? You’d hurt your daughter to hurt your husband?”

  “No. No, God, no. Just to threaten him. I’d never actually do it.”

  Angie stared at Shelley. So frail and pale, so hard inside. So frightened. Very, very softly, Angie said, “You visited the women’s camps in the evening once or twice.”

  She nodded.

  “Were you there on that last evening, Shelley? Did you follow Jasmine to that bay?”

  She took a fast step toward Angie. Angie braced in shock. The woman’s pale, red-rimmed eyes blared into hers, but her voice came out in a thin whisper. “You’re just as much a bitch as she was, you know that? Looking for the worst in people, raking muck out of the past, thinking that we are capable of something so heinous as pushing a client to her death. I know what you’re thinking; I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking: Could this meek and mild little Shelley Tollet do it? Did she kill the bitch in heat who fucked her husband?”

  She spat a harsh little laugh. “Guess you’ll never know, will you? You won’t get to read what she did with my husband, either, because I ripped out those pages before giving the journal to you. You can have that book, but you can’t have those pages. And don’t come looking for them because right now they’re burning to ashes in the hearth inside.” She marched back to the door and yanked it open. Face blotchy, eyes wild and glassy, she turned to face Angie. “Now fuck off the hell outta here.”

  She slammed the door shut. Angie heard the dead bolt thunk across.

  Stunned, she looked down at the book in her hands. She turned to a random page.

  Sweet is revenge, especially to women. It’s an emotion that outlasts all others.

  That night, tucked into her motel room bed, light burning well into the cold darkness, rain pattering against the windows while snow fell at higher elevations, Angie read through Jasmine Gulati’s journal. This purple padded book had been a gift on Jasmine’s twenty-fifth birthday, July 1994. The year she died. She’d spent that birthday in hedonistic bliss with Dr. Douglas J. Hart, her then professor, mentor, and academic advisor. Doug Hart and Jasmine Gulati had on that day already been sleeping together for eight months.

  Angie read further.

  Doug was shocked at first when I told him we were going to have a baby. I don’t think I intended at that point, or perhaps ever, in keeping it. But I wanted to see his face, feel my power over him. Over his wife. Over his daughter. Over his family, his career, his entire life. It was intoxicating, that look of fear on his face, an emotion that escaped before he managed to control his features and hide it. I near climaxed with the delicious delirium of it.

  He called me two days later and took me out to a little cabin, quiet and remote, in Sooke. Right on the sea. There he cooked me prawns in garlic, which I love, and he gave me the diamond ring. Marry me, Jazzie, he said.

  Angie turned the page.

  I’d won! I guess I’d wanted to see how serious he was. And I’d won. We fucked. This way and that. He was rough. Didn’t care about the fact I was pregnant, or he liked it that I was, and it turned him on. He was hard as a rock, harder than ever. Took me from behind like a wild dog. I screamed when I came that day. Never came like that before. It was amazing. We lay there after. Naked. Panting. Bathed in sweat. In a puddle of moonlight.

  Then he rolled over onto his side and said, “Why don’t we wait, Jaz?”

  “To get married?” I said.

  “No, no, to have children.”

  And that’s when he said I should get rid of it.

  Angie turned to the next page.

  I told him I’d consider it. That’s when I saw he was really scared. I really did hold all the control now. Over his marriage. His daughter’s relationship with him. His work. His promotion to dean of the faculty. He’d told me it was in the works. I knew then I could break Dr. Douglas J. Hart. Or I could allow him to become dean of my faculty . . . It was my choice.

  What I also saw in his fear was that perhaps he never truly intended to leave his wife for me. He was fearful that I and some baby would wreck his marriage, his carefully built house of cards. It made this little bonfire of doubt burn inside me. Yet . . . he had given me the ring. I confronted him with this. He claimed I was wrong. It was just a matter of timing. If we waited until after I finished my studies and until after he was appointed dean, the fact I was his student would no longer be an issue. This, he said, was why it would be best to terminate this particular pregnancy, for there would be others, he said, if I wanted.

  Angie flipped faster, scanning through the rest of the pages, which were full with details of sexual encounters with Doug and with younger men. Observations about women and sex. About her friends. About Rachel Hart. About her own mother and father. About her grandmother, the judge.

  Angie stopped when she came to a page that was blank apart from one simple notation:

  Appointment, Women’s Clinic. Abortion. Sophie coming with. Mia is so pissed over this. It’s fucked up our relationship.

  There were no more entries until one that detailed packing and travel arrangements for Rachel Hart’s river trip, where Jasmine wrote about how she planned to wear her engagement ring as a symbol of secret power over Rachel Hart, the woman who would be filming her, the woman whose husband she was having an affair with. The arrogant woman who would be divorced.

  The rest of the pages were just ragged stubs where Shelley had ripped them out.

  Angie sat back against the pillows, Jessie Carmanagh’s voice resonating through her brain.

  Last I saw of that diary, the Hart kid was reading it in the bushes . . . Only surprised me that the kid hadn’t taken it sooner the way Jasmine was tempting her with it.

  Poor Eden Hart. If the kid had indeed sneaked a peek, she’d have seen all these salacious details about her own father—whom she clearly adored—having sex with his student. Jasmine. Who was fishing with both Eden and her betrayed mother.

  Yet Eden had denied reading it. From those photos on her wall in her office, her father still held pride of place in her heart. So maybe Jessie Carmanagh had been lying, or he’d been mistaken, or maybe Eden had been able to spend only a few seconds with the journal and had not grasped the extent of what lay between these pages.

  Angie flung back her covers and began to throw her belongings into her bags. She wanted to be ready to leave at first light.

  She needed to confront Rachel and Dr. Douglas J. Hart.

  CHAPTER 39

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23

  “Reads like an erotica novel,” Angie said, sliding the purple journal into the center of the table in the Hart home. She sat across from Rachel and Doug in their dining room. It was just after 1:00 p.m. She’d returned the damaged Subaru rental first thing that morning and dealt with the necessary insurance papers. She’d then picked up her repaired Mini Cooper and driven straight down the island to the Harts’ estate in Metchosin.

  In her bag at her side, her recording device was running. Neither Rachel nor Doug blinked as they regarded the journal. Neither moved a muscle. Their stillness was unnerving.

  A cuckoo clock on the wall ticktocked, the sound growing unnaturally loud as the little pendulum swung to and fro beneath the ornate bo
x. The sense of time loomed large in the room as Angie sat in front of this couple in their seventies, a lifetime of marriage stretching between them. They had a grown daughter. Grandchildren. A lost son. A big home on the water. Career success was notched into their respective belts. They had health, retirement funds, each other. Rachel and Doug had more than a lot of people in this world could only dream of. But that purple book on the table threatened it all.

  That book held a secret worth killing to keep.

  “Do you know what’s in it?” Angie said.

  Doug moistened his lips, his gaze fixated on the book. Rachel cleared her throat and leaned forward. She met Angie’s gaze, her gray eyes fierce. “I’m sure you’re about to tell us, and if you don’t mind, please move it along. We have guests arriving within an hour, and I’d like to be ready for them.”

  Angie turned to Doug. “You gave Jasmine that journal, Doug. For her twenty-fifth birthday. Back in ’94.”

  Rachel stiffened, bracing for what Angie now believed the filmmaker knew was coming. Angie’s read on Rachel since she’d put that journal on the table was that the old filmmaker knew exactly what it contained.

  Doug’s face began to redden as cords of tension swelled in his neck.

  “You also gave her this engagement ring.” Angie placed on the table the photo of the ring found with Jasmine’s bones. “You were her professor. You were sleeping with your student, Jasmine Gulati, for over a year. And you asked your student, Doug, to marry you, didn’t you?”

  Silence, apart from the ticktock of the clock.

  “Trouble was, you were already married. To Rachel. Did you propose to Jasmine as some kind of insurance or guarantee that you’d still be there for her after she aborted the baby she was carrying. Your baby?”

  “It’s lies, all lies,” snapped Rachel. “That journal contains the fabricated meanderings of a student infatuated with her professor, that’s all! Jasmine was a narcissistic sociopath with some sort paraphilia where her sexual arousal and gratification depended on fantasizing about sexually dominating and emotionally controlling men in positions of power. Men like my husband.”

  Angie picked up the journal and flipped it open to a page she’d marked. “You mean, like in this paragraph?” She began to read:

  “I had him, I controlled him by his cock. My Lady Jane in command of his John Thomas, in the terminology of D. H. Lawrence, which he so smugly taught us in first-year English while watching the girls’ cheeks warm and the boys shifting in their chairs to adjust space in their jeans for their hardening dicks as he discussed the sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I think it was at that moment I decided I would break him . . .”

  Angie looked up. “How did you know what was written in here, Rachel?”

  There was slight flick of her gaze at her husband, a quick glint of panic in her eyes, but within nanoseconds her features were back under control.

  “Doug told me.” She cleared her throat again. “He confessed he’d had a brief affair with Jasmine but had ended it fast. He told me because he was worried that Jasmine was unstable and that she might go all Fatal Attraction on him and his family, and he wanted us prepared up front.”

  Doug reached for Rachel’s hand, covering it with his own as she spoke. She inhaled deeply. “We went for counseling. We worked through it all. It strengthened our marriage and our understanding of each other in the end. But what Jasmine said in that journal—it’s not true. The affair was a brief, one-off thing. If she pretended it was more, it’s lies.”

  Angie regarded Rachel, then Doug. “What about the engagement ring?”

  “She bought that herself is my guess,” Rachel said quickly before Doug could answer. “Like I said, she was playing out a fantasy.”

  “Why did you not mention this to me when I first asked you about Jasmine’s engagement ring and the missing journal?” Angie said.

  Rachel gave a derisive snort. “Why do you think? Even now it would ruin Doug’s standing in academia. It would hurt our daughter. And it would place me in a somewhat awkward position after Jasmine’s accidental death on a trip I had organized. A trip I specifically invited her on.”

  “Awkward?”

  “People would think I had motive to hurt her, had there been any doubt about her drowning being an accident.”

  “You were worried there might be doubt?”

  Silence.

  “Why did you invite Jasmine on the trip, Rachel?”

  “For all the reasons I told you before. She gave me an angle that I wanted.”

  “But you knew she’d slept with your husband?”

  “Yes. Like I said, I wanted all those elements at play in subtle fashion within the subtext of the documentary. I wanted the divorcée, the adulteress, the lesbians, the single women—”

  “The betrayed wife?”

  “I was the observer, the recorder. I already had Kathi as the wife whose husband was betraying her sexually.”

  Angie wasn’t buying it, but she played along, casting about for more information. “It must have pleased you greatly when Jasmine slept with your guide on the first night.”

  Silence.

  “That’s why you did nothing to interrupt her verbal assault on those locals in the pub, isn’t it—you wanted it all to happen? This documentary was, in some ways, going to be your revenge against Jasmine Gulati, wasn’t it? You were going to assassinate her in the editing.”

  Rachel pushed back her chair. “If you’re done now—”

  “I’m not.” Angie leaned forward. “You lied about those final hours of footage. You filmed Jasmine down in the bay where she was angling. You had that tape running when she went into the water. Not only did you see exactly what happened to Jasmine Gulati that evening, you also got it on tape. Didn’t you, Rachel?”

  All color drained from the woman’s face. In the blink of eye, she appeared far older than her seventy-two years.

  Angie tapped the table with her finger. “I have a witness who places you on a rock ledge above the bay where Jasmine’s rod was found. That witness saw you in your pink toque with your tripod, filming. I visited that ledge, Rachel. From it a person has a clear line of sight down to the bay. But you told me quite clearly that when you left the campsite, you went upriver, in the opposite direction, to film the campsite from a promontory of land. Thing is, I walked upriver east of the camp. There is no promontory. There is no way to get a line of sight to the camp.” She paused. “You lied.”

  Rachel swallowed, shifting slightly in her chair. “Who is this witness?”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  “Look, the only reason I misdirected you was because of this very thing happening now. I was afraid that if you learned Jasmine had slept with my husband and had held fantasies about marrying him, it would’ve given me motive to hurt her. The fact I was the last person to see her alive would not help my cause. I destroyed those tapes for that same reason.”

  “What did you see? What did you capture on film? What exactly happened to Jasmine that evening?”

  She got to her feet. “That’s it. You’re done here.” She held her arm out toward the hallway. “Please leave. Now.”

  Angie remained seated. “You watched her struggle,” she said quietly. “Did she sweep with that current into the next little bay right above the falls? I visited that bay, too, and that’s where all the debris swirls in. A lot of it gets trapped there behind a big fallen tree. Couldn’t you have screamed for help, Rachel? Long before Garrison saw her finally going over the falls? Couldn’t you have run down the trail to that little bay and tried to pull her out, to save her? Or did you quietly stand back and do nothing and watch her die?”

  Doug lurched to his feet so fast his chair slammed back against the glass door. “My wife asked you to leave. We’re under no obligation to answer these ridiculous insinuations. You’re not a cop. You’re a failed ex-cop. A miserable, muckraking disgrace of a detective, and the shit that happened in our lives has got nothing to do with
Jasmine Gulati’s slipping and drowning. Like my wife said, this is precisely why she said nothing, because this would happen, people would make these horrific assumptions.” He reached for the journal, but Angie quickly moved it out of his range and tucked it into her bag.

  She hooked her bag over her shoulder and came to her feet.

  “We can trace the ring, Doug. You do know that? We can find out if it was you who bought it and where it was bought. We can trace where the diamonds were sourced from and what jeweler made the ring, what store it went to, how it was paid for.” Angie knew this was a stretch, especially after all these years, but Doug might not.

  “The door is that way,” he said, stepping between his wife and Angie, his eyes blazing, his face red.

  Angie moved toward the front door. Doug followed at her shoulder, Rachel close behind him. But Angie stopped suddenly and faced them both.

  “One other thing. I have witness evidence that Eden read this journal.”

  Both Rachel and Doug froze. Doug’s gaze briefly went to his wife’s. Angie waited in silence. The cuckoo exploded from its ornate house and blasted a noise that made them all jump.

  Angie said, “This also makes a lie of your claim, Rachel, that you hid everything in part because it would hurt Eden. Because if Eden did read that journal, she already knew of her father’s affair with Jasmine Gulati. She knew about Doug’s baby that Jasmine aborted, because that’s in there, too. Eden knew back on the river, twenty-four-years ago, that her father—whom she adored—was going to leave her and her mother for an obnoxious slut.”

  Angie was winging it, pushing them as far as she could before they tossed her out because she couldn’t be certain Eden had read those parts of the journal. She took a step toward them, getting back into their personal bubbles. “Eden had—still has—quite a thing for her father. This father-daughter relationship is very special to her. How might the news of a looming divorce and the possibility of new children in her father’s life have affected a young teenager like Eden?” As Angie said the words, something else struck her. Hard. Her pulse quickened.