The Girl in the Moss

by Loreth Anne White

  “Eden left the camp after you that evening, Rachel,” she said quickly, her mind whirling, her body heating. “Allegedly to relieve herself in the woods. Could she have perhaps followed Jasmine? What did you really see from up on your ledge? Is there a much darker reason that you kept silent and destroyed those tapes?”

  Tiny pearls of sweat beaded along Rachel’s upper lip, and her skin turned gray. She made a small noise and reached for the wall to brace herself. Doug’s gaze shot to Rachel. Shock flared into his features as something dawned on him, too. His attention pinged to a photograph on the wall. Angie turned to see what he was looking at.

  A black-and-white photo of four-year-old Jimmy Hart with his tricycle. A photo taken the summer he drowned. The summer Eden had been left alone with little Jimmy at the dock.

  Angie’s heart began to thump against her ribs as the puzzle pieces clicked into place, Eden’s words tumbling through her memory.

  The hardest, I suppose, was that my mother blames me in some ways for Jimmy’s death. I was supposed to be watching him, but I’d ventured off the dock to gather the blackberries I could see growing in brambles farther along the lakeshore. While I was picking berries, he went off the edge of the dock with his tricycle. By the time I heard the splash . . . Guilt can be a terrible thing. I felt guilt for years. My mother still does, I think. Because she left me with Jimmy, and I was only nine at the time. My mother shouldn’t have given me that responsibility at that age.

  Slowly Angie returned her gaze from the black-and-white photograph to their faces.

  Both appeared to have seen a ghost, some dreadful specter from the past that was rising in the space between them.

  “Jimmy drowned,” Angie said, her voice hushed. “Like Jasmine drowned. Both were alone with Eden, weren’t they? You saw her push Jasmine? You filmed it?”

  Rachel’s legs gave out under her. Doug quickly grabbed her arm and helped her to a chair in the living room. Rachel fell down into the chair like a broken doll. A silent communication passed between Doug and his wife. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. He reached for the back of a chair, holding himself upright, his complexion gray. He appeared utterly and suddenly broken.

  Angie guessed this was the first time Doug realized his daughter might have drowned his son. Rachel, on the other hand, had suspected it a lot longer, probably after she saw Eden push Jasmine into the Nahamish River. She’d protected her husband from the horror that one of their children had killed the other.

  “You saw Eden, Rachel,” Angie said with stronger conviction. “You saw your fourteen-year-old daughter pushing Jasmine Gulati into the Nahamish River above the deadly Plunge Falls. You did not call for help. You did nothing and said nothing because it would expose your child to a murder charge. And when you asked Eden why she’d done it, it was her, not Doug, who explained to you what was in that journal and why she’d followed Jasmine down to the bay. Eden was trying to stop Jasmine from destroying her family, her relationship with her father, her life. You were a mother trying to protect both your child and yourself. Because you couldn’t allow Jasmine in death to destroy Eden and your family on top of what Jasmine in life had already done.”

  Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes. They slid in a silent sheen down her cheeks. She started to shake.

  Doug looked at Angie in horror, his mouth moving, but he was unable to speak. He dropped to his knees in front of Rachel’s chair and took his wife’s hands in his.

  “And you, Doug,” Angie said, “had no idea both your daughter and wife knew about your affair and the engagement. You thought your lover had just conveniently slipped away forever, and you were safe.”

  “Is . . . is it true, Rachel?” His voice came out a rasp. “Please, God, don’t let this be true. Did . . . how long have you believed Eden could have hurt our Jimmy—that our own daughter could have killed our son? Why? Why, Rachel? Why would she do it? Jealousy? Possessiveness? Why didn’t you talk to me?”

  Rachel seemed to have slipped into some distant fugue state. Doug turned to Angie. “You need to leave. You need to leave right now.”

  “I need to call the police and report this,” she said softly. “You do know that.”

  He surged to his feet. “Please, please do not let that woman destroy my wife, my family, for the mistakes I made with her.”

  “Your own daughter destroyed your family a long time ago, if she really did do something to effect Jimmy’s drowning.”

  He slammed his fist into the wall that divided the living room and the hallway. The impact shuddered through his body and left a dent in the drywall. He stared at his bloodied hand, his whole body vibrating.

  Rachel suddenly spoke in a voice that did not sound like her own. “She needs to tell the police now, Doug. She has the journal. It’s all out in the open now. Eden . . .” She shifted in her chair and faced Angie.

  “Eden learned from Jimmy’s death that drowning works. I . . . I don’t know what a parent is supposed to do when they start to suspect terrible things about a child of theirs, yet they’re never certain. Things you don’t want to . . . can’t possibly believe. Can’t even ask them about.” She swiped the tears from her face with the palms of her hands. “I think Eden learned from her success in eliminating Jasmine that organizing a remote trip works. She . . . the police need to look into another death, the drowning of a woman named Jayne Elliot. She . . . she’s Michael’s ex—Michael is Eden’s husband. I—”

  “Rachel! Stop it!” Doug yelled. “Stop right there! Do not say another word.”

  “No. No, I need to, I have to say it. I always wondered. Eden is bad, Doug. She’s got an evil seed inside her. Three years ago, she organized an all-girls salmon-fishing trip up the coast. She invited Michael’s ex, which surprised me, but Eden said she was trying to make amends and get on with the woman. They’d had issues in the past. Eden feared Michael had never properly gotten over Jayne. Eden invited Jayne and a few other friends, hired a boat and a guide—they all chipped in. On the last day of their expedition up the BC coast, Jayne Elliot went overboard in extremely cold and stormy weather. She was swept away, and a search was mounted. They found her body days later, washed up on an island beach. Drowned. No one saw her go overboard apart from Eden. You need to look into that trip. You need to look.”

  “Why would she do that?” Doug said.

  “She’s like that, Doug. She has to be the center of attention. She had to be the apple of your eye, too—especially you. She couldn’t allow Jimmy and a budding father-son relationship to steal that from her. She’s possessive and lethal in her jealousy or when betrayed.”

  Doug sank slowly to the sofa. “I can’t believe you never said anything.”

  “To who? About what? What was I going to say, I think my child is a serial killer?”

  “You had proof, Rachel. If you filmed her pushing Jasmine into the river, you had proof.”

  “I hardly filmed her. I froze when I saw it happen, just froze. I let the film run. I didn’t scream. I didn’t run down to the little bay. That was as much an indictment against me. Then Eden told me why she did it, and I couldn’t tell everyone about what you’d done. For Chrissakes, you have got to see how that would have all played out. Our life would have crumbled. You would have been terminated at the university. And . . . at the time, I never put two and two together with Jimmy’s drowning. That came only later. Even then, I was never certain. It . . . it was just a dark and horrible suspicion, and I’d been a bad mother by leaving a nine-year-old alone with her four-year-old brother in the first place.” She faced Angie.

  “I looked for that diary, you know? When no one seemed to know where it had gone, I thought Eden had taken it. If Eden had taken it, then she would be safe from suspicion in Jasmine’s death and so would I. Because if Eden had it, the contents would never get out. But if anyone else had taken it . . . I worried for years. Then when Jasmine was never found, when the journal never surfaced, I just buried it all away. Deep, deep down in my mind, I compartment
alized it. I went forward believing it never really happened the way I saw it.”

  “How did it happen? What exactly did you see?” Angie said.

  She inhaled deeply. “I’d been filming Jasmine casting alone. The light was so beautiful, the droplets from her line like jewels in the air. I . . . I suddenly saw Eden enter the frame. She was wearing her red Kinabulu toque, and she was carrying a log in her hand. She left the forest fringe and headed directly down the rocky embankment to where Jasmine was casting.” Rachel’s voice caught, and she took a moment to gather herself. Clearing her throat, she said, “Jasmine turned and saw Eden, and she called out. But Eden was like a robot. She just kept moving down among the rocks until she was right in front of Jasmine. She swung the log. She struck Jasmine hard. Jasmine’s boots slid out under her, and she went straight into the water.” Rachel started to rock in her chair, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest.

  “I . . . I knew how the water swirled back into the next little cove above the falls. I did run down there as fast as I could. I got down to the water to find Jasmine clinging to a strainer—a big tree with a massive root ball that had fallen into the river. But I . . . I . . . All I could see in my mind was Eden swinging that stick, and I knew if I pulled Jasmine out she would tell authorities my fourteen-year-old tried to kill her, and I . . . I just let her slide back into the river.” Rachel began to gag.

  Doug helped her up and hurried her to the bathroom, where Angie heard the woman throwing up.

  Angie blew out a chestful of air and let herself out the front door. She stepped onto the porch and got out her phone. She called the local RCMP detachment. She asked for a detective she knew who worked there.

  “I think it’s a serial homicide case,” she told him. “Possibly three murders so far. All drownings. It’ll require an integrated investigation because the cases fall into several jurisdictions. The suspect, Dr. Eden Hart, currently works and lives in Nanaimo.” Angie gave the details of Eden’s practice and the address of the beautiful waterfront home that belonged to the Harts.

  The detective told her to stand by. Units were being dispatched to the Hart home stat. Other units would be dispatched to Dr. Eden Hart’s office and residence in Nanaimo.

  Angie sat down on the front porch steps and rubbed her face. The weight of what she’d done lay heavy on her shoulders.

  Oh, the secrets we keep. And how they keep us. And the havoc the truth could wreak.

  The truth wasn’t always pretty, but it was necessary. Angie believed that. She had to. Truth brought closure. It had brought justice to Jasmine Gulati. Justice to Jilly Monaghan. The old judge would have her closure.

  Truth was the one thing Angie had to hold on to.

  CHAPTER 40

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24

  Angie stood on the misty beach alongside Jilly Monaghan watching the sea. It was Saturday morning, and Gudrun had told Angie that she’d find the old woman down here. Cold wind whipped white spume off the waves, and along the horizon the ocean blended gray with the sky.

  “So our Jasmine was murdered,” Jilly said, leaning heavily on her walking sticks as she braced into the sea wind. “By a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “Allegedly so,” Angie said. “According to Rachel Hart, Eden Hart followed Jasmine down to the secluded bay and surprised her. She struck Jasmine with a log. It threw Jasmine off-balance and into the icy water, where she was weighted down with her boots and waders. The current swept her into a small bay downriver, right above the falls, where she grabbed onto a fallen tree and tried to pull herself up a slick, steep bank. At this point Rachel Hart might have been able to save her but did nothing. Rachel, Eden, and Garrison Tollet from the talus scree above all witnessed Jasmine going over the falls.”

  “Rachel caught her daughter’s act on film?” Jilly Monaghan said.

  “Apparently. Of course this is all hearsay so far; nothing is proven yet. Dr. Eden Hart was arrested in Nanaimo yesterday and is lawyering up. Two additional homicide investigations have been opened, one looking into the drowning death of Eden’s little brother, Jimmy Hart. Another into the drowning of the ex-girlfriend of Eden Hart’s husband. Rachel, however, is giving a full confession on advice of her own legal counsel,” Angie said. “The lead detective on the case told me that Rachel and Doug came to this decision quickly.”

  “Giving up their daughter in exchange for leniency? Pleading her earlier silence was a mother’s need to protect her offspring?”

  “I suspect once it hit them, once it was really driven home that their own daughter might have killed their son, they could no longer hide from what their daughter was. And what she could still do. Legal counsel probably convinced them it was in their best interests to come clean and paint themselves as parents victimized by a cunning young sociopath.”

  “A cold, controlling, narcissistic, and very intelligent personality,” Jilly said, her eyes watering in the wind.

  Angie nodded.

  “So Jasmine must have been trapped underwater by the force of the falls,” the judge said, watching the waves and the spray. “Then came the two big floods, and one of the events must have popped her body out and washed her up into that grove.”

  Angie pushed blowing hair back off her face. “It appears so. The grove where Jasmine was found lies a few feet higher than the estimated rise of the river, but the height that the water rose is just that, an estimate, a meteorologist’s best guess given the records at the time. Also, there could have been some kind of storm surge around the terrain. I checked with a specialist at UVic, and he felt it was possible.”

  “After all these years,” the old woman said, “the truth is finally out.”

  Angie hesitated. “Jilly, it’s also going to come out that Jasmine was a . . . complex and somewhat unlikable person.”

  Jilly Monaghan shot her a look. “I know our Jasmine was difficult. I know she had issues, possibly pathological ones that related to her sexuality.” She paused and looked out once more over the gray sea. Wind flapped the hem of her coat. Softly, she said, “But it seems our Jasmine met her match in the young Eden Hart. A serial killer who started at age nine.” She turned to Angie. “I wonder if there were others, beyond her brother, Jasmine, and her husband’s ex.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are more victims. I’ll have my full report to you in a few days in binder form and on a disc.”

  The judge fell quiet as she watched the waves crunch and churn the pebbles along the shore. A fine mist of rain blew in from the water, dampening her lined face and woolen hat. “You’ll find the balance of your fee plus the bonus has already been credited to your account.” She met Angie’s eyes. “Thank you, Angela. I knew you’d pull through.”

  “Angie.”

  The judge smiled. And something unspoken surged between the two fiercely independent women at different points in this stream of life. Looking into the judge’s watery eyes, Angie felt the echoes of time, of what had been and what was yet to come, and how it all looped together. The judge had shown her a way forward. She’d shown Angie a way to be. A way to grow stronger and a way to age.

  Angie wavered, not quite wanting to say what was on her mind because it would show her vulnerability, but something in the old woman’s face made her say it anyway. “Your phone call, giving me this case—it was a lifeline. I’m the one who owes you.”

  “Ah, but you grabbed that lifeline with both hands. You did the pulling back to shore. It was meant to be that you and I met. I hope you will not be a stranger.”

  Angie shocked herself by impulsively leaning down and giving the judge a quick hug and planting a kiss on her damp, lined cheek. She left the judge facing the water, her arthritic hands gripping her walking sticks as she stared into the nebulous gray distance.

  As Angie hurried along the beach, her hands thrust deep in her pockets against the cold, with the wintery salt wind raw against her face, she considered once more the irony—how media exposure, her notoriety, had tanked both
her policing career and her PI job. Yet the media exposure had brought her Justice Monaghan and a tool to seize it all back. But better. Stronger. She would no longer hide from being Angie Pallorino, the cradle baby, the violent cop who’d shot and killed a sick murderer. She’d be all that and more. She’d carry on marching to her own loud drum, and she’d hold her banner high in the name of truth. And closure. For others like herself and like Jilly Monaghan.

  Once Angie reached her car, she called Jock Brixton.

  His line was busy, so she left a message. “Jock, it’s a wrap. You’ll find the balance of the Gulati case fee plus a bonus, minus my cut and expenses, in the Coastal Investigations account by close of business Monday. Job’s done.” She smiled to herself. “A copy of my report will be on your desk in a few days.”

  She killed the call and sat back, watching the rain wriggle down her Mini Cooper windshield.

  Fuckit. She’d won. She’d done it. Her first solo PI case.

  Angie started her engine. It had taken the full afternoon yesterday to sort things out with the RCMP. She’d then gone home, showered, and crashed. She’d slept in this morning and then come to see Jilly Monaghan to break the news in person. Next on her agenda was Maddocks. She wanted to see him in person, too.

  As she drove she rehearsed in her mind how she’d tell him she was ready. To commit. How she’d ask if he still wanted this—her.

  She turned down a street wet with rain and plastered with dead leaves. Slippery leaves. Slippery like those rocks on the river where Jasmine had slipped . . . Something began to niggle in her brain about the Gulati case, something someone had said about her slipping . . . but she couldn’t pin it down.

  Suddenly, up ahead, she saw the gates of the Mount Saint Agnes Mental Health Treatment Facility. Angie checked the time. Saturday noon. Her dad would be there visiting her mom. He always went on Friday evening and again on Saturday around noon. He’d stay for lunch in the patients’ dining room. Angie quickly tapped her brakes and clicked on her indicator. She drove through the massive wrought-iron gates of the Mount Saint Agnes compound.