“Maddocks,” she said suddenly, “what happened to Jasmine’s infant?”
He held her gaze and took her hand. Tension twisted inside Angie. Something about the look in his eyes made her brace for awful news.
“When Jasmine fled captivity,” he said very quietly, “she took her baby all bundled up in a makeshift papoose. When Axel caught up to them in that grove where we found her remains, she set the little papoose onto the mossy ground and spun around to fight him, trying to swing at him with a wrench she’d taken from the shed. But he caught hold of her wrist. She tried to twist free.”
Barb O’Hagan’s words ran through Angie’s mind.
I’ve seen those spiral arm fractures before, primarily at a mass grave site in Burundi. The women in a village were raped by soldiers and then killed. Some had tried to escape by wrenching so hard against the hold of their captors on their arms that they broke their arms, resulting in this torque-type fracture.
“The spiral fracture on her arm?”
He nodded. “Most likely.”
She frowned. “Garrison told you this, too?”
“He told the RCMP. They have him in custody, and he’s cooperating fully, hoping for leniency in giving up Wallace and the others. Apparently Axel had described to Garrison how Jasmine died, and it fits the pattern from her postmortem results so far. The shoulder injury was from her tumble over the falls. She never received medical treatment for that. And the wrenching fracture occurred perimortem. While Jasmine was struggling to free herself from Axel and screaming at the top of her lungs, Axel brought the wrench down on her skull. He wanted to make her quiet. He didn’t aim to kill her but was panicking and desperate to silence her screams. That blow killed her right there.”
Angie thought of the skull lying in the dirt, the soil in the eye socket. A chill rippled over her skin.
Maddocks said, “Garrison told the RCMP that Axel didn’t like killing things unnecessarily. He was seriously distressed to have murdered Jasmine.”
Angie stared at Maddocks, recalling her conversation with Claire in the mossy grove.
He’d rather kill his own meat humanely than support an industry that slaughters terrified animals in an abattoir. And he prefers bow and arrows because it’s more of a challenge one-on-one with the animal ... won’t even sell Dad meat for guests at the lodge. He says each man should hunt for his own.
“What happened to the baby, Maddocks? It wouldn’t have been in him to kill an infant.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t in him. Axel took the tiny infant in its papoose up to Garrison and Shelley at the lodge. He didn’t know what else to do with it. He begged for their help in taking it somewhere, finding it a home. They were shocked, of course, to learn Jasmine had survived the river and where the baby had come from. Shelley started feeding and caring for the infant. Garrison helped Axel bury Jasmine in the grove. Garrison figured it would be okay after that—everyone thought Jasmine long dead already. And—”
“And he and Shelley had been trying for a child,” Angie whispered. “Shelley had had a couple of miscarriages and was struggling emotionally.” Garrison’s words flooded through her brain.
We’d just taken over the lodge from my dad, and we were trying to expand the guiding and tourism side of the business. But we were short on cash. We’d also been trying for kids for a long, long time. Shelley had suffered two miscarriages, and she’d collapsed into herself. She’d become distant. She no longer enjoyed physical intimacy.
“Claire?” she whispered as the horror sank into her. “Claireis that baby?”
He nodded.
Angie’s heart beat faster, tension and adrenaline rising hot inside her. It wasn’t the Tollet genes that showed so strongly in Claire, as Angie had believed. Claire’s luxurious mane of black hair—it came from her mother’s genes. Dr.Douglas Hart was Claire Tollet’s biological father. Both Jasmine and Doug Hart must have been carriers of a green eye gene. Claire had technically been kidnapped as a child and raised by another family as their own.
“Shelley couldn’t give the infant up, Ange,” Maddocks said. “Even if she had wanted to, showing up with a tiny baby in Port Ferris was going to create problems. It would force questions that would tie back to Axel and his abduction of Jasmine. Authorities would have traced things all the way back to the Porter Bates murder. Bottom line, those men were bound to one another for life through that murder. Their secret was only as strong as their weakest link. That link was Axel.”
“Bates’s victim.”
“Yeah. By helping Axel, Garrison effectively tied the whole gang to his crime, because Axel had threatened to tell all if Garrison and Shelley did not help him with the baby. So Shelley stayed away from town the following winter. She emerged in spring with the child. They registered the baby as their own, claiming it was a home birth. All their friends knew they’d been trying for a child. And that family had a history of keeping to themselves and looking after themselves in the woods, especially through the long winters when the roads into the mountains became a challenge. No one questioned it.”
Maddocks reached down to a briefcase on the floor. From it he took a plastic sleeve containing papers.
“I made copies for you.” He removed the papers from the sleeve and handed them to Angie. They were scans of pages filled with the tiniest cursive writing in tight lines, as if paper had been a scarce commodity and words plentiful.
“What’s this?”
“Jasmine Gulati was a journal keeper. She wrote it all down on tiny scraps, and she kept it all stuffed under one of the wooden slats beneath the bed Axel had made for her. In those pages she detailed the events after Axel had found her—her early days in captivity, her pregnancy, giving birth. Annelise found Jasmine’s pages under the bed slats. She learned from them that she was not the only one who’d been kept in there. She found comfort in those words from Jasmine. Annelise told the RCMP that Jasmine’s words had given her hope, had made her feel less alone, had kept her going, because when she read them she believed—or needed to believe—that Jasmine had managed to escape.”
“These scans—they’re from those crumpled pages on the table that Annelise had stuffed down her dress?”
He nodded. “We found them in the glove compartment of the Subaru wreck. Annelise had kept them well hidden from Axel. She took them out when the fire started. She wanted to save them.”
Angie blew out a heavy breath of air. She looked at the pages in her hands. One sentence had been highlighted.
