Angie and Rachel sat nursing coffees at a small round table in the balmy, low-angled sunshine. The golden light was flattering on the older woman’s features. Angie liked her face. It was angled with interesting lines, a firm set to her jaw, sharp gray eyes. Her wrinkles seemed to map a history of intense thought, laughter. Sadness, too. Strands of silver hair escaped a thick ponytail that brought Jane Goodall to Angie’s mind.
“Do you mind if I record this?” Angie set her digital recording device on the table between them.
Rachel eyed the device. “Why record?”
“Just for my reference. I can be more present, listen more completely if I’m not taking notes.” She smiled.
Rachel nodded, lifted her coffee mug, then stilled. “Run by me again why Justice Monaghan hired you? Does the postmortem on Jasmine show something suspicious?”
“No. Jasmine’s death is being ruled accidental. I suspect engaging my services is Jilly Monaghan’s way of dealing with the news. She feels a need todosomething, anything.”
“She’s losing her memory, you know? Word is that she has some kind of dementia.”
“I heard. I suspect for a woman of her considerable intellect, a woman who once wielded the power to lock people away, to take away their freedom—this makes her feel in control again. Possibly it’s just her way of finding closure.”
Rachel held Angie’s gaze, her mug midair as she considered this. Something softened in the older woman’s countenance, and Angie felt as though she’d passed some arcane test.
Rachel took a sip. “I was going on forty-eight when I got the idea for the documentary,” she said. “At the time, perimenopause was a slap in my face. I wasn’t dealing well with the changes to my body or mind—the irritability, shortness of temper, thinning skin, the sudden aches in my joints, sleepless nights, bad dreams, hot flushes, exhaustion. The list is endless. It felt cruel and sudden.” She paused. “The worst, I think, was the mood swings. I felt almost homicidal at times.” She met Angie’s eyes.
“My fly rod and the river became my only salvation. Fishing in the wilderness brought peace. It drove home to me how angling had brought me happiness during the many stages of my life, starting from when I was a little girl on my granddad’s knee, watching his big hands tie impossibly delicate little flies that would lure esoteric creatures up from their watery depths. He showed me how to study nature, mimic it, quietly. To be strong yet work with a gentle touch that registered every nuance of movement in the line. To not be afraid of the wilderness but to embrace its vagaries, to find solace and meaning in Mother Nature’s arms.” She sipped her coffee, her eyes going distant as they caught autumn sunlight.
“Fishing and camping trips got me through puberty, through being bullied at school. Through my first real relationship and subsequent heartaches. It helped me through my son’s death, brought me close to my own daughter. It gave me my profession—a desire to document outdoor life and sport on film from a female perspective. So, facing menopause, I once again turned to the river, to angling, to my passion for film, and I decided to document a story of women at various stages of their lives using the river as a metaphor for life. I wanted to show how they all came to angling and how they individually used fishing and nature to define their roles and understanding of being female in a man’s world.”
Angie liked this woman even more. “HencetheWomen in the Streamtitle?”
Rachel nodded. “I invited an angler in her seventies, one in her sixties, one divorcée who was also a single mum, another angler married yet childless by choice, two lesbians seeking to adopt a child of their own, all the way down to my own daughter, Eden, entering the difficult teen period.” She looked away, as if remembering.
“All of us were dealing with our sexuality and femininity in our own ways. Jaz, for example, was the flighty temptress with the world still lying fresh at her feet. Her life had not yet been molded by partnership commitments or motherhood. Choices still dangled tantalizingly in front of her.” She cleared her throat. “I pitched the idea, got sponsors, and started planning. We set off in September of ’94.”
Angie eyed her recorder, checking that the red light was still on.
“It must have hit hard to have Jasmine die on that trip.”
Emotion filled Rachel’s gray eyes. She nodded and once more looked away at the ocean. “It crushed me,” she said. “I saw in Jasmine the epitome of femaleness in full, lush, glorious bloom. Could have any man she wanted. Wasn’t choosing to settle yet. She represented what we’d all been once and what we’d lost: choices.” Rachel met Angie’s gaze. “Jasmine would have been going on fifty now, had she lived.”
Angie felt a sudden paradigm shift. Realizing that Jasmine would now be older than she was herself hit home. It made Angie realize she’d have been Eden Hart’s age at the time of the fateful trip. Just fourteen. At that time Angie had been blissfully unaware of her own tragic and brutal childhood or true identity.
She reached down into her sling bag hanging over her chair and took out a file. From the file she extracted the photos Justice Monaghan had given her. Angie placed on the table the picture of the group of women laughing under the Hook and Gaffe sign.
“Can you point out who’s who in this photo and tell me a little bit about each?”
Rachel nodded. “That was shot outside the motel and pub in Port Ferris where we all met the first night. Our guides met us there, too. We left our cars at the motel, and the guides drove us up to Predator Lodge in their big four-wheel-drive vehicles the following morning. That there is me, obviously.” She pointed. “And that’s my daughter, Eden. This is Willow McDonnell. She was thirty-nine at the time, gay, a criminal defense lawyer. This is her partner, Trish Shattuck, forty-two, a landscape architect. They were trying to adopt a child from Korea at the time of the trip, but the process was dragging and they’d faced several disappointments. Both were—still are—keen fly-fishers. Both had come off rough relationships, one with a man, the other with a woman. They were each other’s second chances and working hard not to blow what they had left of life.”
She pointed to the blonde in the photo. “Kathi Daly, thirty-nine at the time. My good mate.” Rachel smiled a little wistfully. “Foul mouth and a sharp wit. She was recently divorced, a single mother of four who felt that she was never enough. Her ex was going through a midlife crisis in hackneyed fashion—new sports car and a string of nubile young pussies, many of whom he paid for in one way or another, which left him nothing for child support. This redhead here is Irene Mallard, forty-two. Married. No kids. Believed her husband was having an affair because her ‘vagina was no longer tight.’” Rachel snorted. “Like she was a disposable cock sheath past her sell-by date. Irene constantly fretted over whether she should’ve had kids, whether that might have kept her philandering husband close. But the reason she’d opted not to have children in the first place was because she figured they aged a woman.” Rachel glanced up. “Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me, I know. I didn’t get Irene at all. But she gave a different perspective on the female journey. Plus, she was a brilliant angler. Fishing was the one thing that took her out of herself and away from self-recrimination.”
Angie’s thoughts turned to Maddocks’s question in the car, about whether she wanted kids, and her chest felt tight. “What about the other two?”
“Donna Gill. Sixty-one. A triathlete. Single by choice. She claimed she was too self-centered for a committed relationship—didn’t want to be a slave to a guy, she said. Donna was a wellness coach, taught gym classes for seniors, led a hiking group in the summer, and did snowshoe and cross-country ski tours in the winter. Über health conscious. Ironically she died five years after the trip—cardiac arrest. Cholesterol apparently off the charts. And this is Hannah Vogel. She’s passed, too. Septuagenarian. German background. Fished the European rivers as a child and forged new frontiers in female fly-casting competition in North America. Widowed at the time of the trip and her children grown. She was a writer—narrative nonfiction. Part of me wanted to be like Hannah.”
“It’s good to put faces to the names in Justice Monaghan’s file,” Angie said. “She gave me a list, and I did manage to make contact with Willow McDonnell and Trish Shattuck last night,” Angie said. “They’re in the phone directory and live not far from here. I’m seeing them on my return to Victoria. I guess I can cross Donna Hill and Hannah Vogel off my list now, since they’re deceased. What about Irene Mallard and Kathi Daly? Do you know where they are?” Angie asked.
“Why do you want to speak to any of them?”
“To get a feeling of what Jasmine’s final days were like, hear what they thought of Jasmine and what she might have told them.”
Rachel eyed her. “Kathi lives up island, in Ladysmith, not far from where my daughter, Eden, now lives. Eden’s a psychotherapist. She has a practice in downtown Nanaimo. Irene lives in Australia now. Do you really have to interview them all?”
“Is there a problem with asking them?”
