FRIDAY, NOVEMBER23
“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 box. 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 yourstudent, 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.Yourbaby?”
“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 inLady 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 allFatal Attractionon 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.”
