The Maid's Diary(83)

“Nineteen,” says Lula. “I’ve located the initial investigating officer mentioned in the articles—Corporal Anna Bamfield. I just got off the phone with her. She’s still with the RCMP but is now a staff sergeant stationed up at Williams Lake. Bamfield said she remembers the case well. She told me that she believed the victim’s version of events. The complainant was only sixteen years old. She was medically examined, and there was evidence of aggressive sex—vaginal tears, multiple semen samples. But not one person from that party would come forward and talk. And no one claimed to know when the victim left the lodge party or how she got home. The kids Bamfield interviewed either said it was a lie, nothing happened, or they said there was a consensual interaction between the girl and Rittenberg. Some claimed she was a ‘whore’ and slept around. Bamfield said there were rumors that someone with a phone might have recorded the events, but she was not able to verify this. The victim then suddenly withdrew charges and went away.”

“Went away?” Mal asks.

“Left town. Left school. Dropped out. Parents declined to pursue anything.”

Mal regards Lula. “Her name?”

“Katarina Popovich.”

Quietly, Mal says, “I think we just found our motive.”





JON


October 31, 2019. Thursday.

Five hours and three minutes before the murder.

Jon grabs his wife’s arm as she tries to enter the Glass House.

“Don’t. She—”

“We must.” Daisy jerks free and steps over the threshold. Jon’s body is electric. With shock. With outrage. With fear. This woman who posed as Mia Reiter—who seduced and set him up to be sexually abused—is Katarina Popovich? It’s a name he hoped never to hear again in his life. He thought she was gone. He never dreamed she would rise from the past and cross his path again.

Not like this.

Not in a wig and red lips, all slender and seductive and sultry with beautiful false green eyes and an accent and walk that made him weak at the knees. The sixteen-year-old Katarina who reported him to the Whistler police, who accused him and his friends of gang rape, was a fat-ass, pimply-faced, desperate little slut of a schoolgirl. A fangirl who, according to other students at her school, had a poster of him on the inside of her locker.

She wanted to spread her legs for him. And for half the ski team.

Jon’s cauldron of emotions sharpens to a white-hot rage. She did this. She spiked his drink, lured him up into that high-rise apartment, cuffed him, brought other men into the apartment, took compromising photos that she delivered to TerraWest.

How did she know about the PI?

I told her. When she was Mia. In the piano lounge—I told her I’d hired a PI to find dirt on a colleague named Ahmed Waheed.

Where had she gotten the contract he signed with Jake Preston?

I am your maid. And it strikes Jon hard—he has a copy of the contract in his home computer. Did Katarina get into that? She’s been inside their house for months. Snooping around. What else has she gotten into? She’s been Daisy’s fake friend since July. What secrets has Daisy let slip?

I’m betting Daisy has not told you about the “insurance” she keeps.

It will send you to prison, JonJon. Mark my words. There is no statute of limitations for what is contained in that “insurance.” It will destroy you. The Wentworths, too.

Jon steps over the threshold and follows his wife and his devil nemesis into the house of glass and flickering candles.

Katarina leads him and Daisy into a white living room. Beyond the glass sliding doors, he sees the greenish glow of a lit infinity pool. The surface ripples with rain and wind. A few dead leaves float on top. Fog hides the ocean that lies beyond the pool, and Jon hears the mournful moan of a foghorn coming from a hidden tanker.

He feels spacey. Disoriented. Still sick with a hangover from being drugged three nights earlier. He’s struggling to assimilate what Katarina has done to them. She must have followed him—or had him followed—from work this morning to the park. He was not able to go home and tell Daisy he’d been fired. Instead, he drove to a liquor store and bought a fifth of whisky. He walked with his drink to a bench under a large chestnut tree in the park near the beach, and he sat there, his briefcase on the bench beside him, sipping from the bottle hidden inside a brown paper bag.

A homeless drunk seated himself beside Jon with a brown bag of his own. The reeking loser actually offered Jon a sip, like they were two of a kind. Disgusted, Jon got up and moved to another bench. He sat there alone, drinking, watching the rain and the mist over the sea until it was time to go home to Rose Cottage.

When he arrived home he was unable to confess to Daisy what had happened at work. It still doesn’t feel real. Everything is twisted and upside down, he thinks as he watches Satan in her tiny top and short skirt with her red tail and horns. How could this blonde maid even look like Mia? Or sound like her? Or walk like her. At the same time he can also see it is her. But he can’t seem to discern the old, plump, teenage Katarina buried in this woman.

“Sit,” the maid says, holding her hand out to the white sofa.

Neither Jon nor Daisy sits.

“I’d listen if I were you.” Her voice turns crisp, cool, all business.

Slowly, they both take a seat, staying at the edge of the cushions. Jon can feel Daisy glancing at him. He can feel Daisy’s questions about “Mia,” about a threesome including males. He recalls the burn around his butthole. The tiny puncture mark in the crook of his arm. He’s going to throw up.