The Maid's Diary(84)
“You can call me Kat,” the devil maid says as she pours drinks into glasses in front of them. “A chilled sparkling rosé for the lady,” she says as she fills the wineglass in front of Daisy. “I know how much you need it. And for you, Jon, a Balvenie Caribbean cask fourteen-year-old.” She reaches for the whisky bottle and pours. She hands the glass to Jon with a dark smile. “I know how much you like the Balvenie, Jon.” Her smile deepens. It makes her vampire eyeteeth seem to grow.
“Kat” seats herself in a chair across from them. She sips her own drink. It appears to be a vodka martini with olives.
“Full disclosure,” she says as she sets her glass carefully on a small table at her side. “I only became Mia after I saw what Daisy had locked in her safe. It really was a point of no return, seeing that recorded footage—that proof—of what happened that night at the ski lodge party. Along with two nondisclosure documents, one of which will scuttle the Wentworth reputation.” She shrugs. “Maybe it’ll even drag Annabelle Wentworth into court, because to my mind, it adds up to obstruction of justice.”
“What proof?” Jon snaps. He turns to his wife. “What is she talking about, Daisy?”
“Who’s Mia, Jon?” Daisy’s voice is low and eerily calm. It scares him. Her complexion is going redder—two violent hot spots forming high on her cheekbones. Her blood pressure is rising, and Jon is peripherally concerned for the baby but a hell of a lot more worried by what’s coming down the pike from this Kat woman.
Daisy turns to Kat. “What do you mean, this will drag my mother into court?”
Kat crosses her stockinged legs and leans back in her chair. She reaches for her martini glass, takes another slow sip of her drink. “It seems as though you two need to process a few things. Daisy, your husband was fired this morning. He was caught stealing personnel information from TerraWest’s HR database and hiring a PI to dig up dirt on a colleague named Ahmed Waheed. The information Jon provided the PI stipulated that the PI dig for leverage around Ahmed Waheed’s race and religious affiliation. Your husband was also photographed naked with a woman named Mia and two unidentified males.” She sips again, leans forward, and puts her martini glass down.
“Jon, your wife has a phone recording of what happened in the ski lodge in Whistler when you were nineteen. It shows you spiking a sixteen-year-old girl’s drink and laughing about it with fellow team members. It shows you giving the drink to the girl, who was so excited just to meet you that night. It shows her passing out, and you and a group of guys helping this drugged girl stumble upstairs and into a bedroom. It shows you taking off her jeans, spreading her legs, and raping her while others cheered you on.” Kat pauses. Her gaze lasers into Jon’s. “I guess that’s why you and your friends call the drug the ‘leg spreader.’”
He swallows. He’s going so hot, so dizzy, he thinks he will faint. Jon’s gaze shoots to Daisy. “Where’d you get a recording like that? Why in the hell would you keep something like that?”
Daisy refuses to look at him. Her gaze remains riveted on the maid.
“And, Daisy,” Kat says, “I don’t suppose you told your husband how you tried to threaten and gaslight Charley Waters into getting rid of Jon’s baby? And how, when that didn’t work, you paid her a huge sum of money to kill the baby? What was it again, five hundred thousand dollars? All hers as long as she went through with the abortion, signed a gag order, and retracted her allegations of sexual assault against Jon. You in turn would ensure all stalking charges against her were dropped.”
Daisy still refuses to look at Jon. Her hands press down hard on her thighs.
Kat says, “Did you tell Jon where you got that idea? Did you tell him what inspired you?”
Kat turns her attention to Jon. “She didn’t tell you, did she? Daughters learn from their mothers. Annabelle Wentworth paid a small fortune to the poor immigrant parents of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who learned she was pregnant after the rape. On condition that her mother persuaded her to get rid of the baby. On condition that the parents would not pursue charges on behalf of their daughter.”
“It wasn’t my baby,” Jon snaps. “It could have been any one of those guys’ sperm.”
Kat falls silent. A hard and frightening look enters her eyes. “Oh,” she says softly. “Are you admitting, then, what happened?”
Jon glances at the walls, the ceiling, looking for the CCTV cameras. “Who’s watching this?” he demands.
Kat leans forward. “I guess Annabelle thought it wasn’t worth the risk of the girl having the baby, because if a paternity test did prove it was yours, you would be irreversibly tied to me via our child for the rest of our child’s life. And that’s not what Annabelle wanted for her Daisy, was it? Better to make the problem with a poor schoolgirl go away. Easy enough since money was no big deal for Annabelle, but it was a very big deal to my parents.”
Kat rises to her feet. She crosses the room on her high, square heels. She spins, faces them both as they sit on the edge of the sofa. “The contents of that NDA make it pretty clear Annabelle Wentworth knew the truth of what happened that night. Probably because Daisy knew the truth of what happened that night. And so did the other rich boys and girls. And you know what hurts me most? That my mother never told me what she signed. I was devastated when she suggested we just make it all go away because we could never win against people like you. She coached me into keeping quiet. She said if I made a fuss, you might sue us for defamation or something—I imagine this was Annabelle’s threat to my mom. And my mother probably never told my father, either. He was old school. Old morals. My pregnancy, my accusations of assault, the fact I was drinking—I became a disgrace to him. My father disrespected me. He was disgusted by me. He heard everyone say I was a liar, a drunk little whore who threw myself at ‘JonJon’ Rittenberg and the other boys, and who got pregnant and tried to defend my promiscuity by crying rape.” Kat reaches for what looks like a television remote on the bar counter.