The Maid's Diary(99)
“Helluva case to go out on.”
“Some curtain call for sure.” He breaks his gaze and turns away. “Gonna miss you, Mal.”
“I’ll be around. Any time you want coffee or to troubleshoot a case. God knows, I miss doing that with Peter.”
“At least Sam Berkowitz will feed her crow,” he says as four divers break the surface, wet-suited heads rising like seals coming up to play in the stormy water. Light glints off their dive masks. Mal tenses as the tender gives a shout. Slowly, the divers surface the body. She lies facedown. Mal sees her blonde hair floating like a gentle fan about her head. The divers begin to swim her to the shore. She’s wearing a lilac jacket.
As the divers and the body draw closer, Mal and Benoit scramble down the bank of wet concrete boulders. A chopper thuds overhead, hidden by the clouds. Crowds are once more gathering along the pedestrian section of the bridge. By tonight the Kit Darling theater will be on everyone’s TV screen and all over social media. The media will have gotten word of Jon Rittenberg’s arrest for the sexual assault that occurred eighteen years ago. The other guys involved in the assault will be scrambling, worrying about what’s coming down for them. Daisy Rittenberg will be awaiting the birth of her child, unsure of what this will mean for her marriage, her baby. And for her. Annabelle and Labden will watch the news and call lawyers about their own exposure.
The divers reach the boulders. The arms of the decedent bob softly at her sides—she floats in the shape of a cross. Mal sees bracelets on one wrist. A watch on the other. Jeans. Boots.
The coroner’s guys make their way over to the rocks with a body bag.
Slowly, the divers roll her over. Mal recoils as a swarm of sea lice explodes in a cloud, exposing the face. Her nose is gone. Her eyes are gaping sockets. Her lips have been eaten. Her cheeks are fleshy holes that expose the teeth in a macabre grimace.
“Shit,” Benoit says quietly. “I know sea lice, crabs, starfish, other underwater critters can strip a body to bone in days, but . . .” His voice fades. He clears his throat.
Mal’s brain is wheeling. “Boots,” she whispers. “And the hair—it’s not blonde. It’s silvery-white.” Her gaze shoots to Benoit as adrenaline dumps into her blood.
“It’s not her,” she says quietly. “It’s not Kit Darling.”
THE MAID’S DIARY
Kat reaches for the umbrella drink at her side and sips. The taste is coconut and lychee. The air is warm and feels rounded and soft against her bare arms. The breeze smells like the ocean. She wears a bikini, a sarong, sandals, and a big straw hat. She’s on the patio of a thatched beachside bar in Bali, ironically named Karma Beach Bar. She’s always wanted to visit Bali. She flew in from Laos via Jakarta this morning. Kit opens a teal-color spiral notebook. She’s starting a new diary. A fresh page. She even managed to find purple gel pens at a Jakarta airport store. She takes another sip of her drink, sets it down, picks up her pen. She writes:
Sometimes when you start a journey—or a journal—you have a destination in mind. You aim for it. You make a plan, devise an itinerary to get there. But the road is never straight. You hit storms, are blocked by rockslides, avalanches, construction detours, accidents. Perhaps you might notice a fellow traveler hitching a ride, so you pick them up . . . and your journey, your plot, your destination changes.
Was my diary supposed to be part of a plot to implicate Jon Rittenberg? To set him up to be investigated for murder? To expose what he and his wife did to me all those years ago? In a way, yes. I started trying to write down my thoughts the day I learned I was in his house. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit with the knowledge he was back, and I was inside his private cocoon. With the fact he was finally having a baby where I could have none, because of his act.
I intended my diary to be a confessional for the police to find. It’s why I left it sealed in my car. I wanted investigators to be able to read my words despite the car going into the water. Does this make my words misdirection? I don’t think so. Not really. Because while I might’ve started it that way, my diary became something else. It became therapy. A way for me to heal. My imaginary therapist was right. “Just put it down, Kit. Spill it out. Ask: Why why why”—and suddenly I did fall through the trapdoor. I met the hidden Kat on the underside of my consciousness. She spoke to me from the distorted fun house mirrors in the Jungian tunnels of my soul. Kat wanted to be seen. She wanted to marry herself to the Kit I eventually became after the attack. And I suddenly saw a whole different image of myself. And of the world. I saw what I was running from. I was running from Me. Myself. I saw how my addictions and quirks helped me hide from the hurtful things. My unconscious really did start to talk to me. The real Kat found her voice in the strokes of purple pen in a book with polka dots—
Kat glances up as an American tourist at the bar loudly asks the bartender to turn up the TV behind the counter. Kat goes still as she realizes what’s on the screen. It’s the Good Morning Global show. The anchors, Ben Woo and Judy Salinger, have invited a retired homicide cop and a criminal lawyer to comment on “The Mysterious Case of the Missing Maid and the Wrong Body.”
Quickly, Kat gathers her pen and diary, slides them into her straw bag, picks up her drink, and goes to sit at the bar counter. She watches intently.
Host Judy says, “A Vancouver family finally found closure when police divers searching for maid Kit Darling brought up the body of a missing senior with dementia instead. Sylvia Kaplan, seventy-one, was last seen on a street near her home in East Vancouver nearly two months ago. Extensive searches in the area for Kaplan yielded nothing. Until Monday, November 4, when divers found her body trapped below water. Investigators have since learned Kaplan boarded a transit bus that crossed to the North Shore. She disembarked near a park east of the site. Investigators believe she must have been confused, disoriented, and she wandered near the water, where she could have slipped and fallen in. The strong tidal currents likely washed her down toward the bridge, where her body became lodged in underwater debris.”