“Just trying to line up the chronology. There’s some discrepancy in accounts. Plus, the VHS footage your mother shot that night has gone missing. Any idea where it might be?”
“Me? Hell no. I never got close to her stuff. There’d have been death to pay.”
“What happened next, after you went into the bush to relieve yourself?”
“I returned to camp. It was getting dark. Cold. I went to sit by the fire, where the other women were having drinks and chatting about the day. Then we heard a man scream for help. We all got up and ran up to the logging road. We saw Jessie Carmanagh come racing down the road toward the camp. He said he needed the radio. He said Garrison Tollet had seen Jasmine going over the falls. Garrison was trying to climb down the cliff to the base of the falls to see if he could find her.”
“Where was your mother at that point?”
Eden looked up and to the left, thinking. “I don’t know. No ... wait. She was there, I remember her there. On the road with everyone milling about in panic. I don’t know which way she’d come from. It was chaos. Jessie radioed for help. We all went downriver with flashlights to see if we could help, but Jessie ordered us back to camp, said he didn’t need anyone else falling in and that the cops and SAR would be arriving soon. When they arrived, they tried searching in the dark below the falls with hunting spotlights and then ramped up in the morning. But there was no sign of Jasmine.”
Angie opened her sling bag and took out her folder. From the folder she extracted the image of the ring. Like the others, Eden said the same things—Jasmine acted like she had a big secret and had told no one who’d given it to her.
“Jasmine wrote nightly in her journal,” Angie said. “Did she ever tell you what was in it?”
“Another secret. She made like it was full of sexy stuff. Her way of messing with the heads and libidos of the male guides who couldn’t stop ogling her boobs and her ass and fussing about her.”
“Jessie fussed about her, too?”
“Everyone was agitated by Jaz in some way.” Eden uncrossed her legs and sat forward, an energy lighting her eyes. “As you’re well aware, Angie, given your professional involvement with lust killers during your tenure with sex crimes—Spencer Addams specifically—sex is often simply about power. Control. Ownership. In retrospect, that’s what Jaz was all about. Controlling others.”
Angie felt her own vibe darken at Eden’s mention of the man she’d shot and killed. The event that had cost her her career. She swallowed, holding Eden’s eyes. “So you never read her journal?”
“No, I never read it. But I wanted to.” She smiled. “I was fourteen and fascinated by Jasmine and what that diary might hold.”
“Any idea who took it? It wasn’t with Jasmine’s belongings after she drowned.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.”
Eden shook her head and made a moue. “Maybe one of the guides sneaked off with it, and after her death it became too awkward to hand it back?”
Angie chatted awhile longer about the first dinner in the pub, about Sheila Tollet visiting the campsite, about the small blowup between Jaz and the lesbian couple over adoption, about an argument Jaz had with Hannah Vogel and Donna Gill regarding a woman’s obligation to support the feminism cause, about Kathi and Jaz’s drunken camaraderie.
Angie thanked Eden and came to her feet. “If anything else comes to mind, would you give me a call?”
“I will.” She got up and moved toward the door. “Was everything kosher with the autopsy results?”
“Yes,” Angie said simply. “Jasmine’s death is being ruled as an accidental drowning.”
“So ... Justice Monaghan is just fishing? S’cuse the pun.”
“She needs to round out an image of her granddaughter’s life before laying her officially to rest. It’s her way of coping, I think.”
“Or entertaining herself.”
“Maybe that, too.”
As Angie left Nanaimo and drove the last leg up the desolate island highway to Port Ferris into a darkening bank of clouds, she considered the enigma that was Dr.Eden Hart.
With a mother like Rachel Hart, it was easy to see the forces that had shaped a young Eden. Both were powerful, strong women with sharp feminist sensibilities. It was this feminism that had underscored the intent of Rachel’s documentary. Jaz, in her own way, had been a free-spirited, powerful female who wielded her sexuality as a weapon or used it as a tool, sparing neither man nor woman. And as Angie knew well, ambitious and driven women could make a lot of people very, very uncomfortable.
Angie wanted to like Eden Hart. She wanted to like Rachel, too. But there was something about the two she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Yet.
Or was she just like the rest—uncomfortable around women who, while holding fast onto their feminine whiles, could also act like men? No. It was more. In Angie’s experience, men were generally straightforward. Women were more dangerous—because they were more devious. The aggression was usually quieter. And sometimes darkly passive, hidden like fly hooks in pretty feathers behind smiles and compliments and nice shoes.
CHAPTER 26
