Mal and Benoit take Saelim to their vehicle. He sits in the back while they sit in the front, turned to face him. They keep the inside light on. Rain patters on the roof and squiggles down the windshield. It’s cold, so they have the engine running, and the windows are fogging up.
“When did you last see Kit?” Benoit asks him.
He closes his eyes, and Mal immediately senses he’s going to lie. She’s a veteran interrogator. Or perhaps he’s just struggling to hold in his emotion.
“I think it was two days ago.”
“You think?” Mal says.
His eyes flick to hers.
“Here’s the thing, Boon,” Mal says. “Sam Berkowitz, Kit’s neighbor, says you went around to her apartment looking for her. Sam tells us you were worried. Holly McGuire at Holly’s Help also says you expressed concern for your close friend. You’ve been looking for Kit all day, and you haven’t yet determined when you last saw her?”
“Am I a suspect here or something?”
“Are you?”
His eyes narrow. His energy turns hostile. “I didn’t see her today. Nor yesterday. I saw her the day before Halloween, so that would have been Wednesday. For our D&D session.”
“D&D?” Benoit asks.
“Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a game.”
“How did Kit seem when you last saw her?” Mal asks.
“Not herself, to be honest. She hasn’t been herself since July 15.”
“That’s very specific,” Mal says. “What happened on July 15?”
“It’s the anniversary of her mother’s death. Kit was pretty messed up by her mom’s dying. It was a long and difficult process for her. Afterward, she was unable to scatter the ashes. But when July 15 rolled around again this year, I said I’d go with her. We went to Lighthouse Park and released them. So that was one thing that happened on that specific day. It was on the same day, right after the scattering of her mother’s cremains, that she started a new cleaning job. She’s been getting progressively weird since then.”
“Do you know which new job?” Benoit asks.
“Rose Cottage. The Rittenbergs.”
Mal’s energy sharpens. “And Kit told you about the Rittenbergs specifically?”
“Yeah. We share a lot about each other’s lives. We’re real close. We grew up in the same ski town, except she was a few years behind me at school, so I didn’t know her back then, but we connected here in the city some years ago when we ran into each other in a coffee shop at a mall.”
“And what is it about the Rittenbergs that might have created issues?” Benoit asks.
Boon shuffles in the seat, rubs his knee, clears his throat. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“I thought you shared a lot,” Mal says.
“That’s why I say that she was off. She got weird. Closed off. Something happened. And I don’t know if it happened in that house. Rose Cottage. Or if she was having some unresolved grief issues. When I asked, she refused to talk about it. It put a rift into our relationship, okay? I continued to press her because it upset me. I felt cut out of her life. Which made her even more defensive. More closed. So I have no idea. I even drove past that house to see. When Kit learned I’d done that, she lost it. Totally went apeshit. She said I’d crossed a line, and I was not to mess in her professional life. But it wasn’t just her work stuff. Whatever was going on, it had spilled into her private life. She was messed up. And . . .” He exhales heavily. “She seemed frightened these past few weeks. Jumpy. Edgy. Paranoid, even.”
“And she didn’t say why?” Mal asks.
He rubs his jaw. “No. I suspected it had to do with those clients. I think she saw something. I—” He swears, then rubs his face harder. “Okay, I’m just going to say it, because I’m worried for her. I mean really worried. Kit has a snooping problem. Like an addiction. She jokes about it, but it’s serious. Like next-level serious. And I think she’s been crossing lines. I told her some time ago she was going to get herself in trouble. She was going to see something that some client wanted to keep hidden. And it could get her in danger.”
Mal and Benoit regard Boon in silence. Tension thickens in the car.
Quietly, Mal says, “When you say snooping ‘problem’—”
“I mean, digging into closets, trying to open safes, hacking into computers. And—” His eyes glisten with emotion again. “I feel like I’m betraying her. But she also has this Instagram account. Under the name @foxandcrow. Both tricksters—the fox and the crow. It’s her joke on the world of false narratives. Her mockery of a social media lifestyle where everyone projects some kind of brand, like they’re selling a product. And she pretends she’s this rich chick with an ultraglamorous globe-trotting lifestyle. And I join in sometimes. Because it seemed fun. No harm, no foul, right? But lately she’s been posting more and more photos of herself inside her clients’ houses. Wearing their clothes and shit. But mostly inside the Rittenberg house. There’s—” He glances away.
“Go on,” says Mal. “Please, Boon. This could be important.”
He moistens his lips. “There’s this one photo with her in front of their unborn baby’s crib, and she’s holding an ultrasound image in front of her stomach, and her caption makes it seem like she is the one having their baby. Maybe they saw it. It would freak the hell out of anyone. Or maybe Kit found something in Rose Cottage. That’s what I believe—that she got into something that the Rittenbergs want to keep secret. Like big-deal secret. Like—I . . . I don’t even want to say it.”
“You mean, something someone would kill to keep secret?” Benoit asks. “Is that what you’re trying to say, Boon?”
He drops his head, stares at his hands in his lap. “Yeah, that’s what scares me,” he says quietly. “Really scares me. She’s vulnerable that way. She’s messed up that way.”
“And you think her disappearance is definitely tied to these clients in particular?” Benoit asks.
He swallows. “I don’t know. But it was after she got Rose Cottage that she got weird.”
Benoit says, “You mentioned you and Kit grew up in the same town.”
He hesitates. “Whistler. I left right after graduation. She dropped out of school and left, too.”
“So you’re a skier, Boon?” Mal asks.
He gives a snort. “Funny how everyone thinks you’re a skier just because you live in a ski town. Do you know what a lift ticket costs, Detective? We never had money to ski. My parents worked at McDonald’s. The franchise owner in Whistler found it impossible to hire ski-town locals. And those kids who flock into town each year from all over the world, looking for work, they come for the ski experience. They all fight to get hired by the mountains, or jockey for jobs that will give them free ski passes. They don’t come all the way from the UK, or Australia, or from Japan to work at McDonald’s. So the owner started a program to import labor from the Philippines and Thailand—the kind of poor people desperate to immigrate to Canada. It was a way in for my parents. That’s how I ended up living in an expensive ski town and attending the only school in the valley that was full of rich ski-town kids.”