The newscast flashes onto a scene near the ADMAC construction site.
“Oh, here it is.” She reaches for the remote and quickly bumps up the sound.
A female reporter stands under klieg lights in the darkness near the cordoned-off entrance to the site. She holds a mike.
“The search for missing maid Kit Darling appears to have come to a sad conclusion earlier this evening. A source close to the investigation says divers located a woman’s body underwater near the area where Darling’s yellow Subaru was pulled out of the Burrard Inlet. The body is trapped in debris at considerable depth. The team is currently devising a strategy to safely bring the remains up, hopefully tomorrow.”
The camera switches to the anchor in the newsroom. “Pamela, are the police saying anything more about other aspects of the investigation?”
“At the moment, all we know is that ex-Olympic skier Jon Rittenberg and his wife have been brought in for questioning. They have since been released. Forensic evidence from the crime scene at the so-called Glass House is still being processed. I imagine results could take a while. But once the body has been retrieved, an autopsy will be performed, which should yield additional clues about what happened on that violent and fateful night at a luxury mansion on West Vancouver’s waterfront.”
Beulah watches reporter Pamela Dorfmann on her small television set in her room.
She feels profoundly sad to hear they’ve found Kit’s body. As images of skier Jon Rittenberg and his wife, Daisy, flash onto the television screen, Beulah knows without a doubt that this is the same couple she saw getting out of the Audi.
Beulah is pleased she dialed 911. She didn’t really think Horton could have hurt anyone, but she’s relieved to hear other people are being questioned and not her son. She’s seen Horton behind the hedge on a few occasions, watching the maid working next door. She also saw Horton spying on the ladies having lunch by the pool. She’s been worried about Horton for quite a while.
She rests her head back in her chair and closes her eyes, feeling content to have had some purpose, to have played an important and exciting role. But she will miss the maid. Beulah will miss her happy wave and smile. As Beulah drifts into an opioid slumber, she tells herself it’s silly to believe she’ll see people again in a heavenly afterlife. But she does like to imagine she might bump into Kit the maid and get to know her properly this time.
Beulah drifts deeper. Part of her knows tonight is the night she will not wake from her slumber. Come morning she will be gone, and this house will be Horton’s.
Boon enters a small and brightly lit gas station supermarket near the town of Hope. It’s pitch dark outside and pummeling with rain. He’s come down from a remote cabin in the mountains to purchase supplies. He fled to the cabin after those cops came to speak to him. He has zero intention of going in to give a DNA sample, or to talk to the police. He could see where their minds were going.
As he puts tins of beans into his shopping basket, he catches sight of the small television screen behind the store counter. He stills as a chyron flashes across the bottom.
POLICE DIVERS FIND BODY.
Boon drops the tin he was holding. It rolls beneath the shelves. Fixated on the television screen, he slowly walks closer to the counter.
“Can you turn that up?” he asks the cashier.
The cashier glances at the TV, reaches for a remote, and turns up the sound.
Boon stares as he listens.
“The search for missing maid Kit Darling appears to have come to a sad conclusion earlier this evening—”
“They found her body,” the cashier says, jerking his thumb at the screen.
Boon swallows as tears fill his eyes. Carefully, he sets his basket on the counter and exits the store. He walks through the rain to his car.
THE MAID’S DIARY
We’re on the log at the beach, my half-eaten sandwich fallen into the sand, and Boon puts his face into his hands. He rocks and moans as though in pain. I have just forced him to watch the recording I copied to my phone.
“I’m sorry, Kit. I am so, so sorry. God, I am sorry.”
“I loved you, Boon. With my whole heart. You were the center of my world, you know that?”
He looks up. His eyes are full of tears. They run down his face. My chest hurts. Part of me died when I heard his high, whooping, nervous laugh on Daisy’s recording. Another part of me is cold and dead as stone and can’t feel anything at all. I will not be able to trust or let anyone in again.
“I hadn’t come out as gay yet, Kit. I was scared. Some of the guys who were at the lodge that night, they were the same guys who beat me at school. Who called me a faggot. Who cornered me in the locker room at the rec center one day and pulled down my pants and taunted me with a bottle, saying they would push it up my butt. I was terrified that if I was the only one who stuck my neck out and told the truth of what we all saw, I’d be outed and worse. I honestly believed they might beat and kill me if I came forward and ratted on them and Jon and the other team members.”
He swipes his tears away. “I was a stupid, frightened kid with no one to turn to. My parents would’ve died in shame if they’d found out what I was—what I am. Kit, listen to me, you know that my mom and dad still don’t know. I have come out to the whole world, but I still can’t tell them. I just can’t. Not after everything they’ve done to try and make a life for me in this country. They’re just incapable of understanding. And now my mom is sick, and she probably won’t get well. And I would rather let both my parents pass without ever having to know this about their son. I—I am so ashamed by how I never stood up for you. I . . . I wish I’d been brave, bold. I wish I could’ve been the kind of kid hero you read about in books. The kid who risks everything to stand up for the underdog. But I wasn’t. I was a scared-shitless boy who didn’t fully understand his own sexuality. A kid who only wanted to belong. To be accepted. Loved. Can you possibly find it in your heart to understand this?”
“You’ve been my closest friend all these years, Boon. You could have told me you were there.”
“But then I would have lost your friendship, Kit. And I can’t bear losing you. My whole life I’ve been trying to make it up to you.”
“Yet you’ve lost me anyway.”
“I’ll do anything, Kit, if you will forgive me. Can you ever forgive me? Please.”
I turn away and stare at the sea. On one level I do understand what kid Boon did, or rather did not do. I know fear. I know marginalization. I was badly bullied myself. All I ever wanted was to belong, too, to be loved, accepted, admired. Maybe time will help me process and accept. Maybe it won’t. Why should we always “understand” our abuser, the villains, the mendacity of evil, the people who let us down? Does understanding help us heal?
I don’t think anything really heals trauma. You just find some kind of narrative to learn to cohabit with it.
I suppose now is the time to admit to you, Dear Diary, I never had a therapist. I always imagined that if I did she would coax me to start a journal. But the reason I really started this diary was to tell my Story. To leave something behind specifically to be found by the police.
To tell them about Jon and Daisy. And what happened that night in the lodge.