The Girl in the Moss (Angie Pallorino Book 3)

by Loreth Anne White

  A crooked smile curved Willow’s mouth. “She wasn’t easy to warm to, unless she felt she needed something from you. Then Jasmine was all smiles and irresistible, cajoling charm. Under her facade I believe lay real depth. She was intelligent, well read. Philosophical at times. I got a sense she was really trying to find who she was, testing ground, pushing boundaries to see just how far she could get. Maybe she was a lot like her grandmother, in truth. Jilly Monaghan had—probably still has—an abrasiveness both in and out of her robes.”

  “Did any of the others on the trip warm to Jaz at all?” Angie said, intrigued at this picture of Jasmine Gulati that was emerging.

  Another exchange of glances. “Maybe that Kathi woman?” Willow said to Trish.

  “Nah, that was more a kinship in the bottle.” Trish met Angie’s eyes. “Those two liked to get drunk and talk shit around the fire before crawling into their sleeping bags and passing out.”

  “So Jasmine drank fairly heavily on the trip?” Angie said.

  “She sure didn’t hold back. Damn fine fly-fisher, though. She showed me a thing or two on the water.” Willow sipped her coffee as she appeared to cast her memory back. “Eden seemed to get on relatively well with her. They chatted a lot, usually earlier in the evenings around the fire while Jasmine was writing in her journal. Before she got drunk for the night.”

  “What about Rachel? Did she like Jasmine?” Angie asked, poking at the perimeters of what Rachel had told her.

  “Rachel was in work mode,” Trish said. “She played the role of nonjudgmental observer. She wanted to encourage natural interaction. She has a real knack of sticking a camera in your face and making it seem like she isn’t even there.”

  “Rachel said Jasmine made an issue of having some big secret.”

  Trish gave a laugh. “Yes. Some clandestine lover who’d given her that diamond ring she was flashing about. Then she’d go on about how everyone held some deep dark secret, each one of us on that river, she said.”

  The words of the old nurse who’d found Angie stuffed into the baby box at Saint Peter’s Hospital on Christmas Eve over thirty years ago sifted through her mind … Sometimes we think we’re keeping secrets. But really, those secrets are keeping us.

  Angie set the photo of Jasmine’s diamond ring on the counter. “This was the ring she mentioned?”

  They nodded.

  “Did you get the sense she was promised to someone? Or just messing with you all?”

  “By the way she was flirting with the guides?” Willow said, her voice quieter, a guarded look entering her eyes. “Someone engaged to be married doesn’t … behave like she did.”

  Angie said, “There’s no forensics evidence to support this question, but it is a question that has nevertheless come up.” She paused. “Did Jasmine at any point lead you to believe she might have given birth in the past, perhaps to a baby she’d surrendered for adoption?”

  Surprise cut through both their faces.

  “No,” Willow said.

  “You both reacted quite sharply. Why?”

  Trish raked her fingers through her silver-gray spikes. “It’s just that one evening we’d all been discussing adoption. It was in relation to what Willow and I were trying to do with an orphanage in Korea. Jaz came across as vehemently negative about our efforts to adopt a Korean baby. She said it was stupid, that we had no idea what we might be getting with a baby from an orphanage.”

  “She was incredibly harsh,” Willow added. “She said we might end up with a kid with fetal alcohol syndrome or brain damage or ADD challenges. Admittedly, she’d made fair inroads into her wine by that point, but—” Willow paused. “It would certainly not lead me to conclude in any way that she was sympathetic to the notion of adoption. Or that she might have gone down that road herself.”

  “Unless, in retrospect, she was disturbed by having done this in her own past,” said Trish, “and it was her way of lashing out and burying it. Maybe that was her big dark secret.”

  “Then why her apparent smugness?” Willow countered. She turned to Angie. “See, that was the thing. Whatever big secret Jaz was on about, it was cloaked in a cocky superiority. It was something she was happy about or at least positive. She was waving it about like a red flag.”

  “Why would she do that?” Angie said.

  “Hell knows. She was twenty-five. World at her feet. We were old bags. Maybe that’s all it was. Animalistic superiority of youth. Put the old crones down.”

  Angie held their eyes. “One more question,” she said. “Rachel mentioned that a group of males taunted you from the shore while you were drifting downriver.”

  “Oh, that.” Another dry laugh from Trish. “We figured that was Jaz’s fault, too. She affronted a group of local males in a pub at Port Ferris. We’d all gathered there for a meal and briefing with the two guides the night before heading up to Predator Lodge. We’d booked into the adjacent motel for the night. But in the pub side of the restaurant, there was some game on television, and it seemed like the whole town had come out to cheer on a local hero. Plenty of drink flowing.”

  “So the place was raucous, patrons really drunk?”

  “We weren’t doing so badly ourselves,” Trish said. “It was our big pretrip sendoff. Some of us, including Jaz, filtered over to the pub side and joined the locals in celebration of the big win.”

  “How did Jaz offend these guys?”

  “Well, most the guys in the pub were really big dark-haired logger types, a lot of them wearing the Kamloops tux—”

  “Kamloops tux?” Angie asked.

  “Oh, just a name for those padded plaid jacket things everyone out in the rural areas of BC seems to wear, from loggers to hunters to mechanics,” Willow said.

  Angie’s mind shot to Garrison Tollet, now current owner of Predator Lodge. He fit the mold—big, built like a logger, thighs the size of her waist. He’d been wearing his padded plaid jacket on both occasions that Angie and Maddocks had interacted with him at the lodge.

  “What did Jaz say to these guys?” Angie prodded.

  “Something about them being interrelated. She asked if they were all cousins and whether they forwent dental hygiene and played banjos in the woods,” Trish said.

  “Oh jeez,” Angie said. “You’re kidding me?”

  “’Fraid not. So we think some of the guys from the pub figured it would be a lark to follow us along the river. There were three of them in the woods, following us, we think. Two big men. One with black hair, one who wore a red toque and a plaid jacket. The third man was shorter and skinny. They’d appear in the trees along the riverbank, just standing there. Sometimes we’d see them silhouetted up along the talus ridges. Then one afternoon we heard a banjo. We heard it again that night near our camp.”

  “And one of the big guys was always carrying something,” Willow added. “It was long. Could have been a rifle or shotgun.”

  “So you think they were just out to spook you, or did you actually feel threatened? Did you feel they could be dangerous?”

  “It felt tense to me,” Willow said. “Bottom line, Jaz asked for it. If Garrison and Jessie hadn’t stepped in and defused things in the pub that night, I suspect things could have gone seriously sideways. Garrison took Jaz aside, bought her another drink, and cozied up to her in a booth at the back of the bar while Jessie talked the other blokes down.”

  Trish and Willow exchanged another look, as if weighing something. Then Trish said, “We weren’t going to say anything because it was personal, but we’re pretty sure Garrison Tollet got into Jaz’s pants that night. She was booked into the motel room next to ours, and we … heard her with someone.”

  “Heard?”

  “Banging headboards kinda heard.”

  “So she slept with Garrison Tollet, her guide, on the first night?”

  “Yes.”

  Angie’s mind shot back to her and Maddocks’s trip. They’d met Sheila Tollet, Garrison’s wife. Sheila had mentioned at the time that she and
Garrison were going on twenty-six years of marriage. They would have been married only two years the night Garrison allegedly slept with his client, Jasmine Gulati.

  “Are you certain it was him in the next room with her?”

  “No. That’s also why we didn’t really want to mention it, because she could have been with someone else entirely. But if you look at the footage Rachel shot in the pub that night, you might learn more.”

  “Not exactly the behavior of a woman promised to another man,” Angie said quietly.

  “Nope,” Trish said. “That you’ll certainly see from the tapes.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Dusk was settling over the city, thick fog rolling in off the ocean as Angie went up a small stone path to the door of what she hoped was Sophie Sinovich’s house.

  Sophie was one of the “three amigas” pictured with Jasmine Gulati on a Hornby Island beach twenty-six years ago.

  Angie had looked up both Mia Smith and Sophie Sinovich after dropping off Rachel Hart’s VHS tapes to be digitized at Mayang Photo Place, a specialty store run by Daniel Mayang, a guy used by Coastal Investigations for all manner of photographic restoration, enhancement, and old film advice in general.

  Turned out there was more than one Mia Smith living in Victoria, and if Mia had married and was using her husband’s name, Angie was likely to hit several dead ends before making any progress. Sinovich, however, was a surname that narrowed the field, so Angie had focused on looking for Sophie first.

  She’d found a social media profile for a Sophie Sinovich Rosenblum that named the University of Victoria as one of the schools she’d attended. The profile photos of Sophie Rosenblum showed a brunette in her early fifties. She looked like she could be a match.

  As Angie raised her hand to knock, the door opened, startling both Angie and a tiny woman holding a Great Dane on a lead. The woman stepped back in fright, her hand shooting to her chest. The hound began to bark.

  “I’m looking for Sophie Sinovich Rosenblum,” Angie said loudly over the sound of the barking dog.

  “Oh, Bella, shut up. Hold on, please,” the flustered woman told Angie. She scooted Bella-the-Dane back inside and stepped out, shutting the door behind her. “Sorry about that. I was just about to take Bella for her walk. We didn’t expect to see anyone right at the door. You scared the daylights out of me.”

  Disappointment flushed through Angie as she regarded this tiny black-haired woman with pinched features. She was not the Sophie in the photos.

  “My apologies. I think I might have the wrong address,” Angie said. “I was hoping to find Sophie Sinovich Rosenblum who attended UVic about twenty-five years back.”

  Hesitancy crossed the tiny woman’s features, followed by suspicion. Inside, the barking intensified. The woman looked back at the door as if reassessing the wisdom of locking her guard dog away.

  “Here—” Angie quickly dug out her card and held it out to the woman. “My name is Angie Pallorino. I’m a private investigator, and I’m looking into a cold case that Sophie Sinovich might be able to help me with.”

  The woman studied the card in the porch light, looked up. “You have the right address. Sophie is away with her family, trekking in Nepal. They’ll not be in cell range much until they return. I’m Lacey Richards. I’m housesitting, or rather”—she jerked her head back to the door—“Great Dane sitting.”

  “When will Sophie be back?”

  “Not for another few days.”

  “Can you give her my card, ask her to call me when she returns?”

  “Sure.”

  Angie thanked the woman and started down the path to her car, but Lacey called out into the misty twilight. “Can I perhaps help? I was also at UVic with Sophie.”

  Angie stilled. Hope flared. She turned and hurried back up the path, ducking under cover of the eaves out of the fine drizzle. She took out the photo she’d put in her jacket pocket. “Do you know who this friend of Sophie’s was?” She showed the print to Lacey.

  “That’s Jasmine—” Her gaze ticked up to Angie. “Is this about Jaz? She disappeared the year after this was taken, presumed drowned in the Nahamish River. No one ever knew for sure what happened to her. There were all sorts of rumors.”

  “Rumors like?”

  “So this is about Jaz?”

  “It is, yes. Her remains were recently discovered and positively identified. Her grandmother has asked me to paint a picture of Jasmine’s final months and days leading up to the accident. I was hoping Sophie could fill in some details.”

  “Wow,” Lacey said, her attention returning to the photo. She fell silent. Inside the house the dog stopped barking, as if listening for her voice now. A foghorn sounded across the water. Darkness seeped in with the mist, wrapping the city in a claustrophobic cape of cold moisture and casting ghostly halos around the streetlights.

  “What were the rumors?” Angie probed gently.

  Her gaze still riveted on Jaz’s smiling image, Lacey said, “The usual stuff that comes up when people vanish without a trace. That she’d faked her own death. That she’d gone south, crossed the border into Mexico, had been seen in Puerto Vallarta. Someone claimed they’d seen Jaz in Oaxaca and that she was living with some man there.” Lacey peered up. “Where was her body found?”

  “Next to the river, in a shallow grave where she likely washed up in a high-water event.”

  “And all this time people thought she could be cavorting around the globe. Meanwhile she was lying right there …”

  “Was there any reason you’d be inclined to believe any of those rumors?” Angie asked. “For example, was there anything Jasmine Gulati might have wanted to escape?”

  “I never did believe the rumors,” Lacey said. “It’s a way of filling a void. The human mind doesn’t like unanswered questions. The instinct is to fill the unknown gaps with something, anything, even if it’s bizarre. That’s why closure is so important. Knowing, even when the truth hurts, you know?”

  Angie knew. All too intimately.

  “How well did you know Jasmine?”

  She gave a shrug. “As well as most people. Jaz had a way of being super friendly to everyone but at the same time not really letting anyone in. Sophie was very close to her, though, and Mia.” She nodded to the pic. “The three amigas, we used to call them.”

  “Does Mia Smith still live in town?”

  “She’s Mia Monroe now. And yes. She owns a boutique near Chinatown called Candescence. She studied law and went straight into clothing design. Go figure.”

  Angie thanked Lacey and reminded her to pass a message to Sophie to call upon her return.

  “Oh,” Lacey said, halting Angie once more. “Mia and Jasmine kinda fell out shortly before that river trip. I remember now—I haven’t thought about it all for such a long time.”

  “Fell out? How so?”

  “Big argument about something. I mean, really big. They’d had their spats, but this one? It was for real.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Maddocks poured hot water over a tea bag. He set the mug of steeping tea on the small galley table in front of Holgersen. The quirky detective had come to visit Maddocks at his yacht. It was 8:30 p.m. on Monday night, and Maddocks had just returned from his law enforcement seminar. He’d showered, fixed himself a double whiskey, and was settling in to read some case files when a bedraggled Holgersen had come knocking on the hatch of his schooner.

  “Thanks,” Holgersen said. He began dunking the bag of green tea in and out of the hot water, presumably to make it steep faster. Maddocks watched him. It was dark, raining, and windy out, and the old schooner rocked gently on a swell, hanging lanterns outside swinging in the mist. Jack-O snoozed on the sofa.

  “You sure you don’t want something stronger?” Maddocks said, holding up his glass. “Got some good whiskey.”

  “Nah. Had two beers at the Pig already.”

  Maddocks sat opposite his detective and took a sip of his drink. “So what’s on your mind? What brought
you all the way down to the marina?”

  He inhaled. “Jeezus, boss, what in the hells do you want from me? What you looking for in Harvey Leo?” His gaze locked with Maddocks’s. “What fucking game you playing with me here?”

  “You got something?”

  Holgersen looked away, chewing on whatever was bothering him.

  “Okay. So maybe Leo’s showing a particular interest in some particular cold cases.”

  Maddocks’s pulse quickened. “What do you mean, ‘interest’?”

  Holgersen dumped his tea bag on a saucer with a small spatter of water. “You gonna tell me what you’s looking for specifically?”

  “Tell me what cases, Holgersen. Tell me how he’s showing interest.”

  The detective ran his tongue over his teeth. “First day on the cold case job, and he’s chosen to siphon off dead tweaker cases—them homeless kids who’s ended up overdosed or who’s died from exposure or things like that. But there’s been some suspicious circumstances around their deaths, so files were opened, but nothing came of them.”

  “All female vics?”

  “Some male kids in there as well.”

  “And he’s prioritizing these cases?”

  “No way, José. He’s spiking them. Claiming them’s lost causes. Just junkies and a waste of our time.” Holgersen brought his mug to his mouth, sipped. “Leo reckons ever since pig farmer Pickton started hunting and killing street workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, every missing or murdered street person is now seen as a potential serial killer vic. He said it’s overkill. Waste of our time.”

  Maddocks eyed Holgersen. “Leo said that?”

  The detective began shuffling in his seat as this question hung between them.

  “Let’s get one thing straight here, boss. I’s not comfortable right now. Spying on a fellow cop—not my shtick. You gotta tell me what’s going down, or I ain’t coming here with tattletales that mean shit. I’s not some tool for some McCarthy witch hunt, ’cause the way I sees it, anyone can make a meal out of nothing if theys really want to. Maybe you gots an axe to grind with Leo over what he did to Pallorino.”