A real estate agent from Maura’s office told Jennifer that her parcel of land was worth one and a half million dollars. Jennifer put it on the market. She just might buy the bungalow in the Valley that Maura had always talked about.
For now, she was still near the sea. She walked on the beach one April evening and thought one last time about Draper’s words. He was right. There was no need to tell the world about the diary, no need to reopen the case and refocus the media’s cameras on her family. No need to revisit the past. The past was dead. It was dust and ashes. To cling to it was to die inside. Life moved on.
When the sun was gone and the sky was deep purple fading to black, she walked out onto Venice pier. At the end of the pier, she reached into her tote bag and brought out a rusty tin box.
Parkinson had indeed left the diary in the house to burn, but the box had protected it. The pages, though scorched, were readable. She had found it in her salvage hunt and had told no one, not even Draper. Probably it wasn’t good to start off their relationship with a lie, even if only a lie of omission. But he was a cop, and he might insist that the diary be booked into evidence, and then the whole story would come out.
Alone on the pier, Jennifer leaned over the railing and dropped the tin straight down, well away from the pilings with their tangled fishing lines. It hit the water with a splash, bobbed on the waves, and drifted away into the dark. Perhaps it would be carried out to sea, or perhaps, like Marilyn Diaz, it would be caught in a riptide and returned shoreward. She would let time and chance decide.
She hoped, though, that it would be lost in the ocean’s distant depths. Not every case had to be solved, as Draper said. Let Jack the Ripper remain a mystery. Let him be remembered not as what he was, not as Edward Hare with his motherless childhood and his lurid dreams of blood, but as what the world wanted him to be-a tall man in a top hat and black cloak, striding down an alley, retreating forever into the fog.