Sex. Murder. Mystery(106)

“It wasn't but a second, but I looked through the water at him. He was standing on the bottom of the pool looking up at me. I can still see his eyes. Looking at me and saying so much. I thought I could, but I guess I can't. Save me. And I did. It wasn't but a second when I reached down for him and pulled him from the water. His eyes had said so much to me then. And they speak to me now. His eyes haunt me now.”





Chapter 3

IT DIDN'T HAPPEN every time, but sometimes when Michelle Rhinehart Jarvis drove her white VW convertible “Lamby” up the hills above the ocean near Corona del Mar, she'd catch a whiff of a fragrance that would send her back, way back to the time when she and Mary Kay Schmitz were young girls. When a little moisture from the Pacific mixed with the fragrance of the wildflowers, the bougainvillea, and the eucalyptus, it would come back to her. It was 1998 and like Mary Kay, Michelle was a mother. She had two little girls—Danielle and Kylie—and a son, Michael, named for her husband, a multi-media developer and designer. Michelle's life in Southern California was the busy-working-mother-with-never-enough-time routine she had once imagined Mary Kay's life had been up in Seattle.

She pulled her car to the side of a canyon road and looked around.

Bleached white condominiums and gated communities of pink stucco had obliterated much of the visual beauty of a raw landscape. There had been a time when hawks circled and coyotes sometimes made it down to where the houses lined up in glistening rows on Spyglass Hill. There had been a time when two girls slid down the hills on paper bags, or spent all day following a coyote's trail. Time had marched on and all of that was gone now.

But even all of the progress couldn't mask the scent that brought back memories. The sweet, salty smell of ocean and canyon. The smell of summertime and youth.

In a moment, Michelle could feel the wind blowing through the open windows of Mary Kay's bedroom on the nights when she'd sleep over on the floor next to her friend. She could hear the water of the swimming pool splashing against its tiled walls while the two of them pretended to flee from sharks.

“Jaws is coming!”

Years later when everyone in the world would have an opinion about her friend, Michelle would sometimes roll down her window and breathe it all in and remember. And she'd think how far Mary Kay had tumbled from Spyglass Hill and how inevitable she believed it all had been.

Mary Schmitz had priorities and none of her children felt the need to make excuses for it. It was the way they lived. The enormous house at 10 Mission Bay on Spyglass Hill had marble floors and carpeting that cost more than forty dollars a yard. The furnishings on the main level were exquisite. Years later, Mary Kay still marveled over a couch her mother had selected and how stunning the silk organza fabric covering its cushions had been. To be sure, upstairs was another world. There was no matching furniture, no gorgeous crystal, and no exquisite figurines. No family photos lined the walls. The children's bedrooms were spare in their furnishings to say the least. Mary Kay's bed had no frame. Her windows went without curtains or screens. Facing west, her corner bedroom would fill with the hot air of the California sun. Some of the Schmitz children used drawers set on the floor to hold their underwear and socks.

“There was so much mold and mildew in the bathroom that I couldn't even use it,” Michelle Jarvis recalled.

But downstairs everything was picture perfect.

Mary Kay would later say that it didn't bother her. She was happy to sprawl out on the forty-dollar-a-yard carpet or flop on a beanbag chair when she watched TV.

“What do those kinds of things matter?” she asked later. “My mother's priorities were elsewhere. We were in private school. She entertained downstairs. We weren't put upon. So what if our couch in the TV room was given to us? We were very happy indeed.”

Michelle and Mary Kay met through their mothers, who were casual acquaintances and played tennis together. With Mary Kay's school friends in Costa Mesa at St. John the Baptist, she was isolated from kids outside of her siblings. Michelle lived in East Bluff just down the road from Spyglass.

Mary Schmitz was the one who suggested getting the girls together. They were in grade school at the time. It seemed a good idea to have a friend close by. It was an idea, however, some would later suggest, that Mrs. Schmitz would have liked to reconsider. Mary Kay and Michelle became inseparable.

“I practically lived there. I annoyed her mother to no end,” Michelle said later. “She always called me that Michelle. She was dismissive to anyone whose last name wasn't Schmitz and who couldn't help her husband's political career. I couldn't help her in her quest to be mother of the year or whatever her pet project was that time.”