51 pages • 1 hour read
Loreth Anne WhiteThe Maid's Diary
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 29-41Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary: “Daisy”
Thirteen days before the murder, Daisy is cooking dinner, hoping to placate Jon after their spat that morning. He arrives with a rose, apparently also trying to smooth over their rift. Jon assures Daisy that he can handle the competition at work. He’s hired an investigator to look into Ahmed’s life. Daisy tells Jon about Vanessa’s controlling husband, Haruto. She suggests that the two couples should meet because she wants Jon’s opinion. Jon agrees and then receives a text that startles him. He covers and says that it’s nothing as he wanders upstairs. Daisy opens the mail and finds a plain brown envelope that was hand-delivered. Inside is another sinister message. She realizes that the stalker now has access to her home.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Jon”
Upstairs, Jon is reading a flirtatious text from the woman named Mia. He tells himself that cheating is harmless and texts Mia to suggest they meet again.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Mal”
On the evening of November 1, Mal and Benoit have just left Jon and are now inspecting his mud-spattered Audi. The detectives decide to call Daisy’s father, Labden Wentworth, the billionaire owner of TerraWest.
Chapter 32 Summary: “The Maid’s Diary”
Kit writes in her diary about documents hidden in Daisy’s safe at Rose Cottage which reveal a dark secret: “It will destroy the Rittenbergs and everyone close to them if I tell. And if I don’t tell, it will destroy me. I have no choice. Not anymore” (170). She also pockets a thumb drive so she can make a copy of it at home before replacing it in the safe, hoping that Daisy won’t notice it missing.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Mal”
On November 1, Mal and Benoit arrive at the Wentworth estate. They are shocked to find the missing Daisy staying with her parents. They question her about the cake and flowers dropped at the front door of the Glass House. Daisy is obviously concealing something, but she says that she and Jon left in a hurry because she thought she was going into labor. They show her a picture of Kit Darling. Daisy goes white but insists that she has never seen this person before.
Chapter 34 Summary: “The Maid’s Diary”
Kit has just returned home after taking the thumb drive from Daisy’s safe. When she opens it, she finds a video of a drunken party involving half the Olympic team at a ski lodge in Whistler. She was a high school student in town at the time and is shocked to realize that she is in the tape as well. Worse still, she recognizes Boon’s distinctive laugh in the background. He never told her that he was there. Kit feels she will need to reprocess everything she “thought was true in [her] life over the past two decades” (179). Kit calls Boon and demands to see him right away.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Daisy”
Six days before the murder, Daisy arrives at Vanessa’s house for a lunch date. She’s still unnerved by her stalker. When Vanessa suggests that they drink some wine, Daisy agrees. She finds herself relaxing and telling Vanessa about two incidents of sexual assault alleged against Jon that she has covered up. Daisy says that Jon got drunk at a ski lodge party and had sex with a fan. She says that the girl “cried rape” and said she was pregnant. Daisy says that if the story had gotten out, it would have been a disaster for the entire Olympic ski team. Daisy’s mother paid off the girl’s family, and Daisy assumed there was nothing to the pregnancy claim.
Years later, Jon was accused of sexual assault by a woman working in a strip club in Colorado, and Daisy intervened again, using a payment and an NDA to silence the victim. Vanessa points out: “Guys like him—they don’t change” (190). Daisy swears that if Jon steps out of line again, she will cut him loose. She has evidence of the assaults: Someone recorded the incident at the ski lodge, and Daisy has this video. She also has NDAs signed by the second victim and the mother of the high school girl from Whistler.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Daisy”
As Daisy drives home from the Glass House, she is disturbed by how much she told Vanessa. At home, she finds another brown envelope sticking out of her mailbox. It contains a threat to her unborn baby. Daisy questions a neighbor, asking if anyone has been near the house. He replies that only the maid was there. Daisy is sure that Charley Waters has come from Colorado to stalk her because the messages echo those Daisy sent to Charley to harass Charley into terminating her pregnancy. Daisy calls Charley who is confused but mentions someone called Kit. Daisy wonders who Kit is.
Chapter 37 Summary: “Mal”
On the evening of November 1, the detectives go to Kit’s apartment. They startle an old man inside. He is a neighbor named Samuel Berkowitz, who has been looking after Kit’s apartment. Kit told Samuel that a man was following her. Boon has come to the apartment to look for Kit. Berkowitz mentions that Kit keeps a journal, as suggested by her psychologist. He noticed she had been acting strangely for the past month. The detectives collect a DNA sample from Kit’s hairbrush and they find a sneaker that matches the one discovered at the crime scene.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Daisy”
Five days before the murder, Daisy has some time to herself because Jon is off entertaining clients. She becomes curious about the maid named Kit. Daisy’s diamond pendant is missing, and she intends to ask the maid about it. Instead of vacating the house on cleaning day, Daisy will stay home on Monday to meet Kit in person.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Mal”
By 10 pm on the night of November 1, Mal and Benoit speak with Boon at his apartment. He is able to fill in many of the blanks in their case. Boon claims that Kit began acting oddly on July 15, the day she scattered her mother’s ashes. Boon suspects that Kit’s snooping problem caused her to find a secret there that the Rittenbergs want to keep hidden.
Boon talks about the high school years he shared with Kit when they were the poor kids living in Whistler. Then, she was known as Katerina Popovich, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. Boon’s family was from Thailand, and the rich kids at school scorned both of them. When told about Kit’s journal, Boon draws a blank and insists Kit said nothing about the diary or a therapist.
When the detectives suggest that Boon might be Kit’s boyfriend, he tells them he is gay, and Kit is like a sister to him. He mentions her previous marriage to a man named Todd Darling. Todd wanted children, but Kit couldn’t have any as a previous abortion had damaged her uterus, and the marriage ended. Todd moved to the UK where he remarried and has a family now. The detectives end their interrogation but tell Boon that he must come to the station for a DNA test the following day.
Chapter 40 Summary: “Daisy”
Three days before the murder, Daisy waits impatiently for her maid to arrive. She is surprised to learn that a new cleaner has been assigned as Kit had a scheduling conflict. Daisy is unable to get Kit’s address from the maid, who refers her to the cleaning agency.
Chapter 41 Summary: “Daisy”
Unwilling to give up, Daisy calls the agency and is told that personal information isn’t given out. She checks the internet but can find no locals who match the name and description of Kit Darling. She then calls Vanessa, seeking some info on Kit, but Vanessa is no help. Vaness invites the Rittenbergs to dinner at the Glass House on Halloween evening. After this phone call, Daisy feels murderous fury toward Kit.
Chapters 29-41 Analysis
In this set of chapters, the false narratives spun by the Rittenbergs begin to unravel. Beneath the gleaming surface of their lives, dark secrets lurk. The novel shifts to an exploration of the theme of Abuse Enablers: Complicity and Moral Responsibility. Jon’s lies and immorality are developed as he engages in an affair. Just as he is willing to cheat by hiring a detective to eliminate his competition at work, Jon is ready to cheat on Daisy. He rationalizes his actions by saying, “No foul if no one finds out, right?” echoing Vanessa’s assessment of him and his pattern of behavior throughout his life. The gradual revelation of this pattern and hints of Kit’s punishment drives the narrative tension at this point.
The previous section made the revelation that Jon drugged and raped Charley. Once Kit finds the flash drive in Daisy’s safe, she learns that Jon did the same thing to her when she was still a teen. As this pattern of assault and cover-up is developed, the book increasingly focuses on the theme of Abuse Enablers: Complicity and Moral Responsibility. When Daisy reveals Jon’s crimes to Vanessa, the latter tells her that these were no isolated incidents. Jon has clearly been an abuser, but these chapters also reveal that his bad behavior was hidden by those who enabled him to commit sexual assault. Daisy intervenes because her own future might be compromised if Jon’s crimes come to light. She tries to justify and excuse her behavior when explaining the situation to Vanessa, showing that she put Jon’s sporting career first. When Vanessa observes that Daisy’s future was also on the line, Daisy is irritated because it places her actions in a far less altruistic light. The discussion between Vanessa and Daisy reveals a wider hypocrisy: They discuss whether Daisy made her decision for Jon or herself but neither seem to consider the victim or that the clear moral responsibility was to her.
In this section, the novel shifts from a focus on Jon and Daisy as prime examples of False Narratives and Identities, to hints that Kit is creating a false narrative of her own, as evidenced by her diary. Detectives Mal and Benoit see Kit, the maid, as the victim of foul play. She is perceived as innocent, while the Rittenbergs are guilty. Kit, the actor, has set the scene admirably for them to reach this erroneous conclusion. The diary increasingly gives clues that it is part of Kit’s entrapment of the Rittenbergs. Boon’s character is important here as he suggests to detectives that Kit found a “big-deal secret,” giving the Rittenbergs a motive for murder. This echoes the earliest pages when Kit’s diary records Boon’s warning that rich people will kill to keep their secrets. No character questions the truth of Kit’s false narrative although the novel encourages the reader to reconsider its sincerity and purpose.
