1
Iris Bell
October 1994
Friday, 7:28 pm
Iris eased the front door shut behind her and held her breath until the latch caught with a quiet click. She stood motionless in the foyer, listening. Nothing greeted her but the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, each sound landing in the silence like a dropped coin.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
The house was empty, just as she’d hoped.
Her parents would be at the Wilsons’ block party for hours yet, performing their usual routine. Richard Bell, beloved architect, and Eden Bell, devoted wife, playing the neighborhood’s golden couple with the ease of two people who’d been rehearsing the act their entire marriage. Her brother Joey was somewhere at the football stadium, probably shouting himself hoarse with that obnoxious friend of his, the one whoalways smelled like cheap body spray and bad decisions. No one had noticed Iris slip away from the bonfire at Miller’s Pond, and no one was going to interrupt what she’d come here to do.
She slid her hand into the pocket of her denim jacket, a vintage find she’d picked up for sixty dollars at the thrift shop on Cherry Street last weekend. It was already her favorite thing in her closet. Her fingertips brushed against the cool plastic casing of her tape recorder, and the familiar shape steadied her. She’d been carrying one for the better part of a year now, and the habit had become second nature, no different than reaching for her house key or checking her reflection in the hall mirror.
Besides, she had other sources of income these days. Babysitting money only went so far.
There was another recorder just like this one planted in the ceramic vase on the foyer table. Her mother had carefully placed the vase beneath the chandelier, likely spending a whole afternoon adjusting it so the glaze reflected the light perfectly for guests arriving. That was the thing about this house. Everything in it existed for the benefit of people who didn’t actually live here.
And it was, Iris had to admit, a beautiful house.
Beautiful in the way a museum was beautiful. Perfect, untouchable, and completely devoid of warmth. The white marble floor stretched across the foyer like a sheet of ice, polished to such a high shine that she could distinguish a faint ghost of herself in its surface. The sweeping staircase curved upward along the far wall, its lacquered banister gleaming from the housekeeper’s relentless polishing. Everything about the space was designed to impress, to announce the moment you crossed the threshold that the Bells had money and taste and all the things that supposedly mattered.
Iris had stopped being impressed a long time ago.
She moved forward, her chunky boots making soft thuds against the marble. The sound bounced off the walls and came back to her, a quiet reminder that even in a house this size, nothing stayed private for long. This house had ears, after all, and most of them belonged to her.
She mentally ticked off their locations as she started up the staircase, running one finger along the smooth banister. There was a miniature recorder taped to the underside of her father’s desk in his study, positioned to capture the phone conversations he had with women who were definitely not her mother. One sat burrowed inside the decorative bowl in the formal dining room, where her mother hosted the charity board for afternoons of sweet smiles and savage gossip. Another was hidden in Joey’s room, and that particular device had picked up his sobbing breakdown after he’d lost his last swim competition. A moment of raw vulnerability that her brother would sooner die than let anyone witness.
Those were just the ones that came to mind.
Throughout the house, Iris had built something she was quietly proud of. A web of surveillance that would have made a federal agent jealous. Each little machine faithfully recorded the things her family and their social circle believed were safely hidden behind closed doors and hushed voices. The whispered phone calls, the tearful confessions, the ugly truths that only surfaced when people thought no one was listening.
“They all deserve it,” Iris murmured, and the vast space swallowed her words whole. She believed the claim, too. Every last one of them deserved what they had coming. “Parasites.”
Her father, with his award-winning designs and his wandering hands. Her mother, with her coordinated outfits and her frozen heart. And her brother, with his golden-boy reputation and his casual, offhand cruelty. They all played their parts so convincingly in public that they had almost fooled Irisherself. Almost, but not quite, because the tapes didn’t lie. They captured the ugly, messy reality lurking underneath all that polish, and Iris had learned to trust them more than she trusted any of the people in her life.
She’d started recording on a whim earlier that year, fascinated by the gap between what people said out loud and what they actually meant. It began as an experiment, a game she played with herself to see how much she could capture without anyone noticing. But it had grown into something bigger. Something with real weight to it. She wasn’t just collecting secrets anymore.
She was building a portfolio of ammunition, leverage, and insurance.
Iris traced her finger along the banister as the top landing came into view. College applications were due soon, and despite her near-perfect GPA, she harbored no illusions about what her parents wanted. They wanted her close and controllable. They wanted her to study something respectable at a school within driving distance so they could keep tabs on her weekends and approve of her boyfriends and make sure she didn’t do anything to embarrass the family name.
What she actually wanted in life had never factored into their plans.
And what she wanted was to be an investigative journalist. She wanted to travel, to see the world through a lens that revealed both its beauty and its ugliness. She wanted to write stories that cracked open comfortable lies. She could picture it already: a desk in some chaotic newsroom, a phone ringing off the hook, the thrill of chasing down a lead that everyone else had overlooked. The satisfaction of putting something true into the world, even when the truth was inconvenient and made powerful people squirm. Her heart beat a little faster at thethought. That life was more real to her than anything in this house ever had.
“A waste of time,” her father had called it during their last argument, his voice tight with disappointment. “You’ll go to college, get a degree, and carry on this family’s legacy.”
“Listen to your father, dear.”
Of course.Listen to your father.The man who couldn’t keep his pants zipped, handing out career advice like he had any moral authority left. And her mother, nodding along like always, as if Eden Bell had ever made a single independent decision in her entire adult life.
