“Threw them away.”
“Without listening to them first?”
“Without listening to them first,” Eden confirmed, her gaze steady. “Richard wanted to. He thought they might providesome closure, or insight, or I don’t even know what he was hoping for. But I refused.”
“Why?”
“Haven’t we already covered this?” Eden’s jaw tightened visibly. “Because my daughter was dead. Whatever she’d recorded, whatever petty teenage drama or family arguments were captured on those tapes, none of it could change that fact. Listening to them would have been like picking at a wound that had finally started to scar over.”
The words were delivered with conviction, but Kinsley caught something beneath them. Not quite a lie, but not the whole truth either. The answer had the polished quality of something rehearsed, a response Eden had practiced in anticipation of exactly this question.
She was protecting something.
Or someone.
“Mrs. Bell, I need to ask you some difficult questions.” Kinsley kept her voice gentle but firm. “About Iris. About your family.”
“And I’ve answered these questions before,” Eden said wearily. “Thirty years ago, I told the detective everything I knew.”
“Did you, though?” Kinsley let the question settle before continuing. “Why did you call and want to meet with me, Eden? And why arrange it for a time when your husband isn’t here?”
Eden was silent for a long moment, her gaze distant. The rain continued its quiet assault on the window. When Eden finally spoke, her voice carried a mixture of bitterness and something that might have been grief, or might have been relief at finally being asked the right question.
“Iris was seventeen going on thirty,” Eden said quietly. “An old soul, everyone used to say. But that wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t mature. She was calculating. There’s a difference.”
Kinsley waited, letting the silence do its work.
“It pains me to say it now, but my daughter was exhausting to parent.” The admission seemed to cost Eden something, a visible effort to push the words past whatever barrier she’d built around them. “From the time she was young, she was always testing boundaries. Always pushing to see how far she could go before someone pushed back. Other mothers would tell me it was just a phase, that all children challenged authority.”
Eden shook her head in dismay.
“But Iris didn’t just challenge. She manipulated.”
“In what way?”
“She’d play her father and me against each other. Tell Richard I’d said yes to something when I’d said no, then act confused when we compared notes. She’d volunteer information about Joey’s mistakes to deflect attention from her own. She was clever about it, too. Made it seem innocent, like she was just being helpful. Just being honest.” Eden began to twist her wedding ring as she spoke, rotating it around her finger in a slow, unconscious rhythm. “When Iris got older, it got worse. She started this obsession with journalism. Investigative journalism, specifically. She wanted to expose corruption, shine a light on truth, all these noble-sounding goals. But I think the nobility was the costume, not the person wearing it. I think she just enjoyed having power over people.”
“The recordings,” Kinsley said, guiding the conversation forward.
“Yes, the recordings. We found the first one when she was sixteen. Richard discovered it underneath the couch cushion, still running. She wasn’t subtle about it at first. When we confronted her, she acted like it was perfectly reasonable. Said she was practicing her skills, learning how to gather information.” Eden’s expression hardened. “I made her promiseto stop. Made her swear on everything she claimed to care about that she wouldn’t invade people’s privacy like that again.”
“But she didn’t stop.”
“Obviously not.” Eden straightened in her chair and crossed her arms. “Iris thought she knew better than everyone. Thought the rules didn’t apply to her because she had some higher purpose. She was seventeen years old, Detective, and she genuinely believed she was smarter than every adult in her life.”
A girl who believed she was untouchable. It was a portrait Kinsley had been assembling all week from different angles, different witnesses, and Eden’s version was the most intimate and the most damning. This was Iris through the eyes of a mother who had loved her and been exhausted by her in equal measure.
“Did you know Iris was blackmailing people?” Kinsley asked directly.
Eden’s reaction was subtle but telling. A slight widening of her eyes, a momentary freeze before she recovered her composure with the practiced speed of a woman who had spent decades controlling her public face.
“I didn’t know the extent of it.”
“She was extorting your neighbors, Mrs. Bell. Your friends. She demanded jewelry from Ginny Kusman. Money from others. She had recordings of your husband’s affair with Shannon Utgoff.”
At the mention of Shannon’s name, Eden’s mask slipped. Pain flashed across her face, sharp and undisguised, before being quickly suppressed by something colder. She cleared her throat and straightened her back against the chair.
“Which brings us to why I asked you here without my husband present.” Eden’s voice had changed, dropping into a register that was quieter and more controlled, as though shewere approaching something she’d been circling all morning. “I was aware of Richard’s infidelities. I tolerated them.”
