Kinsley reviewed the conversation in her mind as she walked through the house, out the front door, and across the short pathway to her Jeep sitting in the driveway. The rain had picked up slightly, but she barely noticed it.
Eden Bell was lying.
Not about everything.
Kinsley believed the woman’s grief was real, the exhaustion with her marriage genuine, the complicated love for her daughter authentic in every painful detail. But she was protecting something. Someone. She had thrown away those recorders without listening to them, and she’d done it urgently enough to haul the trash to the curb herself to prevent Richard from retrieving them. That wasn’t the behavior of a woman who was indifferent to what was on those tapes. That was the behavior of a woman who was terrified of it.
Richard, most likely.
Despite the affairs, despite the resentment, despite the hollowed-out shell of a marriage she’d described with such unflinching transparency, Eden was still playing the role of dutiful wife. Still maintaining appearances, still enduring. Thehabit of protection had become so deeply embedded in who she was that she couldn’t stop, even when the thing she was protecting had long since stopped being worth the effort.
But there was another possibility that Kinsley couldn’t dismiss.Whether it was Grant or someone else.Eden had spoken those words as though she’d considered the alternative before. As though she’d lain awake on nights when the house was too quiet, and the silence was too loud, and allowed herself to wonder whether the man who’d been convicted had actually been the one to push her daughter down those stairs.
As Kinsley drove through Fallbrook’s quiet streets, the rain beginning to fall harder now, she mulled over Eden’s words.Iris was seventeen going on thirty. An old soul who thought she knew better than everyone.
A girl who pushed someone too far.
The question was who had pushed back.
25
Kinsley Aspen
July
Sunday, 2:12 pm
Kinsley experienced a little sense of déjà vu as she once again pulled her Jeep to a stop in front of the Bell Mansion, the tires crunching against the loose gravel at the curb. Only this time, Eden Bell was present, and not her husband.
The humidity had ratcheted up another notch since morning, the kind of oppressive heat that made even breathing feel like an effort. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, dark and swollen with another front that wouldn’t arrive for hours yet but had already turned the sky the color of old pewter.
A harsh FOR AUCTION sign had been planted in front of the double brick entrance, the lettering bold enough to read from across the street. Kinsley cut the engine and glanced at Toby in the passenger seat.
“Don’t you think it’s odd that Mrs. Bell wants to meet here?”
“A little, but she stressed that she wanted to see it one more time before it passed to another owner.” Kinsley unbuckled her seatbelt, scanning the property through the rain-streaked windshield. “She also said there were a couple more things she needed to tell us.”
Eden’s call had come early that morning, before Kinsley had finished her first cup of coffee, and it had carried a tone she hadn’t heard from the woman before. Not the guarded politeness of their interview yesterday, either. Something had broken overnight, or been broken deliberately, and Eden sounded like a woman standing in the rubble of it. She’d asked to meet at the old house, and Kinsley had agreed without hesitation.
She and Toby had spent the previous evening in the fifth-floor conference room until nearly eleven, eating Chinese food from takeout containers and going through every piece of evidence they’d accumulated over the course of the week. Three whiteboards covered in timelines and names and connections, twenty tabs open on her laptop, a table buried under transcripts and forensic reports and empty containers of lo mein. They’d argued over suspects and motives, challenged each other’s theories, and kept circling back to the same unanswered question that sat at the center of everything.
Why that night?
Iris had been blackmailing people for months, maybe longer.
Why had someone finally snapped on that specific evening? Something had triggered it. Something had changed the calculation, and they couldn’t figure out what it was.
Before Toby had left to meet his girlfriend, he’d asked the question Kinsley had been avoiding all week.What if Grant Tatlock was guilty?She’d given him an answer about reasonable doubt, and he’d told her it wasn’t really an answer, and they’d both been right. Now, less than sixteen hours later,Eden Bell was standing in front of her old house with something she needed to say.
Eden had already stepped out of her Mercedes by the time Kinsley and Toby reached the sidewalk. She paused for a moment, taking in the mansion with an expression that was impossible to read from a distance, and then positioned herself just inside the boundary of the low stone wall that circled the grounds. She wore white linen pants and a navy blouse, sunglasses hiding her eyes despite the overcast sky. Her posture was rigid, arms crossed loosely over her chest, and she was staring across the street.
Not at the street itself.
At the houses directly opposite.
“Mrs. Bell,” Kinsley greeted, approaching cautiously. Eden didn’t glance in their direction. Didn’t acknowledge their presence at all for a long moment, as though she were finishing a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. When she finally turned to face them, it was slowly, reluctantly, like a woman being pulled out of a place she wasn’t ready to leave. “Thank you for agreeing to meet.”
“I spent most of my marriage in this house,” Eden said, and her voice had the distant, detached quality of someone narrating a story about another person’s life. “I raised my children here, hosted dinner parties, and maintained appearances. Do you know how exhausting that is, Detective? Keeping up a façade for that long?”
