Eden’s Mercedes was not behind them.
“How did Iris know about Ginny’s affair?”
Toby turned to look at her.
“What?”
“Ginny Kusman was having an affair with her personal trainer. Iris recorded explicit phone conversations between them.” Kinsley shifted in her seat to face Toby fully, the pieces assembling themselves in her mind with a speed that made her heart rate climb. “How? Think about it. Eden is right. Ginny wouldn’t have been foolish enough to have those conversations at the block party or inside the Bell house. She would have been at home. In her own kitchen, behind her own closed doors, in her own house.”
“You think Iris hid recorders in the neighbors’ houses? And they could still be there?”
“I don’t know.” Kinsley rested her elbow on the door and glanced in her rearview mirror. Still no Mercedes. Eden hadn’t followed them out. “But Todd Kusman gave Iris ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars in 1994 money. What could a teenager possibly have recorded that was worth that much? Something he said in private. Something he did behind closed doors. In his own home.”
She checked her surroundings and executed a quick U-turn, the Jeep’s tires scattering gravel as she reversed direction.
“Eden’s right. We’ve been thinking too small.”
They drove back toward the Bell mansion in tense silence, both of them processing the implications. If Iris had planted surveillance devices in multiple houses throughout the neighborhood, the scope of her operation far exceeded anything they’d imagined. The home, the school, those had been impressive enough for a seventeen-year-old. But infiltrating the private spaces of her neighbors, hiding recorders in homes she’d visited as a guest, as a babysitter, as a friend’s daughter, that was something else entirely. That was the work of someone who understood access and trust and the vulnerability of people who believed they were safe inside their own walls.
“Kinsley, look.”
Toby pointed ahead of them, where Eden’s Mercedes was still parked against the curb in front of the mansion. Kinsley pulled up behind it, shifted into park, and scanned the area. The street was quiet. The kind of quiet that had a texture to it, a stillness that was less like peace and more like the held breath before something broke.
“Check the house,” Kinsley said, already climbing out of the Jeep. “Maybe she saw the code we entered into the lockbox. Maybe she went back inside.”
“Where are you going?”
“To test a theory.”
Toby jogged toward the mansion while Kinsley walked to the exact spot on the sidewalk where Eden had been standing earlier. She positioned herself just inside the stone wall boundary, turned to face the street the way Eden had, and truly viewed the scene in front of her.
From this vantage point, the Kusman house was directly across from her. The driveway. The two brick pillars flanking it, ornamental lights mounted on top. This was what Eden had been staring at.
Not the houses in general.
Those pillars specifically.
Ginny had mentioned during her interview that she and Darlene went on daily walks together. Kinsley had witnessed it herself when she’d first arrived at the Bell Mansion. They had the same routine almost every single day. Which meant those pillars were places where private conversations happened regularly, where two women who trusted each other might say things they wouldn’t anywhere else.
“Son of a bitch,” Kinsley muttered, and her stomach dropped.
She crossed the street quickly and approached the left pillar, examining it from ground level first, then standing to inspect the brickwork more carefully. It appeared solid. Uniform. Each brick was mortared neatly into place, the craftsmanship typical of the neighborhood’s construction standards from the seventies and eighties. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She turned to study the second pillar. If she hadn’t been searching specifically for something out of place, she wouldn’t have noticed that one brick appeared slightly different from its neighbors. The mortar around it was cracked in a pattern that didn’t match the natural weathering of the surrounding joints, as though the brick had been removed and replaced repeatedly over a period of time.
Kinsley’s pulse hammered in her ears.
She pressed her fingers against the brick, testing it. It shifted under pressure, rocking slightly in its housing like a loose tooth. She worked it free with both hands, the mortar crumbling at the edges, and when the brick came out, a hollow slot revealed itself behind it. Maybe six inches deep, just wide enough for a small object.
Inside, resting on a bed of dust and crumbled mortar that had accumulated over three decades, was a rusted mini cassette recorder.
26
Kinsley Aspen
July
Sunday, 2:37 pm
