“Not directly. He couldn’t. The paper trail would have led back to him.” Darlene’s voice had taken on a mechanical quality. “I think he set up some kind of shell company. Made it look like my parents had come into money through an inheritance from a distant relative. They used that money to buy this house. And after Frannie was born, they transferred the deed to me.”
“All those years,” Eden said quietly, and the words carried a devastation that was worse than the screaming. “All those block parties, all those neighborhood gatherings, all those times you allowed my daughter to babysit for you.My daughter.You were watching. Waiting. Hoping.”
“No.” Darlene shook her head violently. “No, Eden. You’re wrong. I wasn’t hoping. By the time I was living in this house, I knew Richard wasn’t going to leave you. I knew Frannie would never know her father. I was just surviving. Taking care of my daughter, the only way I knew how.”
Kinsley could hear sirens in the distance now, faint but growing. Toby had called for backup as she’d requested. She needed to keep both women talking, needed to maintain the fragile equilibrium of confession and grief that was the only thing preventing Eden’s rage from reigniting. If Darlene stopped talking, if the silence gave Eden room to think about what she was hearing rather than simply absorbing it, the situation could turn in an instant.
“When did Iris find out?” Eden asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “When did my baby girl find out that she wasn’t Richard’s only daughter?”
The pottery tool rose slightly, Eden’s gaze fixing on Darlene with renewed intensity. The balance had shifted.
“Tell her,” Eden demanded, and she took a step forward that caused Kinsley to take one of her own. “Tell me how my daughter figured out your dirty little secret.”
“I don’t know exactly when she found out. Or how.” Darlene’s voice had the texture of crushed glass, every word cutting her on the way out. “I’d confided in Ginny during a moment of weakness. Years earlier. And Iris was so clever.”
The word came out sounding like an accusation and a eulogy at the same time.
“She told me she had a recording, and that she wanted me out of this house. Out of this neighborhood. Out of your lives. I went straight to Richard, hoping he’d know what to do.”
“What did he say?” Kinsley asked, listening for movement elsewhere in the house, waiting for the sound of additional officers at the perimeter.
“Richard told me to handle it.” Darlene’s voice turned bitter, flavored with the resentment of a woman who had been abandoned by the same man twice. “He said Iris was just a teenager playing games. That she’d never actually follow through because exposing the secret would hurt her own family too much. He told me to ignore her. To call her bluff.”
“But you couldn’t, could you?” Eden accused, her bottom lip trembling. “Because you knew Iris. You’d watched her grow up across the street. You knew she wasn’t bluffing.”
“I knew she meant every word.” Darlene’s gaze dropped to the weapon in Eden’s hand, then rose again to meet her eyes. “And yes, I spent those days trying to figure out what to do. How to protect Frannie. How to keep my daughter from learning a truth that would destroy everything I’d built for her, everything I’d sacrificed for her, every lie I’d told for her.”
“You didn’t mean to kill Iris, did you, Darlene?”
Kinsley had posed the question deliberately, pitching her voice low enough that it might register as gentleness rather than interrogation. She needed Darlene’s answer to reach Eden. She needed the confession to do the work that her weapon couldn’t. Neither woman had noticed Toby materialize in the doorway of the sunroom that Darlene used as her pottery studio, his weapon drawn and trained on Eden from an angle that gave Kinsley the coverage she needed.
“I just wanted to find the tape.” Darlene’s voice cracked in anguish. “I knew she was at the bonfire. I went into the house and searched her room from top to bottom, and I found one tape. A single tape that I wasn’t even sure was the right one, but I took it anyway. When I came out of her room?—”
Darlene’s breath caught.
“She was standing at the top of the staircase.”
A wounded sound escaped Eden’s lips, small and involuntary.
“I swear to you, Eden, I never meant to hurt her.” Darlene was crying openly now, her words fractured by sobs. “She saw me coming out of her room with the tape in my hand, and she stepped backward. She just stepped backward, and she lost her balance, and it happened so fast. One second, she was there, and the next she was?—”
Darlene’s voice broke completely.
“She was falling.”
The kitchen was silent except for Darlene’s ragged breathing and the quiet, devastating sound of Eden’s sobs.
“There was nothing I could do,” Darlene whispered. “Nothing.”
“Darlene, where does Grant come into this?” Kinsley asked as she slowly began to holster her weapon. She gave Toby a small motion with her left hand, signaling him to advance, giving him the angle to keep his weapon trained on Eden while Kinsley moved to position herself between the two women. “How did you know he’d be there?”
“I didn’t.” Darlene wiped at her face with the back of her hand, smearing tears across her cheeks. “I was still in the house. I heard someone calling out for Iris. I didn’t know who it was until later. I panicked. I ran out the back door before he could see me, circled around to my own house, and called the police.”
Eden let out another sound that was pure anguish, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than her body.
“You framed an innocent boy.”
“I was terrified!” Darlene’s voice rose for the first time, cracking under the weight of her own defense. “I had Frannie to think about. She was all I had. I didn’t know what else to do!”
