Chapter 24 #2
“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 promise to 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 she were approaching something she’d been circling all morning. “I was aware of Richard’s infidelities. I tolerated them.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what wives of successful men do, Detective.” Eden’s voice was cold now, brittle as glass. “We maintain appearances. We protect the family reputation. We endure.”
Kinsley noted the present tense. We endure, not we endured. Eden was still performing a role she’d been cast in decades ago, still maintaining the facade even as it crumbled around her.
“Are you still enduring, Eden?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“It is if it’s relevant to Iris’s death.” Kinsley leaned forward slightly. “Did Iris threaten to expose Richard’s affairs? To tell you about Shannon?”
“I already knew about Shannon.” Eden’s words were clipped, each one severed cleanly from the next. “Iris didn’t need to tell me.”
“But she tried to use it as leverage anyway, didn’t she? Against Richard?”
Eden tilted her chin upward in defiance. Anger, perhaps. Or the particular kind of pride that came from refusing to be pitied.
“My daughter was many things, Detective. Clever, ambitious, disingenuous. But she wasn’t cruel for cruelty’s sake.
” Eden’s voice was quieter now, threaded with something that sounded almost like tenderness.
“Despite her behavior, she loved her family. In her own twisted way, she thought she was protecting us. Improving us. Making us better.”
“By blackmailing your husband? Your son?”
“By forcing honesty.” Eden’s eyes met Kinsley’s with an intensity that hadn’t been there before.
“Iris hated secrets. Hated lies. She thought if she could expose everything, drag it all into the light, somehow that would make our family stronger. She didn’t understand that some secrets exist for a reason.
That some lies are the only thing holding certain structures together. ”
The word structures landed with weight. Eden wasn’t talking about abstract principles. She was talking about her marriage, her home, the carefully constructed life she’d built on a foundation of deliberate ignorance.
“What other secrets was Iris threatening to expose, Mrs. Bell?”
“I don’t know.” The answer came too quickly, too rehearsed. “We tossed those recorders away without listening.”
“What were you afraid you’d hear, Eden?”
“I wasn’t afraid,” Eden corrected sharply. “I was tired. Tired of my daughter’s games, tired of the constant drama, tired of pretending everything was fine when it hadn’t been fine for years. I was tired of discovering new ways that my family had failed to be the thing we pretended to be.”
Kinsley chose to remain silent, giving Eden the space to collect herself. There was still a wall between them, still a barrier Eden was maintaining even as she allowed Kinsley closer than she’d ever been before. Eden had decided to meet with Kinsley alone.
Why?
“We were supposed to be the perfect family.” Eden had lowered her voice to almost a whisper.
“The perfect life in the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood. But all of it was a lie, Detective Aspen. Every bit of it. And Iris was the only one brave enough to say so. Or foolish enough. I’ve never been able to decide which. ”
The raw honesty in Eden’s voice surprised Kinsley. She waited, sensing there was more, and Eden stared out the window at the rain as though the water carried something she was trying to read.
“Do you have children, Detective Aspen?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to love someone and resent them at the same time.
” Eden’s voice wavered, and for the first time, she sounded less like a woman delivering prepared statements and more like a mother who had been carrying something for thirty years and was running out of strength.
“I loved my daughter. I would have died for her. But I also wished sometimes that she would just stop. Stop pushing, stop digging, stop trying to fix things that couldn’t be fixed. ”
“What things?”
“Our marriage. Our family. Me.” Eden’s laugh was hollow, the sound of a woman who had long ago stopped finding anything funny about her own life.
“Iris believed that if she could expose all of Richard’s infidelities, I’d finally leave him.
She didn’t understand that I’d made my choice years before she was old enough to recognize what a choice was.
I’d chosen security and stability over happiness.
She thought that was weak. She told me so, more than once. ”
Kinsley processed the information, noting how Eden’s account aligned with what Shannon, Amelia, and Joey had each described in their own ways.
Iris, as a crusader. Iris, as a manipulator.
Iris, as the daughter who loved her mother enough to try to burn down the lie she was living in.
The same girl, seen from different distances, looked like different people.
“When did she tell you this?”
“The week before she died.” Eden seemed to leave the present entirely, her thoughts pulled backward to a conversation she had probably replayed ten thousand times.
“We had a fight. A bad one. She’d recorded some conversation that had her upset.
Evidence of another affair, maybe. She wanted me to confront Richard, to leave him.
I told her to stay out of my marriage. That she was a child and didn’t understand the complexities of an adult relationship. ”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said—” Eden’s voice caught, and she pressed her fingertips against her lips for a moment before continuing. “She said I deserved better. That she’d make sure I got better, whether I wanted it or not.”
The implication hung in the air between them. Iris had been planning something. Something that would have forced the issue, that would have dragged every secret into the open regardless of the cost.
“What do you think Iris was planning to do?”
“I don’t know. I never got the chance to find out.” Eden wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, a surprisingly vulnerable gesture from a woman who had spent the entire conversation maintaining iron control. “Days later, she was dead.”
Iris had made a declaration to her mother, a promise or a threat depending on how one viewed it, and then was found lying at the bottom of a staircase.
The proximity of the timeline was too close to be coincidental.
Whatever Iris had been planning, someone had known.
Someone had decided that the exposure Iris was threatening was more dangerous than the act of silencing her.
“You told me the recorders were thrown away,” Kinsley said after giving Eden a moment to compose herself. “Are you confident that Richard disposed of them?”
“I’m sure, Detective Aspen. Because Richard didn’t throw them away.
I did.” Something shifted in Eden’s posture, a straightening of the spine that came with confession.
“While Richard was at work one day, I gathered every recorder I could find and threw them in the trash. Took the bags out to the curb myself so he couldn’t retrieve them. ”
“How did Richard react when he found out?”
“I understand what you’re insinuating, but you’re wrong.
” Eden’s expression shifted, something hard entering her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“My husband did not murder my daughter. Did we argue over the fact that I threw the tapes out? Yes. I told him that if he was so concerned about Iris discovering his affairs, maybe he should have thought about that before he slept with half his office staff.”
She paused, and when she continued, her voice was flat with exhaustion from a fight that had been fought too many times.
“We haven’t spoken about Iris or her death since that argument. Not once, in all these years. At least, not until you showed up on our doorstep.”