Chapter 25
Kinsley Aspen
July
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 facade for that long?”
Kinsley exchanged a glance with Toby, who hung back slightly, letting her take the lead.
Something had definitely happened between yesterday and today.
The woman who had sat across from Kinsley at her kitchen table, carefully controlling every word and gesture, had been replaced by someone who looked like she hadn’t slept and no longer cared who noticed.
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t.” Eden removed her sunglasses, and her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them shadowed with a darkness that came from hours of crying or hours of staring at a ceiling in the dark, or both. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
“You said you had things to tell me.”
“I do.” Eden turned slowly to face the homes across the street again, and the movement had the quality of a woman returning to something she’d been studying before they arrived.
“This neighborhood used to be so close-knit. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.
Block parties every season, impromptu barbecues, children running between yards like the property lines didn’t exist.”
“That sounds nice,” Kinsley offered, unsure where Eden was heading but unwilling to steer her.
“It was suffocating.” The word was sharp, cutting through the nostalgic veneer without warning. “Everyone in everyone else’s business. No privacy. No secrets that stayed buried for long. At least, that’s what we all believed.”
Kinsley followed Eden’s line of sight to the houses across the street. The Kusman residence sat directly opposite, its bay window staring back at them.
“Eden, what are you trying to tell me?”
Eden was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was barely audible, almost speculative, as though she were testing the words before committing to them.
“I threw away the recorders I found in our house. I told you that yesterday. But standing here now, looking at this neighborhood, I keep wondering—” She stopped herself, pressing her lips together.
Then, with the air of someone stepping off a ledge, asked a single question.
“Did you ever find any recorders outside our property?”
Kinsley’s pulse quickened.
“We didn’t have a reason to expand our search, other than the high school. Should we have?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Eden shook her head slowly.
“Iris was so meticulous about her recordings. So strategic. She planned everything, thought three steps ahead of everyone around her. It just seems odd, doesn’t it, that she’d limit herself to our house when there was so much more to document?
So many conversations happening behind closed doors all around her? ”
Kinsley had been bothered by some of the footage, as well. Iris would have had to place a recorder in the Kusman’s home to gather evidence of Ginny’s affair. The same went for whatever Todd had paid to have disappear.
“If you know something, Mrs. Bell, now is the time to share it.”
“I don’t know anything.” Eden finally met Kinsley’s gaze, and what Kinsley observed there wasn’t evasion. “That’s the problem, Detective. I’ve spent thirty years not knowing. Not wanting to know. And now—”
Her voice broke slightly.
“Now I think maybe I should have looked. Should have listened to those tapes instead of throwing them away. Should have asked the questions I was too afraid to ask.”
“What do you think you would have heard?”
“The truth.” Eden’s laugh was hollow, emptied of everything except exhaustion. “Whatever that is.”
Before Kinsley could press further, Eden turned abruptly and walked toward the mansion, her heels clicking against the flagstone path.
“I’d like to go inside. Just for a moment.”
Kinsley nodded to Toby, who followed Eden toward the house. She lingered on the sidewalk, observing their disappearance through the front entrance, and turned her attention back to the Kusman house. They, too, had brick pillars, but the layout was simpler. No wall accompanied them.
What had Eden been thinking? What had she almost said?
Something had happened last night. Richard had revealed something to Eden, or she had confronted Richard with something, and whatever passed between them had sent her here this morning with red eyes and a question about recorders outside the property.
She was pointing Kinsley somewhere without being willing to say it outright, offering a direction without providing a destination.
Kinsley eventually joined Toby and Eden inside the mansion.
The house was empty, stripped of furniture and personal effects, reduced to the bones of what it had once been.
Eden walked through the rooms in silence for nearly ten minutes, trailing her fingertips along walls, pausing in doorways, standing in the center of spaces that must have been crowded with memories.
When Eden finally emerged, her eyes were wet but her composure intact.
She thanked Kinsley for indulging her, promised to call if she remembered anything else, and walked back to her Mercedes without another word.
Kinsley eventually pulled away from the curb without the answers she’d been hoping for.
It wasn’t as though they could obtain a warrant to search every home in the neighborhood based on a grieving mother’s cryptic suggestions.
Kinsley drove in silence while Toby loosened his tie.
She stopped at two stop signs and wove through the quiet streets until she reached the neighborhood’s front entrance, where she pressed the brakes and came to a complete stop.
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.