Chapter 26
Kinsley Aspen
July
Kinsley left the recorder in place to be collected later and ran.
Not back to the Jeep. Not toward the Bell mansion. She ran up the Kusman driveway, her breath coming hard as she reached the front door. She hammered on it with her fist, not bothering with the doorbell.
“Ginny! It’s Detective Aspen! Open up!”
Behind her, she could hear Toby’s voice calling from the direction of the Bell mansion.
The sequence was assembling itself in her mind.
Eden’s behavior that morning, the red-rimmed eyes, the cryptic questions about recorders outside the property, the way she’d stared at these pillars with an intensity that went beyond nostalgia.
Eden hadn’t come here to walk through her old home one last time.
She’d come here because she’d figured something out, and whatever Richard had confessed to her the night before had given her the final piece of a puzzle.
She’d wanted to visit the mansion once more because she was about to do something she couldn’t take back.
The Kusman’s front door swung open.
Ginny stood in the threshold, her expression shifting from confusion to concern in the span of a heartbeat. She wore yoga pants and an oversized sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.
“Detective? What’s wrong?”
“Is Eden here?” Kinsley’s gaze swept past Ginny into the foyer, searching for movement, for any sign of the other woman. “Eden Bell. Is she inside your house?”
“Eden? No, I haven’t seen her.” Ginny stepped back instinctively as Kinsley’s intensity registered. “Why would she be here? What’s going on?”
Kinsley glanced over her shoulder. Toby was halfway up the Kusman driveway, shaking his head. He hadn’t found Eden inside the mansion either. Kinsley turned back to Ginny, and some of the immediate urgency drained away.
Ginny Kusman was safe, but if Eden wasn’t here, and she wasn’t at the mansion, then she was somewhere else in this neighborhood.
Unfortunately, there was only one other person on this street who would have sent Eden into the kind of fury that Kinsley had witnessed building behind those red-rimmed eyes.
“Ginny.” Kinsley kept her voice calm. “What did Iris have on Darlene?”
The effect was instantaneous and devastating.
Ginny’s face drained of color so completely that for a moment, Kinsley believed she might faint.
The woman’s lips parted and worked soundlessly, the muscles of her jaw contracting around words that refused to form.
No sound came out. Just a strangled intake of breath that told Kinsley everything she needed to know and confirmed the theory she’d been building since she found the recorder.
“I—” Ginny’s hand came up to her throat, fingers pressing against her pulse point as though trying to hold something in or push something down. “I can’t. I don’t—”
“Tell me.” Kinsley stepped closer, and she could sense Toby arriving at her shoulder. “Ginny, tell me right now. What did Iris have on Darlene Barrett?”
“It’s not my secret to tell,” Ginny managed, her voice barely audible. Her eyes were glistening, and her hands had begun to tremble at her sides. “I shouldn’t have ever—Darlene wouldn’t—”
“Is it about Frannie?” The question was a shot in the dark, but it was aimed at the center of every inconsistency Kinsley had cataloged over the past week.
Darlene’s single-mother status in a neighborhood where that would have been conspicuous.
The house supposedly purchased by her parents right after Frannie was born.
The careful, practiced way Darlene had deflected every question about Frannie’s father.
The way she’d shut down the interview the moment Kinsley had inquired if Iris had ever blackmailed her. “What about Frannie, Ginny?”
“I can’t,” Ginny said again, but there were tears forming in her eyes now, spilling over before she could blink them away. “Please. I can’t. You need to talk to Darlene. You—”
Kinsley was already moving. She spun away from the door, almost backing into Toby. She headed toward Darlene Barrett’s house next door.
“Call for backup!” Kinsley yelled over her shoulder without breaking stride. “And stay with Ginny until they get here!”
She didn’t wait to see if Toby complied. She covered the distance between the two properties in seconds, her hand going to her service weapon as she crossed the property line. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she took the porch steps two at a time.
The front door was ajar.
Just an inch, maybe two. Enough to notice that the deadbolt wasn’t engaged, that the door hadn’t been pulled fully shut.
Kinsley could hear voices coming from deeper inside the house.
Low and tense. One of them was trembling with an emotion that sounded less like anger and more like something that had been locked in a cage for thirty years and had finally broken free.
Kinsley drew her weapon and used her left hand to push the door open slowly.
The hinges were mercifully silent. The foyer was empty, the living room beyond it the same.
The voices were coming from the kitchen, exactly where Kinsley remembered the layout from her first interview with Darlene the previous week.
“—can’t keep lying. Not anymore. Richard told me everything, and—”
Eden’s voice. Strained, raw, barely recognizable as the composed woman who had sat across from Kinsley at a kitchen table the previous morning and spoken about her daughter with controlled emotion.
Kinsley moved through the foyer with her weapon held low but ready.
She moved soundlessly across the hardwood until she now had a full view of the living room.
Empty. The pottery studio to the right, its other access door open, clay-covered surfaces visible in the dim light.
The voices were definitely coming from the kitchen ahead.
“Eden, please.” That was Darlene, and her voice was high and fractured with fear. “Please put that down. We can talk about this. We can—”
“Talk?” Eden’s laugh was wild, unmoored from anything resembling composure. “We’re done talking. Thirty years of keeping quiet. Thirty years of your lies. Thirty years of watching you live across the street from me with my husband’s child.”
Kinsley reached the entrance to the kitchen and stopped.
The scene registered in a single, horrible moment.
Eden stood near the kitchen table, and the carefully constructed facade that had defined her through every previous conversation was completely destroyed.
Mascara ran down her cheeks in dark tracks.
Her hair had come loose from the low chignon she’d worn that morning, strands hanging around her face in a way that made her look ten years older than she had two hours ago.
And in her right hand, trembling but raised with unmistakable intent, she held a weapon.
Not a kitchen knife. A pottery tool. Kinsley recognized it from her first visit to this house, one of the sharp implements Darlene used for scoring and trimming her clay work.
The blade was maybe four inches long, narrow and wickedly pointed, the kind of tool that was designed to cut through wet ceramic easily and could do far worse to human skin.
Darlene had backed herself against the kitchen counter, her hands raised in front of her in a placating gesture. Her eyes were wide with terror, fixed on the blade in Eden’s shaking hand.
“Eden.” Kinsley put everything she had into making her voice cut through the room’s charged atmosphere. She took a step into the kitchen, weapon raised, both hands steady on the grip. “Put the tool down. Right now.”
Eden’s head whipped toward her, and for a moment, Kinsley recognized something feral in her eyes.
It was the look of a wounded animal, cornered and deciding whether to attack the new threat or the original one.
Then recognition flickered across her features.
And then something that might have been relief, the desperate, contradictory relief of a person who had gone too far and was grateful someone had arrived to stop them from going further.
“She needs to tell you,” Eden said, and her voice broke on every word. “She needs to tell you what she did. What she’s been hiding all these years.”
Kinsley kept her weapon trained on Eden but shifted her attention between both women.
She measured the distance, calculated the angles, and assessed which direction the violence was most likely to travel.
Eden was the immediate threat, but Darlene held the information that could defuse the situation.
The confession Eden wanted was also the thing most likely to bring her back from the edge.
“Eden, listen to me.” Kinsley took another measured step. She was maybe ten feet away now. Close enough to intervene if Eden lunged, far enough to give herself reaction time. “I understand you’re angry. I understand you want answers. But this is not the way to get them.”
“Then what is?” Eden’s voice was raw, desperate. “She’s been living here, right across the street. Watching us. Watching Richard with his real family while she raised her daughter in our shadow—”
Eden’s voice broke completely.
“Frannie is Richard’s daughter. Did you know that, Detective? Did you figure that out yet?”
“I’m figuring it out now,” Kinsley said quietly. “But I need to hear it from Darlene. And so do you. So I’m asking you to put the tool down, and let her tell us the truth.”
“Why should I believe anything she says?”
“Because if you hurt her, you’ll never know for certain.
” Kinsley’s arms were beginning to ache from holding her weapon ready, the muscles in her shoulders and forearms burning with the sustained effort, but she didn’t waver.
“You’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if you got it right.
And if she did kill Iris, she needs to pay for that.
But legally. Through the system. Not like this. ”