Chapter 26 #2
Somewhere in the back of Kinsley’s mind, a voice whispered hypocrite.
She was standing in another woman’s kitchen, urging the legal system as the path to justice, while twenty-one months ago, she’d stood on a dark road and chosen a different path entirely.
She couldn’t very well confide in Eden that she was living with the alternative, that she knew exactly what it was like to decide the system wasn’t enough and to take matters into her own hands.
All she could do was stand here and hope that the words she no longer fully believed in were enough to pull Eden back from an edge that Kinsley herself had already gone over.
Eden’s hand wavered.
The pottery tool dipped slightly, then rose again. Something in her expression shifted, the wild rage giving way to exhaustion.
“Tell her,” Eden demanded, turning her attention back to Darlene. The blade still pointed at her, but Eden’s arm was trembling more visibly now, the muscles giving out beneath the emotion. “Tell her what you did. Tell her why you moved here. Tell her about Frannie.”
Darlene’s face was streaked with tears, her entire body trembling against the counter. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet that Kinsley had to strain to hear it over the sound of her own pulse.
“You’re right, Eden.” Darlene’s eyes were closed, and she spoke with the hollow resignation of someone who had been carrying a weight for too long. “Richard and I had an affair. But it ended the day I discovered I was pregnant. I thought he loved me. I thought—”
She pressed her lips together.
“I thought I was different from the others.”
“But he chose me,” Eden said bitterly, and the pottery tool lowered another inch. “I suppose I should feel honored.”
“I couldn’t just walk away.” Darlene’s voice was barely a whisper. “I couldn’t do that to my daughter. She deserved to know her father, even if it was only as a neighbor. Even if he could never acknowledge her. And I know it sounds foolish now, but I loved him.”
Darlene laughed bitterly, leaning back against the counter as if it were the only thing keeping her upright. She wasn’t even focused on the weapon in Eden’s hand anymore. She was somewhere else entirely, somewhere in the past, reliving decisions that had determined the shape of every day since.
“Richard offered me money.” Darlene’s voice had gone flat, emotionless, as though she were reading from a document rather than describing her own life.
“He said he’d provide financial support.
But only if I agreed to his terms. I could never tell anyone he was Frannie’s father.
I could never ask for more than what he decided to give.
And I could never tell Frannie the truth.
She could never know who her biological father was. ”
“Richard bought you this house, didn’t he?” Kinsley asked, inching closer while both women were focused on each other.
Darlene understood what was happening. Every word she spoke was a second that Eden’s attention remained fixed on the story rather than the blade.
“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!”
“You could have told the truth!” Eden screamed, and the pottery tool rose again, her arm finding a reserve of strength that Kinsley hadn’t expected. “You could have confessed! You could have saved Grant Tatlock from spending years in prison before dying there! You could have—”
Eden’s voice shattered.
“You could have let me bury my daughter knowing the truth instead of spending the rest of my life wondering if there was more to the story.”
“Eden, please—”
“You killed my daughter.” Eden’s voice had dropped to a register that was somehow more frightening than the screaming. “You framed an innocent boy. You inserted yourself into our lives, pretending to be my friend, pretending to be a good person, while my daughter’s blood was on your hands.”
“Eden.” Kinsley raised her arm. “Put the tool down. It’s over. Let us handle this now.”
“It’s not over.” Eden’s voice was hollow, emptied of rage, filled with something worse.
“It will never be over. My daughter is dead. Richard suspected all this time. He’s just as guilty as she is.
He kept quiet to protect his bastard child while I spent all this time wondering what really happened in my own house. ”
“Eden, please.” Kinsley extended her left hand, palm up, keeping her voice steady and gentle. “Give me the tool. You’ve done nothing wrong today. Let’s keep it that way.”
For a long moment, Eden stood frozen. Then, ever so slowly, she stared down at the pottery tool in her hand as though seeing it for the first time, as though the last several minutes had occurred in a fugue state and she was only now registering what she’d been prepared to do with it.
The rage drained out of her all at once.
The tool clattered to the tile floor.
Kinsley kicked it away with the side of her foot, sending it spinning across the kitchen until it came to rest against the baseboard near the refrigerator.
She placed her hand gently on Eden’s arm and guided her toward one of the kitchen chairs.
The woman sank into the seat, her face falling into her hands, her shoulders heaving with silent sobs that shook her entire frame.
Kinsley turned to Toby, who had moved into the kitchen from the sunroom, his weapon now lowered.
She gave him a nod, and he holstered his weapon.
He then approached Darlene, who hadn’t moved from the counter, who appeared as though she might never move again.
His voice was steady and clear as it filled the kitchen.
“Darlene Barrett, you’re under arrest for the murder of Iris Bell and for obstruction of justice in the wrongful conviction of Grant Tatlock. You have the right to remain silent…”