Page 39 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

DAPHNE:Is she married now?

RUTH:She’s seeing someone, has been for a few years. It’s good; he helps her. Her health’s. . . not so good so he does the driving and a lot of housework.

DAPHNE:Sounds like a keeper. David was great with the kids. By that time, James was eleven and the twins were six. One day David took us to Coney Island, and we rode roller coasters and ate ice cream on the beach. At the end of his visit, he popped the question in the oyster bar in Grand Central Station, which no New Yorker would have done because that station was a shithole in the Sixties. He asked me to come home with him to Vermont, said that he’d be a father to the children, and I wouldn’t have to worry about money. He really gave me the hard sell, like a vacuum cleaner salesman being shown the door.

RUTH (shocked):And you agreed to the marriage? And the move? Just like that?

DAPHNE:Look, people didn’t spend decades hemming and hawing about marriage back in the day, they just slapped a ring on and got on with life. Besides, David must have caught me on a raw day because I was starting to think that maybe my problem was all the high living. Sure, I hated small-town life when I was growing up, but I waspoor. Being rich out there had to be more fun.

RUTH:Well, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

DAPHNE:There’s never a bad place to be rich. You grew up here, right?

RUTH:Yeah.

DAPHNE:I gotta tell you, you should get out of Florida. It’s holding you back. This is where you retire, not where you find success. You should be somewhere buzzy like—

RUTH:Don’t say New York.

DAPHNE:New York!

RUTH:The solution to everything is not New York! I’m not ready to leave Florida; there’s still things I’m trying to work out. And my mom lives here. But tell me about you and David.

DAPHNE:Well, we got married in New York and then we moved north to Leosville, Vermont. I loved New York, but David would have never lived there. And I wanted to give my kids the best childhood, all the happiness denied to me. I guess I was swept up by the Norman Rockwell picture he’d painted me of the children playing in the apple orchard as I sat in the sunshine with a gin rickey and aVogue.

RUTH:To be fair, that does sound nice. Although I will have to google what a gin rickey is. So, how did the kids react?

DAPHNE:Well, they were shocked at first, but David promised the twins horseback riding lessons and James a dog, and they came around. Besides, they already loved David. The twins had never known their father and Geoffrey had been more like a shitty roommate to my son. David was so grateful for a family too. He was infertile because of a teenage case of the mumps, and he’d always wanted kids. I’d pulled off the triple crown: finding an unmarried man with a good job, great house, and who was excited to be a stepdad.

RUTH:Yeah, that does seem like a rare find.

DAPHNE:And I’ve only made them more endangered.

[EDIT: DO NOT INCLUDE IN PODCAST]

RUTH:Have you ever broken up a marriage?

DAPHNE:Why? Is that where you draw the line? Killing my husbands is fine but they better have been single when I met them?

RUTH:I’m just wondering. . .

DAPHNE:Just wondering if I’m like your mom?

RUTH (irritated):My mom didn’t break up a marriage. She was just a young woman and he was her boss. And she wasn’t a homewrecker; he never left his wife.

DAPHNE:Okay, okay, calm down. So, your mom was an unsuccessful homewrecker, big deal. And I wouldn’t call younothing. And yes, I dated a few married men but I preferred men with fewer financial commitments. I didn’t want to hold someone’s hand through a legal battle.

[END OF REMOVED SECTION]

“This is the house,” David said, opening the car door for me. I stepped out and craned my neck up. The house was blue with white trim, three stories with a sharply angled roof. It was freshly painted and gleamed as if someone had spit-polished it. Everything was pristine, from the matching red tartan curtains in every window to the manicured flower gardens beyond the little white gate.

“It’s quite the house,” I murmured. He smiled as he began to pull suitcases out of the trunk. My children got out and stood next to me, staring up at the house in awe.

“Are we the only ones who live here?” James asked.

I smiled. “Yes, darling, it’s not like New York. People don’t have apartments here. Although to be fair, most people don’t have houses like this,” I said.

“This house has been in my family for over a hundred years,” David said. “Or should I say, our family,” he said tentatively, squeezing James’s shoulder. My son smiled up at him and David beamed back. I could see why he was glad to have a family now, a single man would have rattled through a place like this, unable to make enough movement and noise to bring the house to life.

---