Page 6 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

[A knock on the door.]

ATTENDANT:Pills.

DAPHNE:Service with a smile, huh?

[Door slams.]

DAPHNE:Oooeee! Touchy. I’ll just take these in the bathroom. Let’s take a break.

[Sounds of Daphne getting up, shuffling along, opening doors.]

RUTH (Voiceover):Daphne was gone for a while. I got up and began to roam around her living room. There was a large television and a bookshelf stuffed full of books. Most old people had rooms full of photos of their families, but the only pictures in the living room were paintings. I saw a couple of Edward Hopper prints and a few David Hockneys (one of which I had a feeling might have even been an original). The bedroom door was ajar, so I pushed it open, aware that I was now definitely snooping. There was a large hospital-style bed that could be raised and reclined. The closet was bursting with clothes, shoes, and jewelry, all relatively new. On the far bedside table, I found the only photograph in the apartment: a small framed black and white photo of a woman holding a little boy, maybe around two or three. The woman had dark hair and ivory skin, and a luminous smile. She was stunning, dressed in a tight Fifties pencil dress. But it was the way she had her arms wrapped around the little boy, their cheeks pressed together as they laughed, that stopped me. This was a moment of real happiness.

DAPHNE:What are you doing?

RUTH:I, uh. . . sorry!

[Feet shuffle out of the room, and the door slams.]

DAPHNE:Classic journalist, always digging through people’s garbage.

RUTH:I’m really sorry. . . You know, I’m sure this must be tiring for you. I could come back tomorrow.

DAPHNE:Okay, come visit again, just keep your mitts off my stuff.

RUTH (Voiceover):And that was the first interview. It was clear that Daphne was toying with me. She shrugged when I asked her questions, as if to telegraph that she didn’t take anything, even murder, too seriously. And I could see that she didn’t want me to dig too deep, to reveal herself fully. I knew that the next time I visited, I’d need to have a better plan for controlling the interview.

Ruth drove away from Coconut Grove, trying to shake off her uneasiness. She felt like the sea on a windy day, churned up into a soupy froth, all bubbles and whirlpools. It was humid out, and she grabbed her hair and lifted it off the back of her neck, trying to take deep breaths.

Ruth had pretended to be awed by Daphne to get the job, figuring that Daphne didn’t want a journalist who was going to grill her. But now there was a power imbalance as Daphne was steamrolling Ruth, which would make doing a podcast difficult. The listeners needed to know who Daphne was: as a child, as a woman, as a mother, and as a murderer. Anything less wouldn’t be the truth. But Daphne didn’t seem interested in revealing everything.

She wondered again why Daphne had even confessed. Daphne had a cushy life; why would she trade it all for a stark prison cell, fluorescent lightbulbs, concrete floors, and a world calling her a monster? Why would anyone go through the hell of a murder investigation if they could avoid it?

Chapter Four

After a pathetic dinner of scrambled eggs on toast, Ruth sat down at her rickety old IKEA desk. When Jenn lived here, Ruth had borrowed her antique rolltop desk whenever she could. Jenn had been a writer as well, a moderately successful indie author who wrote sci-fi/dystopian novels and had a surprisingly rabid online fan base. She was disciplined too, writing and working out every day, filling the apartment with the lemony smells of fresh Mediterranean cooking. But Jenn, her desk, and lovely smells were all gone now, and Ruth’s lackluster dinners and uncomfortable work setup were just more evidence that her life was in pieces.

But enough ruminating. Ruth had to get through to Daphne and she couldn’t afford to waste time, not when Daphne might go to prison at any moment. Ruth needed a way to cut through Daphne’s bullshit.

The hard part would be the lack of Internet resources for a woman born in the 1930s. In fact, there was very little information about Daphne in the public domain at all. To make matters worse, Daphne had changed her name over the years, wrapping herself in noms de plume and married names like onion layers.

But there were people. And Ruth had a hunch that over the years, Daphne would have revealed slivers of her true self to others, even if they were just fragments. Like Daphne’s murders, these people would likely be scattered all over the country. But Ruth could find them.

Ruth had always prided herself on her research skills. When she was at university, she’d been nominated for a national student journalism prize for a long-form article she’d written about an infamous New Year’s Eve party in Miami in 2002. What had started as a massive, glamorous party of Florida’s biggest and brightest had ended in tragedy after eighteen guests were hospitalized with abdominal pain and convulsions and four guests died. Over the years there had been many theories: ergot contamination, tainted cheese, a militant waiter with extremist links, a recently fired employee looking for revenge, but the case remained a mystery. Ruth had found working on that article fascinating. She had spent months interviewing scientists and first responders, and while she couldn’t present any clear solution, her prize nomination had made her believe that a career in journalism might actually be possible.

Unfortunately, she now put her skills to use researching the hottest TikTok trends and what had happened to child stars from the Nineties as a freelance journalist for clickbait websites. The work was badly paid and idiotic, but Ruth had tried and failed to find a better job so many times that she’d given up searching.

The obvious place to start was Daphne’s daughters. Unlike their mother, Diane Hatton and Rose Prescott were all over the Internet. Their images were splashed across the Florida society pages, a million bland pictures of them smiling at charity events, arm in arm with a bevy of rich people with gleaming suntans and frozen foreheads. Diane was married to a local real estate investor, the kind of man who didn’t think twice about draining a wetland to build just one more golf course. (Didn’t Florida have enough?) Rose was married to a hardline Republican senator, and Ruth was glad he’d be having some sleepless nights about the reputational damage his mother-in-law’s confession was creating.

She didn’t expect Rose and her senator husband would be listed, but it was easy to find Diane’s home phone number online.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered. She sounded distracted and Ruth could hear a TV playing in the background.

“Hello, Diane? My name is Ruth Robinson and I’m a journalist. Your mother and I are doing a podcast about her life. I’m hoping to get some background information from you,” Ruth said quickly, knowing that Diane might hang up the moment she mentioned her mother.

“You have some nerve calling me! If you mention my sister or me on this show, I’ll have my lawyer bankrupt you!” Diane spat into the phone, making Ruth pull it away from her ear.

Diane was clearly someone who was used to getting what she wanted. Ruth had known women like this before—women who used their anger and histrionic reactions to badger everyone into submission. She decided to appeal to Diane’s keen sense of self-preservation.

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