Page 82 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

“I told them that you were a good mother, the kind of mother who read me stories at night and threw me birthday parties. That you were loving, and kind, and very glamorous. But that you died a long time ago,” James said quietly.

“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s about right.”

Let’s be honest, I never intended to go to prison, to leave this comfortable room with its memory foam mattress and plush cream carpets for a prison cell with a thin bed and an open toilet in the corner. It was my decision to confess, as a last-ditch effort to find my son and to set him free from the burden of keeping my secrets. I had never lost control, and I didn’t plan on relinquishing it now. I just wanted one final adventure before my curtain call, one chance to change things.

I’ve said things out loud that I had thought would die with me and it was liberating. All of the people who’d hurt me were dead, forgotten by history and unremarked upon. But I had outlived the bastards and now no one would ever forget me. It was a good ending.

Once James left, I picked up the prescription pills I’d been hoarding ever since I confessed, pills I always assured the attendants I would take in the privacy of my bathroom. Now, I began to take handfuls of them, forcing them down with gulps of water. Then I climbed into bed. It was time to go.

Ruth had asked me once if I believed in God and I said no and that there was probably no afterlife either. “But doesn’t that make your crimes worse?” she had asked. “If you believe you’re sending people into nothingness?” I had shrugged and said that I wasn’t in charge of what happened to people after death, just how they got there.

I’d always wondered when I died if I would see the people I killed. I figured that instead of my life flashing before my eyes, maybe I would just see the lives I’d ended, the people whose last sight had been my face hovering above them. The thought didn’t scare me. It’d be nice to see them one last time.

And there they were.

They were clustered around my bed, looming over me like a canopy. Most of them looked angry, their faces accusing as they scowled down at me. David, however, just looked sad: his eyebrows furrowed as if he could finally see who I was and it pained him. Robert and Gabrielle stood at the foot of my bed, having been given pride of place by the other apparitions. Gabrielle was wearing the clothes she’d been in the night I hit her with my car, and I could see gravel glinting in her hair. Robert had his arm around her and was crying. His mouth was moving and even though I heard no words, I knew he was asking mewhy. They wanted to know why; why instead of hurting the people who had actually harmed me, I had turned on people who had only wanted the things all people want: love, companionship, the chance to be appreciated.

But I had no answers for them. We never do. I smiled. And then everything went black.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The next morning, the care attendants found Daphne St Clair dead in her bed. She had taken an overdose of pills in the night and passed away in her sleep. The attendants who found her had seen many dead bodies, even a few possible suicides among the elderly. But this one unsettled them. It might have been the way the shadows fell on her face, but it almost looked like she was smiling.

And life repeated itself, the story coming full circle. Once again, a body was carried out of the Coconut Grove care home. But instead of a lone girlfriend, the parking lot was packed with TV journalists breathlessly reporting the breaking news, tipped off by someone who worked there.

When news about Daphne’s death was broadcast on the nightly news, most people shrugged and scoffed, making throwaway comments about saving the taxpayers’ money and how only the good die young. But throughout the country, women found themselves standing there, rhythmically drying the same dish, or staring unseeing at their dusky backyards, feeling a strange mix of sadness, guilt, excitement, and regret.

Only women could understand the anger Daphne felt, the rage that gets jammed down and compacted like an overfull garbage bag. Only women could recognize how a single crack widens into a fissure that splits you in two. In men, anger is an explosion. In women, it’s an abscess.

They understood that Daphne had lived her life in frustration. And maybe that was what these women could relate to. The submerging of your own dreams and desires, whether that was out of fear or simply because it was expected of you and so you expected it of yourself. There had been so many times when a woman had sat in a chair with a baby asleep on her, wishing she could move, to shake out her limbs and run through the streets as carefree as she’d done as a child. There had been so many times when a woman had stood in a brightly lit kitchen, alone in a sleeping house, her eyes filling with tears and feeling unbearably sad, yet knowing that this sadness would change nothing. And then there were the darker parts of womanhood, hidden below the surface like murky forms in a flooded quarry. The violence, the threats the first moment you feared being raped, a terror that bloomed into consciousness at some point in girlhood and never left until you were dying, when it was too late for the fuckers to get you or get you again.

To all these women, Daphne felt both familiar and also like a revelation. She had existed in constant agitation, trying to dodge all the predatory men of her childhood, trying to find a place where a girl who grew up poor on a Dust Bowl farm could be celebrated. Until finally she had absorbed all that pain and fear that women ate like bread and butter, and she hadbecomeit.

And none of these normal, good women would admit it, but learning how Daphne had torn through life, ravaging everyone, a force as violent and terrifying as a tornado, made it easier for them to breathe. It awakened something that had lain dormant inside of them for so long, made them hungry again. Not for murder necessarily, but to be the kind of woman who could doanything, the kind of woman who could walk down a dark alley at night with no fear because she knew that the shadows shrank away from her.

And maybe, if the world was a little less demanding of women, didn’t spend all its time keeping them in line with a carousel of violence, and judgment, and cognitive distortions, then there wouldn’t need to be women like Daphne St Clair. But knowing that she had lived, and that she had found the darkest kind of freedom, made the long evenings at home just a little easier to bear.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Ruth woke up to a text from her mother telling her that Daphne was dead. She grabbed her laptop and began streaming the coverage, her mouth dry from sleep and her head hot and clouded.

Ruth sat there, unsure of what she was feeling, or even what was appropriate to feel. She had felt so many different things about Daphne: rage, resentment, protectiveness, it all swirled together in an emotional quagmire. Daphne had done a lot of cruel things in her life. She knew what it was like to look in the eyes of someone who loved her and make them die. She had also likely killed Ruth’s father. But she wasn’t born that way, Buzzy’s memories made that clear, and Ruth would always wonder who she would have been if she had grown up in a different time and a different place.

Still, Ruth had to admire the dramatic flair. Daphne had taken her final victim. In doing so, she had guaranteed that Ruth’s exclusive really was just that. She had changed Ruth’s life, both for the better and the worse, and Ruth knew that someday, if she ended up as an old woman in a nursing home, reporters might still occasionally visit to ask her what it had been like to interview the Gray Widow. She suspected that Daphne would continue to define Ruth’s days, long after her death.

“Don’t record me today,” Diane said as soon as she opened her door. She looked more muted than the last time they’d spoken, dressed in navy chinos and a striped top, with very little jewelry. It was as if she’d turned the volume down on everything, from her clothes to her makeup.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Ruth replied.

Ruth had set up this meeting with Diane to play her some of the podcast episodes and answer any questions she had. Ruth had arrived shortly after Harper had left for school so that Diane would have time to listen to the episodes in peace.

“How are you doing?” Ruth asked, acutely aware that she was visiting someone who had just lost her mother, the only parent she’d ever known. Diane’s face turned frosty and she gestured to a stiff armchair for Ruth to sit in.

The same water pitcher full of Gucci ice cubes sat on the table, the condensation shimmering in the morning light.

“Let’s just play the episodes, since it meant so much to my mother,” she replied formally. Ruth nodded and got out her phone. Diane clearly had as much tolerance for emotional discussions as Daphne had.

Ruth played her the first five episodes: the ones covering her life in Lucan, Winnipeg, and, most explosively, the murder of Geoffrey, Diane’s father. Diane sat unmoving on the couch throughout the episodes, pausing only for bathroom breaks and the occasional water refill. Ruth studied her out of the corner of her eye, trying not to make her feel watched. She looked nothing like her mother but there was something in her stillness, in the way Diane sat with every muscle tensed, that reminded her of Daphne. The only sign that she was stressed were her fingers twitching, and Ruth wondered if she was a former smoker experiencing a long-dormant craving.

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