Page 40 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

Chapter Twenty-Eight

DAPHNE: The seniors home felt like the final chapter of my life.

Although now I suppose I’ve added a few more!

At first, I tried to keep myself busy. I read my serial killer books, I swam in the pool, I went to the center’s dances and did chair fitness.

But soon I was too frail to salsa, too nervous to swim.

I stopped being able to walk more than a few steps on my own, started needing a walker and then a wheelchair when I left my room.

RUTH: I have a parent who is starting to experience mobility issues and it’s hard to watch. . . You still remember how healthy and vibrant they used to be.

DAPHNE: Yeah, great, I feel so bad for all the people who have to watch me get sick.

RUTH: (Tuts) What was it like here when the pandemic started?

DAPHNE: Oh, it was grim. I would just sit in this apartment, day in and day out, watching the world die on TV.

RUTH: When did you start dating Warren Ackerman?

DAPHNE: A year ago. I was eighty-nine, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and I couldn’t watch another episode of NCIS without hanging myself.

Of all the men in my age group, he was the most charming.

But there was competition. At my age there are three women for every man.

It reminded me of my twenties in New York when I had to compete with the other Bergdorf Goodman girls for dates. And I’ve always been Best in Show.

RUTH (sadly): And when did you decide to. . . kill him?

DAPHNE: Just after I turned ninety. It had been ages since I had killed anyone, but the pandemic had made me feel like I needed to take some risks and I wanted to know if I still had it in me. He was an easy target; no one blinks an eye when an old fart kicks the bucket.

RUTH: So, how did you do it? You can barely get to the bathroom by yourself.

DAPHNE: All right, Ruth, no need to rub my nose in it.

But yes, it was difficult. I have arthritis and so even slipping the crushed-up pills into his coffee was hard.

But on the plus side Warren was not the sharpest tool in the shed so he didn’t notice how bad his coffee tasted.

That’s what decades of smoking can do to you, so there’s a good lesson for all the smokers listening.

RUTH: So he died. And people assumed it was natural causes.

DAPHNE: Exactly.

RUTH: And that bothered you? Isn’t that your usual method? To make it look like a health problem? To make it look like their cancer, their hearts, even their diabetes finished them off?

DAPHNE: Diabetes? Where did that come from?

Well, yes, I was a tiny bit disappointed that I’d pulled it off.

Maybe this time I wanted to get caught; I don’t know.

I didn’t do this one for money; we were never married.

I did it for a thrill, to capture that buzz again, but I just felt lost afterwards.

This was my last adventure, and it was over.

That is. . . until I decided it wasn’t.

RUTH (irritated): I just don’t buy it, that there wasn’t more to your confession. Surely there are other ways to get a thrill. And I suppose I should remind you that this was a human being you killed, that the sad part of this story was not that you found this murder anticlimactic.

DAPHNE: Yeah, yeah, you can just patch a lecture in later when you’re editing this thing. Save us all from hearing the sermon on the mount again.

RUTH (Voiceover): It was hard listening to Daphne crow about murdering an elderly man.

But I knew that she didn’t care that her comments made me uncomfortable, that I worried about what Warren Ackerman’s friends and family might think when they heard this podcast. She didn’t care about Warren and she didn’t care about me and she thought we were all fools for caring so much.

I wondered what it would be like to live like that, whether the freedom it offered was worth the pain it caused.

ShockAndBlah:

I still don’t understand why she did it. Why she killed all those people. Or even why she confessed to it all when no one suspected a thing. Was it a control thing? Only she got to write the ending to her story? I don’t know.

PreyAllDay:

Come on, what did you expect? ‘Oh it turns out that I’m allergic to gluten. THAT’S why I was killing everyone!!’ Why do any of us do the things we do?

BurntheBookBurnerz:

Because of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism. It all really boils down to that. She’s the dark side of the American dream, or the byproduct of it anyways.

StopDropAndTroll:

[This comment has been removed by a moderator.]

PreyAllDay:

But Ruth will do more episodes right? I think even a second season. I want to hear about prison. And if she finds any connections to the Tylenol Murders.

StopDropAndTroll:

SHUT UP ABOUT THE TYLENOL MURDERS.

By Ruth’s count, her podcast was now called The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair .

Joe’s death did pose a challenge for her podcast title.

Was it murder to watch someone have a heart attack and refuse to call 911?

Morally, it was obviously wrong, but did it actually count the same as her other sins?

Should Ruth call it The Six and a Half Murders of Daphne St Clair just to be sure? Somehow it didn’t have the same ring.

“So, you’re really not leaving anything out?

” Ruth probed again. “Because the gap between the murders of Donald St Clair and Warren Ackerman is quite big.” Ruth swallowed, trying to control the rising desperation she was feeling.

This couldn’t be the end. Daphne was robbing her of the chance to explain why this all mattered to her, how Daphne had changed her life without ever knowing she existed.

“I’m not an addict, you know! Lots of killers stop. Sometimes they start again, like BTK, sometimes they don’t, like the Golden State Killer—”

“Yes, we all know you know fun facts about serial killers,” Ruth snapped before she could stop herself.

She glanced down at her hands, which were wrapped around the microphone so tightly that her fingers ached.

She had a vision of knocking the old woman to the floor and kicking her with the shoes Daphne mocked so frequently.

“I don’t want to know about them. I’m asking why you stopped?

What could possibly account for such a long period between murders? ”

“I think you need a break. You’re sweating like a whore in church,” Daphne said slowly. She was sitting very still, watching Ruth out of the corner of her eye, like a bird of prey. Ruth brought her hand up to her face and realized that her face was slick with sweat.

“Okay,” Ruth said, her legs shaking as she stood up. “I might go splash some water on my face.”

Ruth tottered to the bathroom and shut the door firmly, feeling her chest rattle with every breath. All the coffee she’d consumed to counteract her bad sleep was making her feel hot and queasy.

In all the hours she had spent in Daphne’s place, Ruth had never actually used Daphne’s bathroom before.

It had always felt too awkward and intimate.

How could you keep some psychological distance from your subject once you sat on their still-warm toilet seat?

And this was definitely an old woman’s bathroom.

There were handles on both sides of the toilet and a large shower with a porous, plastic shower seat.

Ruth tried not to imagine Daphne sitting on that seat, naked and sagging, as a glowering attendant scrubbed her with a washcloth.

Ruth doused her face with water and washed her hands with a soap that smelled heady and floral.

There was a small assortment of lipsticks and face creams on the countertop, all designer brands.

In an effort to calm down, Ruth read the names of the Chanel lipsticks, each of which probably cost as much as her last grocery bill.

Antoinette, Marie, Gabrielle, Etienne, and Adrienne.

The kind of glamorous names Daphne had chosen and changed throughout her life, with as little care as changing lipsticks.

After all, Chanel wasn’t going to make a fifty-dollar lipstick named Loretta.

After a few minutes Ruth felt moderately calmer, even though her head ached and her hands were still shaky. She took a final breath, staring at herself in the mirror.

It’s almost over, she told herself. Make her confess and you’re done.

As she was leaving the bathroom, almost as an afterthought, Ruth slipped one of the lipsticks, a red-gold one named Gabrielle, into her pocket, her small act of rebellion against Daphne.

Ruth noticed instantly that Daphne was sitting on the edge of her seat and seemed to be panting slightly, as if she had just exerted herself.

Slowly, Ruth’s eyes tracked over to her water bottle, which was sitting on the coffee table.

While Ruth had never accepted any food or drink from Daphne, she had gotten into the habit of bringing her reusable metal bottle with her, to keep her voice smooth for interviews.

But this was the first time she had ever left Daphne unattended with her drink.

Had the bottle been moved? Maybe. Ruth thought she remembered it being closer to the center of the table, but she wasn’t certain.

She sat down, painfully aware of her own pounding heart.

Daphne was watching her, a small smile playing on her lips.

Had she put something in her bottle? Cleaning fluid?

Medication? Or had she moved the bottle to make Ruth think she’d tampered with it?

Or was this all paranoia fueled from sleep deprivation and the knowledge she was in a room with a fucking murderer?