Page 5 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

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.

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.

“Diane, I’ve already got a platform for the podcast, and I intend to start releasing episodes immediately. And I can guarantee you a podcast that features interviews with a serial killer is going to be huge. This is your chance to share your perspective.”

“What perspective? I didn’t know a thing about this until she confessed.”

“See? You need to tell people that. Because if you don’t, people will see two daughters who lived a very long time with a serial killer for a mother.

And they might start to wonder. . . how could you have not known?

” Ruth said, surprised at how forceful she sounded, as if the thrill of the chase was awakening some long-dormant impulses in her.

There was a prolonged silence, as Diane considered Ruth’s words, and the threat hidden beneath them.

“If I do this, you need to protect our reputations. In hindsight, there might have been some. . . suspicious events over the years. But we really didn’t know anything. Children just accept whatever their mother says.”

“I won’t distort any facts. But I won’t try to smear you.

You were just kids, after all,” Ruth said, trying to phrase her words carefully so that she could keep her options open.

If the twins were guilty of anything, it was probably ignorance with a dash of willful blindness.

But they might be as criminal as their mother, and she had to be prepared to nail them to the wall if she needed to.

“Will Rose participate as well?” Ruth asked.

“I’ll speak for both of us. She has to be very careful with her husband being a senator.”

“Okay. So, I’ll want to set up some interviews with you in the coming weeks. But what I need right now is some background information. What is your mother’s birth name? And where did she grow up?”

“I know her first name, but I don’t know her maiden name. Her real name is Loretta. She told me one night after too many wines, said she’d always hated it.”

“And her hometown?”

“It’s in. . . Canada,” she said, as if it was a dirty secret.

“It’s a place called Lucan in Southern Saskatchewan.

I only know that because sometimes she would rant about how she was never going back there, how we were lucky to grow up in a city full of exciting people.

I can’t say I disagree with her,” Diane said with a dry laugh.

“Okay, I can work with that. Just one last question. Would you say she was a good mother?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. When Diane spoke again, her voice was lower and thicker, as if she was congested.

“I don’t know. Depends on the day.” And then she hung up.

Later, Ruth sat watching coverage of Daphne’s case on TV.

While the police had released very little information, someone (probably a Coconut Grove staff member) had leaked pictures of Daphne to the media, a few shots of her as an old woman and one of her looking glamorous and young in a Fifties bikini.

Everybody was dissecting the images and the unconfirmed report that Daphne was a serial poisoner.

Body language experts debated whether she had ‘evil eyes,’ feminists and men’s rights activists argued over what this case represented, there was even a comedy sketch where a man dressed up as an old crone pretended to host a cooking show where all the guests ended up dead.

Daphne was being discussed in other mediums too.

The incels on Reddit were using Daphne to back up all their poorly thought-out theories about women.

Ruth had read think pieces in major newspapers that talked about how Daphne represented an era, a problem, a question, even though no one was quite clear on which one.

Everyone was talking about Daphne. Particularly women.

This mysterious man-killer seemed to comfort them in a secret, shameful way, this idea that there might be something dangerous lurking within all of them, that they might not be as fragile as men presumed.

And of course everyone wanted to know why exactly she had confessed.

What kind of self-respecting serial killer turned themselves in?

Ruth was watching a CNN expert discuss incarcerating the elderly when she glanced down at her phone and noticed that she had a missed call from her mom.

Louise Robinson worked in a call center near Tampa.

It was mind-numbing work, but it was more manageable for Louise than waitressing and delivery gigs since Louise had been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease.

After a life of working hard as a young, single mother, now Louise was working even harder to stay afloat in a country that had very little time for people with chronic illness.

It was hard watching her mother get sicker, hard watching the doctors play Whac-A-Mole with the million different symptoms that reared up, hard thinking about how much Louise’s illness would cost as it progressed, a cost Ruth would have to bear alone.

With a twinge of guilt, Ruth decided not to call her back.

She hadn’t spoken to her mother in a while, and she worried that if she did speak to Louise, she’d end up telling her about the podcast. She hoped she hadn’t heard about it already.

It was the worst feeling in the world, worrying her mom, and Ruth had been doing it for years.

But this was different. Her mom was going to hate this .