Page 6 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

Chapter Five

Ruth returned to Coconut Grove the next day with a renewed commitment to get the story out of Daphne.

She was early so she sat in her car, organizing her bag and answering emails.

On impulse, Ruth checked Jenn’s Instagram, looking for any clues about her new life.

She did it almost unconsciously but the pain of seeing Jenn’s face surprised her every time, like pressing her thumb into a sore spot on her body.

Her most recent post was about a book signing and Ruth scrutinized an image of Jenn standing suspiciously close to an unidentified woman.

Was she dating already? Should Ruth start dating again?

It was hard dating in your thirties; people had certain expectations about what a person should have achieved by then.

Her romantic life was another thing that had been rocky for the last six years, and her sexual fluidity only meant that she’d frustrated and disappointed people of all genders.

It was morning but the day was already hot and humid, as if she was breathing through a pillow clamped over her mouth.

Ruth sighed and stared out at a nearby billboard for the Sunshine Development Group, the largest property development company in the city.

Those billboards were all over the city, reminding everyone that while they toiled away writing poorly paid articles about celebrity butt implants, wealthy families like the Montgomerys—the owners of Sunshine Development—got rich building slums and McMansions, passing their wealth and their companies down from generation to generation.

Ruth’s apartment building had been built by Sunshine Development, and every time she passed the sign at the entrance, she fantasized about putting her fist through it.

Once again, an attendant escorted Ruth to Daphne’s room. This time, the attendant handed Daphne her pills. Daphne disappeared into the bathroom while Ruth set up her equipment. Once she had emerged and settled into her armchair, Ruth launched into her questions.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” she said.

“Listen, I’m ninety years old. That’s a lot of life to get through. Let’s just jump to when things get interesting,” Daphne started but Ruth interrupted her.

“No, I think the beginning is important. People love hearing that kind of stuff. Where did you grow up?”

“New York. A little apartment in Midtown,” Daphne said quickly, tossing it on the table like pocket change.

“Really? Because your daughter said you’re from a small town in Canada,” Ruth said, trying not to look triumphant. There was a flash of darkness in Daphne’s eyes. Ruth had angered her. Well, too bad.

“Well, why ask if you already knew the answer?” Daphne asked sourly. She crossed her arms over her cherry silk blouse and glowered.

“I wanted to know if you would lie to me,” Ruth replied plainly, settling her unopened notebook on her lap.

The recording equipment was doing the heavy lifting, leaving her free to focus on the expressions that flickered across Daphne’s face, as quick as a starling passing in front of the sun.

She watched Daphne smooth the anger off her face, leaving it as crisp and clean as a freshly ironed sheet.

“Okay, so you got me there. But isn’t the whole point of America that a person can be anything they want? I’m a New Yorker at heart; it’s only bad luck that I was born in the ass-crack of nowhere.”

“What did your parents do for a living?”

“They were farmers. Obviously. Everyone in Saskatchewan is a farmer,” Daphne snapped, as if Ruth knew anything about Saskatchewan. Or Canada for that matter. It couldn’t be that great up there; they always seemed to be coming to Florida for vacation.

“Did you have a happy childhood?” Ruth asked.

Daphne rolled her eyes. “Have you met many serial killers who had happy childhoods? It’s hard to go to bed with a full belly and a happy heart and think: ‘Shit, the only thing missing is a drawer full of hookers’ teeth.’”

She’s trying to shock me, Ruth thought, and so she kept her face neutral, not giving Daphne the reaction she wanted.

The bluntness, the profanity, it served the same purpose as the superficial charm she probably used with men; it was all to keep people at arm’s length.

But Ruth needed to push harder, to get beneath the brittle surface.

“What made your childhood unhappy?”

“Ask me what made it happy; it’s a much shorter list,” Daphne said.

Another bumper-sticker quip. Ruth sat there, letting the silence fill the room until Daphne sighed and continued.

“My parents were dirt-poor, and they had too many kids. To top it off, I was born in the Thirties, in the Dust Bowl. It was the worst decade to be on a farm. People lost everything.”

“How many children did they have?”

“Seven. And I was the oldest, which meant I spent my childhood boiling diapers and chasing after toddlers.”

“What about your parents? Did they make you unhappy?”

“Of course they did. My mother never had time to take care of us. She was too busy working, always working, trying to keep the farm above water. That woman was the hardest worker I ever met, and it showed. She looked about sixty by the time she turned thirty, all bony and gray. I can probably count on one hand the times I saw her smile.” Her voice was a strange mixture of pride and bitterness.

“What about your father? Did you have a better relationship with him?” Ruth asked, almost certain the answer was no. Daphne had confessed to killing a lot of men. That didn’t exactly scream ‘Daddy’s Girl.’ Still, she needed to hear it out loud.

“No, we didn’t. He was a bastard,” Daphne said.

“How so?”

“If you think I’m going to talk about my father, you’ve got another thing coming.

” Daphne flashed with anger, for a moment becoming a different person, a mask slipping out of place before it was thrust back into position.

There was truth behind the facade, a sense of frustration Ruth instantly recognized.

But Ruth needed to be careful asking about Daphne’s father.

She knew there were some things that cost too much to share.

So she let Daphne take control of the narrative. At least for now.

It’s hard to explain to a young person how much can change during one person’s life.

The way I grew up doesn’t exist anymore.

The things people take for granted today: exotic fruit, owning more than one set of clothes at a time, traveling to other countries, were impossible things to me as a child.

It was a different world, a time before Hitler, the Cold War, television, birth control.

Young people don’t understand that one day they’ll change countries without ever moving their feet, that the world they grew up in will disappear forever.

I’m not one of those grandmothers who constantly narrates her life story to her grandkids, hoping that they’ll memorize every detail and love me long after I’m fertilizer.

Most of my grandchildren are idiots who either ignore me or try to make me dance in videos with them so that strangers on the Internet will think they’re funny.

I was born in 1932 in Lucan, Saskatchewan.

It was a flat, hard place. That’s all there was to it.

By the time I was born, Saskatchewan had been in a drought for two years; people called it the Hard Times.

The crops burned under the sun, and everything became so dry that the topsoil was lifted up and carried away.

Soon, we were living in the Dust Bowl, where rolling dust storms choked out the sun, blew down houses, and suffocated the cattle.

The dust coated me, filling my hair and eyes with grit, collecting on my clothes and in the cracks of my body, drying me out, fossilizing me.

Sometimes the dust was the only thing in my stomach, during the lean months.

And all that dust got in our lungs, making us cough all day long.

I had a doctor in New York once tell me that he could see scars in my lungs from all the dirt I breathed in as a child.

He had trained in Oklahoma and said he could spot a Duster from a mile away.

I never went back to that doctor. I hated the idea that my body was giving up my secrets.

Then the grasshoppers came to Saskatchewan, like a Biblical plague.

They ate the rest of the crops, the vegetables from the garden, even the clothes and bedding hanging on the line.

All we could hear was a strange humming sound, as if the air had been electrified.

It was unsettling. There were so many grasshoppers that the trains couldn’t run because their squashed bodies were gumming up the tracks.

And every time you stepped out of your house, you walked on a carpet of grasshoppers, feeling them crush beneath your feet like bones breaking.

Things got so bad that the province set up a Grasshopper Control Committee to try to stop the outbreaks that returned every season.

The committee distributed Criddle Mixture (a grasshopper poison) to farmers everywhere.

By the time I was born, over one hundred thousand gallons of arsenic were being used in Saskatchewan every year.

People would walk through their fields, flinging ladlefuls of poison everywhere.

You see, I was born in a cloud of poison.

Poison was ours. It was how we fought back against a world that was trying to break us.