“That’s so cute!” I smiled at the thought: hundreds of scarlet-haired Edies coloring in yesterday’s coloring session, an endless hall of mirrors. “What was she like as a kid?”
“She was the shyest thing when she was little.” She slid her palm across the armrest, back and forth. “Then she turned ten or so and really came out of her shell.”
“Center of attention,” I said before I could stop myself.
She looked at me. “Yes, that’s true.”
“Did she develop…was she depressed when she was younger?” She blinked at me, and I hastily added: “I know you’re a psychiatrist, so I thought maybe—”
“We didn’t know,” she interrupted. “We should’ve been watching for it since it was in her family history, but we didn’t know until after.”
“Us neither.” I shifted in my seat. “You were pretty close with her, right? I know you came by Calhoun sometimes to see her.”
She stared hard at me, expressionless. “She was my daughter. I liked seeing her.”
I swallowed. “Well, did you talk to her about what was going on at Calhoun? Like, with Alex and everything?”
She picked up her mug and drank deeply, then set it down with a clink. “Lindsay, I know what you’re doing here.”
A cold spring of shock. I stared at her, my cup frozen in front of my throat.
“I’m not stupid,” she continued. “You’re not the first conspiracy theorist. But Edie killed herself. It wasn’t a freak accident. There wasn’t any foul play. Suicide.”
I brought the mug back down to my lap but couldn’t speak.
“She was depressed,” Mrs. Iredale continued, “and she hid it very well. But she was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and then she’d experimented for the first time with ecstasy, which is extremely problematic for someone with her delicate brain chemistry. I wish there hadn’t been a gun at her disposal, but if it hadn’t been that, it would have been another way. I saw her just hours before it happened. She didn’t seem well.”
It hung in the air for a moment. “Wait, what? You saw her?”
She shrugged. Then I caught it, a weird tic near her eye. “I came by to see her that night. Are you here to find out what we talked about, like that’s the missing piece?”
I didn’t answer. Everything was moving too fast. A coffee drip slid down the side of the mug and coated my fingers.
“I was there to deliver more bad news: that we were losing our home and could no longer help her out with her tuition. Not exactly the best revelations when you’re, as it turns out, fighting with your friends and going through a breakup and recovering from a medical emergency.”
My insides lurched. She knew—of course she knew about the baby, of course the autopsy report hit her eyeballs first—but it jarred me, how she tossed these things off like a grocery list.
So Mrs. Iredale had been in Calhoun the very night of Edie’s death. Now busily trying to convince me it was nothing but a suicide.
Something clicked. “Wait, other conspiracy theorists?”
She sighed and the same eye flicked again. “It’s been ten years, Lindsay. I think you should go.” There was a calm confidence in her syntax, as if it made perfect sense. As if I’d spent a decade on the armchair in Edie’s mother’s living room.
Sarah, right? She had to mean Sarah. I should talk to Sarah.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale. To have taken up your time. I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe me, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t come with a…conspiracy theory.” I wiped the drip on the side of the mug. “Guess I just miss her.”
She shook her head. “You can’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. I think about her every single day. And how I should’ve tried harder to persuade her to come back home with me, to talk some more.” She sighed and rubbed her temple. “I’ll never forgive that kid for convincing her to go back inside.”
My stomach did something gymnastic. This was too much all at once. The rain throbbed against the window and she glanced at it; when it rains, it pours, my neurons spit out.
“Who convinced her to go back into Calhoun?”
“Some boy she was seeing. He was texting her the whole time we were talking, and she must have told him where we were because eventually he showed up to escort her back inside.” She looked out the window again. “He introduced himself, seemed pretty