Dark Places (16 page)

“Misunderstanding? Ben wouldn’t misunderstand a kiss. Or touching. Not with a little girl. He’s not a pervert. He’s an odd kid, but he’s not sick. He’s not crazy.” Patty had spent her life swearing
Ben
wasn’t
odd, was just an average kid. But now she’d settle for odd. The realization came suddenly, a wild jolt, like having your hair blown in your face while driving.

“Will you tell them he wouldn’t do that?” Patty asked, and the tears came all at once, suddenly her cheeks were soaked.

“I can tell everyone in Kinnakee, everyone in the state of Kansas that he wouldn’t do that, and it might not be the end of it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just heard yesterday afternoon, but it seems to be getting … bigger. I almost came out here. Then I spent the rest of the night convincing myself that it wasn’t anything. Then I woke up this morning and realized it was.”

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.

“So you came over here with groceries and a sticker book and all along you had this
story
about Ben you were going to tell me.”

“Like I said …” Diane shrugged sympathetically, splayed her fingers except for the ones holding the cigarette.

“Well, what happens now? Do you know the girls’ names? Is someone going to phone me or talk to me, or talk to Ben? I need to find Ben.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight. About his hair. He took off on his bike.”

“So what was the story with his hair?”

“I don’t know, Diane! What in God’s name does it matter now?”

But of course Patty knew it did matter. Everything now would be filtered and sifted for meaning.

“Well, I don’t think this is an emergency,” Diane said quietly. “I don’t think we need to get him home right now unless you want him home right now.”

“I want him home right now.”

“OK, well let’s start calling people then. You can give me a list of his friends and I’ll start phoning.”

“I don’t even know his friends anymore,” Patty said. “He was talking to someone this morning, but he wouldn’t say who.”

“Let’s hit redial.”

Her sister grunted, stamped out her cigarette with a boot, pulled Patty out of her chair, led her inside. Diane snapped at the girls to stay in their room when the bedroom door cracked, and made her way to the phone, purposefully hit the redial button with one braut-sized finger. Sing-song numeric tones blared out of the receiver— beepBeepBEEPbeepbeepbupBEEP—and before it even rang, Diane hung up.

“My number.”

“Oh, yeah. I called after breakfast to see when you’d be over.”

The two sisters sat at the table, and Diane poured more mugs of coffee. The snow glared into the kitchen like a strobelight.

“We need to get Ben home,” Patty said.

M
oony as a grade-school girl, I drove home thinking about Ben. Since I was seven, I pictured him in the same haunted-house flashes: Ben, black-haired, smooth-faced, with his hands clasped around an axe, charging down the hall at Debby, a humming noise coming from his tight lips. Ben’s face speckled in blood, howling, the shotgun going up to his shoulder.

Id forgotten there was once just Ben, shy and serious, those weird unsettling blasts of humor. Just Ben my brother, who couldn’t have done what they said. What I said.

At a stoplight, my blood sizzling, I reached behind my seat and grabbed the envelope from an old bill. Above the plastic window, I wrote:
Suspects
. Then I wrote:
Runner
. Then I stopped.
Someone with a grudge against Runner?
I wrote.
Someone Runner owed money to?
Runnerrunnerrunner. It came back to Runner. That male voice, bellowing in our house that night, that could have been Runner or an enemy of Runner’s as easily as it was Ben. I needed this to be true, and provable. I had a gust of panic: I can’t live with this, Ben in jail, this open-ended guilt. I needed it finished. I needed to know. Me, me. I was still predictably selfish.

As I passed the turnoff for our farm, I refused to look.

I stopped in a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Kansas City, filled up with gas, bought a log of Velveeta, some Coke, white bread, and kibble for my old, starving cat. Then I drove home to Over There That Way, pulled up my slope of a hill, got out, and stared at the two old ladies across the street who’d never look at me. They sat on the porch swing as always, despite the chill, their heads rigidly straight, lest I muddy their view. I stood with my hands on my hips, on top of my hill, and waited until one finally caved. Then I waved rather grandly, an Old West corral sort of wave. The wrinkled biddy nodded at me, and I went inside and fed poor Buck, feeling a bubble of triumph.

While I still had the energy, I knifed bright yellow mustard onto my white bread, stacked thick smushy chunks of Velveeta on top, and swallowed the sandwich while negotiating with three different but equally bored phone operators to reach the Bert Nolan Group Home for Men. That’s another thing to add to my list of potential occupations for ole Jim Jeffreys: operator. As a kid, that was something little girls wanted to be when they grew up, an operator, but I couldn’t remember why.

A thin layer of bread pasted to the roof of my mouth, I finally reached a voice at the Bert Nolan Home, and was surprised to find it was Bert Nolan himself. I’d assumed anyone with a home named after him must be dead. I told him I was trying to find Runner Day, and he paused.

“Well, he’s been in and out, mostly out the past month, but I’d be happy to give him a message,” Bert Nolan said in a voice like an old car horn. I gave my name—no recognition on his part—and started to give my phone number when Nolan interrupted me.

“Oh, he’s not going to be able to phone long distance, I can tell you that right now. The men here tend to be big corresponders. By mail, you know? Less’n fifty cents for a stamp and you don’t have to worry about waiting in line for the phone. You want to leave your address?”

I did not. I shivered at the idea of Runner clomping up my steps with his overstacked dress boots, his grimy hands around his little waist, grinning like he’d beaten me at a game.

“If you want, I can take any message you have and you can give
me your address privately,” Bert Nolan said reasonably. “And once Runner finishes his letter to you, I can mail it for him, and he’ll never even know your zip code. A lot of family members do it that way. It’s a sad but necessary thing.” In the background, a soda machine rattled out a sodapop, someone asked Nolan if he wanted one, and he said
No thanks, trying to cut back
in the kindly voice of a town doctor. “You want to do that, Miss? Otherwise it’ll be hard to reach him. Like I said, he’s not really one to sit by the phone and wait for you to call back.”

“And there’s no e-mail?”

Bert Nolan grunted. “No, no e-mail, I’m afraid.”

I’d never known Runner to be much of a letter writer, but he always wrote more than he phoned, so I guessed that would be my best shot, short of driving down to Oklahoma and waiting on one of Bert Nolan’s cots. “Would you tell him I need to talk about Ben and that night? I can come down to see him if he just gives me a day.”

“OK … you said, Ben and
that night
?”

“I did.”

I KNEW LYLE
would be too smug about my turnaround—semi-possible, potential turnaround—on Ben. I could picture him addressing the Kill Club groupies in one of his weird tight jackets, explaining how he convinced me to go see Ben. “She really was refusing at first, I think she was scared of what she might discover about Ben … and about herself.” And all those faces looking up at him, so happy about what he’d done. It irritated me.

Who I wanted to talk to was Aunt Diane. Diane who’d taken care of me for seven of my eleven years as an underage orphan. She’d been the first to take me in, shuffling me into her mobile home with my suitcase of belongings. Clothes, a favorite book, but no toys. Michelle hoarded all the dolls with her at night, she called it her slumber party, and she peed on them when she was strangled. I still remember a sticker book Diane had given us the day of the murders— flowers and unicorns and kittens—and always wondered if it had been in that ruined pile.

Diane couldn’t afford a new place. All the money from my
mom’s life insurance went to get Ben a decent lawyer. Diane said my mother would want that, but she said it with a drawn face, like she’d give my mother a good talking to if she could. So no money for us. Being runty, I was able to sleep in a storage closet where the washer/dryer would have gone. Diane even painted it for me. She worked overtime, shuttled me to Topeka for therapy, tried to be affectionate with me, even though I could tell it hurt her to hug me, this pissy reminder of her sister’s murder. Her arms encircled me like a hula-hoop, like it was a game to get them around me but touch as little as possible. But every single morning she told me she loved me.

Over the next ten years, I totaled her car twice, broke her nose twice, stole and sold her credit cards, and killed her dog. It was the dog that finally broke her. She’d gotten Gracie, a mop-haired mutt, not long after the murders. It was yappy and the size of Diane’s forearm and Diane liked her more than me, or so I felt. For years I was jealous of that dog, watching Diane brush Gracie, her big manly hands wrapped around a pink plastic comb, watching her barrette Gracie’s tassled fur, watching her whip out a photo of Gracie from her wallet, instead of me. The dog was obsessed with my foot, the bad one, with only two toes, the second and the pinky, skinny gnarled things. Gracie was always smelling at them, like she knew they were wrong somehow. It did not endear her to me.

I’d been grounded for something, the summer between sophomore and junior year, and while Diane worked, I sat in the hot trailer getting angrier and angrier with that dog, the dog getting feistier and feistier. I refused to walk it, so it had resorted to running in frantic loops from the sofa to the kitchen to the closet, yipping the whole time, nipping at my feet. As I coiled up, nursing my fury, pretending to watch a soap opera but instead letting my brain turn good and red, Gracie paused in one of her loops and bit at the pinky toe on my bad foot, just grabbed onto it with her canines and shook. I remember thinking,
If this dog takes one of my last toes,
and then getting enraged at how ridiculous I was: On my left hand was a stump where a man would never put a wedding ring, and my unsupported right foot gave me a permanent sailor’s gait in a land-locked town. The girls at school called my finger a nubbin. That was worse, it sounded both quaint and grotesque at the same time, something to giggle at while
looking quickly away. A physician had recently told me the amputations probably weren’t even necessary, “Just an overambitious country doctor.” I grabbed Gracie around her middle, feeling her ribcage, that chilly tremble of a little thing. The tremble only made me angrier, and suddenly I was ripping her off my toe—the flesh going with her—and throwing her as hard as I could toward the kitchen. She hit the pick-axe edge of the counter and collapsed in a twitching pile, bleeding all over the linoleum.

I hadn’t meant to kill her, but she died, not as quickly as I’d have liked, but within about ten minutes as I paced around the trailer trying to figure out what to do. When Diane came home, bearing an offertory of fried chicken, Gracie was still lying on the floor, and all I could say was, “She bit me.”

I tried to say more, to explain why it wasn’t my fault, but Diane just held up a single, shaking finger:
Don’t
. She’d called her best friend, Valerie, a woman as delicate and motherly as Diane was bulky and bluff. Diane stood hunched over the sink, looking out the window as Valerie folded Gracie into a special blanket. Then they huddled behind a closed bedroom door, and emerged, Valerie standing silently next to Diane, teary and kneading, as Diane told me to pack my things. In retrospect, I assume Valerie must have been Diane’s girlfriend—every night, Diane would climb in bed and talk to her on the phone til she fell asleep. They conferred on everything together and even had the exact same gently feathered wash-n-wear haircut. At the time I didn’t care who she was to Diane.

I lived my last two high school years with a polite couple in Abilene who were twice-removed somethings and whom I only mildly terrorized. From then on, every few months, Diane would phone. I’d sit with her on the line, all heavy telephone buzz and Diane’s smoky breathing into the receiver. I’d picture the bottom half of her mouth hanging there, the peach fuzz on her chin and that mole perched near her bottom lip, a flesh-colored disc that she once told me, cackling, would grant wishes if I rubbed it. I’d hear a creak-squeak in the background, and knew Diane was opening the middle cabinet in the kitchen of her trailer. I knew that place better than I did the farmhouse. Diane and I would make unnecessary noises, pretend to
sneeze or cough, and then Diane would say, “Hold on, Libby,” pointlessly since neither of us had been talking. Valerie would usually be there, and they’d murmur to each other, Valerie’s voice coaxing, Diane’s a grumble, and then Diane would give me about twenty more seconds of conversation and make an excuse to go.

She stopped taking my calls when
Brand New Day
came out. Her only words:
What possessed you to
do
such a thing?
which was prim for Diane, but filled with more hurt than three dozen fuckyous.

I knew Diane would be at the same number, she was never going to move—the trailer was attached to her like a shell. I spent twenty minutes digging through piles at my house, looking for my old address book, one I’d had since grade school, with a pig-tailed redheaded girl on the cover that someone must have thought looked like me. Except for the smile. Diane’s number was filed under
A
for Aunt Diane, her name inked in purple marker in my balloon-animal cursive.