Dark Places (3 page)

“Yup,” I said. I hate people who start conversations with facts— what are you supposed to do with that?
Sure is hot today. Yes, it is
. I peered around to signal for a drink. A miniskirted waitress with voluptuous black hair had her pretty backside to us. I table-tapped my fingers til she turned around, gave me a face that had to have been at least seventy years old, her pancake makeup pooling in the crepe of her cheeks, purple veins marbling her hands. Some part of her creaked as she bent down for my order, snuffing when I asked for just a PBR.

“The brisket is really good here,” Lyle said. But he wasn’t having it either, just sipping on the dregs of something milky.

I don’t eat meat, really, not since seeing my family sliced open— I was still trying to get Jim Jeffreys and his sinewy steak out of my head. I shrugged no, waited for my beer, looking around like a tourist. Lyle’s fingernails were dirty, first thing I noticed. The old waitress’s black wig was ajar: Strands of sweaty white hair stuck to her neck. She tucked a few back under as she grabbed a packet of fries sizzling beneath the heat lamp. A fat man sat by himself at the next table, eating short ribs and examining his flea-market purchase:
a kitschy old vase with a mermaid on it. His fingers left grease marks on the mermaid’s breasts.

The waitress said nothing as she set the beer squarely in front of me and then purred over to the fat man, calling him Honey.

“So what’s with the club?” I prompted.

Lyle turned pink, his knee jittery beneath the table.

“Well, you know how some guys do fantasy football, or collect baseball cards?” I nodded. He let out a strange laugh and continued. “Or women read gossip magazines and they know everything about some actor, know like, their baby’s name and the town they grew up in?”

I gave a wary incline of the head, a be-careful nod.

“Well, this is like that, but it’s, well, we call it a Kill Club.”

I took a slug of beer, sweat beads popping on my nose.

“It’s not as weird as it sounds.”

“It sounds pretty fucking weird.”

“You know how some people like mysteries? Or get totally into true-crime blogs? Well, this club is a bunch of those people. Everyone has their crime that they’re obsessed with: Laci Peterson, Jeffrey MacDonald, Lizzie Borden … you and your family. I mean you and your family, it’s huge with the club. Just huge. Bigger’n JonBenét.” He caught me grimacing, and added: “Just a tragedy, what happened. And your brother in jail for, what, going on twenty-five years?”

“Don’t feel sorry for Ben. He killed my family.”

“Heh. Right.” He sucked on a piece of milky ice. “So, you ever talk with him about it?”

I felt my defenses flip up. There are people out there who swear Ben is innocent. They mail me newspaper clippings about Ben and I never read them, toss them as soon as I see his photo—his red hair loose and shoulder-length in a Jesus-cut to match his glowing, full-of-peace face. Pushing forty. I have never gone to see my brother in jail, not in all these years. His current prison is, conveniently, on the outskirts of our hometown—Kinnakee, Kansas—where he’d committed the murders to begin with. But I’m not nostalgic.

Most of Ben’s devotees are women. Jug-eared and long-toothed, permed and pant-suited, tight-lipped and crucifixed. They show up
occasionally on my doorstep, with too much shine in their eyes. Tell me that my testimony was wrong. I’d been confused, been coerced, sold a lie when I swore, at age seven, that my brother had been the killer. They often scream at me, and they always have plenty of saliva. Several have actually slapped me. This makes them even less convincing: A red-faced, hysterical woman is very easy to disregard, and I’m always looking for a reason to disregard.

If they were nicer to me, they might have got me.

“No, I don’t talk to Ben. If that’s what this is about, I’m not interested.”

“No, no, no, it’s not. You’d just come to, it’s like a convention almost, and you’d let us pick your brain. You really don’t think about that night?”

Darkplace.

“No, I don’t.”

“You might learn something interesting. There are some fans … experts, who know more than the detectives on the case. Not that
that’s
hard.”

“So these are a bunch of people who want to convince me Ben’s innocent.”

“Well … maybe. Maybe you’ll convince them otherwise.” I caught a whiff of condescension. He was leaning in, his shoulders tense, excited.

“I want $1,000.”

“I could give you $700.”

I glanced around the room again, noncommittal. I’d take whatever Lyle Wirth gave me, because otherwise I was looking at a real job, real soon, and I wasn’t up for that. I’m not someone who can be depended on five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don’t even get out of bed five days in a row—I often don’t remember to eat five days in a row. Reporting to a workplace, where I would need to stay for eight hours—eight big hours outside my home—was unfeasible.

“Seven hundred’s fine then,” I said.

“Excellent. And there’ll be a lot of collectors there, so bring any souvenirs, uh, items from your childhood you might want to sell. You
could leave with $2,000, easy. Letters especially. The more personal the better, obviously. Anything dated near the murders. January 3, 1985.” He recited it as if he’d said it often. “Anything from your mom. People are really … fascinated by your mom.”

People always were. They always wanted to know: What kind of woman gets slaughtered by her own son?

H
e was talking on the phone again, she could hear the cartoonish
mwaMWAwa
of his voice murmuring behind his door. He’d wanted an extension of his own—half his schoolmates, he swore, had their own listings in the phone book. They were called Children’s Lines. She’d laughed and then got pissed because
he
got pissed at her for laughing. (Seriously, a children’s phone line? How spoiled were these kids?) Neither of them mentioned it again—they were both easily embarrassed—and then a few weeks later he’d just come home, head tucked down, and showed her the contents of a shopping bag: a line splitter that would allow two phones to use the same extension and a remarkably light plastic phone that didn’t seem much different from the pink toy versions the girls used to play secretary. “Mr. Benjamin Day’s office,” they’d answer, trying to pull their older brother into the game. Ben used to smile and tell them to take a message; lately he just ignored them.

Since Ben brought home his goodies, the phrase “goddang phone cord” had been introduced to the Day home. The cord corkscrewed from the kitchen outlet, over the counter, down the hall, and crimped under the crack of his door, which was always closed.
Someone tripped on the cord at least once a day, and this would be followed by a scream (if it was one of the girls) or a curse (if it was Patty or Ben). She’d asked him repeatedly to secure the cord against the wall, and he’d just as repeatedly failed to do it. She tried to tell herself this was normal teenage stubbornness, but for Ben it was aggressive, and it made her worry he was angry, or lazy, or something worse she hadn’t even thought of. And who was he talking to? Before the mysterious addition of the second phone, Ben hardly ever got calls. He had two good friends, the Muehler brothers, overalled Future Farmers of America who were so reticent they sometimes just hung up when she answered—and then Patty would tell Ben that Jim or Ed just called. But there had never been long conversations behind closed doors until now.

Patty suspected her son finally had a girlfriend, but her few hints in that direction made Ben so uncomfortable his pale skin turned blue-white and his amber freckles actually glowed, like a warning. She’d backed off completely. She wasn’t the kind of mother to jam open her kids’ lives too wide—it was hard enough for a fifteen-year-old boy to get privacy in a house full of women. He’d installed a padlock on his door after he’d returned home from school one day to find Michelle squirreling through his desk drawers. The lock installation, too, was presented as a done-deal: A hammer, some banging, and there it suddenly was. His own boy-nest, secured. Again, she couldn’t blame him. The farmhouse had gone girly in the years since Runner left. The curtains, the couches, even the candles were all apricot and lace. Little pink shoes and flowered undies and barrettes cluttered drawers and closets. Ben’s few small assertions—the curlicue phone cord and the metallic, manly lock—seemed understandable, actually.

She heard a shot of laughter coming from behind his door, and it unnerved her. Ben wasn’t a laugher, not even as a kid. At age eight he’d looked at one of his sisters coolly and announced, “Michelle has a case of the giggles,” as if it was something to be fixed. Patty described him as stoic, but his self-containment went beyond that. His dad certainly didn’t know what to do with him, alternating between roughhousing (Ben stiff and unresponsive as Runner crocodile-rolled him on the floor) and recrimination (Runner complaining loudly that the kid was no fun, weird, girlish). Patty hadn’t fared much better.
She’d recently bought a book about mothering a teenage boy, which she’d hidden under her bed like pornography. The author said to be brave, ask questions, demand answers from your child, but Patty couldn’t. Much more than a graze of a question pissed Ben off these days, triggered that unbearably loud silence from him. The more she tried to figure him out, the more he hid. In his room. Talking to people she didn’t know.

Her three daughters were already awake too, had been for hours. A farm, even their pathetic, overleveraged, undervalued one, demanded early rising, and the routine stuck through the winter. They were now fluffing around in the snow. She’d shooed them out like a pack of puppies so they wouldn’t wake up Ben, then got annoyed when she heard his voice on the phone, realized he was already up. She knew that was the reason she was fixing pancakes, the girls’ favorite. Even the score. Ben and the girls were always accusing her of taking sides—Ben forever being asked to have patience with the small, ribboned creatures, the girls forever being begged to hush now, don’t bother your brother. Michelle, at ten, was the oldest daughter, Debby was nine, and Libby seven. (“Jesus, Mom, it’s like you dropped a litter,” she could hear Ben admonish.) She peeked out a filmy curtain to view the girls in their natural animal state: Michelle and Debby, boss and assistant, constructing a snow fort from plans they hadn’t bothered to share with Libby; Libby trying to nose into the side of the action, offering snowballs and rocks and a long, waggly stick, each rejected with barely a glance. Finally Libby bent at the legs for a good scream, then kicked the whole thing down. Patty turned away—fists and tears were next, and she wasn’t in the mood.

Ben’s door creaked open, and his heavy thumps at the end of the hall told her he was wearing those big black boots she hated. Don’t even look at them, she told herself. She said the same thing whenever he wore his camo pants. (“Dad wore camo pants,” he sulked when she’d complained. “Hunting, he wore them hunting,” she’d corrected.) She missed the kid who used to demand unflashy clothes, who wore only jeans and plaid button-downs. The boy with dark red curls and an obsession with airplanes. Here he came now, in black denim jacket, black jeans, and a thermal hat pulled down low. He mumbled something and aimed for the door.

“Not before breakfast,” she called. He checked, turned only his profile to her.

“I gotta get a few things done.”

“That’s fine, have some breakfast with us.”

“I hate pancakes. You know that.” Dammit.

“I’ll make you something else. Sit.” He wouldn’t defy a direct order, would he? They stared each other down, Patty about to give in, when Ben sighed pointedly, then slumped onto a chair. He started fiddling with the salt shaker, pouring the granules on the table and plowing them into a pile. She almost told him not to do it, but stopped. It was enough for now that he was at the table.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked, pouring him some orange juice she knew he’d leave untouched to spite her.

“Just some people.”

“People, plural?”

He only raised his eyebrows.

The screen door scissored open, then the front door banged against the wall, and she could hear a series of boots tumbling onto the floor mat—well-trained, untracking daughters that they were. The fight must have been settled quickly. Michelle and Debby were already bickering about some cartoon on TV. Libby just marched right in and hurled herself on a chair next to Ben, shook some ice off her hair. Of Patty’s three daughters, only Libby knew how to disarm Ben: She smiled up at him, gave a quick wave, and then stared straight ahead.

“Hey, Libby,” he said, still sifting salt.

“Hey, Ben. I like your salt mountain.”

“Thanks.”

Patty could see Ben visibly re-shell himself when the other two entered the kitchen, their bright, harsh voices splattering the corners of the room.

“Mom, Ben’s making a mess,” Michelle called out.

“It’s fine, sweetie, pancakes are almost ready. Ben, eggs?”

“Why does Ben get eggs?” Michelle whined.

“Ben, eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“I want eggs,” Debby said.

“You don’t even like eggs,” Libby snapped. She could always be depended on to side with her brother. “Ben needs eggs cause he’s a boy. A man.”

That made Ben smile the slightest bit, which made Patty select the most perfectly round pancake for Libby. She piled the cakes onto plates while the eggs spat at her, the fine calibrations of breakfast for five going surprisingly well. It was the last of the decent food, left over from Christmas, but she wouldn’t worry right now. After breakfast, she’d worry.

“Mom, Debby has her elbows on the table.” Michelle, in her bossy mode.

“Mom, Libby didn’t wash her hands.” Michelle again.

“Neither did you.” Debby.

“Nobody did.” Libby laughing.

“Dirty bugger,” Ben said, and poked her in her side. It was some old joke with them, that phrase. Patty didn’t know how it had started. Libby tilted her head back and laughed harder, a stage laugh designed to please Ben.