Dark Places (25 page)

“What happened after dinner?” Lyle interrupted. I waited for him to look over at me for an appreciative smile, but he didn’t.

“We, uh, had relations. Then Runner was out of beer, so he left to get more beer. I think this was about 8 p.m. because I watched
The Fall Guy,
although I remember it was a repeat and that was discouraging.”

“She watched
The Fall Guy,”
Magda piped in. “Isn’t that ironic?”

Peggy looked at her blankly.

“Anyway, Runner left and he didn’t come back, and, you know, it’s winter time, so I fell asleep early. I woke up to him coming home,
but he didn’t have a clock, so I don’t know what time it was. But it was definitely middle of the night, definitely late, because I kept waking up, and I finally got up to pee and the sun was starting to come up and that couldn’t have been more than a few hours later.”

When this woman was peeing, and looking for toilet paper and probably not finding toilet paper, then wending her way back to bed through the motors and blades and TV intestines that Runner always pretended to be working on, maybe stubbing a toe, feeling sulky, I was crawling through snow toward my blood-soaked house, my family dead. I held it against her.

“Lord help me, the police came by in the morning, asking Runner where he was between 12 and 5 a.m., asking
me
where he was. The whole time, he was so insistent:
I was home early, I was home way before midnight
. And I don’t think he was, but I went along with it. I just went along.”

“Well, you’re done with that, girl!” said the brunette with the baby.

“I haven’t even heard from him in a year.”

“Well, that’s more than me,” I said, and regretted it. I wondered if this woman would have kept her secret if Runner had just stayed in touch a bit more. Phoned every three months instead of every eight. “And, like I said,” Peggy continued, “he had these scratches on him, all over his hands, but I can’t be sure that it wasn’t from those beer tabs. I just don’t remember if he scratched himself before he left that night, or if maybe someone scratched him.”

“Only one victim, Michelle Day, was found to have any skin under her nails, which makes sense, since she was strangled, so she was physically closest to the killer,” Lyle said. We all sat quietly for a second, the baby’s coos fluttering higher, heading toward squeals. “Unfortunately, that piece of skin was lost somewhere before it reached the laboratory.”

I pictured Runner, with that leery, wide-eyed look of his, bearing down on Michelle, the weight of him pushing her into the mattress, and Michelle scrambling to breathe, trying to rip his hands away, getting one good scratch in, a scrawl over the back of his small, oil-stained hands, wrapping themselves more tightly around her neck …

“And that’s my story,” Peggy said with an open-handed shrug, a comedian’s whatcha-gonna-do? gesture.

“Ned, we’re ready for the dessert!” Magda hollered toward the kitchen, and Ned hustled in, shoulders up near his ears, crumbs on his lower lip as he bore a depleted plate of dry cookies with hard-jelly centers.

“Jesus, Ned, stop eating my stuff!” Magda snapped, glowering over the tray.

“I just had two.”

“Bullshit you had two.” Magda lit a cigarette from a limp pack. “Go to the store, I need cigarettes. And more cookies.”

“Jenna’s got the car.”

“Walk, then, it’ll be good for you.”

The women were clearly planning on making a night of it, but I wasn’t going to stay. I parked myself near the door, eyeing a cloisonné candy dish that seemed too nice for Magda. I slipped it into my pocket as I watched Lyle work out the deal, Magda saying
She’ll do it? She’s got him? Does she actually believe?
as she flapped her checkbook. Each time I blinked, Peggy was edging closer to me, some grotesque chess game. Before I could make a break for the bathroom, she was there at my elbow.

“You don’t look like Runner at all,” she said, squinting. “Maybe the nose.”

“I look like my mother.”

Peggy seemed stricken.

“You with him a long time?” I offered.

“Off and on, I guess. Yeah. I mean I’d have boyfriends in between. But he had a way of coming back and making you feel like it was part of the plan. Like, almost like you’d discussed it that he’d disappear but come back and it would be the same as it was before. I don’t know. I wished I’d met an accountant or something like that. I never know where to go to meet nice men. In my whole life. I mean, where do you go?”

She seemed to be asking for a geographic place, like there was a special town where all the accountants and actuaries were kept.

“You still in Kinnakee?”

She nodded.

“I’d leave there, for a start.”

P
atty flew into the driver’s seat of Diane’s car—her eyes on the keys dangling from the ignition,
get out of here, now, get out
. Diane hopped into the passenger side as Patty turned over the engine. She actually made a burned-rubber noise as she squealed away from the Muehlers’ house, the rear end of the car flailing behind her. All the crap in Diane’s trunk—baseballs and garden tools and the girls’ dolls—rolled and banged like passengers in a turnover wreck. She and Diane bumped along the gravel road, dust flying, skidding toward the trees on the left and then veering toward a ditch on the right. Finally Diane’s strong hand appeared and landed gently on the wheel.

“Easy.”

Patty rumbled along until she got off the Muehler property, swung a wide left, pulled to the side of the road and cried, fingers grasped around the wheel, her head on the center causing an aborted honk.

“What the hell is going on!” she shrieked. It was a child’s tear-scream, wet, enraged and baffled.

“Some strange stuff,” Diane said, patting her back. “Let’s get you home.”

“I don’t want to go home. I need to find my son.”

The word
son
started her weeping again and she let it rip: gulping sobs and thoughts jabbing her like needles. He’d need a lawyer. They didn’t have money for a lawyer. He’d get some bored county guy appointed to him. They’d lose. He’d go to jail. What would she tell the girls? How long did someone go away for something like that? Five years? Ten? She could see a big prison parking lot, the gates opening, and her Ben gingerly walking out, twenty-five years old, frightened of the open space, eyes narrowed against the light. He comes near her, her arms open, and he spits on her for not saving him. How do you live with not being able to save your son? Could she send him away, on the run, fugitive? How much money could she even give him? In December, numb from exhaustion, she’d sold her dad’s army 45 Auto to Linda Boyler. She could picture Dave Boyler, who she’d never liked, opening it up Christmas morning, this gun he didn’t earn. So Patty, right now, had almost three hundred bucks squirreled away in the house. It was all owed to others, she’d planned on making her first-of-the-month rounds later today, but that wouldn’t happen now—plus $300 would only keep Ben going a few months.

“Ben will come home when he finishes blowing off steam,” Diane reasoned. “How far can he get on a bike in January?”

“What if
they
find him first?”

“Sweetheart, there’s no mob after him. You heard, the Muehler boys didn’t even know about the … accusation. They were talking about other bullshit rumors. We need to talk to Ben to straighten this out, but for all we know he could be home right now.”

“Who’s the family that’s saying he did this?”

“No one said.”

“You can find out though. They can’t just say things like that and expect us to lie down and take it, right? You can find out. We have a right to know who’s saying this. Ben has a right to confront his accuser.
I
have a right.”

“Fine, let’s go back to the house, check in on the girls, and I’ll make some calls. Now will you let me drive?”

THEY WALKED INTO
pure din. Michelle was trying to fry salami strips on the skillet, screaming at Debby to go away. Libby had a splatter of bright pink burns up one arm and a cheek where the grease had hit her, and was sitting on the floor, mouth wide, crying the way Patty had just been crying in the car: as if there was absolutely no hope, and even if there was, she wasn’t up to the challenge.

Patty and Diane moved like they were choreographed, one of those German clocks with the fancy men and women dancing in and out. Diane strode to the kitchen in three big steps and yanked Michelle away from the stove, dragging her by the one arm, doll-like, to the living room, depositing her on the sofa with a swat on her tush. Patty crisscrossed them, swooped up Libby, who monkey-wrapped herself around her mother and continued crying into her neck.

Patty turned on Michelle, who was loosing fat silent tears. “I told you: You may only use the stove to heat soup. You could have set this whole place on fire.”

Michelle glanced around the shabby kitchen and living room as if wondering whether that would be a loss.

“We were hungry,” Michelle mumbled. “You’ve been gone forever.”

“And that means you need a fried salami sandwich your mom told you not to make?” snapped Diane, finishing up the frying, slapping the meat on a plate. “She needs you to be good girls right now.”

“She always needs us to be good girls,” Debby mumbled. She was nuzzling a pink stuffed panda that Ben had won years ago at the Cloud County fair. He’d knocked down a bunch of milk bottles, just as his pre-teen muscles were coming in. The girls had celebrated as if he’d won a Medal of Honor. The Days never won anything. They always said that, marveling, whenever they had a tiny piece of good luck:
We never win anything!
It was the family motto.

“And is it really so hard to be good?” Diane gave Debby a soft chuck under her chin and Debby lowered her gaze even more as she started to smile.

“I guess not.”

Diane said she’d make the calls, grabbing the kitchen phone and pulling it all the way down the hall as far as it could go. As she walked away, she told Patty to feed her dang children—the words riling Patty, as if she was so negligent she often forgot meals. Make tomato soup from ketchup and milk from a powder, yes. Toast some stale bread, add a squirt of mustard and call it a sandwich, yes. On the worst days, yes. But she never forgot. The kids were on the free-lunch program at school, so they always got something there at least. Even as she thought this, she felt worse. Because Patty went to the same school as a kid, and she never had to do Half-Lunch or Free-Lunch, and now her stomach knotted as she remembered the Free-Lunch kids and her patronizing smiles toward them as they presented their dog-eared cards, and the steamy cafeteria ladies would call it out: Free Lunch! And the boy next to her, buzz-haired and confident, would whisper inanely:
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
. And she’d feel sorry for the kids, but not in a way that made her want to help, just in a way that made her not want to look at them anymore.

Libby was still heaving and crying in her arms; Patty’s neck was sweaty from the girl’s hot breaths. After twice asking Libby to look at her, the girl finally blinked and turned her face up to her mother’s.

“I, got, buuurrrned.” Then she started crying again.

“Baby, baby, it’s just a few ouchies. It won’t be permanent, is that what you’re worried about? They’re just some little pink ouchies— you won’t even remember next week.”

“Something bad’s gonna happen!”

Libby was her worrier; she came out of the womb wary and stayed that way. She was the nightmare girl, the fretter. She was an outta-nowhere pregnancy; neither Patty nor Runner were happy. They didn’t even bother with a baby shower; their families were so sick of them procreating that the entire pregnancy was an embarrassment. Libby must have marinated in anxious stomach acid for nine months, soaking up all that worry. Potty training her was surreal— she screamed when she saw what came out of her, ran away naked and frantic. Dropping her off at school had always been an act of utter abandonment, her daughter with the giant, wet eyes, face pressed against the glass, as a kindergarten teacher restrained her.
This past summer she refused to eat for a week, turned white and haunted, then finally (finally, finally) revealed to Patty a pod of warts that had sprouted on one knee. Eyes down, in slow sentences that Patty extracted from her over the course of an hour, Libby explained that she thought the warts might be like poison ivy, that they’d eventually cover her and (sob!) no one would be able to see her face anymore. And when Patty had asked why, why in the world hadn’t Libby told her these worries before, Libby just looked at her like she was crazy.

Whenever possible, Libby prophesized doom. Patty knew that, but the words still made her clench. Something bad had already happened. But it would get worse.

She sat with Libby on the couch, smoothing her hair, patting her back. Debby and Michelle hovered near, fetching tissues for Libby and fussing over her the way they should have done a good hour ago. Debby tried to make the panda pretend-talk to Libby, telling her she was OK, but Libby shoved it away and turned her head. Michelle asked if she could cook everyone soup. They ate soup all through the winter, Patty keeping giant vats of it in the freezer-locker in the garage. They usually ran out right around the end of February. February was the worst month.

Michelle was dumping a big frozen square of beef and vegetables into a stew pot, cracking off the ice, ignoring the plate of salami, when Diane returned with her mouth tugged into a grimace. She lit a cigarette—
trust me, I need it
—and sat down on the sofa, her weight bumping up Patty and Libby like a seesaw. She sent the girls into the kitchen with Michelle, the kids not saying anything, obedient in their nervousness.

“OK. So it’s this family named Cates that started it—they live halfway between here and Salina, send their kid to Kinnakee because the public school’s not finished in their suburb. So it started because Ben was doing after-school volunteering with the Cates girl. Did you know he was volunteering?”