Dark Places

  “So, Ben Day,” she continued. “Red-headed bastard. He really fucked my life up.”

  “So, you maintain you were molested by him?” Lyle said, leaning out from behind me like a squirrel.

  I turned around to glare at him, but Krissi didn’t seem to care. She had the incuriosity of the drugged. She continued to speak only to me.

  “Yeah. Yeah. It was all part of his satanic thing. I think he’d have sacrificed me, I think that was the plan. He’d have killed me if they hadn’t caught him for, you know, what he did to his family.”

  People always wanted their piece of the murders. Just like everyone in Kinnakee knew someone who’d screwed my mom, everyone had suffered some close call with Ben. He’d threatened to kill them, he’d kicked their dog, he’d looked at them really scary-like one day. He’d bled when he heard a Christmas song. He’d shown them the mark of Satan, tucked behind one ear, and asked them to join his cult. Krissi had that eagerness, that intake of air before she started talking.

  “So what happened exactly?” I asked.

  “You want the PG or R version?” She ordered another round of vodka and cranberry and then called out for three Slippery Nipple shots. The bartender poured them, pre-made, from a plastic jug, raised an eyebrow at me, asked us if we wanted to start a tab.

  “It’s fine, Kevin, my friend’s got it,” Krissi said, and then laughed. “What’s your name anyway?”

  I avoided the question by asking the bartender how much I owed, paid it from a fan of twenties so Krissi knew I had more money. Takes a mooch to catch a mooch.

  “You’ll love these, like drinking a cookie,” she said. “Cheers!” she raised the shot up with a screw-you gesture toward a dark window in the back of the club, where I guessed Mike was sitting. We drank, the shot sitting thick in my throat, Lyle making a whoo! noise like it had been whiskey.

  After a few beats, Krissi readjusted a boob and then pulled in another big gulp of air. “So, yeah. I was eleven, Ben was fifteen. He started hanging around me after school, just always watching me. I mean, I got that a lot, I always got that. I was always a cute kid, I’m not bragging, I just was. And we had a lot of money. My dad—” here I caught a flicker of pain, a quick wrinkle of her lip that exposed a single tooth—“he was a self-made man. Got into the videotape industry right at the start, he was the biggest videotape wholesaler in the Midwest.”

  “Like, movies?”

  “No, like blank tapes, for people to record stuff on. Remember? Well, you probably were too young.”

  I wasn’t.

  “Anyway, so I was kind of an easy target maybe. Not like I was a latchkey kid or anything, but my mom didn’t keep the best eye out for me all the time, I guess.” This time a more obvious look of bitterness.

  “Wait, why are you here again?” she asked.

  “I’m researching the case.”

  Her mouth drooped down at the corners. “Oh. For a second I thought my mom sent you. I know she knows I’m here.”

  She clicked long, coral nails on the counter and I hid my left hand, with its stumped finger, under my shotglass. I knew I should care something about Krissi’s homelife but I didn’t. Well, I cared enough not to tell her that her mom was never going to check up on her.

  One of the patrons at one of the plastic tables kept peeling off glances at us, looking over his shoulder with a drunk pissiness. I wanted to get out of there, leave Krissi and her issues behind.

  “So,” Krissi began again. “Ben was really sneaky with me. He’d, like … you want some chips? The chips are really good here.”

  The chips hung in cheap snack packs behind the bar. The chips are really good here. I had to like the woman for working me so hard. I nodded a yes and soon Krissi was tearing into a bag, the stench of sour-cream-and-onion making my mouth water in spite of its better judgment. Yellow flavoring stuck to Krissi’s bubblegum lipgloss.

  “Anyway, so Ben earned my trust and then started molesting me.”

  “How did he earn your trust?”

  “You know, gum, candy, saying nice things to me.”

  “And how did he molest you?”

  “He’d take me into the closet where he kept his janitor stuff, he was a janitor at the school, I remember he always smelled horrible, like dirty bleach. He’d take me in there after school and make me perform oral sex on him and then he’d perform oral sex on me and he’d make me swear allegiance to Satan. I was so so scared. He’d tell me, you know, that he’d hurt my parents if I told.”

  “How did he make you go into the closet?” Lyle asked. “If it was at school?”

  Krissi turtled her neck at that, the same angry gesture I’ve always made when anyone questioned my testimony about Ben.

  “Just, you know, threaten me. He had an altar in there, he’d pull it out, it was an upside-down cross. I think some dead animals too that he’d killed were in there. A sacrifice thing. That’s why I think he was working up to killing me. But he got his family instead. The whole family was into it, that’s what I heard. That the whole family was worshiping the Devil and stuff.” She licked chip shards off her thick plastic fingernails.

  “I doubt that,” I muttered.

  “Well, how do you know?” Krissi snapped. “I lived through this, OK?”

  I kept waiting for her to figure out who I was, to let my face— not so different from Ben’s face—float into her memory, to notice the wide hairline of red roots springing from my head.

  “So how many times did Ben molest you?”

  “Countless. Countless.” She nodded somberly.

  “How did your dad react when you told him what Ben had done to you?” Lyle asked.

  “Oh my god he was so protective of me, he freaked, went totally ballistic. He drove around town that day, the day of the murders, looking for Ben. I always think if he’d only found Ben, he’d have killed him, and then Ben’s family would still be alive. Isn’t that sad?”

  My gut clenched at that and then my anger flared back.

  “Ben’s family—the horrible Devil worshipers?”

  “Well, maybe I was exaggerating on that.” Krissi cocked her head, the way grown-ups do when they’re trying to placate a child. “I’m sure they were nice Christian people. Just think, if my dad had found Ben though …”

  Just think if your dad didn’t find Ben and instead found my family. Found a gun, found an axe, wiped us out. Almost wiped us out.

  “Did your dad come back to your house that night?” Lyle asked. “Did you see him after midnight?”

  Krissi lowered her chin again, raised her eyebrows at me, and I added a more reassuring, “I mean, how did you know he never made contact with any of the Days?”

  “Because I’m serious, he would have done some serious damage. I was like, the apple of his eye. It killed him, what happened to me. Killed him.”

  “He live around here?” Lyle was freaking her out, his intensity was laserlike.

  “Uh, we’ve lost touch,” she said, already looking around the bar for the next score. “I think it was all too much for him.”

  “Your family sued the school district, didn’t they?” Lyle said, leaning in, getting greedy. I moved my stool so I blocked him off a bit, hoping he’d get the idea.

  “Hell yeah. They needed to be sued, letting someone like that work there, letting a little girl get molested right under their noses. I came from a really good family—”

  Lyle cut her off. “Do you mind if I ask, with the settlement … how did you end up, uh, here?” The customer at the table was now turned around entirely in his chair, watching us, belligerent.

  “My family had some business setbacks. The money’s been gone a long time. It’s not like it’s a bad thing, working here. People always think that. It’s not, it’s empowering, it’s fun, it makes people happy. How many people can say all that about their jobs? It’s not like I’m a whore.”

  I frowned before I could help myself, looked in the direction of the truck park.

  “That?”
Krissi fake-whispered. “I was just getting a hold of a little something for tonight. I wasn’t … oh God. No. Some girls do, but I don’t. There’s some poor girl, sixteen years old, works it with her mom. I try to look out for her. Colleen. I keep thinking I should call child services on her or something? Who do you even call for something like that?”

  Krissi asked it with all the concern of finding a new gynecologist.

  “Can we get your dad’s address?” Lyle asked.

  Krissi stood up, about twenty minutes after I would have. “I told you, we’re not in touch,” she said.

  Lyle started to say something when I turned to him, poked a finger toward his chest and mouthed, Shut up. He opened his mouth, shut it, looked at the girl onstage, who was now pantomiming fucking the floor, and walked out the door.

  It was too late, though, Krissi was already saying she had to go meet someone. As I was settling up with the bartender she asked me if she could borrow twenty dollars.

  “I’ll buy Colleen some dinner with it,” she lied. Then she quickly changed it to fifty. “I just haven’t cashed my work check yet. I will totally pay you back.” She made an elaborate play out of getting a sheet of paper and a pen for me, told me to write down my address and she’d totally totally mail me the money.

  I mentally put the cash on Lyle’s tab, forked it over to Krissi, her counting it in front of me like I might shortchange her. She opened the big maw of her purse and a child’s sippy cup rolled out onto the floor.

  “Leave it,” she waved at me when I bent to pick it up, and so I left it.

  Then I took the greasy scrap of paper and wrote down my address and my name. Libby Day. My name is Libby Day, you lying whore.

  Patty Day

  JANUARY 2, 1985

  1:50 P.M.

  Patty wondered how many hours she and Diane had spent I rumbling around in cars together: a thousand? two thousand? Maybe if you added it all up, a sum total of two years, put end to end, the way mattress companies always did: You spend a third of your life asleep, why not do it on a ComfortCush? Eight years standing in lines, they say. Six years peeing. Put like that, life was grim. Two years waiting in the doctor’s office, but a total of three hours watching Debby at breakfast laughing until milk started dribbling down her chin. Two weeks eating soppy pancakes her girls made for her, the middle still sour with batter. Only one hour staring in amazement as Ben unconsciously tucked his baseball cap behind his ears in a gesture mirror-perfect to what his grandpa did, his grandpa dead when Ben was just a baby. Six years of hauling manure, though, three years of ducking calls from bill collectors. Maybe a month of having sex, maybe a day of having good sex. She’d slept with three men in her life. Her gentle high school boyfriend; Runner, the hotshot who stole her from her gentle high school boyfriend and left her with four (wonderful) children; and a guy she dated for a few months some-where in the years after Runner left. They’d slept together three times with the kids at home. It always ended awkwardly. Ben, sulky and possessive at age eleven, would park himself in the kitchen so he could glower at them as they left her bedroom in the morning, Patty worrying about the guy’s semen on her, that smell so stark and embarrassing with your children still in their pajamas. It was clearly not going to work from the start, and she’d never gotten the courage up to try again. Libby would graduate from high school in eleven years, so maybe then. She’d be forty-three, which was right when women were supposed to peak sexually. Or something. Maybe it was menopause.

  “We heading to the school?” Diane asked, and Patty pulled out of her three-second trance to remember their horrible errand, their mission: find her son and, what? Hide him away til this blew over? Drive him to the little girl’s house and straighten it all out? In family movies, the mom always caught the son stealing, and she’d march him back over to the drugstore and get him to hand over the candy on a shaky palm, and beg forgiveness. She knew Ben shoplifted some. Before he started locking his door, she’d occasionally find strange, pocket-sized items in his room. A candle, batteries, a plastic packet of toy soldiers. She’d never said anything, which was horrible. Part of her didn’t want to deal with it—drive all the way into town, and talk to some kid who got paid minimum wage and didn’t care anyway. And the other part (even worse) thought, Why the hell not? The boy had so little, why not keep pretending this was something a friend gave him? Let him have this stolen trifle, a pebble-plunk of a wrongdoing in the grand scheme.

  “No, he wouldn’t go to the school. He only works Sundays.”

  “Well, where?”

  They came to a stoplight, swaying on a line like laundry. The road dead-ended onto the pasture of a land-rich family that lived in Colorado. Turn right and they were heading to Kinnakee proper— the town, the school. Turn left and they were going deeper into Kansas, all farmland, where Ben’s two friends lived, those shy Future Farmers of America who couldn’t bear to ask for Ben when she picked up the phone.

  “Take a left, we’ll go see the Muehlers.”

  “He still hangs around with them? That’s good. No one could think those boys would do anything … weird.”

  “Oh, because Ben would?”

  Diane sighed and turned left.

  “I’m on your side, P.”

  The Muehler brothers had dressed as farmers for Halloween every year since birth, their parents driving them into Kinnakee in the same wide-body truck, the boys deposited on Bulhardt Avenue for trick-or-treating in their tiny John Deere baseball caps and overalls while the parents drank coffee at the diner. The Muehler brothers, like their parents, talked only about alfalfa and wheat and weather, and went to church on Sunday, where they prayed for things that were probably crop-related. The Muehlers were good people with no imagination, with personalities so tied to the land, even their skin seemed to take on the ridges and furrows of Kansas.

  “I know.” Patty reached to put her hand on Diane’s just as Diane shifted gears, so her hand hung just above her sister’s and then went back to her lap.

  “Oh you bleeping jerk!” Diane said to a car ahead of her, rolling along at twenty miles an hour and deliberately going slower as Diane closed in on the bumper. She swerved up to pass them and Patty stared rigidly ahead, even though she could feel the driver’s face on her, a murky moon in her peripheral. Who was this person? Had they heard the news? Is that why they were staring, maybe even pointing? There’s the woman who raised that boy. The Day boy. A hundred phones were rattling this morning, if Diane had heard last night. At home her three girls were probably sitting in front of the TV, turning from cartoons to the blaring telephone, which they’d been told to pick up in case Ben called. They seemed unlikely to follow that instruction: they were strung out with the fear of the morning. If anyone dropped by, they’d find three unattended, teary kids, age ten and under, huddled on the living room floor, cringing at the noise.

  “Maybe one of us should have stayed home … in case,” Patty said.

  “You’re not going anywhere by yourself while this is going on, and I don’t know where to go. This is the right thing. Michelle’s a big girl. I watched you when I was younger’n her.”

  But that was back when people still did that, Patty thought. Back when people went out for a whole night and left the kids on their own and no one thought anything of it. In the ’50s and ’60s, out on that quiet old prairie where nothing ever happened. Now little girls weren’t supposed to ride bikes alone or go anywhere in groups of less than three. Patty had attended a party thrown by one of Diane’s work friends, like a Tupperware party, but with rape whistles and mace instead of wholesome plastic containers. She’d made a joke about what kind of lunatic would drive all the way out to Kinnakee to attack someone. A blond woman she’d just met looked up from her new pepper-spray keychain and said, “A friend of mine was raped once.” Patty had bought several cans of mace out of guilt.

  “People think I’m a bad mother, that’s why this is happening.”

  “No one thinks you’re a bad mother. You’r
e superwoman as far as I’m concerned: you keep the farm going, get four kids to school every day, and don’t drink a gallon of bourbon to do it.”

  Patty immediately thought of the freezing cold morning two weeks ago, when she almost wept with exhaustion. Actually putting on clothes and driving the girls to school seemed an entirely remote possibility. So she let them all stay home and watch ten hours of soap operas and game shows with her. She made poor Ben ride his bike, shooed him out the door with a promise she’d petition again to get the school bus to come to them next year.

  “I’m not a good mother.”

  “Hush.”

  THE MUEHLERS’ HOME was on a decent chunk of land, four hundred acres at least. The house was tiny and looked like a buttercup, a swipe of yellow against miles of green winter wheat and snow. It was blowing even harder than before now; the forecast said it would snow through the night, and then would come sudden springlike temperatures. That promise was wedged in her brain: sudden springlike temperatures.

  They drove up the skinny, unwelcoming strip of road leading to the house, past a tiller sitting just inside the barn like an animal. Its hooked blades cast claw shadows on the ground. Diane made a sinus noise she always resorted to when she was uncomfortable, a fake clearing of the throat to fill the silence. Neither of them looked at the other as they got out of the car. Attentive black grackles perched in the trees, cawing continually, ill-natured, noisy birds. One of them flew past, a silvery trail of Christmas tinsel fluttering from its beak. But otherwise the place was immobile, no motors of any kind, no gates clanking shut, no TV within, just the silence of land packed under snow.

  “Don’t see Ben’s bike,” was all Diane said as they banged the doorknocker.

  “Could be around back.”

  Ed answered the door. Jim, Ed, and Ben were all in the same grade, but the brothers weren’t twins, one of them had flunked at least once, maybe twice. She thought it was Ed. He goggled at her for a second, a short kid of only 5’4” or so, but with a man’s athletic build. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked behind him.