“Well, hi, Mrs. Day.”
“Hi, Ed. Sorry to bother you on Christmas break.”
“No, no problem.”
“I’m looking for Ben—is he here? Have you seen him?”
“Be-en?” He said it in two syllables, like he was tickled at the idea. “Ah, no, we ain’t seen Ben in … well, I don’t think we seen him this whole year. Aside from school. He’s been hanging around with a different group now.”
“What group?” asked Diane, and Ed looked at her for the first time.
“Uh, we-ell …”
She could see Jim’s silhouette approaching the door, backlit by the picture window in the kitchen. He lumbered toward them, bigger and wider than his brother.
“Can we help you, Mrs. Day?” He nudged his face in, then his torso, slowly moving his brother to the side. The two of them effectively closed off the doorway. It made Patty want to crane her neck around them and peek inside.
“I was just asking Ed if you two’d seen Ben today, and he said you hadn’t been seeing much of him this whole school year.”
“Mmm, no. Wish you’d phoned, could have saved you some time.”
“We need to find him soon, you have any idea where we can find him, it’s sort of a family emergency,” Diane interrupted.
“Mmm, no,” said Jim again. “Wish we could help.”
“You can’t give us even a name of who he spends time with? Surely you must know that.”
Ed had swung to the background now, so he was calling from the shadow of the living room.
“Tell her to phone 1-800-Devils-R-Us!” he cackled.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Jim looked at the door knob in his hand, debating whether to start closing it.
“Jim, can you help us, please?” Patty murmured. “Please?”
The boy frowned, tapped the point of a cowboy boot against the floor like a ballerina, refused to raise his eyes. “He hangs out with, like, the Devil crowd.”
“What does that mean?”
“Some older guy heads it, I don’t know his name. They do a lot of drugs, peyote or whatever, and kill cows and sh-stuff. That’s just what I heard. They don’t go to our school, the kids in it. Except for Ben, I guess.”
“Well, you must know the name of someone,” Patty coaxed.
“I really don’t, Mrs. Day. We steer clear of that stuff. I’m sorry, we tried to stay friends with Ben, but. We go to church here, my parents, they run a tight ship. Er … I’m real sorry.”
He looked at the ground, and stopped talking, and Patty couldn’t think of anything else to ask.
“OK, Jim, thanks.”
He shut the door and before they could turn around, from inside the house they heard a bellow: Asshole, why’d you gotta say that! followed by a heavy bang against the wall.
Libby Day
NOW
Back in the car, Lyle said only three words. “What a nightmare.” In reply, I said, mmmm. Krissi reminded me of me. Grasping and anxious, always bundling things aside for future use. That packet of chips. We scroungers always like little packets of food because people give them up with less hassle.
Lyle and I drove for twenty minutes without saying much, until finally he said, in his summing-up, newscaster voice, “So obviously she’s lying about Ben molesting her. I think she lied to her dad too. I think Lou Cates went nuts, killed your family, and then later, he found out she’d lied. He killed an innocent family for nothing. Hence, his own family disintegrates. Lou Cates disappears, starts drinking.”
“Hence?” I nipped at him.
“It’s a solid theory. Don’t you think?”
“I think you should not come on any more of these interviews. It’s embarrassing.”
“Libby, I’m financing this whole thing.”
“Well, you’re not helping it.”
“Sorry,” he said, and then we stopped talking. As the lights of Kansas City turned the sky a sick orange in the distance, Lyle said, without looking at me, “It’s a solid theory though, right?”
“Everything’s a theory, that’s why it’s a mystery!” I mimicked him. “Just a great mystery, Who Killed The Days?” I proclaimed, brightly. After a few minutes, I said grudgingly. “I think it’s an OK theory, I think we should look at Runner too.”
“Fine by me. Although I’m still going to track down Lou Cates.”
“Be my guest.”
I dropped him back outside Sarah’s, not offering to take him home, Lyle standing on the curb like a kid baffled that his parents can really bear leaving him at camp. I got home late and cranky and anxious to count my money. I’d made $1,000 so far from the Kill Club, with another $500 that Lyle owed me for Krissi, even though Krissi clearly would have talked to anybody. But even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t true. None of those Kill Club misfits could have made that work with Krissi, I thought. She talked to me because we had the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia.
I’d earned my money, I thought, resentful for no reason. Lyle seemed completely fine with paying me. That’s what I did, though— I had angry, defensive conversations in my head, got mad at things that hadn’t even happened yet. Yet.
I’d earned my money (now I felt calmer), and if I heard from Runner, if I talked to Runner, I’d earn a lot more money and be set for a good four months. If I lived very still.
Make that five months: by the time I got home, Lyle had already left a message saying some local Kill Creeps wanted to have a swap meet, buy some of my family’s “memorabilia.” Magda would host, if I was interested. Magda the cave troll who’d drawn Devil horns on my photo. Yes, Magda, I would love to be a guest in your home, where do you keep your silver again?
I clicked off the answering machine, which I’d stolen from a roommate two moves ago. I thought of Krissi and knew her house was probably filled with other people’s crap too. I had a stolen answering machine, a nearly full set of pocketed restaurant silverware, and a half-dozen salt-and-pepper shakers, including the new pair, from Tim-Clark’s that I couldn’t manage to transfer from the hall table to the kitchen. In one corner of my living room, by my old TV set, is a box with more than a hundred small bottles of lotion I’ve swiped. I keep them because I like to look at the lotions all together, pink and purple and green. I know this would look crazy to anyone who came to my home, but no one does, and I like them too much to get rid of them. My mom’s hands were always rough and dry, she was constantly oiling them, to no avail. It was one of our favorite ways to tease her: “Oh mom don’t touch, you’re like an alligator!” The church we fitfully attended kept lotion in the women’s room that she said smelled like roses: we’d all take turns squirting and sniffing our hands, complimenting each other on our ladylike scent.
No phone call from Diane. She’d have gotten my message by now, and she hadn’t called. That seemed strange. Diane always made it easy for me to apologize. Even after this latest round of silent treatment— six years. Guess I should have autographed my book for her.
I turned around to the other set of boxes, the under-the-stairs boxes that had grown more ominous the more I let myself think about the murders. It’s just stuff, I told myself. It cannot hurt you.
When I was fourteen, I thought a lot about killing myself—it’s a hobby today, but at age fourteen it was a vocation. On a September morning, just after school started, I’d gotten Diane’s .44 Magnum and held it, babylike, in my lap for hours. What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart. But I thought about Diane, and her coming home to my small torso and a red wall, and I couldn’t do it. It’s probably why I was so hateful to her, she kept me from what I wanted the most. I just couldn’t do it to her, though, so I made a bargain with myself: If I still feel this bad on February 1, I will kill myself. And it was just as bad on February 1, but again I made the bargain: If it’s this bad May 1, I’ll do it. And so on. I’m still here.
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I looked at the boxes and made a quieter kind of bargain: If I can’t stand doing this anymore in twenty minutes, I’ll burn the whole lot.
The first box came apart easily, one side collapsing as soon as I pulled off the tape. Inside, at the top of the pile, was a concert T-shirt for The Police that was my mom’s, food-stained and extremely soft.
Eighteen minutes.
Below that was a rubberbanded bunch of notebooks, all Debby’s. I flipped through random pages:
Harry S Truman was the 33rd American
president and from Missouri.
The heart is the pump of the body it keeps blood
going all over the body.
Under that was a pile of notes, from Michelle to me, from me to Debby, from Debby to Michelle. Sifting through these, I plucked out a birthday card with an ice-cream sundae on the front, its cherry made with red sequins.
Dear Debby, wrote my mom in her cramped handwriting.
We are so lucky to have such a sweet, kind, helpful girl in our
family. You are my cherry on top! Mom
She never wrote Mommy, I thought, we never called her that even as kids. I want my mommy, I thought. We never said that. I want my mom. I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone.
Fourteen minutes.
I rummaged through more notes, putting the boring, inane ones aside for the Kill Club, missing my sisters, laughing at some of them, the strange worries we had, the coded messages, the primitive drawings, the lists of people we liked and didn’t like. I’d forgotten we were tight, the Day girls. I wouldn’t have said we were, but now, studying our writings like a spinster anthropologist, I realized it was true.
Eleven minutes. Here were Michelle’s diaries, all rubberbanded together in a faux-leathery bundle. Every year she got two for Christmas—she needed twice as many as a normal girl. She’d always start the new one right there while we were still under the tree, chronicling every gift each of us got, keeping score.
I flipped open one from 1983 and remembered what a rotten busybody Michelle was, even at age nine. The day’s entry talked about how she heard her favorite teacher, Miss Berdall, saying dirty things to a man on the phone in the teachers’ lounge—and Miss Berdall wasn’t even married. Michelle wondered if she confronted her, maybe Miss Berdall would bring her something nice for lunch. (Apparently Miss Berdall had once given Michelle half her jelly donut, which had left Michelle permanently fixated on Miss Berdall and her brown paper bags. Teachers were usually reliable for half a sandwich or a piece of fruit if you stared at them long enough. You just couldn’t do it too much or you’d get a note sent home and Mom would cry.) Michelle’s diaries were filled with drama and innuendo of a very grade-school level: At recess, Mr. McNany smoked just outside the boys’ locker room, and then used breath spray (breath spray underlined several times) so no one would know. Mrs. Joekep from church was drinking in her car … and when Michelle asked Mrs. Joekep if she had the flu, since why was she drinking from that bottle, Mrs. Joekep laughed and gave her $20 for Girl Scout cookies, even though Michelle wasn’t a Girl Scout.
Hell, she even wrote things about me: she knew, for instance, I lied to Mom about punching Jessica O’Donnell. This was true, I gave the poor girl a black eye but swore to my mom she fell off a swing. Libby told me the Devil made her do it, Michelle wrote. Think I should tell Mom?
I closed the book on 1983, browsed through 1982 and 1984. The diary for the second half of 1984 I read carefully, in case Michelle said anything noteworthy about Ben. Not much, except repeated claims that he was a big jerk and no one liked him. I wondered if the cops had had the same idea. I pictured some poor rookie, eating Chinese food at midnight while reading about how Michelle’s best friend got her period.
Nine minutes. More birthday cards and letters, and then I dug up a note that was folded more expertly than the rest, origami’d so it looked almost phallic, which, I supposed, was the intention, as the word STUD was written at the top. I opened it up, and read the rounded girlish writing:
11/5/84
Dear Stud,
I’m in biology and I’m fingering myself under the desk I am so hot for you. Can you picture my pussy? It’s still nice and red from you. Come over to my house after school today, K? I want to jump your bones!!! I’m so horny, even now. I wish you’d just live with me whenever my parents are gone. Your mom won’t know, she’s so spacy! Why would you stay at home when you could be with me?! Get some balls and tell your mom to go to hell. I’d hate for you to come for a visit one day and find me getting some action somewhere else. JK! Oh I want to cum so much. Meet me at my car after school, I’ll park over on Passel St.
See ya soon,
Diondra
Ben had not had a girlfriend, he hadn’t. Not a single person, including Ben, had ever said so. The name didn’t even sound familiar. At the bottom of the box was a stack of our school yearbooks, from 1975, when Ben started school, to 1990, when Diane sent me away the first time.
I opened the yearbook for 1984–1985, and scanned Ben’s class. No Diondra, but a photo of Ben that hurt: sloped shoulders, a loose half-mullet, and an Oxford shirt that he always wore on special occasions. I pictured him, back home, putting it on for Picture Day, practicing in the mirror how he’d smile. In September 1984 he was still wearing shirts my mom bought him, and by January he was an angry, black-haired kid accused of murder. I skimmed through the class above Ben’s, jerking occasionally as I hit Dianes and Dinas, but no Diondra. Then to the class above that, about to give up, when there she was, Diondra Wertzner. Worst name ever, and I pulled my finger over the row, expecting to find a lunchlady in the making, someone coarse and mustached, and instead found a pretty, plump-cheeked girl with a fountain of dark spiral curls. She had small features, which she overplayed with heavy makeup, but even in the photo she popped off the page. Something in the deep-set eyes, a daring, with her lips parted so you could see pointy puppy-teeth.
I pulled out the yearbook for the previous year, and she was gone. I pulled out the yearbook for the following year, and she was gone.
Ben Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
3:10 P.M.
Trey’s truck smelled like weed, sweat socks, and sweet wine cooler that Diondra had probably spilled. Diondra tended to pass out while still holding a bottle in her hand, it was her preferred way to drink, to do it til it knocked her out, that last sip nearby just in case. The truck was littered with old fast-food wrappers, fish hooks, a Penthouse, and, on the fuzzy mat at Ben’s feet, a crate of cartons labeled Mexican Jumping Beans, each box featuring a little bean wearing a sombrero, swooshes at its feet to make it look like it was bouncing.
“Try one,” Trey said, motioning at it.
“Nah, isn’t that supposed to be bugs or something?”
“Yeah, they’re like beetle larvae,” Trey said, and gave his jack-hammer laugh.
“Great, thanks, that’s cool.”
“Oh shit, man, I’m just fucking with you, lighten up.”
They pulled into a 7-Eleven, Trey waving to the Mexican guy behind the counter—now there’s a bean for you—loading Ben up with a case of Beast, some microwave nachos that Diondra always whined for, and a fistful of beef jerky, which Trey held in his hand like a bouquet.
The guy smiled at Trey, made an ululating Indian war sound. Trey crossed his arms in front of his chest and pretended to do a hat dance. “Just ring me up, José.” The guy didn’t say anything else, and Trey left him the change, which was a good three bucks. Ben kept thinking about that on the drive to Diondra’s. That most of this world was filled with people like Trey, who’d just leave behind three dollars without even thinking of it. Like Diondra. A few months back, at the very hot end of September, Diondra ended up having to babysit two of her cousins or step-half-cousins or something, and she and Ben had driven them to a water park near the Nebraska border. She’d been driving her mom’s Mustang for a month (she was bored with her own car) a
nd the backseat was filled with things they’d brought, things it would never occur to Ben to own: three different kinds of sunscreen, beach towels, squirt bottles, rafts, inflatable rings, beach balls, pails. The kids were small, like six or seven years old, and they were jammed back there with all that crap, the inflatable rafts making a whoogee-whoogee sound every time they moved, and somewhere near Lebanon, the kids rolled down the window, giggling, the rafts making more and more noise, like they were climaxing in some air mattress mating ritual, and Ben realized what the kids were giggling about. They were scraping all the change Diondra left in the backseat, on the floor, in the crevices—she just tossed any change she had back there—and the kids were throwing it by the handful out the window so they could watch it scatter like sparks. And not just pennies, a lot of it was quarters.
Ben thought that was how you could tell the difference between most people. It wasn’t I’m a dog person and I’m a cat person or I’m a Chiefs fan and I’m a Broncos guy. It was whether you cared about quarters. To him, four quarters was a dollar. A stack of quarters was lunch. The amount of quarters those little shits threw out the window that day could have bought him half a pair of jeans. He kept asking the kids to stop, telling them it was dangerous, illegal, they could get a ticket, they needed to sit down and face forward. The kids laughed and Diondra howled—Ben won’t get his allowance this week if you keep taking his change—and he realized he’d been found out. He hadn’t been as quick-wristed as he’d thought: Diondra knew he scraped after her leftover coins. He felt like a girl whose dress just shot up in the wind. And he wondered what that said about her, seeing her boyfriend scrape around for change and saying nothing, did that make her nice? Or mean.
Trey rolled up full speed to Diondra’s house, a giant beige box surrounded by a chainlink fence to keep Diondra’s pit bulls from killing the mailman. She had three pits, one a white sack of muscles with giant balls and crazy eyes that Ben disliked even more than the other two. She let them in the house when her parents were gone, and they jumped on tables and crapped all over the floor. Diondra didn’t clean it up, just sprayed bathroom air freshener on all the shit-entwined carpet threads. That nice blue rug in the rec room—a dusty violet, Diondra called it—was now a land mine of ground-in dumps. Ben tried not to care. It wasn’t his business, as Diondra was happy to remind him.