Dark Places(16)

I opened a window in my mom’s room and pushed myself through the broken screen, a breech birth onto the snowy ground just a few feet below, my socks immediately soaked, hair tangling in the bushes. I ran.

Libby! Looking back at the house, just a single light in a window, everything else black.

My feet were raw by the time I reached the pond and crouched in the reeds. I was wearing double layers like my mom, longjohns under my nightgown, but I was shaking, the wind ruffling the dress and blasting cold air straight up to my belly.

A flashlight frenetically scanned the tops of the reeds, then a copse of trees not far away, then the ground not far from me. Libby! Ben’s voice again. Hunting me. Stay where you are, sweetheart! Stay where you are! The flashlight getting closer and closer, those boots crunching on the snow and me weeping hard into my sleeve, racking myself until I was almost ready to stand up and get it over with, and then the flashlight just swung back around and the footsteps marched away from me and I was there by myself, left to freeze to death in the dark. The light in the house went out and I stayed where I was.

Hours later, when I was too numb to stand upright, I crawled in the weak dawn light back to the house, my feet like ringing iron, my hands frozen in crow’s fists. The door was wide open, and I limped inside. On the floor outside the kitchen was a sad little pile of vomit, peas and carrots. Everything else was red—sprays on the walls, puddles in the carpet, a bloody axe left upright on the arm of the sofa. I found my mom lying on the floor in front of her daughters’ room, the top of her head shot off in a triangular slice, axe gashes through her bulky sleeping clothes, one breast exposed. Above her, long strings of red hair were stuck to the walls with blood and brain matter. Debby lay just past her, her eyes wide open and a bloody streak down her cheek. Her arm was nearly cut off; she’d been chopped through the stomach with the axe, her belly lay open, slack like the mouth of a sleeper. I called for Michelle, but I knew she was dead. I tiptoed into our bedroom and found her curled up on her bed with her dolls, her throat black with bruises, one slipper still on, one eye open.

The walls were painted in blood: pentagrams and nasty words. Cunts. Satan. Everything was broken, ripped, destroyed. Jars of food had been smashed against the walls, cereal sprayed around the floor. A single Rice Krispie would be found in my mother’s chest wound, the mayhem was so haphazard. One of Michelle’s shoes dangled by its laces from the cheap ceiling fan.

I hobbled over to the kitchen phone, pulled it down to the floor, dialed my aunt Diane’s number, the only one I knew by heart, and when Diane answered I screamed They’re all dead! in a voice that hurt my own ears for its keening. Then I jammed myself into the crevice between the refrigerator and the oven and waited for Diane.

At the hospital, they sedated me and removed three frostbitten toes and half of a ring finger. Since then I’ve been waiting to die.


I SAT UPRIGHT in the yellow electricity. Pulled myself out of our murder house and back to my grown-up bedroom. I wasn’t going to die for years, I was hunting-dog healthy, so I needed a plan. My scheming Day brain thankfully, blessedly returned to thoughts of my own welfare. Little Libby Day just discovered her angle. Call it survival instinct, or call it what it was: greed.

Those “Day enthusiasts,” those “solvers” would pay for more than just old letters. Hadn’t they asked me where Runner was, and which of Ben’s friends I might still know? They’d pay for information that only I could get. Those jokers who memorized the floor plans to my house, who packed folders full of crime-scene photos, all had their own theories about who killed the Days. Being freaks, they’d have a tough time getting anyone to talk to them. Being me, I could do that for them. The police would humor poor little me, a lot of the suspects even. I could talk to my dad, if that’s what they really wanted, and if I could find him.

Not that it would necessarily lead to anything. At home under my bright hamster-y lights, safe again, I reminded myself that Ben was guilty (had to be had to be), mainly because I couldn’t handle any other possibility. Not if I was going to function, and for the first time in twenty-four years, I needed to function. I started doing the math in my head: $500, say, to talk to the cops; $400 to talk to some of Ben’s friends; $1,000 to track down Runner; $2,000 to talk to Runner. I’m sure the fans had a whole list of people I could cajole into giving Orphan Day some of their time. I could drag this out for months.

I fell asleep, the rum bottle still in my hand, reassuring myself: Ben Day is a killer.





Ben Day





JANUARY 2, 1985

9:13 A.M.





Ben was free-spinning over ice, the wheels of his bike shimmying. The path was for dirtbikes, for summer, and it had iced over, so it was stupid to ride it. It was more stupid what he was doing: pedaling as fast as he could over the bumpy ground, broken corn stalks on both sides like stubble, and him picking at the goddam butterfly sticker one of his sisters had pasted to the speedometer. It’d been there for weeks, buzzing in and out of his vision, pissing him off, but not enough to deal with it. He bet it was Debby who put it there, loll-eyed and mindless: This looks pretty! Ben had the sparkly thing halfway off when he hit a patch of dirt, his front wheel turning completely to the left, his rear bucking out from under him. He didn’t fly clear. He jerked up, one leg still caught on the bike, and fell sideways, his right arm scraping the corn shards, his right leg bending beneath him. His head smashed the dirt hard, his teeth sang like a bell.