Dark Places(78)

Patty winced, Det. Collins watched her wince.

“Let’s try to start this civilly,” Collins said. “Because we’ve got a long way to go together before this is cleared up. The charges leveled against your son, Mrs. Day, are of a very serious, and very concerning nature. At this point, we’ve got four little girls who say that Ben touched them in their private areas, that he made them touch him. That he took them out to some farm area and performed certain … acts that are associated with ritualistic Devil worship.” He said those words—ritualistic Devil worship—the way people who don’t know cars repeat what the mechanic said: It’s a broken fuel pump.

“Ben doesn’t even have a car,” Patty said in a barely audible voice.

“Now the age difference between an eleven-year-old and a fifteen-year-old is only four years, but those are very crucial years,” continued Collins. “We would consider him a danger and a predator if these accusations turn out to be true. And, frankly, we’ll need to talk not only to Ben, but to your little girls too.”

“Ben is a good boy,” Patty said, and hated how limp and weak her voice was. “Everyone likes him.”

“How is he regarded at school?” Collins asked.

“Pardon?”

“Is he considered a popular kid?”

“He has a lot of friends,” Patty mumbled.

“I don’t think he does, ma’am,” Collins said. “From what we understand, he doesn’t have very many friends, he’s a bit of a loner.”

“So what does that prove?” Diane snapped.

“It proves absolutely nothing, Miss … ?”

“Krause.”

“It proves absolutely nothing, Miss Krause. But that fact, combined with the fact that he doesn’t have a strong father figure around, would lead me to believe he may be more vulnerable to, say, a negative influence. Drugs, alcohol, people who are maybe a bit rougher, a bit troubled.”

“He doesn’t associate with delinquents, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Patty said.

“Name summa his friends for me then,” Collins said. “Name the kids he hangs out with. Name who he was with last weekend.”

Patty sat, tongue thick in her mouth, and then shook her head, folded her hands near a smear of someone else’s chocolate icing. It was late coming. But now finally, she was being revealed for what she was: a woman who couldn’t quite keep it together, who lived from emergency to emergency, borrowing money, scrambling for sleep, sliding by when she should have been tending to Ben, encouraging him to pick up a hobby or join a club, not secretly grateful when he locked himself in his room or disappeared for an evening, knowing it was one less kid to deal with.

“There are some parenting gaps then,” Collins sighed, like he already knew the end to the story.

“We want a lawyer before anything else happens, before you talk to any of the kids,” Diane interrupted.

“Frankly, Mrs. Day,” Collins said, not even glancing at Diane, “with three little girls at home, if I were you, I’d want the truth out more than anyone. This kind of behavior doesn’t go away. In fact, if this is true, and to be frank, I think it is, your daughters were probably his first victims.”

Patty looked behind at Libby, who sat licking the frosting off her donut. She thought of how much Libby used to hang on Ben. She thought of all the chores the kids did on their own. Sometimes after a day working in the barn with Ben, the girls would come back to the house, irritated, weepy. But … what? They were little girls, they got tired out and cranky. She wanted to throw her coffee in Collins’s face.

“May I speak plainly?” Collins said, his voice kneading her. “I can’t imagine how … horrible it must be to hear these things as a mother. But I can tell you something, and this is straight from our psychologist, who’s been working one-on-one with these girls, and I can tell you what he tells me. That’s that these girls, they’re telling us things a fifth-grader wouldn’t know about, sexually, unless they’d actually happened. He says they are classic abuse scenarios. You know about the McMartin case, of course.”

Patty vaguely remembered. A preschool in California, and all the teachers were on trial for being Devil worshipers, molesting the kids. She could remember the evening newscast: a pretty sunny California house and then black words stamped across it: Daycare Nightmare.

“Satanic worship is not uncommon, I’m afraid,” Collins was saying. “It’s made its way into all areas of the community, and Devil worshipers tend to target young men, get them in the fold. And part of Devil worship is the … the degradation of children.”

“Do you have any evidence?” Diane bellowed at Collins. “Any witnesses besides some eleven-year-old girls? Do you even have kids yourself? Do you know how easily they imagine things—their whole lives are make-believe. So do you have anyone to vouch for these lies but a bunch of little girls and some Harvard know-it-all psychiatrist who impresses you all?”

“Well, as far as evidence. The girls all said he took their underpants as some sick souvenir or something,” Collins said to Patty. “If you’d let us look around your home, we could start to clear that up.”

“We need to talk to a lawyer before that,” Diane grumbled to Patty.