Dark Places(9)

“Well, that was weird,” she offered. The girls perked up a bit, visibly sitting higher in their chairs.

“He’s so weird,” Michelle added.

“His hair matches his clothes now,” Debby said, wiping her tears on the back of her hand, and forking some pancake into her mouth.

Libby just looked at her plate, shoulders caved in toward the table. It was a look of dejection only a kid could pull off.

“It’s OK, Lib,” Patty said, and tried to pat her casually without getting the other girls going again.

“No it’s not,” she said. “He hates us.”





Libby Day





NOW





Five nights after my beer with Lyle, I drove down the bluff from my house, and then down some more, into the trough of Kansas City’s West Bottoms. The neighborhood had thrived back in the stockyard era and then spent many decades the-opposite-of-thriving. Now it was all tall, quiet brick buildings, bearing names of companies that no longer existed: Raftery Cold Storage, London Beef, Dannhauser Cattle Trust. A few reclaimed structures had been converted into professional haunted houses that lit up for the Halloween season: five-story slides and vampire castles and drunk teenagers hiding beers inside letter jackets.

In early March, the place was just lonesome. As I drove through the still streets, I’d occasionally spot someone entering or leaving a building, but I had no idea what for. Near the Missouri River the area turned from semi-empty to ominously vacant, an upright ruin.

I felt a bulb of unease as I parked in front of a four-story building labeled Tallman Corporation. This was one of those moments where I wished I had more friends. Or, friends. I should have someone with me. Barring that, I should have someone who’d be waiting to hear from me. As it was, I’d left a note on the stairs inside my house, explaining where I was, with Lyle’s letter attached. If I disappeared, the cops would have a place to start. Of course, if I had a friend, maybe the friend would tell me, No way am I letting you do that, sweetie, the way women always said things, in that protective voice.

Or maybe not. The murders had left me permanently off-kilter in these kinds of judgment calls. I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen. But, then, weren’t the chances minuscule that I, Libby Day, would meet harm on top of it? Wasn’t I safe by default? A shiny, indestructible statistic. I can’t decide, so I veer between drastic overcaution (sleeping with the lights on at all times, my mom’s old Colt Peacemaker on my bedside table) to ridiculous incaution (venturing by myself to a Kill Club in a vacant building).

I was wearing boots with big heels, to give myself another few inches, the right one fitting much looser than the other because of my bad foot. I wanted to crack every bone in my body, loosen things up. I was tight. Pissed, my teeth gritted. No one should need money this badly. I’d tried to cast what I was doing in an inoffensive light, and in brief flashes over the past day, I’d turned myself into something noble. These people were interested in my family, I was proud of my family, and I was allowing these strangers some insight they wouldn’t otherwise have. And if they wanted to offer me money, I’d take it, I wasn’t too good for that.

In truth though, I wasn’t proud of my family. No one had ever liked the Days. My dad, Runner Day, was crazy, drunk, and violent in an unimpressive way—a small man with sneaky fists. My mom had four kids she couldn’t take proper care of. Poor, farm-bust kids, smelly and manipulative, always showing up at school in need: breakfast skipped, shirts ripped, snotty and strep-throat ridden. Me and my two sisters had been the cause of at least four lice infestations in our short grade-school experience. Dirty Days.

And here I was, twenty-some years later, still showing up to places, needing things. Money, specifically. In the back pocket of my jeans was a note Michelle had written me a month before the murders. She’d ripped it from a spiral notebook, the fringe carefully trimmed away, then folded it elaborately into the shape of an arrow. It talked about the usual things that filled Michelle’s fourth-grade mind: a boy in her class, her dumb teacher, some ugly designer jeans that some spoiled girl got for her birthday. It was boring, unmemorable—I had boxes of this stuff I crated from house to house and never opened until now. I’d need $200 for it. I had a quick, guilty burst of glee when I thought of all the other crap I could sell, notes and photos and junk I’d never had the balls to throw out. I got out of my car and took a breath, popped my neck.

The night was cold, with balmy pockets of spring here and there. An enormous yellow moon hung in the sky like a Chinese lamp.

I climbed the soiled marble stairs, dirty leaves crunching beneath my boots, an unwholesome, old-bones sound. The doors were a thick, weighty metal. I knocked, waited, knocked three more times, standing exposed in the moonglow like a heckled vaudevillian. I was about to phone Lyle on my cell when the door swung open, a tall, long-faced guy looking me up and down.

“Yeah?”

“Uh, is Lyle Wirth here?”

“Why would Lyle Wirth be here?” he said without a smile. Screwing with me because he could.

“Oh, f*ck you,” I blurted, and turned away, feeling idiotic. I got three steps when the guy called after me.

“Jeez, wait, don’t get bent out of shape.”

But I was born bent out of shape. I could picture myself coming out of the womb crooked and wrong. It never takes much for me to lose patience. The phrase f*ck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue.