Dark Places(92)
She was about to lecture Michelle on not going into Ben’s room without his permission, and wanted to slap herself. She thought about what Det. Collins had said, the organs of animals, in Tupper-ware containers. She imagined them. Some dried in tight, wooden balls, others fresh and assaulting when you opened the lid, let the smell hit you.
Patty stood up. “What’s in his room?”
She started walking down the hall, Ben’s goddang phone cord tripping her up, as always. She marched past his padlocked door, down the hall, turned the corner left, past the girls’ room and into her own. Socks and shoes and jeans lay everywhere, each day’s flotsam abandoned in piles.
She opened her bedside table and found an envelope, In Case of Emergency scrawled on the front in Diane’s elongated cursive that looked just like their mother’s. Inside was $520, cash. She had no idea when Diane had sneaked that in her room, and she was glad she hadn’t known, because Runner would have sensed her holding out. She lifted the money to her nose and smelled it. Then she tucked the envelope back inside and pulled out a bolt-cutter she’d bought weeks ago, just to have on hand, just if she ever needed to get into Ben’s lair. She’d been ashamed. She started back down the hallway, the girls’ room looking like a flophouse, beds against each wall except the doorway. She could picture the police wrinkling their noses— they all sleep in here?—and then the aroma of urine hit her and she realized one of them must have wet the bed last night. Or the night before?
She debated switching out the sheets right then, but made herself walk straight back to Ben’s, stood eye-level with an old Fender Guitar sticker he’d partly scraped off. She had a quick moment of nausea when she almost decided she couldn’t look. What if she found incriminating photos, sickening Polaroids?
Snap. The lock fell to the carpet. She yelled at the girls, peeking out from the living room like startled deer, to go watch TV. She had to say it three times—gowatchTVgowatchTVgowatchTV-—before Michelle finally went away.
Ben’s bed was unmade, rumpled under a pile of jackets and jeans and sweaters, but the rest of the room wasn’t a pit. His desk was piled with notebooks and cassette tapes and an outdated globe that had been Diane’s. Patty spun it, her finger leaving a mark in the dust near Rhodesia, then began flipping through the notebooks. They were covered in band logos: AC/DC with the lightning slash, Venom, Iron Maiden. On the notebook paper, Ben had drawn pentagrams and poems about murder and Satan.
The child is mine
But really not
Cuz Satan has a darker plot
Kill the baby and its mother
Then look for more
And kill another
She felt a ripple of illness, as if a vein running from her throat to her pelvis had gone sour. She riffled through more notebooks, and as she shook the last one, it flipped naturally to the middle. For pages and pages, Ben had drawn ballpoint pictures of vaginas with hands going into them, uteruses with creatures inside, grinning demonically, pregnant ladies sliced in two, their babies half falling out.
Patty sat down on Ben’s chair, feeling giddy, but she kept flipping until she came to a page with several girls’ names written in pancake-stack rows: Heather, Amanda, Brianne, Danielle, Nicole, and then over and over, in progressively embellished gothic cursive: Krissi, Chrissy, Krissi, Krissie, Krissi, Krissi Day, Krissi Day, Krissi Dee Day Krissi D. Day, Krissi D-Day!
Krissi Day inside a heart.
Patty rested her head on the cool desktop. Krissi Day. Like he was going to marry little Krissi Cates. Ben and Krissi Day. Is that what he thought? Did that make what he did to her seem OK? Did he picture himself bringing that little girl home for dinner, letting Mom meet his girlfriend? And Heather. That was the name of the Hinkel girl who was at the Cates’s. Were the rest of these names even more girls he’d hurt?
Patty’s head was heavy, she willed herself not to move. She would just keep her head right here, on the desk, until someone told her what to do. She was good at this, she sometimes sat for hours without leaving a chair, her head bobbing like a nursing-home inmate, thinking about her childhood, when her parents had their list of chores for her, and told her when to go to bed and when to get up and what to do during the day, and no one ever asked her to decide things. But as she was staring at the rumpled sheets on Ben’s bed, with the airplane pattern, and remembering him asking for new sheets—plain sheets—about a year ago, she notice a wadded plastic bag jutting out from underneath the bed frame.
She got down on her hands and knees, pulled out an old plastic shopping bag. It had a weight to it, swung out like a pendulum. She peered in and saw only clothing, and then she realized she was looking at girly patterns: flowers and hearts, mushrooms and rainbows. She dumped them out in a pile on the floor, afraid even as she was doing it that that those Polaroids she feared would tumble out with them. But it was just clothes: underwear, undershirts, bloomers. They were all different sizes, from Krissi’s age to toddler. They were used. As in, they had been worn by little girls. Just like the detective had said. Patty put them back in the bag.
Her son. Her son. He would go to prison. The farm would be gone, Ben would be in jail, and the girls … She realized, as she too often did, that she didn’t know how to function properly. Ben needed a good lawyer, and she didn’t know how to do that.
She walked into the living room, thinking about a trial and how she couldn’t bear it. She scattered the girls back to their bedroom in a fierce voice, them staring back at her with open mouths, hurt and scared, and she thought about how she made things even worse for Ben, a single mother who was incompetent, overwhelmed, how much worse it made him look, and she put some kindling and newspapers in the fireplace, and just a few logs on top, and she set fire to the clothes. A pair of underpants with daisies on them was just catching at the waistband when the phone rang.