Dark Places

Chapter 17

Libby Day NOW

Lyle was stiff and silent as we drove toward Magda's for our meeting. I wondered if he was judging me, me and my packet of notes I was going to sell. Nothing I'd decided to part with was particularly interesting: I had five birthday cards my mom had given Michelle and Debby over the years, cheerful quick notes scrawled at the bottom, and I had a birthday card she'd written to Ben I thought might bring decent money. I felt guilty about all of it, not good at all, but I feared having no money, really feared being broke, and that came before being nice. The note to Ben, on the inside of a card for his twelfth birthday, read: You are growing up before my eyes, before I know it you'll be driving! When I read it, I had to turn it facedown and back away, because my mom would be dead before Ben would ever learn how to drive. And Ben would be in prison, would never learn how to drive anyway.

Anyway.

We drove across the Missouri River, the water not even bothering to glisten in the afternoon sun. What I didn't want was to watch these people read the notes, there was something too intimate about that. Maybe I could leave while they looked at them, assessed them like old candlesticks at a yard sale.

Lyle guided me to Magda's, through middle-middle-class neighborhoods where every few houses waved a St. Patrick's Day flag - all bright clovers and leprechauns just a few days stale. I could feel Lyle fiddling beside me, twitchy as usual, and then he turned toward me, his knees almost punching my stickshift out of gear.

"So," he said.

"So."

"This meeting, as is often the case with Magda, has turned into something a little different than planned."

"What's that mean?"

"Well, you know she's in that group - the Free Day Society. To get Ben out of prison. And so she's invited a few of those ... women."

"Oh. No." I said. I pulled the car over to the curb.

"Listen, listen, you said you wanted to look into Runner. Well, this is it. They will pay us - you - to find him, ask him some questions, father to daughter."

"Daughter to father?"

"Right. See, I'm running out of money. So this is where the next funding will come from."

"So I have to sit here and let them be rude to me? Like last time?"

"No, no, they can fill you in on the investigation into Runner. Bring you up to speed. I mean, you think Ben is innocent now, right?"

I had a flash of Ben watching TV, my mom rustling his hair with one hand as she walked past with a load of laundry on her hip, and him smiling but not turning around. Waiting til she left the room before he combed his hair back into place.

"I haven't gotten that far."

My keys dangled from the ignition, turning in time to a Billy Joel song on the radio. I switched stations.

"Fine, let's go," I said.

I drove another few blocks. Magda's neighborhood was as cheap as mine, but nicer. Every house had been built shabby, but the owners still found enough pride to slap on a coat of paint now and then, hang a flag, plant some flowers. The houses reminded me of hopeful homely girls on a Friday night, hopping bars in spangly tops, packs of them where you assumed at least one might be pretty, but none were, and never would be. And here was Magda's house, the ugliest girl with the most accessories, frantically piled on. The front yard was spiked with lawn ornaments: gnomes bouncing on wire legs, flamingos on springs, and ducks with plastic wings that circled when the wind blew. A forgotten cardboard Christmas reindeer sat soggy in the front garden, which was mostly mud, baby-fuzz patches of grass poking through intermittently. I turned off the car, and we both stared into the yard, with its jittering denizens.

Lyle turned to me, fingers outstretched like a coach giving advice on a difficult play: "So, don't worry. I guess the only thing to remember is to be careful how you talk about Ben. These people can get pretty riled when it comes to him."

"What's pretty riled?"

"Like, do you go to church at all?"

"When I was a kid."

"So it would be kind of like someone coming into your church and saying they hate God."

IT DID FEEL like a church. Or maybe a wake. Lots of coffee, dozens of people murmuring in dark wool clothes, regretful smiles. The air was blue with cigarette smoke, and I thought how rarely I saw that anymore, after growing up in Diane's foggy trailer. I took a deep breath of it.

We'd knocked several times on the open door, and when no one heard, we just walked in. Lyle and I stood there, American Gothic style, for a good five seconds as the conversation trailed off and people started staring. An older woman with Brillo-wire hair in barrettes blinked at me with the force of someone giving a secret code, a smile frozen large on her face. A brunette in her early twenties, startlingly pretty, looked up from dishing peaches into a baby's mouth and she too offered an expectant smile. One glaring old broad with a snowman's build tightened her lips and fingered the crucifix on her neck, but everyone else in the room was clearly following orders: Be nice.

They were all women, more than a dozen, and they were all white. Most looked care-worn, but a handful had the bright, full-hour-in-front-of-the-mirror look of the upper class. That's how you pick 'em, not by the clothes or the cars, but by the extra touches: an antique brooch (rich women always have antique brooches) or lip-liner that was blended just the right amount. Probably drove in from Mission Hills, feeling magnanimous about setting foot north of the river.

Not a single man there, it was what Diane would call a hen party (and then make that disapproving sinus sound). I wondered how they'd all found Ben, stuck in prison as he was, and what attraction he had for them. Did they sit in their tousled beds at night with their gelatined husbands snoring next to them and daydream about a life with Ben once they freed him? Or did they think of him as a poor kid in need of their altruism, a cause to be nurtured between tennis matches?

Out of the kitchen stomped Magda, six foot tall, her frizzy hair almost as wide. I wouldn't have been able to place her from the Kill Club meeting, where everyone's face was smeared from my memory, a Polaroid yanked out too early. Magda wore a denim jumper dress over a turtleneck, and an incongruous amount of jewelry: dangly gold earrings, a thick gold chain, and rings on almost every finger but her wedding finger. All those rings unsettled me, like barnacles growing where they shouldn't be. I shook Magda's outstretched hand anyway. Warm and dry. She made a sound like mmmaaahhhh! and pulled me in for a hug, her big breasts parting and closing on me like a wave. I stiffened, then pulled away, but Magda held on to my hands.

"Bygones be bygones. Welcome to my home," she said.

"Welcome," called the women behind her, too close to unison.

"You are welcome here," Magda reasserted.

Well, obviously, since I'd been invited, I wanted to say.

"This, everyone, is Libby Day, Ben's youngest sister."

"Ben's only sister," I added.

The women nodded solemnly.

"And that's part of the reason we're here today," Magda addressed the room. "To help bring some peace to that situation. And help. Bring. Ben. Home!"

I glanced at Lyle, who wrinkled his nose minutely. Beyond the living room, a boy of about fifteen, chubby in a less authoritative way than his mother, came down the carpeted stairs. He'd put on khakis and a button-down for the occasion, and he looked out into the room without making any eye contact, one thumb fiddling with the top of his belt.

Magda sighted the kid but didn't introduce him. Instead she said, "Ned, go in the kitchen and make more coffee." The boy walked through the circle of women without moving his shoulders, staring at a spot on the wall no one else could see.

Magda pulled me into the room, me pretending to cough so I could free my hand. She set me down in the middle of the sofa, one woman on each side of me. I don't like sitting in the middle, where arms brush lightly against mine and knees graze my pant leg. I balanced on one buttock and then the other, trying not to sink into the cushion, but I'm so small I still ended up looking like a cartoon kid in an overstuffed chair.

"Libby, I'm Katryn. I'm so sorry for your loss," said one of the rich ladies next to me, looking down into my face, her perfume widening my nostrils.

"Hi, Katherine." I wondered when the time limit lapsed on expressing sadness for a stranger's dead. I guess never.

"It's Kate-ryn," she said with sugar, her gold flower brooch bobbling on its clasp. There's another way to pick rich women: They immediately correct how their names are said. A-lee-see-a, not Al-eesh-a, Deb-or-ah, not Debra. I said nothing in response. Lyle was talking tightly with an older woman across the room, giving her his profile. I pictured her hot breath tunneling into his tiny snail ear. Everyone kept talking and looking at me, whispering and looking at me.

"Well, wanna get the show going?" I said and clapped once. It was rude, but I didn't need the suspense.

"Well, Libby ... Ned, will you get that coffee out here?" Magda started. "We're here to talk with you about your father, as the prime suspect in the murders your brother has been wrongfully convicted of."

"Right. The murders of my family."

Magda pulled in an impatient breath, annoyed I would assert my rights to my family.

"But before we work on that," Magda continued, "we want to share with you some of our stories about your brother, who we all love."

A slender fifty-something woman with administrative hair stood up. "My name is Gladys, I met Ben three years ago, through my charity work," she said. "He changed my life. I write to a lot of prisoners" - here I physically scoffed, and the woman noted it - "I write to prisoners because to me it's the ultimate Christian act, loving the usually unlovable. I'm sure everyone here's seen Dead Man Walking. But I began writing Ben, and the purity of him just shined through his letters. He is true grace under fire, and I love that he's able to make me laugh - make me laugh, when I'm supposed to be helping him - about the horrible conditions he endures each day."

Everyone added a note then: he's so funny ... that's so true ... he's amazing that way. Ned appeared with a coffeepot and started refilling a dozen outstretched plastic mugs, the ladies hand-signaling to stop pouring without even looking at him.

A younger woman stood up, about Lyle's age, trembling. "I'm Alison. I met Ben through my mom, who couldn't be here today ..."

"Chemo, ovarian cancer," whispered Katryn.

"... but we both feel the same, which is her work on this earth is not done until Ben is a free man." There were scattered claps at this. "And it's just, it's just," here the girl's trembles turned to tears, "he's so good! And it's all so wrong. And I just can't believe we live in a world where someone as good as Ben is ... is in a cage, for no good reason!"

I set my jaw then. I could feel this going south.

"I just think you need to set this all right," spat the crucifixed snow-woman who looked the least friendly. She didn't bother to stand up, just leaned around a few people. "You need to right your wrongs, just like anybody else. And I'm real sorry for the loss of your family, and I'm real sorry for what you've gone through, but now you need to be a grown-up and fix it."

I couldn't spot anyone nodding at that little speech, but the room was full of an agreement so strong it seemed to have a sound, an mmm-hmm sound I couldn't trace. Like the hum of a railroad track when the train is still miles away but churning toward you. I glanced at Lyle, and he rolled his eyes discreetly.

Magda moved to the center of the entryway, swelling like a red-nosed orator on the hustings. "Libby, we have forgiven you for your part in this fiasco. We believe your father committed this horrible crime. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have ... many important facts," she said, unable to pull up more legal jargon. "Motive: Two weeks before the murders your mother, Patricia Day, filed a complaint against your father concerning child support. For the first time, Ronald "Runner" Day was going to be legally on the hook to his family. He also was in hock several thousand dollars for gambling debts. Removing your family from this situation would help his finances tremendously - he was assuming he was still in your mother's will when he went there that night. As it turned out, Ben was not at home when he arrived, and you escaped. He killed the others."

I pictured Runner breathing heavily, striding through the house with that shotgun, his grimy Stetson tilted back as he sighted my mother with the 10-gauge. I heard the bellowing in my head that I always heard when I remembered that night, and tried to make it come out of Runner's mouth.

"Fibers from your home were found in Runner's cabin, although this has been continually dismissed because he'd been in and out of your home that summer, but it's still a viable fact. None of the victims' blood or tissue was found on Ben, although the prosecution made a lot of the fact that Ben's blood was found in the house."

"Hell-ooo? Like you aren't allowed to cut yourself shaving?" the angry crucifixed woman said.

The women laughed on cue, primed.

"Finally, the part that I'm most excited for, Libby, is the opportunity portion. As you know, your father was vouched for by a girlfriend of his at the time, a Ms. Peggy Bannion. Just so you know there's no shame in righting a wrong, Peggy is currently in the process of recanting that alibi. Even though she could be sentenced up to five years."

"Well, she won't be," cheered Katryn. "We won't let that happen."

The others applauded as a spindly woman in elasticized jeans stood up. She wore her hair short, the top part permed and frosted, and her eyes were small and bland as dimes that had been in someone's pocketbook too long. She looked at me, then away. She fiddled with the oversized blue stone she wore on a chain, which matched a blue stripe on her sweatshirt. I pictured her at home in front of a water-stained mirror, enjoying the slight bit of good fortune of matching her necklace to the sweatshirt.

I stared at my dad's girlfriend - this special guest of Magda's -  and willed myself not to blink.

"I just want to thank you all for your support these past months," she began, her voice reedy. "Runner Day used me like he used everyone. I'm sure you know." It took a few seconds before I realized she was talking to me. I nodded, then wished I hadn't.

"Share your story with us, will you, Peggy," Magda said. I could tell Magda watched a lot of Oprah. She had the cadence but not the warmth.

"The truth of the story is this. On the evening of January 2, I cooked dinner for Runner at his cabin. It was chop suey with rice, and of course with Runner, a lot of beer. He drank these beers called Mickey's Big Mouths, you had to pull the tab off, but the tabs came off at these sharp angles, looked like crab claws and he was always all cut up by them. Do you remember that, Libby? He was always bleeding with those."

"What happened after dinner?" Lyle interrupted. I waited for him to look over at me for an appreciative smile, but he didn't.

"We, uh, had relations. Then Runner was out of beer, so he left to get more beer. I think this was about 8 p.m. because I watched The Fall Guy, although I remember it was a repeat and that was discouraging."

"She watched The Fall Guy," Magda piped in. "Isn't that ironic?"

Peggy looked at her blankly.

"Anyway, Runner left and he didn't come back, and, you know, it's winter time, so I fell asleep early. I woke up to him coming home, but he didn't have a clock, so I don't know what time it was. But it was definitely middle of the night, definitely late, because I kept waking up, and I finally got up to pee and the sun was starting to come up and that couldn't have been more than a few hours later."

When this woman was peeing, and looking for toilet paper and probably not finding toilet paper, then wending her way back to bed through the motors and blades and TV intestines that Runner always pretended to be working on, maybe stubbing a toe, feeling sulky, I was crawling through snow toward my blood-soaked house, my family dead. I held it against her.

"Lord help me, the police came by in the morning, asking Runner where he was between 12 and 5 a.m., asking me where he was. The whole time, he was so insistent: I was home early, I was home way before midnight. And I don't think he was, but I went along with it. I just went along."

"Well, you're done with that, girl!" said the brunette with the baby.

"I haven't even heard from him in a year."

"Well, that's more than me," I said, and regretted it. I wondered if this woman would have kept her secret if Runner had just stayed in touch a bit more. Phoned every three months instead of every eight. "And, like I said," Peggy continued, "he had these scratches on him, all over his hands, but I can't be sure that it wasn't from those beer tabs. I just don't remember if he scratched himself before he left that night, or if maybe someone scratched him."

"Only one victim, Michelle Day, was found to have any skin under her nails, which makes sense, since she was strangled, so she was physically closest to the killer," Lyle said. We all sat quietly for a second, the baby's coos fluttering higher, heading toward squeals. "Unfortunately, that piece of skin was lost somewhere before it reached the laboratory."

I pictured Runner, with that leery, wide-eyed look of his, bearing down on Michelle, the weight of him pushing her into the mattress, and Michelle scrambling to breathe, trying to rip his hands away, getting one good scratch in, a scrawl over the back of his small, oil-stained hands, wrapping themselves more tightly around her neck ...

"And that's my story," Peggy said with an open-handed shrug, a comedian's whatcha-gonna-do? gesture.

"Ned, we're ready for the dessert!" Magda hollered toward the kitchen, and Ned hustled in, shoulders up near his ears, crumbs on his lower lip as he bore a depleted plate of dry cookies with hard-jelly centers.

"Jesus, Ned, stop eating my stuff!" Magda snapped, glowering over the tray.

"I just had two."

"Bullshit you had two." Magda lit a cigarette from a limp pack. "Go to the store, I need cigarettes. And more cookies."

"Jenna's got the car."

"Walk, then, it'll be good for you."

The women were clearly planning on making a night of it, but I wasn't going to stay. I parked myself near the door, eyeing a cloisonne candy dish that seemed too nice for Magda. I slipped it into my pocket as I watched Lyle work out the deal, Magda saying She'll do it? She's got him? Does she actually believe? as she flapped her checkbook. Each time I blinked, Peggy was edging closer to me, some grotesque chess game. Before I could make a break for the bathroom, she was there at my elbow.

"You don't look like Runner at all," she said, squinting. "Maybe the nose."

"I look like my mother."

Peggy seemed stricken.

"You with him a long time?" I offered.

"Off and on, I guess. Yeah. I mean I'd have boyfriends in between. But he had a way of coming back and making you feel like it was part of the plan. Like, almost like you'd discussed it that he'd disappear but come back and it would be the same as it was before. I don't know. I wished I'd met an accountant or something like that. I never know where to go to meet nice men. In my whole life. I mean, where do you go?"

She seemed to be asking for a geographic place, like there was a special town where all the accountants and actuaries were kept.

"You still in Kinnakee?"

She nodded.

"I'd leave there, for a start."