Dark Places

Chapter 27
Libby Day NOW

Idrove back home through sickly forests. Somewhere down one of those long stringy roads was a landfill. I never saw the dump itself, but I drove through a good twenty miles of float-away trash. To my right and left, the ground flickered with a thousand plastic grocery bags, fluttering and hovering just above the grass. Looking like the ghosts of little things.

Rain started splattering, then got thicker, freezing. Everything outside my car looked warped. Whenever I saw a lonely place - a dimple in the landscape, a copse of whiskery trees - I pictured Diondra buried beneath, a collection of unclaimed bones and bits of plastic: a watch, the sole of a shoe, maybe the red dangly earrings she wore in the yearbook photo.

Who gives a tinker's damn about Diondra? I thought, Diane's phrases again popping into my head. Who cares if Ben killed her, because he killed your family, and it all ends there anyway.

I'd wanted so badly for Runner to give something up, make me believe he did it. But seeing him only reminded me how impossible it was that he killed them all, how dumb he was. Dumb, it was a word you used as a kid, but it was the best way to describe Runner. Wily and dumb at the same time. Magda and the Kill Club would be disappointed, although I'd be happy to give them his address if they wanted to continue the conversation. Me, I hoped he'd die soon.

I passed a thick, flat brown-earth field, a teenage boy leaning against a fence in the rain, in the dark, sulky or bored, staring out at the highway. My brain returned to Ben. Diondra and Ben. Pregnant. Everything else Ben told me about that night felt right, believable, but the lie, the insistent lie about Diondra. That seemed like something to worry about.

I sped home, feeling contaminated. I went straight to the shower and scrubbed myself, Silkwood-style with a hard nail brush, my skin looking like I'd been attacked by a pack of cats when I was done. I got into bed still feeling infected, fussed around in the sheets for an hour, then got up and showered again. Around 2 a.m., I fell into a sweaty, heavy sleep filled with leering old men I thought were my father until I got close enough to see their faces melt. More potent nightmares followed: Michelle was cooking pancakes, and grasshoppers were floating in the batter, their twig legs snapping off as Michelle stirred. They got cooked into the pancakes, and my mom made us eat them anyway, good protein, crunch, crackle. Then we all started dying -  choking, slobbering, eyes floating back in our heads - because the grasshoppers were poisoned. I swallowed one of the big insects and felt it fight its way back up my throat, its sticky body surfacing in my mouth, squirting my tongue with tobacco, pushing its head against my teeth to escape.

The morning dawned an unimpressive gray. I showered again -  my skin still feeling suspicious - and then drove to the downtown public library, a white pillared building that used to be a bank. I sat next to a pungent man with a matted beard and a stained army jacket, the guy I always end up next to in public places, and finally got on the Internet. I found the massive, sad Missing Persons database and entered her name.

The screen made its churning, thinking sound and I sweated while hoping a No Data screen would come up. No such luck. The photo was different from the yearbook but not too: Diondra with the mousse-hard curls and the cresting bangs, charcoal eyeliner and pink lipgloss. She was smiling just the tiniest bit, pouting her lips out.DIONDRA SUE WERTZNER

BORN: OCTOBER 28, 1967

REPORTED MISSING: JANUARY 21, 1985

BEN WAS WAITING for me again, this time with his arms crossed, leaned back in the chair, belligerent. He'd given me the silent treatment a week before granting my request to see him. Now he shook his head at me when I sat down.

It threw me off.

"You know, Libby, I've been thinking since we talked last," he finally said. "I've been thinking I don't need this, this pain. I mean, I'm already in here, I don't really need my little sister to show up, believe in me, don't believe in me. Ask me weird questions, put me on the guard after goddam twenty-four years. I don't need the tension. So if you're coming here, trying to 'get to the bottom of things,'" he made angry air quotes, "you know, go somewhere else. Because I just don't need it."

"I found Runner."

He didn't stand up, he stayed solid in his chair. Then he gave a sigh, a might-as-well sigh.

"Wow, Libby, you missed your calling as a detective. What'd Runner have to say? He still in Oklahoma?"

I felt an inappropriate twitch of a smile. "He's at a Superfund dump on the edge of Lidgerwood, got turned out from the group home."

Ben grinned at that. "He's living in a toxic waste dump. Ha."

"He says Diondra Wertzner was your girlfriend, that you got her pregnant. That she was pregnant and you two were together, the night of the murders."

Ben put a hand over his face, his fingers splayed. I could see his eyes blink through them. He talked with his face still covered, and I couldn't hear what he said. He tried twice, me asking each time what he was saying, and on the third try he pulled his head up, chewing on the inside of his cheek, and leaned in.

"I said, what the f*ck is your obsession with Diondra? You got a goddam bee in your bonnet about this, and you know what's going to happen, you're going to f*ck all this up. You had a chance to believe in me, to do the right thing and finally believe in your brother. Who you know. Don't say you don't because that's a lie. I mean, don't you get it, Libby? It's the last chance for us. The world can believe I'm guilty, believe I'm innocent, we both know I'm not going anywhere. There's no DNA going to release me - there's no goddam house anymore. So. I'm not getting out. So. The only person I care, to say they know I couldn't have murdered my family, is you."

"You can't blame me for wondering whether - "

"Of course I can. Of course I can. I can blame you for not believing in me. Now, I can forgive you for your lie, for getting confused, as a kid. I can forgive that. But goddamit, Libby, what about now? You're what, thirty-some years old, and still believe your own blood could do something like that?"

"Oh I totally believe my own blood could do that," I said, my anger surging up, bumping against my ribs. "I totally believe our blood is bad. I feel it in me. I've beaten the shit out of people, Ben. Me. I've busted in doors and windows and ... I've killed things. Half the time I look down, my hands are in fists."

"You believe we're that bad?"

"I do."

"Even with Mom's blood?"

"Even with."

"Well, I'm sad for you, little girl."

"Where is Diondra?"

"Let it go, Libby."

"What'd you do with the baby?"

I felt queasy, fevered. If the baby had lived, it'd be (he'd be, she'd be), what, twenty-four years old. The baby wasn't a baby anymore. I tried to picture an adult, but my brain kept bouncing back an image of a blanket-swaddled infant. But hell, I could barely picture me as an adult. My next birthday I'll be thirty-two, my mom's age when she was killed. She'd seemed so grown up. More grown up than I'd ever be.

So if it was alive, the baby was twenty-four. I had one of my awful visions. A might-have-been vision. Us, if everyone had lived, at home in Kinnakee. There's Michelle in the living room, still fiddling with her oversized glasses, bossing around a bundle of kids who roll their eyes at her but do what they're told. Debby, chubby and chattery with a big, blond farmer-husband and a special room in her own farmhouse for crafts, packed with sewing ribbons and quilting patches and glue guns. My mom, ripe-fifties and sunbaggy, her hair mostly white, still bickering pleasantly with Diane. And into the room comes Ben's kid, a daughter, a redhead, a girl in her twenties, thin and assured, bangly bracelets on delicate wrists, a college graduate who doesn't take any of us seriously. A Day girl.

I choked on my own spit, started coughing, my windpipe shut down. The visitor two booths down from me leaned out to look and then, deciding I wasn't going to die, went back to her son.

"What happened that night, Ben? I need to know. I just need to know."

"Libby, you can't win this game. I tell you I'm innocent, that means you're guilty, you ruined my life. I tell you I'm guilty ... I don't think that makes you feel much better, does it?"

He was right. It was one reason I'd stayed immobile for so many years. I threw something else out: "And what about Trey Teepano?"

"Trey Teepano."

"I know he was a bookie, and that he was into Devil shit, and that he was a friend of yours, and he was with you that night. With Diondra. That all seems pretty f*cked up."

"Where'd you get all that?" Ben looked me in the eye, then raised his gaze up, gave a long stare at my red roots that were to my ears now.

"Dad told me. He said he owed Trey Teepano money and - "

"Dad? He's Dad now?"

"Runner said - "

"Runner said f*ck-all. You need to grow up, Libby. You need to pick a side. You can spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what happened, trying to reason. Or you can just trust yourself. Pick a side. Be on mine. It's better."