Dark Places

Chapter 3

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.

I paused, straddled between two steps, heading down.

"Look, I know Lyle Wirth, obviously," the guy said. "You on the guest list or something?"

"I don't know. My name's Libby Day."

He dropped his jaw, pulled it back up with a spitty sound, and gave me that same checklist look that Lyle had given me.

"Your hair's blond."

I raised my eyebrows at him.

"Come in, I'll take you down," he said, opening the door wide. "Come on, I won't bite."

There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won't bite. The only line that pisses me off faster is when some drunk, ham-faced dude in a bar sees me trying to get past him and barks: Smile, it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.

I headed back up, rolling my eyes goonily at the door-guy, walking extra slow so he had to lean against the door to keep it open. A*shole.

I entered a cavelike foyer, lined with broken lamp fixtures made of brass and shaped to look like stalks of wheat. The room was more than forty feet high. The ceiling had once been painted with a mural - vague, chipped images of country boys and girls hoeing or digging. One girl, her face now vanished, looked like she might be holding a jump rope. Or a snake? The entire western corner of the ceiling had caved in at some point: where the mural's oak tree should have exploded into green summer leaves, there was instead a patch of blue night sky. I could see the glow of the moon but not the moon itself. The foyer remained dark, electricity-free, but I could just make out piles of trash swept into the corners of the room. The partygoers had hustled off the squatters, then taken a broom to the place, tried to spiff it up. It smelled like piss anyway. An ancient condom was spaghetti-stuck to one wall.

"You guys couldn't have sprung for, like, a banquet hall?" I mumbled. The marble floor hummed beneath me. Clearly all the action was happening downstairs.

"We're not exactly a welcome convention," the guy said. He had a young, fleshy face with moles. He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool. "Plus this building has a certain ... ambiance. One of the Tallmans blew his brains out here in 1953."

"Nice."

We stood looking at each other, his face shapeshifting in the gloom. I couldn't see any obvious way to get downstairs. The elevator banks to the left were clearly not working, their tarnished counters all frozen between floors. I pictured a workforce of ghost-men in business suits waiting patiently to start moving again.

"So ... are we going anywhere?"

"Oh. Yeah. Look I just wanted to say ... I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sure even after all this time ... I just can't imagine. That's like, something out of Edgar Allan Poe. What happened."

"I try not to think about it much," I said, the standard answer.

The guy laughed. "Well, you're in the wrong place, then."

He led me around the corner and down a hallway of former offices. I crunched broken glass, peering into each room as we passed: empty, empty, a shopping cart, a careful pile of feces, the remains of an old bonfire, and then a homeless man who said Hiya! cheerfully over a forty-ounce.

"His name's Jimmy," the kid said. "He seemed OK, so we let him stay."

How gracious, I thought, but just nodded at Jimmy. We reached a heavy firewall of a door, opened it, and I was assaulted by the noise. From the basement came competing sounds of organ music and heavy metal and the loud hum of people trying to yell over each other.

"After you," he said. I didn't move. I don't like people behind me. "Or, I can ... uh, this way."

I thought about retreating right then, but the nastiness reared up in me when I pictured this guy, this f*cking Renaissance Fest juggler, going down and telling his friends: She freaked, she just ran away! And them all laughing and feeling tough. And him adding: She's really different from what I thought she'd be. And holding his hand up about yay-high to show how little I'd stayed. F*ckyouf*ckyouf*ckyou, I chanted, and followed him.

We walked down the one floor to a basement door plastered with flyers: Booth 22: Hoardin' Lizzie Borden! Collectible items for sale or swap! Booth 28: Karla Brown - Bite Marks Discussion. Booth 14: Role Play - Interrogate Casey Anthony! 15: Tom's Terrible Treats - Now serving Jonestown Punch and Sweet Fanny Adams!

Then I saw a grainy blue flyer with a xeroxed photo of me in one corner: Talk About a Bad Day! The Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre - Case Dissection and a Special, Special GUEST!!!

Again I debated leaving, but the door flung open and I was sucked inside a humid, windowless basement crowded with maybe two hundred people, all leaning into each other, yelling in ears, hands on shoulders. At school once, they showed us a film strip of a grasshopper plague hitting the Midwest, and that's what I flashed to - all those goggling eyes looking at me, mouths chewing, arms and elbows askew. The room was set up like a swap meet, divided into rows of booths created from cheap chain-link fencing. Each booth was a different murder. I counted maybe forty at first glance. A generator was barely igniting a string of lightbulbs, which hung from wires around the room, swaying in uneven time, illuminating faces at gruesome angles, a party of death masks.

On the other side, Lyle spotted me and started arrowing through the crowd, leading with a shoulder, scooting along sideways. Glad-handing. He was, apparently, an important guy in this crowd -  everyone wanted to touch him, tell him something. He leaned down to let some guy whisper in his dainty ear, and when he pulled himself upright, his head hit a flashlight, and everyone around him laughed, their faces glowing off and on as the light rotated like a police car's. Men's faces. Guys' faces. There were only a few women in the entire place - four that I could see, all bespectacled, homely. The men were not attractive either. There were whiskery, professorial fellows; nondescript, suburban-dad types; and a goodly amount of guys in their twenties with cheap haircuts and math-nerd glasses, men who reminded me of Lyle and the guy who'd led me downstairs. Unremarkable, but with a brainy arrogance wafting from them. Call it AP aftershave.

Lyle reached me, the men behind him grinning at his back, studying me like I was the new girlfriend. He shook his head. "Sorry, Libby. Kenny was supposed to phone my cell when you got here so I could bring you down myself." He eyed Kenny over my head and Kenny made a shruggy noise and left. Lyle was steering me into the crowd, using an assertive finger to the back of my shoulder. Some people were wearing costumes. A man with a black waistcoat and tall black hat pushed past me, offering me sweets and laughing. Lyle rolled his eyes at me, said, "Frederick Baker freak. We've been trying to push out the role players for the past few years, but ... too many guys are into that."

"I don't know what that means," I said, worried I was about to lose it. Elbows and shoulders were jostling me, I kept getting pushed back every few feet I moved forward. "I really, seriously, don't understand what the f*ck is going on."

Lyle sighed impatiently, looked at his watch. "Look, our session doesn't start til midnight. You want me to walk you around, explain more?"

"I want my money."

He chewed at his lower lip, pulled an envelope out of his back pocket, and stuck it in my hand as he leaned into my ear and asked me to count it later. It felt fat, and I calmed down a bit.

"Let me show you around." We walked the perimeter of the room, cramped booths on our left and right, all that metal fencing reminding me of kennels. Lyle put that finger on my arm again, prodding me onward. "The Kill Club - and by the way, don't lecture, we know it's a bad name, it just stuck. But the Kill Club, we call it KC, that's one reason we have the big meeting here every year, Kansas City, KC, Kill Club ... uh, like I said, it's basically for solvers. And enthusiasts. Of famous murders. Everyone from, like Fanny Adams to - "

"Who is Fanny Adams?" I snapped, realizing I was about to get jealous. I was supposed to be the special one here.

"She was an eight-year-old, got chopped to bits in England in 1867. That guy we just passed, with the top hat and stuff, he was playing at being her murderer, Frederick Baker."

"That's really sick." So she'd been dead forever. That was good. No competition.

"Well, that was a pretty notorious murder." He caught me grimacing. "Yeah, like I said, they're a less palatable section. I mean, most of those murders have already been solved, there's no real mystery. To me, it's all about the solving. We have former cops, lawyers - "

"Are there role players for ... mine? My family, are there role players here?" A beefy guy with highlighted hair and an inflatable doll in a red dress paused in the crowd, nearly on top of me, not even noticing me. The doll's plastic fingers tickled my cheek. Someone behind me yelled Scott and Amber! I pushed the guy off me, tried to scan the crowd for anyone dressed as my mother, as Ben, some bastard in a red wig, brandishing an axe. My hand had balled into a fist.

"No, no of course not," Lyle said. "No way, Libby, I would never let that happen, the role play ... it. No."

"Why is it all men?" In one of the booths nearby, two tubby guys in polo shirts were snarling at each other over some child murders in the Missouri bootheel.

"It's not all men," Lyle said, defensive. "Most of the solvers are men, but I mean, go to a crossword-puzzle convention and you'll see the same thing. Women come for the, like, networking. They talk about why they identify with the victims - they've had abusive husbands or whatnot - they have some coffee, buy an old photo. But we've had to be more careful because sometimes they can get too ... attached."

"Yeah, better not get too human about it," I said, me being a f*cking hypocrite.

Thankfully Lyle ignored me. "Like, right now, they're all obsessed with the Lisette Stephens thing." He motioned back behind him, where a small cluster of women were huddled around a computer, necks stretched downward, henlike. I moved past Lyle toward the booth. They were all looking at a video montage of Lisette. Lisette and her sorority sisters. Lisette and her dog. Lisette and her look-alike sister.

"See what I mean?" Lyle said. "They're not solving, they're just looking at stuff they could see online at home."

The problem with Lisette Stephens was there was nothing to solve: She had no boyfriend, no husband, no upset coworkers, no strange ex-cons doing repair work in her home. She just vanished for no reason anyone could think of, except she was pretty. She was the kind of girl people noticed. The kind of girl the media bothered to cover when she disappeared.

I nudged into a spot next to a stack of sweatshirts bearing iron-on decals that read Bring Lisette Home. Twenty-five bucks. The group, however, was more interested in the laptop. The women clicked through the website's message boards. People often attached photos with their notes, but the photos were jarring. "We love you Lisette, we know you will come home," popped up alongside a picture of three middle-aged women at the beach. "Peace and love to your family in this time of need," surfaced next to a photo of someone's Labradoodle. The women returned to the homepage, and up came the picture the media liked the most: Lisette and her mother, both arms wrapped around each other, cheek-to-cheek, beaming.

I shrugged, trying to ignore my worry about Lisette, who I didn't know. And also fighting the jealousy again. Out of all these murders, I wanted the Day booth to be the biggest. It was a blush of love: my dead people were the best. I had a flash of my mother, her red hair tied back in a ponytail, helping me tug off my flimsy winter boots, and then rubbing my toes one by one. Warming up big toe, warming up baby toe. In this memory, I could smell buttered toast, but I don't know if there was buttered toast. In this memory I still had all my toes.

I shivered hard, like a cat.

"Wow, someone walk over your grave?" Lyle said, and then realized the irony.

"So what else?" We hit a traffic jam of people in front of a booth marked Bob's Bizarre Bazaar, manned by a guy wearing an oversized black mustache and slurping soup. Four skulls lined up on a plank behind him with a sign that read The Final Four. The guy was hollering at Lyle to introduce him to his little friend. Lyle started to wave him off, tried to pull us through the milling crowd, then shrugged, whispered role player to me.

"'Bob Berdella,'" Lyle said to the man, making a winky joke of the name, "this is Libby Day, whose family was ... of the Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre. The Days."

The guy leaned across the table at me, a drooly piece of hamburger hanging off his tooth. "If you had a cock, you'd be in pieces in my garbage right now," he said and then gunned out a laugh. "Little, tiny pieces."

He swatted at me. I skittered back involuntarily, then I lurched back toward Bob, my fist up, rageful, as I always got when I had a fright. Go for the nose, make him bleed, smack that piece of chili meat right off his face, then hit him again. Before I could get to him, Bob shoved his seat back, hands up, muttering not to me but to Lyle, dude I was only playing, no harm, man. He didn't even look at me as he apologized, like I was some child. As he yammered at Lyle, I went for him. My fist couldn't quite connect, so I ended up giving him a hard smack against his chin, the way you'd punish a puppy.

"F*ck you, a*shole."

Then Lyle snapped to, muttering apologies and steering me away, my fists still tight, my jaw set. I kicked Bob's table with my boot as I walked away, just enough so it wobbled once, severely, and dumped the guy's soup on the floor. I was already regretting that I hadn't just shot over the table. Nothing more embarrassing than a short woman who can't land a punch. I might as well have been carried away, my feet baby-kicking in the air. I glanced behind us. The guy just stood there, his arms slack, his chin pink, trying to decide if he was contrite or angry.

"OK, that wouldn't have been the first fistfight at Kill Club, but it might have been the weirdest," Lyle said.

"I don't like being threatened."

"He wasn't really ... I know, I know," Lyle muttered. "Like I said, at some point these role-play guys will splinter off and leave the serious solvers alone. You'll like the people in our group, the Day group."

"Is it the Day group, or the Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre group?" I grumbled.

"Oh. Yeah, that's what we call it." He tried to squirm through another bottleneck in the cramped aisle, ended up smushed to my side. My face was stuck just a few inches shy of a man's back. Blue oxford shirt, starched. I kept my eyes on the perfect center crease. Someone with a big hobo-clown gut was pushing me steadily from behind.

"Most people work Satan in there somehow," I said. "Satan Farmhouse Massacre. Kansas Satan Killings."

"Yeah, we don't really believe that, so we try not to use any Devil references. Excuse me!" he said, wriggling ahead.

"So it's a branding issue," I sniped, eyes fixed on the blue shirt. We pushed around a corner into the coolness of open space.

"Do you want to see any more groups?" He pointed to his immediate left, toward a bunch of men in Booth 31: quickie haircuts, a few mustaches, a lot of button-downs. They were arguing intensely at a low volume. "These guys are pretty cool, actually," Lyle said. "They're basically creating their own mystery: They think they've identified a serial killer. Some guy has been crossing states -  Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma - and helping to kill people. Family men, or older people sometimes, who got trapped with too much debt, credit cards maxed out, subprime mortgages, no way out."

"He kills people because they aren't good with money?" I said, rolling my eyes.

"Nah, nah. They think he's like a Kevorkian for people who have bad credit and good life insurance. They call him the Angel of Debt."

One of the Booth 31 members, a young guy with a jutting mandible and lips that didn't quite cover his teeth, was eavesdropping and eagerly turned to Lyle: "We think we've got the Angel in Iowa last month: a guy with a McMansion and four kids has a picture-perfect snowmobile accident at a really convenient time. That's like one a month the past year. Economy, man."

The kid was about to keep going, wanting to pull us into the booth, with its charts and calendars and news clippings and a messy nut-mix that was scattered all over the table, the men grabbing overflowing handfuls, pretzels and peanuts bouncing down to their sneakers. I shook my head at Lyle, steered him away for a change. Out in the aisle, I took a breath of unsalted air and looked at my watch.

"Right," said Lyle. "It's a lot to take in. Let's head over. You really will appreciate our group, I think. It's much more serious. Look, there are already people there." He pointed toward a tidy corner booth, where a fat, frizz-haired woman was sipping coffee out of a jug-sized Styrofoam cup, and two trim, middle-aged men were scanning the room, hands on hips, ignoring her. Looked like cops. Behind them, an older, balding guy sat hunched at a card table, scribbling notes on a legal pad, while a tense college-aged kid read over his shoulder. A handful of nondescript men crowded toward the back, flipping through stacks of manila file folders or just loitering.

"See, more women," Lyle said triumphantly, pointing at the frizz-haired female mountain. "You want to go over now, or do you want to wait and make a big entrance?"

"Now's fine."

"This is a sharp group, serious fans. You're going to like them. I bet you'll even learn a few things from them."

I humphed and followed Lyle over. The woman looked up first, narrowed her eyes at me, then widened them. She was holding a homemade folder on which she'd pasted an old junior-high photo of me wearing a gold-heart necklace someone had mailed me. The woman looked like she wanted to hand the folder to me - she was holding it like a theater program. I didn't reach out. I noticed she'd drawn Devil horns on my head.

Lyle put an arm on my shoulder, then took it off. "Hi, everyone. Our special guest has arrived, and she's the star of this year's Kill Convention - Libby Day."

A few eyebrows raised, several heads nodded appreciatively, one of the cop-looking guys said, holy shit. He was about to give Lyle a high-five and then thought better: his arm froze in an accidental Nazi salute. The older man darted his eyes away from me and scribbled more notes. I worried for a moment I was supposed to make a speech - instead I mumbled a tart hello and sat down at the table.

There were the usual greetings, questions. Yes, I lived in Kansas City, no, I was sort of between jobs, no, I didn't have any contact with Ben. Yes, he wrote me a few times a year but I tossed the envelopes straight into the trash. No, I wasn't curious what he wrote. Yes, I'd be willing to sell the next one I got.

"Well," Lyle finally interrupted with a grandiose rumble. "You have here in front of you a key figure in the Day case, a so-called eyewitness, so why don't we move on to real questions?"

"I have a real question," said one of the cop-looking guys. He gave a half-twist smile and turned in his chair. "If you don't mind me cutting to the chase."

He actually waited for me to say I didn't mind.

"Why did you testify that Ben killed your family?"

"Because he did," I said. "I was there."

"You were hiding, sweetheart. No way you saw what you say you did, or you'd be dead, too."

"I saw what I saw," I began, the way I always did.

"Bullshit. You saw what they told you to see because you were a good, scared little girl who wanted to help. The prosecution screwed you up royally. They used you to nail the easiest target. Laziest police work I ever seen."

"I was in the house ..."

"Yeah, how do you explain the gunshots your mom died from?" the guy hammered, leaning forward on his knees. "Ben didn't have any residue on his hands - "

"Guys, guys," the older man interrupted, waving thick, crimped fingers. "And ladies," he added, greasily, nodding at me and the Frizz-Head Woman. "We haven't even presented the facts of the case. We have to have protocol or this might as well be some Internet chat session. When we have a guest like this, we should be particularly sure we're all on the same page."

No one disagreed more than a grumble's worth, so the old guy wet his lips, looked over his bifocals and rearranged some throat phlegm. The man was authoritative, yet somehow unwholesome. I pictured him at home by himself, eating canned peaches at the kitchen counter, smacking at the syrup. He began reciting from his notes.

"Fact: Somewhere around 2 a.m. on January 3,1985, a person or persons killed three members of the Day family in their farmhouse in Kinnakee, Kansas. The deceased include Michelle Day, age ten; Debby Day, age nine; and the family matriarch, Patty Day, age thirty-two. Michelle Day was strangled; Debby Day died of axe wounds, Patty Day of two shotgun wounds, axe wounds, and deep cuts from a Bowie hunting knife."

I felt the blood rush in my ears, and told myself I wasn't hearing anything new. Nothing to panic about. I never really listened to the details of the murder. I'd let the words run over my brain and out my ears, like a terrified cancer patient hearing all that coded jargon and understanding nothing, except that it was very bad news.

"Fact," the man continued. "Youngest child Libby Day, age seven, was in the house at the time, and escaped the killer or killers through a window in her mother's room.

"Fact: Oldest child Benjamin Day, fifteen, claims he was out sleeping in a neighbor's barn that night after an argument with his mother. He has never produced another alibi, and his demeanor with the police was extremely unhelpful. He was subsequently arrested and convicted, based largely on rumors within the community that he'd become involved in Satan worship - the walls of the house were covered in symbols and words associated with Devil worship. In his mother's blood."

The old man paused for dramatic effect, eyed the group, returned to his notes.

"More damning was the fact his surviving sister, Libby, testified that she saw him commit the murders. Despite Libby's confused testimony and young age, Ben Day was convicted. This despite a startling lack of physical evidence. We convene to explore other possibilities and to debate the merits of the case. What I think we can agree on is that the killings can be traced to the events of January 2, 1985. It all went wrong in a single day - no pun intended." Murmurs of laughter, guilty looks toward me. "When that family got up that morning, it wasn't like there was a hit on them. Something went really wrong that day."

Part of a crime-scene photo had slid out of the speaker's folder: a plump, bloody leg and part of a lavender nightgown. Debby. The man noticed my gaze and tucked it back in, like it wasn't my business.

"I think the general consensus is that Runner Day did it," the fat woman said, rummaging in her purse, wadded tissues falling out the side of it.

I started at the sound of my dad's name. Runner Day. Miserable man.

"I mean, right?" she continued. "He goes to Patty, tries to bully her for money, as usual, gets nothing, gets pissed, goes haywire. I mean, the guy was crazy, right?"

The woman produced a bottle and popped two aspirin the way people in the movies did, with a sharp, violent throwback of the head. Then she looked at me for confirmation.

"Yeah. I think so. I don't remember him that well. They divorced when I was, like, two. We didn't have much contact after. He came back and lived with us for a summer, the summer before the murders, but - "

"Where's he now?"

"I don't know."

She rolled her eyes at me.

"But what about the big guy's footprint?" said a man in the back. "The police never explained why a man's dress shoe shows up tracking blood in a house where no men wore dress shoes ..."

"The police never explained a lot," started the older guy.

"Like the random bloodstain," Lyle added. He turned to me. "There was a bloodstain on Michelle's bedsheets - and it was a different blood type than anyone in the family. Unfortunately the sheets were from Goodwill, so the prosecution claimed the blood could have come from anyone."

"Gently used" sheets. Yes. The Days were big fans of Goodwill: sofa, TV, lamps, jeans, we even got our curtains there.

"Do you know how to find Runner?" the younger kid asked. "Could you ask him some questions for us?"

"And I still think it'd be worthwhile to question some of Ben's friends from the time. Do you still have any connections in Kinnakee?" said the old man.

Several people started arguing about Runner's gambling and Ben's friends and poor police procedure.

"Hey," I snapped. "What about Ben? Ben is just off the table?"

"Please, this is the grossest miscarriage of justice ever," said the fat lady. "And don't pretend you think otherwise. Unless you're protecting your daddy. Or you're too ashamed about what you did."

I glared at her. She had a glop of egg yolk in her hair. Who ate eggs at midnight? I thought. Or had that been there since this morning?

"Magda here is very involved with the case, very involved in the effort to free your brother," said the old guy, with a patronizing rise of his eyebrows.

"He's a wonderful man," Magda said, pointing her chin at me. "He writes poetry and music and he's just a force of hope. You should get to know him, Libby, you really should."

Magda was running her fingernails across a set of folders on the table before her, one for each Day family member. The thickest folder was covered with photos of my brother: Ben, red-headed and young, somberly holding a toy bomber; Ben, black-haired and scared in his mug shot after the arrest; Ben today, in prison, the red hair returned, studious looking, his mouth partly open, as if caught midsentence. Next to that was Debby's folder, bearing a single photo of her dressed as a gypsy for Halloween: red cheeks, red lips, her brown hair covered by my mom's red bandanna, a hip jutted to the side, pretend-sexy. To her right, you can see my freckled arm, reaching for her. It was a family photo, something I thought had never been released.

"Where'd you get that?" I asked her.

"Around." She covered the folder with a thick hand.

I looked down at the table, resisting the urge to lunge. The photograph of Debby's dead body had slipped out of the old guy's folder again. I could see the bloody leg, a sliced-up belly, an arm nearly off. I leaned across the table and grabbed the man's wrist.

"You put that shit away," I murmured. He tucked the photo away again, then held the folder shield-like, and blinked at me.

The group was all looking at me now, curious, a little concerned, like I was some pet bunny they just realized might be rabid.

"Libby," Lyle said in the soothing tones of a talk-show host. "No one doubts you were in the house. No one doubts you survived an incredibly horrific ordeal no child should ever endure. But did you really see with your own eyes what you say you saw? Or may you have been coached?"

I was picturing Debby, sifting my hair with nimble, pudgy fingers, braiding it in the fishbone style she insisted was more difficult than French braids, huffing warm baloney breath on the back of my neck. Tying a green ribbon on the end, turning me into a present. Helping me balance on the edge of the bathtub so I could hold a handmirror and see the back of my furrowed head in the looking glass over the sink. Debby, who so desperately wanted everything to be pretty.

"There's no proof that anyone but Ben killed my family," I said, pulling back to the land of the living, where I live by myself. "He never even filed an appeal, for Christsakes. He's never tried to get out." I had no experience with convicts, but it seemed to me that they were always launching appeals, that it was a passion for them, even if they had no shot. When I pictured prison, I pictured orange jumpsuits and yellow legal pads. Ben had proved himself guilty by sheer inertia - my testimony was beside the point.

"He had reason enough for eight appeals," Magda pronounced, grandly. I realized she was one of those women who would show up on my doorstep to scream at me. I was glad I'd never given Lyle my address. "Not fighting doesn't mean he's guilty, Libby, it means he's lost hope."

"Well, then good."

Lyle widened his eyes.

"Oh, God. You really think Ben did it." Then he laughed. Once, accidentally, quickly swallowed but entirely genuine. "Excuse me," he murmured.

No one laughs at me. Everything I say or do is taken very, very seriously. No one mocks a victim. I am not a figure of mirth. "Well, you all enjoy your conspiracy theories," I said, and bumped up from the chair.

"Oh don't be like that," said the cop-guy. "Stay. Convince us."

"He never ... filed ... an appeal," I said, like a preschool teacher. "That's good enough for me."

"Then you're an idiot."

I flipped him off, a hard gesture like I was digging into cold earth. Then I turned away, someone behind me saying, "She's still a little liar."

I darted back into the crowd, pushing my way under armpits and past groins until I arrived back into the cool of the stairwell, the noise behind me. My only victory of the night was the wad of money in my pocket and the knowledge that these people were as pathetic as I was.

I GOT HOME, turned every light on, and got into bed with a bottle of sticky rum. I lay sideways, studying the intricate folds of Michelle's note, which I'd forgotten to sell.

THE NIGHT FELT tilted. Like the world had once been carefully parceled out between people who believed Ben guilty and people who believed him innocent, and now, those twelve strangers crunched in a booth in a downtown basement had scrambled over to the side of the innocent with bricks in their pockets, and - boom! -  that's where all the weight was now. Magda and Ben and poetry and a force of hope. Footprints and bloodstains and Runner going berserk. For the first time since Ben's trial, I had fully subjected my-self to people who believed I was wrong about Ben, and it turns out I wasn't entirely up to the challenge. Me of little faith. On another night, I might have shrugged it all off, like I usually did. But those people were so assured, so dismissive, as if they'd discussed me countless times and decided I wasn't worth grilling that hard. I'd gone there assuming they'd be like people used to be: they might want to help me, take care of me, fix my problems. Instead they mocked me. Was I really that easy to unsettle, that flimsy?

No. I saw what I saw that night, I thought, my forever-mantra. Even though that wasn't true. The truth was I didn't see anything. OK? Fine. I technically saw nothing. I only heard. I only heard because I was hiding in a closet while my family died because I was a worthless little coward.

THAT NIGHT, THAT night, that night. I'd woken up in the dark in the room I shared with my sisters, the house so cold that frost was on the inside of the window. Debby had gotten in bed with me at some point - we usually jammed in together for warmth - and her plump behind was pushed into my stomach, pressing me against the chilled wall. I'd been a sleepwalker since I could toddle, so I don't remember pulling myself over Debby, but I do remember seeing Michelle asleep on the floor, her diary in her arms as usual, sucking on a pen in her sleep, the black ink drooling down her chin with her saliva. I hadn't bothered trying to wake her up, get her back in bed. Sleep was viciously defended in our loud, cold, crowded house, and not one of us woke without a fight. I left Debby in my bed and opened the door to hear voices down the hall in Ben's room - urgent whispers that bordered on noise. The sounds of people who think they're being quiet. A light coming from the crack under Ben's door. I decided to go to my mom's room, padded down the hall, pulled back her covers and pressed myself against my mother's back. In the winter, my mom slept in two pairs of sweats and several sweaters - she always felt like a giant stuffed animal. She usually didn't move when we got in bed with her, but that night I remember she turned to me so quickly I thought she was angry. Instead she grabbed me and squeezed me, kissed my forehead. Told me she loved me. She hardly ever told us she loved us. That's why I remember it, or think I do, unless I added that for comfort after the fact. But we'll say she told me she loved me, and that I fell immediately back to sleep.

When I next woke, it could have been minutes or hours later, she was gone. Outside the closed door, where I couldn't see, my mother was wailing and Ben was bellowing at her. There were other voices too; Debby was sobbing, screaming Mommymommymommymichelle and then there was the sound of an axe. I knew even then what it was. Metal on air - that was the sound - and after the sound of the swing came the sound of a soft thunk and a gurgle and Debby made a grunt and a sound like sucking for air. Ben screaming at my mom: "Why'd you make me do this?" And no sound from Michelle, which was strange, since Michelle was always the loudest, but nothing from her. Mom screaming Run! Run! Don't Don't. And a shotgun blast and my mom still yelling but no longer able to make words, just a screeching sound like a bird banging into the walls at the end of the hallway.

Heavy foot treads of boots and Debby's small feet running away, not dead yet, running toward my mom's room and me thinking no, no, don't come here and then boots shaking the hallway behind her and dragging and scratching at the floor and more gurgling, gurgling, banging and then a thud and the axe sound and my mom still making horrible cawing sounds, and me standing, frozen, in my mom's bedroom, just listening and the shotgun blasting my ears again and a thunk that rattled the floorboards beneath my feet. Me, coward, hoping everything would go away. Huddling half in and out of the closet, rocking myself. Go away go away go away. Doors banging and more footsteps and a wail, Ben whispering to himself, frantic. And then crying, a deep male crying and Ben's voice, I know it was Ben's voice, screaming Libby! Libby!

I opened a window in my mom's room and pushed myself through the broken screen, a breech birth onto the snowy ground just a few feet below, my socks immediately soaked, hair tangling in the bushes. I ran.

Libby! Looking back at the house, just a single light in a window, everything else black.

My feet were raw by the time I reached the pond and crouched in the reeds. I was wearing double layers like my mom, longjohns under my nightgown, but I was shaking, the wind ruffling the dress and blasting cold air straight up to my belly.

A flashlight frenetically scanned the tops of the reeds, then a copse of trees not far away, then the ground not far from me. Libby! Ben's voice again. Hunting me. Stay where you are, sweetheart! Stay where you are! The flashlight getting closer and closer, those boots crunching on the snow and me weeping hard into my sleeve, racking myself until I was almost ready to stand up and get it over with, and then the flashlight just swung back around and the footsteps marched away from me and I was there by myself, left to freeze to death in the dark. The light in the house went out and I stayed where I was.

Hours later, when I was too numb to stand upright, I crawled in the weak dawn light back to the house, my feet like ringing iron, my hands frozen in crow's fists. The door was wide open, and I limped inside. On the floor outside the kitchen was a sad little pile of vomit, peas and carrots. Everything else was red - sprays on the walls, puddles in the carpet, a bloody axe left upright on the arm of the sofa. I found my mom lying on the floor in front of her daughters' room, the top of her head shot off in a triangular slice, axe gashes through her bulky sleeping clothes, one breast exposed. Above her, long strings of red hair were stuck to the walls with blood and brain matter. Debby lay just past her, her eyes wide open and a bloody streak down her cheek. Her arm was nearly cut off; she'd been chopped through the stomach with the axe, her belly lay open, slack like the mouth of a sleeper. I called for Michelle, but I knew she was dead. I tiptoed into our bedroom and found her curled up on her bed with her dolls, her throat black with bruises, one slipper still on, one eye open.

The walls were painted in blood: pentagrams and nasty words. Cunts. Satan. Everything was broken, ripped, destroyed. Jars of food had been smashed against the walls, cereal sprayed around the floor. A single Rice Krispie would be found in my mother's chest wound, the mayhem was so haphazard. One of Michelle's shoes dangled by its laces from the cheap ceiling fan.

I hobbled over to the kitchen phone, pulled it down to the floor, dialed my aunt Diane's number, the only one I knew by heart, and when Diane answered I screamed They're all dead! in a voice that hurt my own ears for its keening. Then I jammed myself into the crevice between the refrigerator and the oven and waited for Diane.

At the hospital, they sedated me and removed three frostbitten toes and half of a ring finger. Since then I've been waiting to die.

I SAT UPRIGHT in the yellow electricity. Pulled myself out of our murder house and back to my grown-up bedroom. I wasn't going to die for years, I was hunting-dog healthy, so I needed a plan. My scheming Day brain thankfully, blessedly returned to thoughts of my own welfare. Little Libby Day just discovered her angle. Call it survival instinct, or call it what it was: greed.

Those "Day enthusiasts," those "solvers" would pay for more than just old letters. Hadn't they asked me where Runner was, and which of Ben's friends I might still know? They'd pay for information that only I could get. Those jokers who memorized the floor plans to my house, who packed folders full of crime-scene photos, all had their own theories about who killed the Days. Being freaks, they'd have a tough time getting anyone to talk to them. Being me, I could do that for them. The police would humor poor little me, a lot of the suspects even. I could talk to my dad, if that's what they really wanted, and if I could find him.

Not that it would necessarily lead to anything. At home under my bright hamster-y lights, safe again, I reminded myself that Ben was guilty (had to be had to be), mainly because I couldn't handle any other possibility. Not if I was going to function, and for the first time in twenty-four years, I needed to function. I started doing the math in my head: $500, say, to talk to the cops; $400 to talk to some of Ben's friends; $1,000 to track down Runner; $2,000 to talk to Runner. I'm sure the fans had a whole list of people I could cajole into giving Orphan Day some of their time. I could drag this out for months.

I fell asleep, the rum bottle still in my hand, reassuring myself: Ben Day is a killer.