Flynn, Gillian - Sharp_Objects

Only the last sentence was entirely true, and I didn’t realize it until the words came out of me. Richard was a smart guy, a great cop, extremely ambitious, on his first major case with an entire outraged community bellowing for an arrest, and he didn’t have a break yet. If he had more on John than a wish, he’d have arrested him days ago.

“Camille, despite what you think, you don’t know everything about this investigation.”

“Richard, believe me, I’ve never thought that I did. I’ve never felt anything but the most useless outsider. You’ve managed to fuck me and still remain airtight. No leaks with you.”

“Ah, so you’re still pissed about that? I thought you were a big girl.”

Silence. A hiss of lemon. I could vaguely hear the big silver watch on Richard’s wrist ticking.

“Let me show you what a good sport I can be,” I said. I was back on autopilot, just like the old days: desperate to submit to him, make him feel better, make him like me again. For a few minutes last night, I’d felt so comforted, and Richard’s appearing outside that motel door had smashed what was left of the lingering calm. I wanted it back.

I lowered myself to my knees, and began unzipping his pants. For a second he put his hand on the back of my head. Then instead he grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

“Camille, Christ, what are you doing?” He realized how hard his grip was and loosened it, pulled me to my feet.

“I just want to make things okay with us.” I played with a button on his shirt and refused to meet his eyes.

“That won’t do it, Camille,” he said. He kissed me almost chastely on the lips. “You need to know that before we go any further. You just need to know that, period.”

Then he asked me to leave.

Ichased sleep for a few darting hours in the back of my car. The equivalent of reading a sign between the cars of a passing train. Woke up sticky and peevish. Bought a toothbrush kit at the FaStop, along with the strongest-smelling lotion and hairspray I could find. I brushed my teeth in a gas-station sink, then rubbed the lotion into my armpits and between my legs, sprayed my hair stiff. The resulting smell was sweat and sex under a billowing cloud of strawberry and aloe.

I couldn’t face my mother at the house and crazily thought I’d do work instead. (As if I were still going to write that story. As if it weren’t all about to go to hell.) With Geri Shilt’s mention of Katie Lacey fresh in my mind, I decided to go back to her. She was a mother’s aide at the grade school, for both Natalie and Ann’s classes. My own mother had been a mother’s aide, a coveted, elite position in the school that only women who didn’t work could do: swoop into classrooms twice a week and help organize arts, crafts, music, and, for girls on Thursdays, sewing. At least in my day it’d been sewing. By now it was probably something more gender neutral and modern. Computer usage or beginners’ microwaving.

Katie, like my mother, lived at the top of a big hill. The house’s slender staircase cut into the grass and was bordered with sunflowers. A catalpa tree sat slim and elegant as a finger on the hilltop, the female match to the burly shade oak on its right. It was barely ten, but Katie, slim and brown, was already sunning herself on the widow’s walk, a box fan breezing her. Sun without the heat. Now if she could only figure out a tan without the cancer. Or at least the wrinkles. She saw me coming up the stairs, an irritating flicker against the deep green of her lawn, and shaded her eyes to make me out from forty feet above.

“Who is that?” she called out. Her hair, a natural wheaty blonde in high school, was now a brassy platinum that sprung out of a ponytail atop her head.

“Hi, Katie. It’s Camille.”

“Ca-meeel! Oh my God, I’m coming down.”

It was a more generous greeting than I’d expected from Katie, who I hadn’t heard from again after the night of Angie’s Pity Party. Her grudges always came and went like breezes.

She bounded to the door, those bright blue eyes glowing from her suntanned face. Her arms were brown and skinny as a child’s, reminding me of the French cigarillos Alan had taken to smoking one winter. My mother had blocked him off into the basement, grandly called it his smoking room. Alan soon dropped the cigarillos and took up port.

Over her bikini Katie had thrown a neon pink tank, the kind girls picked up in South Padre in the late ’80s, souvenirs from wet T-shirt contests over Spring Break. She wrapped her cocoa-buttered arms around me and led me inside. No A/C in this old house either, just like my momma’s, she explained. Although they did have one room unit in the master bedroom. The kids, I guessed, could sweat it out. Not that they weren’t catered to. The entire east wing seemed to be an indoor playground, complete with a yellow plastic house, a slide, a designer rocking horse. None of it looked remotely played with. Big colored letters lined one wall: Mackenzie. Emma. Photos of smiling blonde girls, pug nosed and glassy eyed, pretty mouth breathers. Never a close-up of a face, but always framed in order to capture what they were wearing. Pink overalls with daisies, red dresses with polka-dot bloomers, Easter bonnets and Mary Janes. Cute kids, really cute clothes. I’d just created a tagline for Wind Gaps’ li’l shoppers.

Katie Lacey Brucker didn’t seem to care why I was in her home this Friday morning. There was talk of a celebrity tell-all she was reading, and whether childrens’ beauty pageants were forever stigmatized by JonBenet. Mackenzie is just dying to model. Well she’s as pretty as her mother, who can blame her? Why, Camille, that’s sweet of you to say—I never felt like you thought I was pretty. Oh of course, don’t be silly. Would you like a drink? Absolutely. We don’t keep liquor in the home. Of course, not what I meant at all. Sweet tea? Sweet tea is lovely, impossible to get in Chicago, you really miss the little regional goodies, you should see how they do their ham up there. So great to be home.

Katie came back with a crystal pitcher of sweet tea. Curious, since from the living room I saw her pull a big gallon jug out of the icebox. A hit of smugness, followed by a self-reminder that I wasn’t being particularly frank, either. In fact, I’d cloaked my own natural state with the thick scent of fake plant. Not just aloe and strawberry, but also the faint strain of lemon air freshener coming from my shoulder.

“This tea is wonderful, Katie. I swear I could drink sweet tea with every meal.”

“How do they do their ham up there?” She tucked her feet under her legs and leaned in. It reminded me of high school, that serious stare, as if she were trying to memorize the combination to a safe.

I don’t eat ham, hadn’t since I was a kid and went to visit the family business. It wasn’t even a slaughtering day, but the sight kept me up nights. Hundreds of those animals caged so tightly they couldn’t even turn around, the sweet throaty scent of blood and shit. A flash of Amma, staring intently at those cages.

“Not enough brown sugar.”

“Mmmhmm. Speaking of which, can I make you a sandwich or something? Got ham from your momma’s place, beef from the Deacons’, chicken from Coveys. And turkey from Lean Cuisine.”

Katie was the type who’d bustle around all day, clean the kitchen tile with a toothbrush, pull the lint from the floorboards with a toothpick before she spoke much about anything uncomfortable. Sober at least. Still, I maneuvered her to talk of Ann and Natalie, guaranteed her anonymity, and started up my tape recorder. The girls were sweet and cute and darling, the obligatory cheery revisionism. Then: