Gillian Flynn - Dark Places

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, fuck 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 fuck 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. Asshole.

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 fucking 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. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou, 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!!!