“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!!!
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 fuck 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.