Dark Places(132)

I had called Lyle collect from a phone outside the gas station I was sure wouldn’t work, and he’d started the conversation before the operator even got off the line: Did you hear? Did you hear? I did not hear. I don’t want to hear. Just come get me. I hung up before he started in with his questions.

“What happened?” Lyle said, when he finally pulled up, me in full bone-chatter, the air frosted. I threw myself in the car, my arms in a mummy wrap from the cold.

“Diondra’s definitely not fucking dead. Take me home, I need to get home.”

“You need to get to a hospital, your face is, it’s. Have you seen your face?” He pulled me under the dome light of his car to take a closer look.

“I’ve felt my face.”

“Or the police department? What happened? I knew I should have gone with you. Libby. Libby, what happened?”

I told him. The whole thing, letting him sort it out between my crying jags, ending with, and then they, then they tried to kill me … the words coming out like hurt feelings, a little girl telling her mom that someone was mean to her.

“So Diondra killed Michelle,” Lyle said. “We’re going to the cops.”

“No we’re not. I just need to go home.” My words were curdled with snot and tears.

“We’ve got to go to the cops, Libby.”

I started screaming, nasty things, slamming my hand on the window, yelling til spittle ran out my mouth, and that only made Lyle more sure he was taking me to the police.

“You’ll want to go to the police, Libby. When I tell you what I need to tell you, on top of this, you’ll want to go to the police.”

I knew that’s what I needed to do, but my brain was infected with memories of what happened after my family was murdered: the long, washed-out hours going over and over my story with the police, my legs hanging off oversized chairs, cold hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups, me unable to get warm, just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even your face is numb. And you can say all you want, it doesn’t matter because everyone’s dead anyway.

Lyle turned the heater on full blast, aimed every vent at me.

“OK, Libby, I have some, some news. I think, well, OK I’ll just say it. OK?”

“You’re freaking me out, Lyle. Just say it.” The dome light didn’t cast enough glow, I kept looking around the parking lot to make sure no one was coming.

“Remember the Angel of Debt?” Lyle began. “That the Kill Club was investigating? He’s been caught in a suburb of Chicago. He got nailed in the middle of helping some poor stockmarket sucker stage his death. It was supposed to look like a horseriding accident. The Angel got caught on one of the riding trails, going at the guy with a rock, bashing his head in. His name is Calvin Diehl. Used to be a farmer.”

“OK,” I said, but I knew more was coming.

“OK, so it turns out he’s been helping to kill people since the ’80s. He was smart. He has handwritten notes from everyone he murdered—thirty-two people—swearing they hired him.”

“OK.”

“One of those notes was from your mother.”

I bent over at the waist, but kept looking at Lyle.

“She hired him to kill her. But it was supposed to be just her. To get the life insurance, save the farm. Save you guys, Ben. They have the note.”

“So. What? No, that doesn’t make sense. Diondra killed Michelle. She had her diary. We just said it was Diondra—”

“Well, that’s just the thing. This Calvin Diehl’s playing himself off like a folk hero—I swear, there’s been a crowd outside the jail the past few days, people with signs, like, Diehl’s the Real Deal. They’ll be writing songs about him soon: helping people in debt die so the banks won’t get their property, screwing over the insurance companies to boot. People are eating it up. But, uh, he’s saying he won’t confess to murder on any of the thirty-two people, says they were all assisted suicide. Die with dignity. But he’s taking the rap for Debby. He says he’ll confess to Debby, says she wandered in, got in the middle, things went bad. He says that’s the only one he’s sorry for.”

“What about Michelle?”

“He says he never even saw Michelle. I can’t think why he’d lie.”

“Two killers,” I said. “Two killers the same night. That would be our luck.”

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE time I was hiding in the woods, then whimpering at the gas station, then bawling in Lyle’s car, and finally convincing a sleepy local sheriff’s deputy I wasn’t crazy (You’re who’s sister?), I wasted seven hours. Diondra and Crystal were clean gone by the morning, and I mean clean. They’d doused the place with gas, and it had burnt to the ground before the fire trucks even got out of the station.