Dark Places(19)

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.





Ben Day


JANUARY 2, 1985

9:13 A.M.


Ben was free-spinning over ice, the wheels of his bike shimmying. The path was for dirtbikes, for summer, and it had iced over, so it was stupid to ride it. It was more stupid what he was doing: pedaling as fast as he could over the bumpy ground, broken corn stalks on both sides like stubble, and him picking at the goddam butterfly sticker one of his sisters had pasted to the speedometer. It’d been there for weeks, buzzing in and out of his vision, pissing him off, but not enough to deal with it. He bet it was Debby who put it there, loll-eyed and mindless: This looks pretty! Ben had the sparkly thing halfway off when he hit a patch of dirt, his front wheel turning completely to the left, his rear bucking out from under him. He didn’t fly clear. He jerked up, one leg still caught on the bike, and fell sideways, his right arm scraping the corn shards, his right leg bending beneath him. His head smashed the dirt hard, his teeth sang like a bell.

By the time he could breathe again—ten tear-blink seconds—he could feel a warm trickle of blood snake down past his eye. Good. He smeared it with his fingertips down across the side of his cheek, felt a new line of blood immediately stream out of the crack in his forehead. He wished he’d hit harder. He’d never broken a bone, a fact he admitted only when pressed. Really, dude? How do you get through life without breaking something? Your mom wrap you in bubble wrap? Last spring, he’d broken into the town pool with some guys, and stood on the diving board over the big dry hole, staring at the concrete bottom, willing himself to flip in, really smash himself up, be the crazy kid. He’d bounced a few times, taken another swig of whiskey, jiggled up and down some more, and walked back to the guys, who he hardly knew, who’d been watching him only out the sides of their eyes.

A broken bone would be best, but some blood wasn’t bad. It was flowing steadily now, down his cheek, under his chin, dripping on the ice. Pure, round red ponds.

Annihilation.

The word came from nowhere—his brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he’d been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn’t ten.

He started pedaling, his right hip knotted, his arm sizzling with the scrape from the corn. Maybe he’d get a good bruise too. Diondra would like that, she’d brush one soft fingertip over it, circle it once or twice and give it a poke so she could tease him when he jumped. She was a girl who liked big reactions, Diondra—she was a screamer, a weeper, a howler when she laughed. She made her eyes go wide, her brows almost up to her hairline when she wanted to seem surprised. She liked to jump out from behind doors and scare him so he’d pretend to chase her. Diondra, his girl with the name that made him think of princesses or strippers, he wasn’t sure which. She was a little of both: rich but sleazy.

Something had rattled loose on his bike, there was a sound like a nail in a tin can coming from somewhere near his pedals. He stopped a second to look, his hands pink and wrinkled in the cold like an old man’s, and just as weak, but could see nothing wrong. More blood pooled into his eyes as he willed himself to find the problem. Fuck, he was useless. He’d been too young when his dad left. He never had a chance to learn anything practical. He saw guys working on motor-cycles and tractors and cars, the insides of the engines looking like the metal intestines of an animal he’d never seen before. Now animals he did know, and guns. He was a hunter like everyone else in his family, but that didn’t stand for much since his mom was a better shot than he was.