Gillian Flynn - Dark Places

She was about to lecture Michelle on not going into Ben’s room without his permission, and wanted to slap herself. She thought about what Det. Collins had said, the organs of animals, in Tupper-ware containers. She imagined them. Some dried in tight, wooden balls, others fresh and assaulting when you opened the lid, let the smell hit you.

Patty stood up. “What’s in his room?”

She started walking down the hall, Ben’s goddang phone cord tripping her up, as always. She marched past his padlocked door, down the hall, turned the corner left, past the girls’ room and into her own. Socks and shoes and jeans lay everywhere, each day’s flotsam abandoned in piles.

She opened her bedside table and found an envelope, In Case of Emergency scrawled on the front in Diane’s elongated cursive that looked just like their mother’s. Inside was $520, cash. She had no idea when Diane had sneaked that in her room, and she was glad she hadn’t known, because Runner would have sensed her holding out. She lifted the money to her nose and smelled it. Then she tucked the envelope back inside and pulled out a bolt-cutter she’d bought weeks ago, just to have on hand, just if she ever needed to get into Ben’s lair. She’d been ashamed. She started back down the hallway, the girls’ room looking like a flophouse, beds against each wall except the doorway. She could picture the police wrinkling their noses— they all sleep in here?— and then the aroma of urine hit her and she realized one of them must have wet the bed last night. Or the night before?

She debated switching out the sheets right then, but made herself walk straight back to Ben’s, stood eye-level with an old Fender Guitar sticker he’d partly scraped off. She had a quick moment of nausea when she almost decided she couldn’t look. What if she found incriminating photos, sickening Polaroids?

Snap. The lock fell to the carpet. She yelled at the girls, peeking out from the living room like startled deer, to go watch TV. She had to say it three times— gowatchTVgowatchTVgowatchTV- —before Michelle finally went away.

Ben’s bed was unmade, rumpled under a pile of jackets and jeans and sweaters, but the rest of the room wasn’t a pit. His desk was piled with notebooks and cassette tapes and an outdated globe that had been Diane’s. Patty spun it, her finger leaving a mark in the dust near Rhodesia, then began flipping through the notebooks. They were covered in band logos: AC/DC with the lightning slash, Venom, Iron Maiden. On the notebook paper, Ben had drawn pentagrams and poems about murder and Satan. The child is mine

But really not

Cuz Satan has a darker plot

Kill the baby and its mother

Then look for more

And kill another

She felt a ripple of illness, as if a vein running from her throat to her pelvis had gone sour. She riffled through more notebooks, and as she shook the last one, it flipped naturally to the middle. For pages and pages, Ben had drawn ballpoint pictures of vaginas with hands going into them, uteruses with creatures inside, grinning demonically, pregnant ladies sliced in two, their babies half falling out.

Patty sat down on Ben’s chair, feeling giddy, but she kept flipping until she came to a page with several girls’ names written in pancake-stack rows: Heather, Amanda, Brianne, Danielle, Nicole, and then over and over, in progressively embellished gothic cursive: Krissi, Chrissy, Krissi, Krissie, Krissi, Krissi Day, Krissi Day, Krissi Dee Day Krissi D. Day, Krissi D-Day!

Krissi Day inside a heart.

Patty rested her head on the cool desktop. Krissi Day. Like he was going to marry little Krissi Cates. Ben and Krissi Day. Is that what he thought? Did that make what he did to her seem OK? Did he picture himself bringing that little girl home for dinner, letting Mom meet his girlfriend? And Heather. That was the name of the Hinkel girl who was at the Cates’s. Were the rest of these names even more girls he’d hurt?

Patty’s head was heavy, she willed herself not to move. She would just keep her head right here, on the desk, until someone told her what to do. She was good at this, she sometimes sat for hours without leaving a chair, her head bobbing like a nursing-home inmate, thinking about her childhood, when her parents had their list of chores for her, and told her when to go to bed and when to get up and what to do during the day, and no one ever asked her to decide things. But as she was staring at the rumpled sheets on Ben’s bed, with the airplane pattern, and remembering him asking for new sheets— plain sheets—about a year ago, she notice a wadded plastic bag jutting out from underneath the bed frame.

She got down on her hands and knees, pulled out an old plastic shopping bag. It had a weight to it, swung out like a pendulum. She peered in and saw only clothing, and then she realized she was looking at girly patterns: flowers and hearts, mushrooms and rainbows. She dumped them out in a pile on the floor, afraid even as she was doing it that that those Polaroids she feared would tumble out with them. But it was just clothes: underwear, undershirts, bloomers. They were all different sizes, from Krissi’s age to toddler. They were used. As in, they had been worn by little girls. Just like the detective had said. Patty put them back in the bag.

Her son. Her son. He would go to prison. The farm would be gone, Ben would be in jail, and the girls … She realized, as she too often did, that she didn’t know how to function properly. Ben needed a good lawyer, and she didn’t know how to do that.

She walked into the living room, thinking about a trial and how she couldn’t bear it. She scattered the girls back to their bedroom in a fierce voice, them staring back at her with open mouths, hurt and scared, and she thought about how she made things even worse for Ben, a single mother who was incompetent, overwhelmed, how much worse it made him look, and she put some kindling and newspapers in the fireplace, and just a few logs on top, and she set fire to the clothes. A pair of underpants with daisies on them was just catching at the waistband when the phone rang.

IT WAS LENthe Lender. She started to make her excuses, explain that there was too much going on to talk about the foreclosure. There was a problem with her son—

“That’s why I phoned,” he interrupted. “I heard about Ben. I hadn’t been going to phone. Before. But. I think I can help. I don’t know if you’ll want it. But I have an option.”

“An option for Ben?”

“A way to help Ben. With legal costs. What you’re facing, you’re going to need a bundle.”

“I thought we were out of options,” Patty said.

“Not entirely.”

LEN WOULDN’T COMEout to the farm, he wouldn’t meet her in town. He got all clandestine on her, insisting she drive out to the Rural Route 5 picnic station and park. They haggled and bickered, Len finally breathing a big huff into the phone that made her lips twist. “If you want some help, come out there, now. Don’t bring no one else. Don’t tell no one. I’m doing this because I think I can trust you, Patty, and I like you. I really want to help you.” A pause came on, so deep Patty looked at the phone receiver, and whispered Len? into the phone, already thinking he was gone, that she was about to hang up.

“Patty, I really don’t know how to help you but this. I think, well, you’ll see. I’m praying for you.”

She turned back to the fireplace, sifted through the flames, saw only half the clothes were burned. No logs left, so she hurried into the garage, grabbed her dad’s old axe with its heavy head and razor-sharp blade—back when they made tools right—and chopped up a bundle of wood, carried it all back in.

She was feeding it to the fire when she felt Michelle’s swaying presence at her side. “Mom!”

“What, Michelle.”

She looked up and Michelle was in her nightgown pointing at the fire. “You were about to throw the axe in with the wood.” Michelle smiled. “Scatterbrain.” There was the axe laid across Patty’s arms like kindling. Michelle took it from her, holding the blade away from her, as she’d been taught, and set it beside the door.

She watched Michelle walk hesitantly back to her room, as if she were picking through grass, and Patty followed in her daughter’s footsteps. The girls were all piled on the floor, murmuring to their dolls. There was that joke people told, that they loved their children most when they were sleeping, hah-hah, and Patty felt a small stab. She really did like them best when they were sleeping, not asking any questions, not needing food or amusement, and she liked them second best when they were like this: tired, calm, disinterested in their mother. She put Michelle in charge and left them there, too worn out to do anything but take direction from Len the Lender.

Don’t hope for too much, she told herself. Don’t hope.

It was a half-hour drive through bright snow, the flakes turning to stars in her headlights. It was a “good snow,” as Patty’s mom, the winter lover, would say, and Patty thought how the girls would be playing in it all day tomorrow and then thought: Would they? What happens tomorrow? Where will Ben be?

Where is Ben?

She pulled up to the abandoned picnic area, the shelter a big slab of concrete and metal built in the ’70s with communal tables and a roof that was angled like some failed attempt at origami. Two swingsets sat beneath four inches of snow, their old black-rubber seats not swaying at all, as Patty thought they should. There was a breeze, why were they so still?

Len’s car wasn’t there. In fact, no car was there, and she started to fidget with the zipper of her coat, running a fingernail on each metal tooth so it made a clicking noise. What might happen: She would go up to the picnic bench and find Len had left her an envelope with a stack of money, a gentlemanly gesture she would repay. Or maybe Len had organized a bunch of folks who felt pity on her, and they were about to arrive and Wonderful Life her with cash handouts, Patty realizing everyone did love her after all.

A rap came on her window, bright pink knuckles and a man’s thick torso. It wasn’t Len. She rolled her window partway down and peered out, ready for him to tell her to move along, lady. It was that kind of rap.

“Come on,” he said instead. He didn’t lean down, she still couldn’t see his face. “Come on, we’ll talk up on the benches.”

She shut off the car, and pulled herself out, the man already walking up ahead, bundled under a thick ranch coat and a Stetson. She was wearing a wool hat that had never fit right, her ears always popped out, so she was already rubbing at the tips when she reached the man.

He seemed nice, was what she thought. She needed him to be nice. He had dark eyes and a handlebar mustache, the tips drooping off his chin. He was probably forty, looked like he might come from around here. He looked nice, she thought again. They settled down on the picnic benches, pretending they weren’t covered in snow. Maybe he was a lawyer? she thought. A lawyer Len had talked into representing Ben. But then why would they be meeting out—

“Hear you got yourself some trouble,” he said in a rumbly voice that matched his eyes. Patty just nodded.

“About to foreclose on your farm, and your boy’s about to be arrested.”

“The police just want to talk to him about an incident that—”

“Your son is about to be arrested, and I know what for. In this next year, you will need money to fend off your creditors, so you can keep your children at home—in their own goddam home—and you will need money for a lawyer for your son, because you do not want your son to go to prison labeled a child molester.”