Dark Places

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.

“She was an eight-year-old, got chopped to bits in England in 1867. That guy we just passed, with the top hat and stuff, he was playing at being her murderer, Frederick Baker.”

“That’s really sick.” So she’d been dead forever. That was good. No competition.

“Well, that was a pretty notorious murder.” He caught me grimacing. “Yeah, like I said, they’re a less palatable section. I mean, most of those murders have already been solved, there’s no real mystery. To me, it’s all about the solving. We have former cops, lawyers—”

“Are there role players for … mine? My family, are there role players here?” A beefy guy with highlighted hair and an inflatable doll in a red dress paused in the crowd, nearly on top of me, not even noticing me. The doll’s plastic fingers tickled my cheek. Someone behind me yelled Scott and Amber! I pushed the guy off me, tried to scan the crowd for anyone dressed as my mother, as Ben, some bastard in a red wig, brandishing an axe. My hand had balled into a fist.

“No, no of course not,” Lyle said. “No way, Libby, I would never let that happen, the role play … it. No.”

“Why is it all men?” In one of the booths nearby, two tubby guys in polo shirts were snarling at each other over some child murders in the Missouri bootheel.

“It’s not all men,” Lyle said, defensive. “Most of the solvers are men, but I mean, go to a crossword-puzzle convention and you’ll see the same thing. Women come for the, like, networking. They talk about why they identify with the victims—they’ve had abusive husbands or whatnot—they have some coffee, buy an old photo. But we’ve had to be more careful because sometimes they can get too … attached.”

“Yeah, better not get too human about it,” I said, me being a fucking hypocrite.

Thankfully Lyle ignored me. “Like, right now, they’re all obsessed with the Lisette Stephens thing.” He motioned back behind him, where a small cluster of women were huddled around a computer, necks stretched downward, henlike. I moved past Lyle toward the booth. They were all looking at a video montage of Lisette. Lisette and her sorority sisters. Lisette and her dog. Lisette and her look-alike sister.

“See what I mean?” Lyle said. “They’re not solving, they’re just looking at stuff they could see online at home.”

The problem with Lisette Stephens was there was nothing to solve: She had no boyfriend, no husband, no upset coworkers, no strange ex-cons doing repair work in her home. She just vanished for no reason anyone could think of, except she was pretty. She was the kind of girl people noticed. The kind of girl the media bothered to cover when she disappeared.

I nudged into a spot next to a stack of sweatshirts bearing iron-on decals that read Bring Lisette Home. Twenty-five bucks. The group, however, was more interested in the laptop. The women clicked through the website’s message boards. People often attached photos with their notes, but the photos were jarring. “We love you Lisette, we know you will come home,” popped up alongside a picture of three middle-aged women at the beach. “Peace and love to your family in this time of need,” surfaced next to a photo of someone’s Labradoodle. The women returned to the homepage, and up came the picture the media liked the most: Lisette and her mother, both arms wrapped around each other, cheek-to-cheek, beaming.

I shrugged, trying to ignore my worry about Lisette, who I didn’t know. And also fighting the jealousy again. Out of all these murders, I wanted the Day booth to be the biggest. It was a blush of love: my dead people were the best. I had a flash of my mother, her red hair tied back in a ponytail, helping me tug off my flimsy winter boots, and then rubbing my toes one by one. Warming up big toe, warming up baby toe. In this memory, I could smell buttered toast, but I don’t know if there was buttered toast. In this memory I still had all my toes.

I shivered hard, like a cat.

“Wow, someone walk over your grave?” Lyle said, and then realized the irony.

“So what else?” We hit a traffic jam of people in front of a booth marked Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar, manned by a guy wearing an oversized black mustache and slurping soup. Four skulls lined up on a plank behind him with a sign that read The Final Four. The guy was hollering at Lyle to introduce him to his little friend. Lyle started to wave him off, tried to pull us through the milling crowd, then shrugged, whispered role player to me.

“‘Bob Berdella,’” Lyle said to the man, making a winky joke of the name, “this is Libby Day, whose family was … of the Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre. The Days.”

The guy leaned across the table at me, a drooly piece of hamburger hanging off his tooth. “If you had a cock, you’d be in pieces in my garbage right now,” he said and then gunned out a laugh. “Little, tiny pieces.”

He swatted at me. I skittered back involuntarily, then I lurched back toward Bob, my fist up, rageful, as I always got when I had a fright. Go for the nose, make him bleed, smack that piece of chili meat right off his face, then hit him again. Before I could get to him, Bob shoved his seat back, hands up, muttering not to me but to Lyle, dude I was only playing, no harm, man. He didn’t even look at me as he apologized, like I was some child. As he yammered at Lyle, I went for him. My fist couldn’t quite connect, so I ended up giving him a hard smack against his chin, the way you’d punish a puppy.

“Fuck you, asshole.”

Then Lyle snapped to, muttering apologies and steering me away, my fists still tight, my jaw set. I kicked Bob’s table with my boot as I walked away, just enough so it wobbled once, severely, and dumped the guy’s soup on the