“You grab me a beer, Diondra?” he said, pissy.
She cocked her head at him, then handed him hers, went back to the fridge for another.
“So let’s go find Runner, and we’ll get some pot and get some money,” Diondra said, draping herself next to him on the chair. “And then we can get the hell out of Dodge.”
Ben looked at that blue eye, that bright blue eye—it seemed like Diondra was always looking at him sideways, he never saw both eyes at the same time—and for the first time he felt really bone scared. He couldn’t even drop out of school without his mom’s permission before he turned sixteen. Much less get a job at the brick plant or anything that made enough money for Diondra to not hate him, not sigh when he came home at night, and now that’s what he saw, not even that little apartment in Wichita, but some factory near the border, near Oklahoma, where the really cheap work was, where you worked sixteen hours a day, worked weekends, and Diondra would be with the baby and she’d hate it. She had no mothering instinct, she’d sleep right through the baby crying, she’d forget to feed it, she’d go out drinking with some guys she met—she always was meeting guys, at the mall or the gas station or the movies—and leave the kid there.
“Fine,” he said, thinking once they left the house, they’d lose track of the idea. He almost had. His brain was bundling itself up, getting woolly. He wanted to go home.
Trey immediately shot up, jingling his truck keys—
Libby DayNOW
Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down:
Ben was lying. I didn’t want this to be true but it was undeniable. Why lie about a silly high school girlfriend? My thoughts chased themselves like birds trapped in an attic. Maybe Ben was telling the truth, and the note from Diondra really wasn’t to him, it was just part of the haphazard flotsam that went with a houseful of school kids. Hell, Michelle could have pulled it out of the trash after some senior boy tossed it, a useful bit of garbage for her ongoing petty blackmail.
Or maybe Ben knew Diondra, loved Diondra, and was trying to keep it a secret because Diondra was dead.
He’d killed her the same night he killed our family, part of his satanic sacrifices, buried her somewhere out there in that big, flat Kansas farm country. The Ben that frightened me was back in my head: I could picture a campfire, liquor sloshing in a bottle, Diondra-from-the-yearbook, with her spiral curls bouncing as she laughed, eyes closed, or sang, her face orange in the fire and Ben standing behind her, gently raising a shovel, eyes on the crown of her head …
Where were the other cult kids, the rest of the pack of Satan worshipers? If there was a ring of pale, sloe-eyed teens who’d recruited Ben, where were they? By now I’d read every scrap of information from the trial. The police had never found anyone involved in Satan worship with Ben. All the wild-haired, pot-smoking Devil kids of Kinnakee morphed back to peachy country boys in the days after Ben’s arrest. How convenient for them. Two “habitual drug users” in their early twenties testified that Ben had shown up at some abandoned warehouse, a hangout place, on the day of the murders. They said he screeched like a demon when someone played a Christmas song. They claimed he told them he was going to make a sacrifice. They said he left with a guy named Trey Teepano, who supposedly mutilated cattle and worshiped the Devil. Teepano testified he only vaguely knew Ben. He had an alibi for the time of the killings: his dad, Greg Teepano, testified Trey was at home with him in Wamego, more than sixty miles away.
So maybe Ben was crazy all by his lonesome. Or maybe he was innocent. Again the birds in the attic battered around. Crash thunk shatter. I had probably sat for hours on the couch, wondering what to do, being shiftless, when I heard the heavy footsteps of my mailman thump up my stairs. My mom always had us bake Christmas cookies for our mailman. But my mailman, or lady, changed every few weeks. No cookies.
I had three envelopes offering me credit cards, one bill that belonged to someone named Matt who lived on a street nowhere near me, and one envelope that looked like dirty laundry, it was so soft and wrinkled. Used. Someone else’s name and address had been blacked out with a magic marker, and mine written in the cramped space left below it. Mrs. Libby Day.
It was from Runner.
I went upstairs to read the letter, sitting on the edge of my bed. Then, as I always do when I get nervy, I smushed myself into a small space, in this case the spot between my bed and the bedside table, sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. I opened the dirty envelope and pulled out an unwholesome piece of women’s stationery, bordered with roses. My father’s handwriting swarmed across it: tiny, frenetic, pointy, like a hundred spiders had been splattered across the page.
