Dark Places (6 page)

“I saw what I saw,” I began, the way I always did.

“Bullshit. You saw what they told you to see because you were a good, scared little girl who wanted to help. The prosecution screwed you up royally. They used you to nail the easiest target. Laziest police work I ever seen.”

“I was in the house …”

“Yeah, how do you explain the gunshots your mom died from?” the guy hammered, leaning forward on his knees. “Ben didn’t have any residue on his hands—”

“Guys, guys,” the older man interrupted, waving thick, crimped fingers. “And ladies,” he added, greasily, nodding at me and the Frizz-Head Woman. “We haven’t even presented the facts of the case. We have to have protocol or this might as well be some Internet chat session. When we have a guest like this, we should be particularly sure we’re all on the same page.”

No one disagreed more than a grumble’s worth, so the old guy wet his lips, looked over his bifocals and rearranged some throat phlegm. The man was authoritative, yet somehow unwholesome. I pictured him at home by himself, eating canned peaches at the kitchen counter, smacking at the syrup. He began reciting from his notes.

“Fact: Somewhere around 2 a.m. on January 3,1985, a person or persons killed three members of the Day family in their farmhouse in Kinnakee, Kansas. The deceased include Michelle Day, age ten; Debby Day, age nine; and the family matriarch, Patty Day, age thirty-two. Michelle Day was strangled; Debby Day died of axe wounds, Patty Day of two shotgun wounds, axe wounds, and deep cuts from a Bowie hunting knife.”

I felt the blood rush in my ears, and told myself I wasn’t hearing anything new. Nothing to panic about. I never really listened to the details of the murder. I’d let the words run over my brain and out my ears, like a terrified cancer patient hearing all that coded jargon and understanding nothing, except that it was very bad news.

“Fact,” the man continued. “Youngest child Libby Day, age seven, was in the house at the time, and escaped the killer or killers through a window in her mother’s room.

“Fact: Oldest child Benjamin Day, fifteen, claims he was out sleeping in a neighbor’s barn that night after an argument with his mother. He has never produced another alibi, and his demeanor with the police was extremely unhelpful. He was subsequently arrested and convicted, based largely on rumors within the community that he’d become involved in Satan worship—the walls of the house were
covered in symbols and words associated with Devil worship. In his mother’s blood.”

The old man paused for dramatic effect, eyed the group, returned to his notes.

“More damning was the fact his surviving sister, Libby, testified that she
saw
him commit the murders. Despite Libby’s confused testimony and young age, Ben Day was convicted. This
despite a startling lack of physical evidence
. We convene to explore other possibilities and to debate the merits of the case. What I think we can agree on is that the killings can be traced to the events of January 2, 1985. It all went wrong in a single day—no pun intended.” Murmurs of laughter, guilty looks toward me. “When that family got up that morning, it wasn’t like there was a hit on them. Something went really wrong
that day
.”

Part of a crime-scene photo had slid out of the speaker’s folder: a plump, bloody leg and part of a lavender nightgown. Debby. The man noticed my gaze and tucked it back in, like it wasn’t my business.

“I think the general consensus is that Runner Day did it,” the fat woman said, rummaging in her purse, wadded tissues falling out the side of it.

I started at the sound of my dad’s name. Runner Day. Miserable man.

“I mean, right?” she continued. “He goes to Patty, tries to bully her for money, as usual, gets nothing, gets pissed, goes haywire. I mean, the guy was crazy, right?”

The woman produced a bottle and popped two aspirin the way people in the movies did, with a sharp, violent throwback of the head. Then she looked at me for confirmation.

“Yeah. I think so. I don’t remember him that well. They divorced when I was, like, two. We didn’t have much contact after. He came back and lived with us for a summer, the summer before the murders, but—”

“Where’s he now?”

“I don’t know.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“But what about the big guy’s footprint?” said a man in the back.
“The police never explained why a man’s dress shoe shows up tracking blood in a house where no men wore dress shoes …”

“The police never explained a lot,” started the older guy.

“Like the random bloodstain,” Lyle added. He turned to me. “There was a bloodstain on Michelle’s bedsheets—and it was a different blood type than anyone in the family. Unfortunately the sheets were from Goodwill, so the prosecution claimed the blood could have come from anyone.”

“Gently used” sheets. Yes. The Days were big fans of Goodwill: sofa, TV, lamps, jeans, we even got our curtains there.

“Do you know how to find Runner?” the younger kid asked. “Could you ask him some questions for us?”

“And I still think it’d be worthwhile to question some of Ben’s friends from the time. Do you still have any connections in Kinnakee?” said the old man.

Several people started arguing about Runner’s gambling and Ben’s friends and poor police procedure.

“Hey,” I snapped. “What about Ben? Ben is just off the table?”

“Please, this is the grossest miscarriage of justice ever,” said the fat lady. “And don’t pretend you think otherwise. Unless you’re protecting your daddy. Or you’re too ashamed about what you did.”

I glared at her. She had a glop of egg yolk in her hair.
Who ate eggs at midnight?
I thought.
Or had that been there since this morning
?

“Magda here is very involved with the case, very involved in the effort to free your brother,” said the old guy, with a patronizing rise of his eyebrows.

“He’s a wonderful man,” Magda said, pointing her chin at me. “He writes poetry and music and he’s just a force of hope. You should get to know him, Libby, you really should.”

Magda was running her fingernails across a set of folders on the table before her, one for each Day family member. The thickest folder was covered with photos of my brother: Ben, red-headed and young, somberly holding a toy bomber; Ben, black-haired and scared in his mug shot after the arrest; Ben today, in prison, the red hair returned, studious looking, his mouth partly open, as if caught midsentence. Next to that was Debby’s folder, bearing a single photo of her dressed as a gypsy for Halloween: red cheeks, red lips, her brown hair
covered by my mom’s red bandanna, a hip jutted to the side, pretend-sexy. To her right, you can see my freckled arm, reaching for her. It was a family photo, something I thought had never been released.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked her.

“Around.” She covered the folder with a thick hand.

I looked down at the table, resisting the urge to lunge. The photograph of Debby’s dead body had slipped out of the old guy’s folder again. I could see the bloody leg, a sliced-up belly, an arm nearly off. I leaned across the table and grabbed the man’s wrist.

“You put that shit away,” I murmured. He tucked the photo away again, then held the folder shield-like, and blinked at me.

The group was all looking at me now, curious, a little concerned, like I was some pet bunny they just realized might be rabid.

“Libby,” Lyle said in the soothing tones of a talk-show host. “No one doubts you were in the house. No one doubts you survived an incredibly horrific ordeal no child should ever endure. But did you really see with your own eyes what you say you saw? Or may you have been coached?”

I was picturing Debby, sifting my hair with nimble, pudgy fingers, braiding it in the fishbone style she insisted was more difficult than French braids, huffing warm baloney breath on the back of my neck. Tying a green ribbon on the end, turning me into a present. Helping me balance on the edge of the bathtub so I could hold a handmirror and see the back of my furrowed head in the looking glass over the sink. Debby, who so desperately wanted everything to be pretty.

“There’s no proof that anyone but Ben killed my family,” I said, pulling back to the land of the living, where I live by myself. “He never even filed an appeal, for Christsakes. He’s never tried to get out.” I had no experience with convicts, but it seemed to me that they were always launching appeals, that it was a passion for them, even if they had no shot. When I pictured prison, I pictured orange jumpsuits and yellow legal pads. Ben had proved himself guilty by sheer inertia—my testimony was beside the point.

“He had reason enough for eight appeals,” Magda pronounced, grandly. I realized she was one of those women who would show up on my doorstep to scream at me. I was glad I’d never given Lyle my
address. “Not fighting doesn’t mean he’s guilty, Libby, it means he’s lost hope.”

“Well, then good.”

Lyle widened his eyes.

“Oh, God. You really think Ben did it.” Then he laughed. Once, accidentally, quickly swallowed but entirely genuine. “Excuse me,” he murmured.

No one laughs at me. Everything I say or do is taken very, very seriously. No one mocks a victim. I am not a figure of mirth. “Well, you all enjoy your conspiracy theories,” I said, and bumped up from the chair.

“Oh don’t be like that,” said the cop-guy. “Stay. Convince us.”

“He never … filed … an appeal,” I said, like a preschool teacher. “That’s good enough for me.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

I flipped him off, a hard gesture like I was digging into cold earth. Then I turned away, someone behind me saying, “She’s still a little liar.”

I darted back into the crowd, pushing my way under armpits and past groins until I arrived back into the cool of the stairwell, the noise behind me. My only victory of the night was the wad of money in my pocket and the knowledge that these people were as pathetic as I was.

I GOT HOME
,
turned every light on, and got into bed with a bottle of sticky rum. I lay sideways, studying the intricate folds of Michelle’s note, which I’d forgotten to sell.

THE NIGHT FELT
tilted. Like the world had once been carefully parceled out between people who believed Ben guilty and people who believed him innocent, and now, those twelve strangers crunched in a booth in a downtown basement had scrambled over to the side of the innocent with bricks in their pockets, and—boom!— that’s where all the weight was now. Magda and Ben and poetry and a force of hope. Footprints and bloodstains and Runner going berserk. For the first time since Ben’s trial, I had fully subjected my-self
to people who believed I was wrong about Ben, and it turns out I wasn’t entirely up to the challenge. Me of little faith. On another night, I might have shrugged it all off, like I usually did. But those people were so assured, so dismissive, as if they’d discussed me countless times and decided I wasn’t worth grilling that hard. I’d gone there assuming they’d be like people used to be: they might want to help me, take care of me, fix my problems. Instead they mocked me. Was I really that easy to unsettle, that flimsy?

No. I saw what I saw that night, I thought, my forever-mantra. Even though that wasn’t true. The truth was I didn’t see anything. OK? Fine. I technically saw nothing. I only heard. I only heard because I was hiding in a closet while my family died because I was a worthless little coward.

THAT NIGHT, THAT
night, that night. I’d woken up in the dark in the room I shared with my sisters, the house so cold that frost was on the inside of the window. Debby had gotten in bed with me at some point—we usually jammed in together for warmth—and her plump behind was pushed into my stomach, pressing me against the chilled wall. I’d been a sleepwalker since I could toddle, so I don’t remember pulling myself over Debby, but I do remember seeing Michelle asleep on the floor, her diary in her arms as usual, sucking on a pen in her sleep, the black ink drooling down her chin with her saliva. I hadn’t bothered trying to wake her up, get her back in bed. Sleep was viciously defended in our loud, cold, crowded house, and not one of us woke without a fight. I left Debby in my bed and opened the door to hear voices down the hall in Ben’s room—urgent whispers that bordered on noise. The sounds of people who think they’re being quiet. A light coming from the crack under Ben’s door. I decided to go to my mom’s room, padded down the hall, pulled back her covers and pressed myself against my mother’s back. In the winter, my mom slept in two pairs of sweats and several sweaters—she always felt like a giant stuffed animal. She usually didn’t move when we got in bed with her, but that night I remember she turned to me so quickly I thought she was angry. Instead she grabbed me and squeezed me, kissed my forehead. Told me she loved me. She hardly ever told us
she loved us. That’s why I remember it, or think I do, unless I added that for comfort after the fact. But we’ll say she told me she loved me, and that I fell immediately back to sleep.

When I next woke, it could have been minutes or hours later, she was gone. Outside the closed door, where I couldn’t see, my mother was wailing and Ben was bellowing at her. There were other voices too; Debby was sobbing, screaming
Mommymommymommymichelle
and then there was the sound of an axe. I knew even then what it was. Metal on air—that was the sound—and after the sound of the swing came the sound of a soft thunk and a gurgle and Debby made a grunt and a sound like sucking for air. Ben screaming at my mom: “Why’d you make me do this?” And no sound from Michelle, which was strange, since Michelle was always the loudest, but nothing from her. Mom screaming
Run! Run! Don’t Don’t
. And a shotgun blast and my mom still yelling but no longer able to make words, just a screeching sound like a bird banging into the walls at the end of the hallway.

Heavy foot treads of boots and Debby’s small feet running away, not dead yet, running toward my mom’s room and me thinking
no, no, don’t come here
and then boots shaking the hallway behind her and dragging and scratching at the floor and more gurgling, gurgling, banging and then a thud and the axe sound and my mom still making horrible cawing sounds, and me standing, frozen, in my mom’s bedroom, just listening and the shotgun blasting my ears again and a thunk that rattled the floorboards beneath my feet. Me, coward, hoping everything would go away. Huddling half in and out of the closet, rocking myself.
Go away go away go away
. Doors banging and more footsteps and a wail, Ben whispering to himself, frantic. And then crying, a deep male crying and Ben’s voice, I know it was Ben’s voice, screaming
Libby! Libby
!