Sharp_Objects (2 page)

For no good reason, I held my breath as I passed the sign welcoming me to Wind Gap, the way kids do when they drive by cemeteries. It had been eight years since I’d been back, but the scenery was visceral. Head down that road, and I’d find the home of my grade-school piano teacher, a former nun whose breath smelled of eggs. That path led to a tiny park where I smoked my first cigarette on a sweaty summer day. Take that boulevard, and I’d be on my way to Woodberry, and the hospital.

I decided to head directly to the police station. It squatted at one end of Main Street, which is, true to its word, Wind Gap’s main street. On Main Street you will find a beauty parlor and a hardware store, a five-and-dime called Five-and-Dime, and a library twelve shelves deep. You’ll find a clothing store called Candy’s Casuals, in which you may buy jumpers, turtlenecks, and sweaters that have ducks and schoolhouses on them. Most nice women in Wind Gap are teachers or mothers or work at places like Candy’s Casuals. In a few years you may find a Starbucks, which will bring the town what it yearns for: prepackaged, preapproved mainstream hipness. For now, though, there’s just a greasy spoon, which is run by a family whose name I can’t remember.

Main Street was empty. No cars, no people. A dog loped down the sidewalk, with no owner calling after it. All the lampposts were papered with yellow ribbons and grainy photocopies of a little girl. I parked and peeled off one of the notices, taped crookedly to a stop sign at a child’s height. The sign was homemade, “Missing,” written at the top in bold letters that may have been filled in by Magic Marker. The photo showed a dark-eyed girl with a feral grin and too much hair for her head. The kind of girl who’d be described by teachers as a “handful.” I liked her.

Natalie Jane Keene

Age: 10

Missing since 5/11

Last seen at Jacob J. Garrett Park, wearing

blue-jean shorts, red striped T-shirt

Tips: 555-7377

I hoped I’d walk into the police station and be informed that Natalie Jane was already found. No harm done. Seems she’d gotten lost or twisted an ankle in the woods or ran away and then thought better of it. I would get in my car and drive back to Chicago and speak to no one.

Turns out the streets were deserted because half the town was out searching the forest to the north. The station’s receptionist told me I could wait—Chief Bill Vickery would be returning for lunch soon. The waiting room had the false homey feel of a dentist’s office; I sat in an orange endchair and flipped through a
Redbook.
An air freshener plugged into a nearby outlet hissed out a plastic smell meant to remind me of country breezes. Thirty minutes later I’d gone through three magazines and was starting to feel ill from the scent. When Vickery finally walked in, the receptionist nodded at me and whispered with eager disdain, “Media.”

Vickery, a slim fellow in his early fifties, had already sweated through his uniform. His shirt clung to his chest, and his pants puckered out in back where an ass should have been.

“Media?” He stared at me over looming bifocals. “What media?”

“Chief Vickery, I’m Camille Preaker, with the
Daily Post
in Chicago.”

“Chicago? Why are you here from Chicago?”

“I’d like to speak with you about the little girls—Natalie Keene and the girl who was murdered last year.”

“Jesus H. Christ. How’d you hear about this up there? Jesus Christ.”

He looked at the receptionist, then back to me, as if we’d collaborated. Then he motioned to me to follow. “Hold my calls, Ruth.”

The receptionist rolled her eyes.

Bill Vickery walked ahead of me down a wood-paneled hallway checked with cheap framed photos of trout and horses, then into his office, which had no window, which was in fact a tiny square lined with metal files. He sat down, lit a cigarette. Didn’t offer me one.

“I don’t want this to get out, Miss. I have no intention of letting this get out.”

“I’m afraid, Chief Vickery, that there’s not too much choice in the matter. Children are being targeted. The public should be aware.” It’s the line I’d been mouthing on the drive down. It directs fault to the gods.

“What do you care? They’re not your kids, they’re Wind Gap kids.” He stood up, sat back down, rearranged some papers. “I bet I’m pretty safe to say Chicago never cared about Wind Gap kids before.” His voice cracked at the end. Vickery sucked on his cigarette, twisted a chunky gold pinky ring, blinked in quick succession. I wondered suddenly if he was going to cry.

“You’re right. Probably not. Look, this isn’t going to be some sort of exploitive story. It’s important. If it makes you feel any better, I’m from Wind Gap.”
There you go, Curry. I’m trying.

He looked back at me. Stared at my face.

“What’s your name?”

“Camille Preaker.”

“How do I not know you?”

“Never got in trouble, sir.” I offered a slight smile.

“Your family’s Preaker?”

“My mother married out of her maiden name about twenty-five years ago. Adora and Alan Crellin.”

“Oh. Them I know.” Them everybody knew. Money was none too common in Wind Gap, not real money. “But I still don’t want you here, Miss Preaker. You do this story and from now on, people will only know us for…this.”

“Maybe some publicity would help,” I offered. “It’s helped in other cases.”

Vickery sat quiet for a second, pondering his paper-bag lunch crumpled at the corner of his desk. Smelled like bologna. He murmured something about JonBenet and shit.

“No thanks, Miss Preaker. And no comment. I have no comment on any ongoing investigations. You can quote me.”

“Look, I have the right to be here. Let’s make this easy. You give me some information. Something. Then I’ll stay out of your way for a while. I don’t want to make your job any harder. But I need to do mine.” It was another little exchange I’d thought up somewhere near St. Louis.

I left the police station with a photocopied map of Wind Gap, on which Chief Vickery had drawn a tiny X to mark where the murdered girl’s body was discovered last year.

Ann Nash, age nine, was found on August 27 in Falls Creek, a bumpy, noisy waterway that ran through the middle of the North Woods. Since nightfall on the twenty-sixth, when she went missing, a search party had combed the forest. But it was hunters who came across her just after 5 a.m. She’d been strangled close to midnight with a basic clothesline, looped twice around her neck. Then dumped in the creek, which was low from the long summer drought. The clothesline had snagged on a massive rock, and she’d spent the night drifting along in the lazy stream. The burial was closed coffin. This was all Vickery would give me. It took an hour of questions to get that much.

F
rom the pay phone at the library I dialed the number on the Missing poster. An elderly female voice identified it as the Natalie Keene Hotline, but in the background I could hear a dishwasher churning. The woman informed me that so far as she knew, the search was still going in the North Woods. Those who wanted to help should report to the main access road and bring their own water. Record temperatures were expected.

At the search site, four blonde girls sat stiffly on a picnic towel spread in the sun. They pointed toward one of the trails and told me to walk until I found the group.

“What are you doing here?” asked the prettiest. Her flushed face had the roundness of a girl barely in her teens and her hair was parted in ribbons, but her breasts, which she aimed proudly outward, were those of a grown woman. A lucky grown woman. She smiled as if she knew me, impossible since she’d have been a preschooler the last time I was in Wind Gap. She looked familiar, though. Maybe the daughter of one of my old schoolmates. The age would be right if someone got knocked up straight out of high school. Not unlikely.

“Just here to help,” I said.

“Right,” she smirked, and dismissed me by turning all her interest to picking the polish off a toenail.

I walked off the crunch of the hot gravel and into the forest, which only felt warmer. The air was jungle wet. Goldenrod and wild sumac bushes brushed my ankles, and fuzzy white cottonwood seeds floated everywhere, slipping into my mouth, sticking to my arms. When I was a kid we called them fairy dresses, I remembered suddenly.

In the distance people were calling for Natalie, the three syllables rising and falling like song. Another ten minutes of hard hiking and I spotted them: about four dozen people walking in long rows, sifting the brush in front of them with sticks.

“Hello! Any news?” called out a beer-bellied man closest to me. I left the trail and threaded my way through the trees until I reached him.

“Can I help out at all?” I wasn’t quite ready to whip out my notebook.

“You can walk beside me here,” he said. “We can always use another person. Less ground to cover.” We walked silently for a few minutes, my partner occasionally pausing to clear his throat with a wet, rocky cough.

“Sometimes I think we should just burn these woods,” he said abruptly. “Seems like nothing good ever happens in them. You a friend of the Keenes?”

“I’m a reporter actually.
Chicago Daily Post
.”

“Mmmm…. Well how ’bout that. You writing about all this?”

A sudden wail shot through the trees, a girl’s scream: “Natalie!” My hands began sweating as we ran toward the cry. I saw figures tumbling toward us. A teenager with white-blonde hair pushed past us onto the trail, her face red and bundled. She was stumbling like a frantic drunk, yelling Natalie’s name at the sky. An older man, maybe her father, caught up with her, wrapped her in his arms, and began walking her out of the forest.

“They found her?” my friend called.

A collective head shaking. “She just got spooked, I think,” another man called back. “Too much for her. Girls shouldn’t be out here anyway, not as things stand.” The man looked pointedly at me, took off his baseball cap to wipe his brow, then began sifting the grass again.

“Sad work,” my partner said. “Sad time.” We moved forward slowly. I kicked a rusted beer can out of my way. Then another. A single bird flew by at eye level, then shot straight up to the treetops. A grasshopper landed suddenly on my wrist. Creepy magic.

“Would you mind if I asked your thoughts on all this?” I pulled out my notebook, wagged it.

“Don’t know I could tell you much.”

“Just what you think. Two girls in a small town…”

“Well, no one knows these are related, right? Unless you know something I don’t. For all we know, Natalie will turn up safe and sound. Hasn’t even been two days.”

“Are there any theories about Ann?” I asked.

“Some loony, some crazy man musta done it. Some guy rides through town, forgot to take his pills, voices are talking to him. Something like ’at.”

“Why do you say that?”

He stopped, pulled a package of chaw from his back pocket, buried a fat pinch in his gumline and worked it until he got the first tiny cut to let the tobacco in. The lining of my mouth began tingling in sympathy.

“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?”

“He took her teeth?”

“All but the back part of a baby molar.”

A
fter another hour with no results and not much more information, I left my partner, Ronald Kamens (“write my middle initial too, if you will:
J
”), and hiked south toward the spot where Ann’s body was found last year. Took fifteen minutes before the sound of Natalie’s name drifted away. Ten more minutes and I could hear Falls Creek, the bright cry of water.

It would be hard to carry a child through these woods. Branches and leaves strangle the pathway, roots bump up from the ground. If Ann was a true girl of Wind Gap, a town that demands utmost femininity in its fairer sex, she’d have worn her hair long down her back. It would have tangled itself in the passing brush. I kept mistaking spiderwebs for glimmering strands of hair.

The grass was still flattened along the point where the body was discovered, raked through for clues. There were a few recent cigarette butts that the idle curious had left behind. Bored kids scaring each other with sightings of a madman trailing bloody teeth.

In the creek, there’d been a row of stones that had snagged the clothesline around Ann’s neck, leaving her tethered and floating in the stream like the condemned for half a night. Now, just smooth water rolling over sand. Mr. Ronald J. Kamens had been proud when he told me: The townsfolk had pried out the rocks, loaded them in the back of a pickup, and smashed them just outside town. It was a poignant gesture of faith, as if such destruction would ward off future evil. Seems it didn’t work.

I sat down at the edge of the creek, running my palms over the rocky soil. Picked up a smooth, hot stone and pressed it against my cheek. I wondered if Ann had ever come here when she was alive. Maybe the new generation of Wind Gap kids had found more interesting ways to kill summers. When I was a girl, we swam at a spot just downstream where huge table rocks made shallow pools. Crawdads would skitter around our feet and we’d jump for them, scream if we actually touched one. No one wore swimsuits, it took too much planning. Instead you just rode your bike home in soaked shorts and halters, shaking your head like a wet dog.