Sharp_Objects - Flynn

“You did. Sounds nice, though.” I took another bite of tart. “So tell me about the girls.”

“All business, huh? You never were the friendliest. I know about your sister. That you had a sister who died.”

“Meredith, we can talk some time. I’d like that. After this. But let’s get this story, and then maybe we can enjoy ourselves.” I didn’t intend on staying more than a minute after the interview wrapped.

“Okay…So, here it is. I think I know why…the teeth…” she pantomimed extraction.

“Why?”

“I can’t believe everyone refuses to acknowledge this,” she said.

Meredith glanced around the room.

“You didn’t hear this from me, okay?” she continued. “The girls, Ann and Natalie, they were biters.”

“What do you mean, biters?”

“Both of them. They had serious tempers. Like scary-time tempers. Like boy tempers. But they didn’t hit. They bit. Look.”

She held out her right hand. Just below the thumb were three white scars that shone in the afternoon light.

“That’s from Natalie. And this.” She pulled back her hair to reveal a left ear with only half an earlobe. “My hand she bit when I was painting her fingernails. She decided halfway through that she didn’t like it, but I told her to let me finish, and when I held her hand down, she sunk her teeth into me.”

“And the earlobe?”

“I stayed over there one night when my car wouldn’t start. I was asleep in the guest room and the next thing I knew, blood all over the sheets and my ear just felt like it was on fire, like I wanted to run away from it but it was attached to my head. And Natalie was screaming like she was on fire. That screaming was scarier than the biting. Mr. Keene had to hold her down. The kid had serious problems. We looked for my earlobe, see if it could be stitched back on, but it was gone. I guess she swallowed it.” She gave a laugh that sounded like the reverse of a gulp of air. “I mostly just felt sorry for her.”

Lie.

“Ann, was she as bad?” I asked.

“Worse. There are people all over this town with her teeth marks in them. Your mother included.”

“What?” My hands began to sweat and the back of my neck went cold.

“Your mom was tutoring her and Ann didn’t understand. She completely lost it, pulled some of your momma’s hair out, and bit into her wrist. Hard. I think there had to be stitches.” Images of my mother’s thin arm caught between tiny teeth, Ann shaking her head like a dog, blood blossoming on my mother’s sleeve, on Ann’s lips. A scream, a release.

A little circle of jagged lines, and within, a ring of perfect skin.

Chapter Eleven

Phone calls back in my room, no sign of my mother. I could hear Alan downstairs, snapping at Gayla for cutting the filets wrong.

“I know it seems trivial, Gayla, but think of it like this: Trivial details are the difference between a good meal and a dining experience.” Gayla emitted an assenting sound. Even her mm-hhmms have a twang.

I phoned Richard on his cell, one of the few people in Wind Gap to own one, though I shouldn’t snipe, since I’m one of the only holdouts in Chicago. I just never want to be that reachable.

“Detective Willis.” I could hear a loudspeaker calling a name in the background.

“You busy, Detective?” I blushed. Levity felt like flirting felt like foolishness.

“Hi there,” came his formal voice. “I’m wrapping things up here; can I give a call back?”

“Sure, I’m at…”

“The number shows up on my display.”

“Fancy.”

“Very true.”

Twenty minutes later: “Sorry, I was at the hospital in Woodberry with Vickery.”

“A lead?”

“Of sorts.”

“A comment?”

“I had a very nice time last night.”

I’d written Richard cop Richard cop twelve times down my leg, and had to make myself stop because I was itching for a razor.

“Me, too. Look, I need to ask you something straight and I need you to tell me. Off record. Then I need a comment I can print for my next piece.”

“Okay, I’ll try to help you, Camille. What do you need to ask me?”

“Can we meet at that cheesy bar we first had a drink at? I need to do this in person, and I need to get out of the house and, yes, I’ll say it: I need a drink.”

Three guys from my class were at Sensors when I got there, nice guys, one of whom had famously won a State Fair blue ribbon for his obscenely big, milk-dripping sow one year. A folksy stereotype Richard would have loved. We exchanged niceties—they bought me my first two rounds—and photographs of their kids, eight in all. One of them, Jason Turnbough, was still as blond and round-faced as a kid. Tongue just peeking out the corner of his mouth, pink cheeks, round blue eyes darting between my face and my breasts for most of the conversation. He stopped once I pulled out my tape recorder and asked about the murders. Then it was those whirling wheels that had his full attention. People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.

“Who’d have thought when we were kids back in school, we’d be sitting here talking about murders in Wind Gap?” marveled Tommy Ringer, now grown into a dark-haired fellow with a rangy beard.

“I know, I mean I work in a supermarket, for Chrissakes,” said Ron Laird, a kindly, mouse-faced guy with a booming voice. The three glowed with misplaced civic pride. Infamy had come to Wind Gap, and they’d take it. They could keep working at the supermarket, the drugstore, the hatchery. When they died, this—along with getting married and having kids—would be on their list of things they’d done. And it was something that merely happened to them. No, more accurately, it was something that happened in their town. I wasn’t entirely sure about Meredith’s assessment. Some people would love to have the killer be a guy born and raised in Wind Gap. Someone they went fishing with once, someone they were in Cub Scouts with. Makes a better story.

Richard flung open the door, which was surprisingly light for its looks. Any customer who wasn’t a regular used too much force, so every few minutes the door banged into the side of the building. It offered an interesting punctuation to conversation.

As he walked in, pitching his jacket over his shoulder, the three men groaned.

“This guy.”

“I’m so fucking impressed, dude.”

“Save some brain cells for the case, buddy. You need ’em.”

I hopped off the stool, licked my lips, and smiled.

“Well fellows, got to go to work. Interview time. Thanks for the drinks.”

“We’ll be over here when you get bored,” Jason called out. Richard just smiled at him, muttering idiot through his teeth.

I slugged back my third bourbon, grabbed the waitress to set us up, and once we had our drinks in front of us, I rested my chin on my hands and wondered if I really wanted to talk business. He had a scar just above his right eyebrow and a tiny dimple in his chin. He tapped his foot on top of mine twice, where no one could see.

“So what gives, Scoop?”

“Look, I need to know something. I really need to know it, and if you can’t tell me, then you can’t tell me, but please think hard.” He nodded.

“When you think of the person who did these killings, do you have a specific person in your mind?” I asked.

“I have a few.”

“Male or female?”

“Why are you asking me this with such urgency right now, Camille?”

“I just need to know.”

He paused, sipped his drink, rubbed his hand over stubble on his chin.

“I don’t believe a woman would have done these girls this way.” He tapped my foot again. “Hey, what’s going on? You tell me the truth now.”

“I don’t know, I’m just freaking out. I just needed to know where to point my energies.”

“Let me help.”

“Did you know the girls were known for biting people?”

“I understood from the school there had been an incident involving Ann hurting a neighbor’s bird,” he said. “Natalie was on a pretty tight leash, though, because of what happened at her last school.”

“Natalie bit the earlobe off of someone she knew.”

“No. I have no incident reports filed against Natalie since she came here.”

“Then they didn’t report it. I saw the ear, Richard, there was no lobe, and there was no reason for this person to lie. And Ann attacked someone, too. Bit someone. But I wonder more and more if these girls got tangled up with the wrong person. It’s like they were put down. Like a bad animal. Maybe that’s why their teeth were taken.”

“Let’s begin slowly. First, who did each of the girls bite?”

“I can’t say.”

“Goddam it, Camille, I’m not fucking around. Tell me.”

“No.” I was surprised at his anger. I’d expected him to laugh and tell me I was pretty when defiant.

“This is a fucking murder case, okay? If you have information, I need it.”

“So do your job.”

“I’m trying, Camille, but your screwing around with me doesn’t help.”

“Now you know how it feels,” I muttered childishly.

“Fine.” He rubbed at his eyes. “I’ve had a real long day, so…good night. I hope I was helpful to you.” He stood up, nudged his half-full glass over to me.

“I need an on-record quote.”

“Later. I need to get a little perspective. You may have been right about us being a horrible idea.” He left, and the guys called me to come back and join them. I shook my head, finished my drink, and pretended to take notes until they left. All I did was write sick place sick place over and over for twelve pages.

This time it was Alan waiting for me when I got home. He was sitting on the Victorian love seat, white brocade and black walnut, dressed in white slacks and a silk shirt, dainty white silk slippers on his feet. If he’d been in a photograph, it would be impossible to place him in time—Victorian gentleman, Edwardian dandy, ’50s fop? Twenty-first-century househusband who never worked, often drank, and occasionally made love to my mother.

Very rarely did Alan and I talk outside of my mother’s presence. As a child, I’d once bumped into him in the hallway, and he’d bent down stiffly, to my eye level, and said, “Hello, I hope you’re well.” We’d been living in the same house for more than five years, and that’s all he could come up with. “Yes, thank you,” was all I could give in return.

Now, though, Alan seemed ready to take me on. He didn’t say my name, just patted the couch beside him. On his knee he balanced a cake plate with several large silvery sardines. I could smell them from the entryway.

“Camille,” he said, picking at a tail with a tiny fish fork, “you’re making your mother ill. I’m going to have to ask you to leave if conditions don’t improve.”

“How am I making her ill?”

“By tormenting her. By constantly bringing up Marian. You can’t speculate to the mother of a dead child how that child’s body might look in the ground right now. I don’t know if that’s something you can feel detached from, but Adora can’t.” A glob of fish tumbled down his front, leaving a row of greasy stains the size of buttons.

“You can’t talk to her about the corpses of these two dead little girls, or how much blood must have come out of their mouths when their teeth were pulled, or how long it took for a person to strangle them.”

“Alan, I never said any of those things to my mother. Nothing even close. I truly have no idea what she’s talking about.” I didn’t even feel indignant, just weary.

“Please, Camille, I know how strained your relationship is with your mother. I know how jealous you’ve always been of anyone else’s well-being. It’s true, you know, you really are like Adora’s mother. She’d stand guard over this house like a…witch, old and angry. Laughter offended her. The only time she ever smiled was when you refused to nurse from Adora. Refused to take the nipple.”

That word on Alan’s oily lips lit me up in ten different places. Suck, bitch, rubber all caught fire.

“And you know this from Adora,” I prompted.

He nodded, lips pursed beatifically.

“Like you know that I said horrible things about Marian and the dead girls from Adora.”

“Exactly,” he said, the syllables precisely cut.

“Adora is a liar. If you don’t know that, you’re an idiot.”

“Adora’s had a hard life.”

I forced out a laugh. Alan was undaunted. “Her mother used to come into her room in the middle of the night and pinch her when she was a child,” he said, eyeing the last slab of sardine pitifully. “She said it was because she was worried Adora would die in her sleep. I think it was because she just liked to hurt her.”

A jangle of memory: Marian down the hall in her pulsing, machine-filled invalid’s room. A sharp pain on my arm. My mother standing over me in her cloudy nightgown, asking if I was okay. Kissing the pink circle and telling me to go back to sleep.

“I just think you should know these things,” Alan said. “Might make you be a bit kinder to your mother.”

I had no plans for being kinder to my mother. I just wanted the conversation to end. “I’ll try to leave as soon as I can.”

“Be a good idea, if you can’t make amends,” Alan said. “But you might feel better about yourself if you tried. Might help you heal. Your mind at least.”

Alan grabbed the last floppy sardine and sucked it into his mouth whole. I could picture the tiny bones snapping as he chewed.

A tumbler full of ice and an entire bottle of bourbon purloined from the back kitchen, then up to my room to drink. The booze hit me fast, probably because that was how I was drinking it. My ears were hot and my skin had stopped its blinking. I thought about that word at the back of my neck. Vanish. Vanish will banish my woes, I thought loopily. Vanish will banish my troubles. Would we have been this ugly if Marian hadn’t died? Other families got over such things. Grieve and move on. She still hovered over us, a blonde baby girl maybe a hair too cute for her own good, maybe just a bit too doted on. This before she got sick, really sick. She had an invisible friend, a giant stuffed bear she called Ben. What kind of kid has an imaginary friend that’s a stuffed animal? She collected hair ribbons and arranged them in alphabetical order by color name. She was the kind of girl who exploited her cuteness with such joy you couldn’t begrudge her. Batting of the eyes, tossings of the curls. She called my mother Mudder and Alan…hell, maybe she called Alan Alan, I can’t place him in the room in these memories. She always cleaned her plate, kept a remarkably tidy room, and refused to wear anything but dresses and Mary Janes. She called me Mille and she couldn’t keep her hands off me.