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Who I wanted to talk to was Aunt Diane. Diane who’d taken care of me for seven of my eleven years as an underage orphan. She’d been the first to take me in, shuffling me into her mobile home with my suitcase of belongings. Clothes, a favorite book, but no toys. Michelle hoarded all the dolls with her at night, she called it her slumber party, and she peed on them when she was strangled. I still remember a sticker book Diane had given us the day of the murders— flowers and unicorns and kittens—and always wondered if it had been in that ruined pile.
Diane couldn’t afford a new place. All the money from my mom’s life insurance went to get Ben a decent lawyer. Diane said my mother would want that, but she said it with a drawn face, like she’d give my mother a good talking to if she could. So no money for us. Being runty, I was able to sleep in a storage closet where the washer/dryer would have gone. Diane even painted it for me. She worked overtime, shuttled me to Topeka for therapy, tried to be affectionate with me, even though I could tell it hurt her to hug me, this pissy reminder of her sister’s murder. Her arms encircled me like a hula-hoop, like it was a game to get them around me but touch as little as possible. But every single morning she told me she loved me.
Over the next ten years, I totaled her car twice, broke her nose twice, stole and sold her credit cards, and killed her dog. It was the dog that finally broke her. She’d gotten Gracie, a mop-haired mutt, not long after the murders. It was yappy and the size of Diane’s forearm and Diane liked her more than me, or so I felt. For years I was jealous of that dog, watching Diane brush Gracie, her big manly hands wrapped around a pink plastic comb, watching her barrette Gracie’s tassled fur, watching her whip out a photo of Gracie from her wallet, instead of me. The dog was obsessed with my foot, the bad one, with only two toes, the second and the pinky, skinny gnarled things. Gracie was always smelling at them, like she knew they were wrong somehow. It did not endear her to me.
I’d been grounded for something, the summer between sophomore and junior year, and while Diane worked, I sat in the hot trailer getting angrier and angrier with that dog, the dog getting feistier and feistier. I refused to walk it, so it had resorted to running in frantic loops from the sofa to the kitchen to the closet, yipping the whole time, nipping at my feet. As I coiled up, nursing my fury, pretending to watch a soap opera but instead letting my brain turn good and red, Gracie paused in one of her loops and bit at the pinky toe on my bad foot, just grabbed onto it with her canines and shook. I remember thinking, If this dog takes one of my last toes, and then getting enraged at how ridiculous I was: On my left hand was a stump where a man would never put a wedding ring, and my unsupported right foot gave me a permanent sailor’s gait in a land-locked town. The girls at school called my finger a nubbin. That was worse, it sounded both quaint and grotesque at the same time, something to giggle at while looking quickly away. A physician had recently told me the amputations probably weren’t even necessary, “Just an overambitious country doctor.” I grabbed Gracie around her middle, feeling her ribcage, that chilly tremble of a little thing. The tremble only made me angrier, and suddenly I was ripping her off my toe—the flesh going with her—and throwing her as hard as I could toward the kitchen. She hit the pick-axe edge of the counter and collapsed in a twitching pile, bleeding all over the linoleum.
I hadn’t meant to kill her, but she died, not as quickly as I’d have liked, but within about ten minutes as I paced around the trailer trying to figure out what to do. When Diane came home, bearing an offertory of fried chicken, Gracie was still lying on the floor, and all I could say was, “She bit me.”
I tried to say more, to explain why it wasn’t my fault, but Diane just held up a single, shaking finger: Don’t. She’d called her best friend, Valerie, a woman as delicate and motherly as Diane was bulky and bluff. Diane stood hunched over the sink, looking out the window as Valerie folded Gracie into a special blanket. Then they huddled behind a closed bedroom door, and emerged, Valerie standing silently next to Diane, teary and kneading, as Diane told me to pack my things. In retrospect, I assume Valerie must have been Diane’s girlfriend—every night, Diane would climb in bed and talk to her on the phone til she fell asleep. They conferred on everything together and even had the exact same gently feathered wash-n-wear haircut. At the time I didn’t care who she was to Diane.
I lived my last two high school years with a polite couple in Abilene who were twice-removed somethings and whom I only mildly terrorized. From then on, every few months, Diane would phone. I’d sit with her on the line, all heavy telephone buzz and Diane’s smoky breathing into the receiver. I’d picture the bottom half of her mouth hanging there, the peach fuzz on her chin and that mole perched near her bottom lip, a flesh-colored disc that she once told me, cackling, would grant wishes if I rubbed it. I’d hear a creak-squeak in the background, and knew Diane was opening the middle cabinet in the kitchen of her trailer. I knew that place better than I did the farmhouse. Diane and I would make unnecessary noises, pretend to sneeze or cough, and then Diane would say, “Hold on, Libby,” pointlessly since neither of us had been talking. Valerie would usually be there, and they’d murmur to each other, Valerie’s voice coaxing, Diane’s a grumble, and then Diane would give me about twenty more seconds of conversation and make an excuse to go.
She stopped taking my calls when Brand New Day came out. Her only words: What possessed you to do such a thing? which was prim for Diane, but filled with more hurt than three dozen fuckyous.
I knew Diane would be at the same number, she was never going to move—the trailer was attached to her like a shell. I spent twenty minutes digging through piles at my house, looking for my old address book, one I’d had since grade school, with a pig-tailed redheaded girl on the cover that someone must have thought looked like me. Except for the smile. Diane’s number was filed under A for Aunt Diane, her name inked in purple marker in my balloon-animal cursive.
What tone to take, and what explanation for calling? Partly I just wanted to hear her wheeze into the phone, her football-coach voice bellowing in my ear, Well, why’d it take you so long to phone back? Partly I wanted to hear what she really thought about Ben. She’d never railed against Ben to me, she’d always been very careful about how she spoke of him, another thing I owed her retroactive thanks for.
I dialed the number, my shoulders pulling up to my ears, my throat getting tight, holding my breath and not realizing it until the third ring when it went to the answering machine and I was suddenly exhaling.
It was Valerie’s voice on the machine asking me to leave a message for her or Diane.
“Hi, uh, guys. This is Libby. Just wanting to say hi and let you all know I’m still alive and.” I hung up. Dialed back. “Please ignore that last message. It’s Libby. I called to say I’m sorry, for. Oh, a lot of things. And I’d like to talk …” I trailed on in case anyone was screening, then left my number, hung up, and sat on the edge of my bed, poised to get up but having no reason to.
I got up. I’d done more this day than the previous year. While I still held the phone, I made myself call Lyle, hoping for voicemail and, as usual, getting him. Before he could annoy me, I told him the meeting with Ben had gone fine and I was ready to hear who he believed was the killer. I said this all in a very precise tone, like I was doling out information with a measuring spoon.
“I knew you’d like him, I knew you’d come around,” he crowed, and once again I pleased myself by not hanging up.
“I didn’t say that, Lyle, I said I was ready for another assignment, if you want.”
We met again at Tim-Clark’s Grille, the place cloudy with grease. Another old waitress, or else the same one with a red wig, hustled around on spongy tennis shoes, her miniskirt flapping around her, looking like an ancient tennis pro. Instead of the fat man admiring his new vase, a table of hipster dudes were passing around ’70s-era nudie playing cards and laughing at the big bushes on the women. Lyle was sitting tightly at a table next to them, his chair turned awkwardly away. I sat down with him, poured a beer from his pitcher.
“So was he what you expected? What did he say?” Lyle started, his leg jittering.
I told him, except for the part about the porcelain bunny.
“See what Magda meant, though, about him being hopeless?”
I did. “I think he’s made peace with the prison sentence,” I said, an insight I shared only because the guy had given me $300 and I wanted more. “He thinks it’s penance for not being there to protect us or something. I don’t know. I thought when I told him about my testimony, about it being … exaggerated, that he’d jump on it, but … nothing.”
“Legally it’s maybe not that helpful after this long,” Lyle said. “Magda says if you want to help Ben, we should compile more evidence, and you can recant your testimony when we file for habeas corpus—it’ll make more of a splash. It’s more political than legal at this point. A lot of people made big careers on that case.”
“Magda seems to know a lot.”
“She heads up this group called the Free Day Society—all about getting Ben out of prison. I sometimes go, but it seems mostly for, uh, fans. Women.”
“You ever hear of Ben with a serious girlfriend? One of those Free Day women whose name is Molly or Sally or Polly? He had a tattoo.”
“No Sallys. Polly seems like a pet’s name—my cousin had a dog named Polly. One Molly, but she’s seventy or so.”
A plate of fries appeared in front of him, the waitress definitely different from our previous one, just as old but much friendlier. I like waitresses who call me hon or sweetie, and she did.
Lyle ate fries for a while, squeezing packets of ketchup on the side of the plate, then salting and peppering the ketchup, then dipping each fry individually and placing it in his mouth with girlish care.
“Well, so tell me who you think did it,” I finally nudged.
“Who what?”
I rolled my eyes and set my head in my hands, as if it was too much for me, and it almost was.
“Oh, right. I think Lou Cates, Krissi Cates’s dad, did it.” He leaned back in his chair with satisfaction, as if he’d just won a game of Clue.
Krissi Cates, the name jangled something. I tried to fake Lyle out, but it didn’t work.
“You do know who Krissi Cates is, right?” When I didn’t say anything, he continued, his voice taking on a sleek, patronizing tone. “Krissi Cates was a fifth-grader at your school, at Ben’s school. The day your family was killed, the police were looking to question Ben— she’d accused him of molesting her.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
We both stared each other down, with matching you-are-crazy looks.
Lyle shook his head at me. “When you say people don’t talk to you about this stuff, you aren’t kidding.”
“She didn’t testify against Ben …” I started.
“No, no. It’s the one smart thing Ben’s defense did, making the case that they weren’t legally linked, the molestation and the murders. But the jury was sure poisoned against him. Everyone in the area had heard that Ben had molested this nice little girl from this nice family, and that was probably what led up to his ‘satanic murders.’ You know how rumors go.”
“So, did the Krissi Cates thing ever go to trial?” I asked. “Did they prove Ben did anything wrong with her?”
“It never went forward—the police didn’t bring charges,” Lyle said. “The Cates family got a quick settlement with the school district and then they moved. But you know what I think? I think Lou Cates went to your home that night to question Ben. I think Lou Cates, who was this powerfully built sort of guy, went to the house to get some answers, and then …”
“Flew into such a rage he decided to kill the whole family? That makes no sense at all.”
“This guy did three years for manslaughter when he was younger, that’s what I found out, he hurled a pool ball full-throttle at a guy, ended up killing him. He had a violent temper. If Lou Cates thought his daughter’d been molested, I can see rage. Then he did the pentagrams and stuff to throw off suspicion.”
“Mmmm, it doesn’t make sense.” I had really wanted it to make sense.
“Your brother doing it doesn’t make sense. It’s an insane, insane crime, a lot of it isn’t going to make sense. That’s why people are so obsessed with these murders. If they made any sense, they wouldn’t really be mysteries, right?”
I didn’t say anything. It was true. I started fidgeting with the salt and pepper shakers, which were surprisingly nice for a dive.
“I mean, don’t you think it’s at least worth looking into?” Lyle pushed. “This massive, horrible allegation exploding the same day your family is murdered?”
“I guess. You’re the boss.”
“So, I say until you find Runner, see if you can get someone in the Cates family to talk to you. Five hundred dollars if it’s Krissi or Lou. I just want to see if they’re still telling the same story about Ben. If they can live with themselves, you know? I mean, it’s got to be a lie. Right?”
I was feeling shaky again. My faith did not need to be tested right now. Still, I clung to a weird bit of assurance: Ben had never molested me. If he was a child molester, wouldn’t he have started with a little girl right at home?
“Right.”
“Right,” Lyle repeated.
“But I’m not sure I’ll have more luck than you would. I mean, I’m the sister of the guy they say molested her.”
“Well, I tried and got nowhere,” Lyle shrugged. “I’m not good with that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Finessing.”
“Oh, well that’s definitely my kind of thing.”
“Excellent. And if you’re able to set up a meeting, I’d like to come along.”
I shrugged silently, stood up, planning on leaving him with the bill, but he belted my name before I got three steps.
“Libby, do you know you have the salt and pepper shakers in your pocket?”
I paused for a second, debated acting stunned—oh my gosh, I am so absentminded. Instead I just nodded and hustled out the doors. I needed them.
LYLE HAD TRACKED down Krissi Cates’s mother in Emporia, Kansas, where she lived with her second husband, with whom she’d had a second daughter almost twenty years after the first. Lyle had left several messages in the past year, but she’d never returned his call. That was as far as he’d gotten.
Never leave a message for someone you really want to reach. No, you keep phoning and phoning until someone picks up—out of anger or curiosity or fear—and then you blurt out whatever words will keep them on the line.
I rang Krissi’s mother twelve times before she picked up the phone, then, in a rush, said, “This is Libby Day, Ben Day’s little sister, do you remember Ben Day?”
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