Sharp_Objects (18 page)

“I can imagine.” I could: I remember Marian’s tiny pink coat hanging in the hall closet till I left for college. Might still be there.

I turned on the tape recorder, pushed it across the table toward the boy.

“Tell me what your sister was like, John.”

“Uh, she was a nice kid. She was extremely smart. Just unbelievable.”

“Smart how? Like good in school, or just bright?”

“Well, she didn’t do that well in school. She had a bit of a discipline problem,” he said. “But I think it was just because she got bored. She should have skipped a grade or two, I think.”

“His mom thought it would stigmatize her,” Meredith interjected. “She was always worried about Natalie sticking out.”

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“That’s true. My mom really wanted Natalie to fit in. She was this sort of goofy kid, kind of a tomboy, and just kind of a weirdo.” He laughed, staring at his feet.

“Are you thinking of a particular story?” I asked. Anecdotes are Curry’s coin of the realm. Plus, I was interested.

“Oh, like once, she invented this whole other language, you know? And a regular kid, I mean it’d be gibberish. But Natalie had the whole alphabet figured out—looked like Russian. And she actually taught it to me. Or tried. She got frustrated with me pretty quickly.” He laughed again, that same croak, like it was coming up from underground.

“Did she like school?”

“Well it’s hard to be the new kid, and the girls here…well I guess the girls anywhere can be a little bit snotty.”

“Johnny! Rude!” Meredith pretended to push him. He ignored her.

“I mean, your sister…Amma, right?” I nodded to him. “She was actually friends with her for a little bit. They’d run around in the woods, Natalie’d come back all scraped up and daffy.”

“Really?” Considering the scorn with which she’d mentioned Natalie’s name, I couldn’t picture it.

“They were real intense for a little bit. But I think Amma got bored with her, Natalie being a few years younger. I don’t know. They had some sort of falling out.” Amma learned that from her mother—the glib discarding of friends. “It was okay, though,” John said, as if to reassure me. Or him. “She had one kid she played with a lot, James Capisi. Farm kid a year or so younger that no one else talked to. They seemed to get along though.”

“He says he’s the last one to see Natalie alive,” I said.

“He’s a liar,” Meredith said. “I heard that story, too. He’s always made stuff up. I mean, his mom’s dying of cancer. He’s got no dad. He has no one to pay any attention to him. So he throws out that wild story. Don’t listen to anything he says.”

Again I looked at John, who shrugged.

“It is sort of a wild story, you know? A crazy lady snatches Natalie in broad daylight,” he said. “Besides, why would a woman do something like that?”

“Why would a man do something like that?” I asked.

“Who knows why men do such freaky stuff,” Meredith added. “It’s a gene thing.”

“I have to ask you John, have you been questioned by the police?”

“Along with both my parents.”

“And you have an alibi for the nights of both killings?” I waited for a reaction, but he continued to sip his tea calmly.

“Nope. I was out driving around. I just need to get out of here sometimes, you know?” He darted a quick glance at Meredith, whose lips pursed when she caught him looking. “It’s just a smaller town than I’m used to. Sometimes you need to get lost for a little. I know you don’t get it, Mer.” Meredith stayed silent.

“I get it,” I offered. “I remember getting very claustrophobic growing up here, I can’t imagine what it must be like to move here from somewhere else.”

“Johnny’s being noble,” Meredith interrupted. “He was with me both those nights. He just doesn’t want to get me in trouble. Print that.” Meredith was wobbling on the edge of the sofa, stiff and upright and slightly disconnected, as if she were speaking in tongues.

“Meredith,” John murmured. “No.”

“I’m not going to have people thinking my boyfriend is a fucking baby killer, thank you very much, John.”

“You tell that story to the police, and they’ll know the truth in an hour. It will look even worse for me. No one really thinks I’d kill my own sister.” John took a single lock of Meredith’s hair and pulled his fingers gently from the roots to the end. The word
tickle
flashed randomly from my right hip. I believed the boy. He cried in public and told silly stories about his sister and played with his girlfriend’s hair and I believed him. I could almost hear Curry snort at my naiveté.

“Speaking of stories,” I started. “I need to ask you about one. Is it true Natalie hurt one of her classmates back in Philadelphia?”

John froze, turned to Meredith, and for the first time he looked unpleasant. He gave me a true image for the phrase
curled lips.
His whole body jolted and I thought he’d bolt for the door, but then he leaned back and took a breath.

“Great. This is why my mom hates the media,” he grumbled. “There was an article about that in the paper back home. It was just a few paragraphs. It made Natalie sound like an animal.”

“So tell me what happened.”

He shrugged. Picked at a nail. “It was in art class, and the kids were cutting and painting, and a little girl got hurt. Natalie was a little kid with a temper, and this girl was sort of always bossing Natalie around. And one time Natalie happened to have scissors in her hand. It wasn’t like a premeditated assault. I mean, she was nine at the time.”

I had a flash of Natalie, that serious child from the Keene family photo, wielding blades at a little girl’s eyes. An image of bright red blood mingling unexpectedly with pastel watercolors.

“What happened to the little girl?”

“They saved her left eye. Her right was, uh, ruined.”

“Natalie attacked both her eyes?”

He stood up, pointing down at me from almost the same angle as his mother had. “Natalie saw a shrink for a year after, dealing with this. Natalie woke up with nightmares for months. She was nine. It was an accident. We all felt horrible. My dad set up a fund for the little girl. We had to leave so Natalie could start over. That’s why we had to come here—Dad took the first job he could find. We moved in the middle of the night, like criminals. To this place. To this goddam town.”

“Gee John, I didn’t realize you were having such a horrible time,” Meredith murmured.

He began to cry then, sitting back down, his head in his hands.

“I didn’t mean that I was sorry I came here. I meant I’m sorry she came here, because now she’s dead. And we were trying to help. And she’s dead.” He let out a quiet wail, and Meredith wrapped her arms grudgingly around him. “Someone killed my sister.”

T
here would be no formal dinner that night, as Miss Adora wasn’t feeling well, Gayla informed me. I assume it was my mother’s affectation to request the
Miss
in front of her name, and I tried to imagine how the conversation might go.
Gayla, the best servants in the best households call their mistresses by their formal names. We want to be the best, don’t we?
Something like that.

Whether it was my argument with my mother or Amma’s that was the cause of the trouble, I wasn’t sure. I could hear them bickering like pretty birds in my mother’s room, Adora accusing Amma, correctly, of having driven the golf cart without permission. Like all rural towns, Wind Gap has an obsession with machinery. Most homes own a car and a half for every occupant (the half being an antique collectible, or an old piece of crap on blocks, depending on the income bracket), plus boats, Jet Skis, scooters, tractors, and, among the elite of Wind Gap, golf carts, which younger kids without licenses use to whip around town. Technically illegal, but no one ever stops them. I guessed my mother had tried to withhold this bit of freedom from Amma after the murders. I would have. Their fight squeaked on like an old seesaw for nearly half an hour.
Don’t lie to me, little girl….
The warning was so familiar it gave me an old feeling of unease. So Amma did occasionally get caught.

When the phone rang, I picked up, just so Amma wouldn’t lose her momentum, and was surprised to hear the cheerleader staccato of my old friend Katie Lacey. Angie Papermaker was having the girls over for a Pity Party. Drink a bunch of wine, watch a sad movie, cry, gossip. I should come. Angie lived in the New Rich part of town—huge mansions at the outskirts of Wind Gap. Practically Tennessee. I couldn’t tell from Katie’s voice if that made her jealous or smug. Knowing her, probably a bit of both. She’d always been one of those girls who wanted what anyone else had, even if she didn’t want it.

I knew when I saw Katie and her friends at the Keenes’ home that I’d have to submit to at least one evening out. It was this or finish transcribing my talk with John, which was making me dangerously sad. Plus, like Annabelle, Jackie, and that catty group of my mother’s friends, this gathering was likely to yield more information than I’d get through a dozen formal interviews.

As soon as she pulled up in front of the house I realized that Katie Lacey, now Katie Brucker, had, predictably, done well for herself. I knew this both from the fact it took her just five minutes to pick me up (turns out her home was but a block away) and what she picked me up in: one of those huge, stupid SUVs that cost more than some people’s homes and provide just as many comforts. Behind my head, I could hear the DVD player tittering with some kids’ show, despite the absence of kids. In front of me, the dashboard navigator was providing unnecessary play-by-play directions.

Her husband, Brad Brucker, was studying at her father’s feet, and when Daddy retired, he’d take over the business himself. They peddled a controversial hormone used to bulk up chickens with horrific rapidity. My mother always sniffed at this—she’d never use anything that put such a stunning rush on the growing process. That didn’t mean she eschewed hormones: My mother’s pigs were pricked with chemicals till they plumped and reddened like squirting cherries, till their legs couldn’t support their juicy girth. But it was done at a more leisurely pace.

Brad Brucker was the type of husband to live where Katie said, impregnate Katie when she asked, buy Katie the Pottery Barn sofa she wanted, and otherwise shut up. He was good-looking if you looked at him long enough, and he had a dick the size of my ring finger. This I knew firsthand, thanks to a slightly mechanical exchange my freshman year. But apparently the tiny thing worked fine: Katie was at the end of her first trimester for her third kid. They were going to keep trying till she had a boy.
We really want a little rascal running around.

Talk of me, Chicago, no husband yet but fingers crossed! Talk of her, her hair, her new vitamin program, Brad, her two girls, Emma and Mackenzie, Wind Gap ladies’ auxiliary, and the horrible job they did with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Then sigh:
those poor little girls.
Yes, sigh: my story on those poor little girls. Apparently she didn’t care that much, because she was quickly back to the ladies’ auxiliary and how scattered it had become now that Becca Hart (née Mooney) was activities director. Becca was a girl of midtier popularity from our days, who shot to social stardom five years ago when she snagged Eric Hart, whose parents owned a sprawling Go-Kart, waterslide, mini-golf tourist trap in the ugliest part of the Ozarks. The situation was quite reproachable. She’d be there tonight and I could see for myself. She just didn’t fit in.

Angie’s house looked like a child’s drawing of a mansion: It was so generic it was barely three-dimensional. When I entered the room I realized how much I didn’t want to be there. There was Angie, who’d unnecessarily dropped ten pounds since high school, and who smiled demurely at me and went back to setting out a fondue. There was Tish, who’d been the little mommy of the group even back then, the one who held your hair when you threw up, and who had occasional dramatic crying jags about feeling unloved. She’d married a guy from Newcastle, I learned, a slightly dorky man (this in hushed tones from Katie) who made a solid living. Mimi draped herself over a chocolate-leather couch. A dazzling adolescent, her looks didn’t translate into adulthood. No one else seemed to notice. Everyone still referred to her as “the hot one.” Backing this up: the giant rock on her hand, courtesy of Joey Johansen, a gangly, sweet boy who’d sprouted into a linebacker junior year, and suddenly demanded to be called Jo-ha. (That’s truly all I remember of him.) Poor Becca sat amidst them, looking eager and awkward, dressed almost comically similar to her hostess (Had Angie taken Becca shopping?). She flashed smiles to anyone who caught her eye, but no one talked to her.

We watched
Beaches.

Tish was sobbing when Angie turned the lights on.

“I’ve gone back to work,” she announced in a wail, pressed coral pink fingernails across her eyes. Angie poured wine and patted her knee, stared at her with a showy concern.

“Good God, sweetie, why?” Katie murmured. Even her murmur was girlish and clicky. Like a thousand mice nibbling crackers.

“With Tyler in preschool, I thought I wanted to,” Tish said between sobs. “Like I needed a purpose.” She spat the last word out as if it were contaminated.