Sharp_Objects (7 page)

“A decent person would have quit before writing about dead children.”
Bang.
“Opportunism, Miss Preaker.”

Across the street, an elderly man clutching a carton of milk was shuffling half-steps toward a white clapboard house.

“I’m not feeling so decent right now, you’re right.” I didn’t mind gingering Vickery along a little bit. I wanted him to like me, not just because it would make my job easier, but because his bluster reminded me of Curry, who I missed. “But a little publicity might bring some attention to this case, help get it solved. It’s happened before.”

“Goddam.” He threw the hammer with a thud on the ground and faced me. “We already asked for help. Got some special detective from Kansas City down here, off and on for months. And he hasn’t been able to figure out one goddam thing. Says it might be some crazed hitchhiker dropped off the road here, liked the looks of the place, and stayed for near on a year. Well this town ain’t that big, and I sure as hell haven’t seen anyone looks like they don’t belong.” He glanced pointedly at me.

“We’ve got some pretty big woods around here, pretty dense,” I suggested.

“This isn’t some stranger, and I would guess you know it.”

“I would have thought you’d prefer it to be a stranger.”

Vickery sighed, lit a cigarette, put his hand around the sign post protectively. “Hell, of course I would,” he said. “But I’m not too dumb myself. Ain’t worked no homicide before, but I ain’t a goddam idiot.”

I wished then that I hadn’t sucked down so much vodka. My thoughts were vaporizing, I couldn’t hold on to what he was saying, couldn’t ask the right questions.

“You think someone from Wind Gap is doing this?”

“No comment.”

“Off record, why would someone from Wind Gap kill kids?”

“Got called out one time because Ann had killed a neighbor’s pet bird with a stick. She’d sharpened it herself with one of her daddy’s hunting knifes. Natalie, hell, her family moved here two years ago because she stabbed one of her classmates in the eye with a pair of scissors back in Philadelphia. Her daddy quit his job at some big business, just so they could start over. In the state where his granddad grew up. In a small town. Like a small town don’t come with its own set of problems.”

“Not the least of which is everyone knows who the bad seeds are.”

“Damn straight.”

“So you think this could be someone who didn’t like the children? These girls specifically? Maybe they had done something to him? And this was revenge?”

Vickery pulled at the end of his nose, scratched his mustache. He looked back at the hammer on the ground, and I could tell he was debating whether to pick it up and dismiss me or keep talking. Just then a black sedan whooshed up next to us, the passenger-side window zipping down before the car even stopped. The driver’s face, blocked by sunglasses, peered out to look at us.

“Hey, Bill. Thought we were supposed to meet at your office right about now.”

“Had some work to do.”

It was Kansas City. He looked at me, lowering his glasses in a practiced way. He had a flip of light brown hair that kept dropping over his left eye. Blue. He smiled at me, teeth like perfect Chiclets.

“Hi there.” He glanced at Vickery, who pointedly bent down to pick up the hammer, then back at me.

“Hi,” I said. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands, balled the ends up in my palms, leaned on one leg.

“Well, Bill, want a ride? Or are you a walking man—I could pick us up some coffee and meet you there.”

“Don’t drink coffee. Something you should’ve noticed by now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“See if you can make it ten, huh? We’re already running late.” Kansas City looked at me one more time. “Sure you don’t want a lift, Bill?”

Vickery said nothing, just shook his head.

“Who’s your friend, Bill? I thought I’d met all the pertinent Wind Gappers already. Or is it…Wind Gapians?” He grinned. I stood silent as a schoolgirl, hoping Vickery would introduce me.

Bang!
Vickery was choosing not to hear. In Chicago I would have jabbed my hand out, announced myself with a smile, and enjoyed the reaction. Here I stared at Vickery and stayed mute.

“All right then, see you at the station.”

The window zipped back up, the car pulled away.

“Is that the detective from Kansas City?” I asked.

In answer, Vickery lit another cigarette, walked off. Across the street, the old man had just reached his top step.

Chapter Four

S
omeone had spray-painted blue curlicues on the legs of the water tower at Jacob J. Garrett Memorial Park, and it was left looking oddly dainty, as if it were wearing crochet booties. The park itself—the last place Natalie Keene was seen alive—was vacant. The dirt from the baseball field hovered a few feet above the ground. I could taste it in the back of my throat like tea left brewing too long. The grasses grew tall at the edge of the woods. I was surprised no one had ordered them cut, eradicated like the stones that snagged Ann Nash.

When I was in high school, Garrett Park was the place everyone met on weekends to drink beer or smoke pot or get jerked off three feet into the woods. It was where I was first kissed, at age thirteen, by a football player with a pack of chaw tucked down in his gums. The rush of the tobacco hit me more than the kiss; behind his car I vomited wine cooler with tiny, glowing slices of fruit.

“James Capisi was here.”

I turned around to face a blond, buzz-cut boy of about ten, holding a fuzzy tennis ball.

“James Capisi?” I asked.

“My friend, he was here when she got Natalie,” the kid said. “James saw her. She was wearing her nightgown. They were playing Frisbee, over by the woods, and she took Natalie. It would’ve been James, but he decided to stay here on the field. So Natalie was the one right by the trees. James was out here because of the sun. He’s not supposed to be in the sun, because his mom’s got skin cancer, but he does anyway. Or he did.” The boy bounced the tennis ball, and a puff of dirt floated up around him.

“He doesn’t like the sun anymore?”

“He doesn’t like nothing no more.”

“Because of Natalie?”

He shrugged belligerently.

“Because James is a pussy.”

The kid looked me up and down, then suddenly threw the ball at me, hard. It hit my hip and bounced off.

He blurted out a little laugh. “Sorry.” He scrambled after the ball, dove on top of it dramatically, then leapt up and hurled it against the ground. It bounced about ten feet in the air, then dribbled to a stop.

“I’m not sure I understood what you said. Who was wearing a nightgown?” I kept my eye on the bouncing ball.

“The woman who took Natalie.”

“Wait, what do you mean?” The story I’d heard was that Natalie had been playing here with friends who left to go home one by one, and that she was assumed to have been abducted somewhere along her short walk home.

“James saw the woman take Natalie. It was just the two of them, and they were playing Frisbee, and Natalie missed and it went into the grasses by the woods, and the woman just reached out and grabbed her. Then they were gone. And James ran home. And he don’t come out since.”

“Then how do you know what happened?”

“I visited him once. He told me. I’m his buddy.”

“Does James live around here?”

“Fuck him. I might go to my grandma’s for the summer anyway. In Arkansas. Better’n here.”

The boy threw the ball at the chain-link fence outlining the baseball diamond, and it lodged there, rattling the metal.

“You from here?” He began kicking dirt in the air.

“Yeah. I used to be. I don’t live here anymore. I’m visiting.” I tried again: “Does James live around here?”

“You in high school?” His face was deeply tanned. He looked like a baby Marine.

“No.”

“College?” His chin was wet with spit.

“Older.”

“I got to go.” He hopped away backward, yanked the ball out of the fence like a bad tooth, turned around and looked at me again, waggled his hips in a nervous dance. “I got to go.” He threw the ball toward the street, where it bounced off my car with an impressive thunk. He ran after it and was gone.

I looked up
Capisi, Janel,
in a magazine-thin phone book at Wind Gap’s lone FaStop. Then I filled a Big Mouth with strawberry pop and drove to 3617 Holmes.

The Capisi home sat on the edge of the low-rent section to the far east of town, a cluster of broken-down, two-bedroom houses, most of whose inhabitants work at the nearby pig factory-farm, a private operation that delivers almost 2 percent of the country’s pork. Find a poor person in Wind Gap, and they’ll almost always tell you they work at the farm, and so did their old man. On the breeding side, there are piglets to be clipped and crated, sows to be impregnated and penned, manure pits to be managed. The killing side’s worse. Some employees load the pigs, forcing them down the gangway, where stunners await. Others grab the back legs, fasten the catch around them, release the animal to be lifted, squealing and kicking, upside down. They cut the throats with pointy slaughter knives, the blood spattering thick as paint onto the tile floors. Then on to the scalding tank. The constant screams—frantic, metallic squeals—drive most of the workers to wear earplugs, and they spend their days in a soundless rage. At night they drink and play music, loud. The local bar, Heelah’s, serves nothing pork related, only chicken tenders, which are, presumably, processed by equally furious factory workers in some other crappy town.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should add that my mother owns the whole operation and receives approximately $1.2 million in profits from it annually. She lets other people run it.

A tomcat was yowling on the Capisis’ front porch, and as I walked toward the house, I could hear the din of a daytime talk show. I banged on the screen door and waited. The cat rubbed up against my legs; I could feel its ribs through my pants. I banged again, and the TV switched off. The cat stalked under the porch swing and cried. I traced the word
yelp
on my right palm with a fingernail and knocked again.

“Mom?” A child’s voice at the open window.

I walked over, and through the dust of the screen could see a thin boy with dark curls and gaping eyes.

“Hi there, I’m sorry to bug you. Are you James?”

“What do you want?”

“Hi James, I’m sorry to bother you. Were you watching something good?”

“Are you the police?”

“I’m trying to help figure out who hurt your friend. Can I talk to you?”

He didn’t leave, just traced a finger along the window ledge. I sat down on the swing at the far end away from him.

“My name’s Camille. A friend of yours told me what you’d seen. A boy with real short blonde hair?”

“Dee.”

“Is that his name? I saw him at the park, the same park where you were playing with Natalie.”

“She took her. No one believes me. I’m not scared. I just need to stay in the house is all. My mom has cancer. She’s sick.”

“That’s what Dee said. I don’t blame you. I hope I didn’t scare you, coming by like this.” He began scraping an overlong fingernail down the screen. The clicking sound made my ears itch.

“You don’t look like her. If you looked like her, I’d call the police. Or I’d shoot you.”

“What did she look like?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve said it already. A hundred times.”

“One more time.”

“She was old.”

“Old like me?”

“Old like a mother.”

“What else?”

“She was wearing a white bed dress with white hair. She was just all white, but not like a ghost. That’s what I keep saying.”

“White like how?”

“Just like she’d never been outside before.”

“And the woman grabbed Natalie when she went toward the woods?” I asked it in the same coaxing voice my mother used on favored waitstaff.

“I’m not lying.”

“Of course not. The woman grabbed Natalie while y’all were playing?”

“Real fast,” he nodded. “Natalie was walking in the grass to find the Frisbee. And I saw the woman moving from inside the woods, watching her. I saw her before Natalie did. But I wasn’t scared.”

“Probably not.”

“Even when she grabbed Natalie, at first I wasn’t scared.”

“But then you were?”

“No.” His voice trailed off. “I wasn’t.”

“James, could you tell me what happened when she grabbed Natalie?”

“She pulled Natalie against her, like she was hugging her. And then she looked up at me. She stared at me.”

“The woman did?”

“Yeah. She smiled at me. For a second I thought it might be all right. But she didn’t say anything. And then she stopped smiling. She put her finger to her lips to be quiet. And then she was gone into the woods. With Natalie.” He shrugged again. “I’ve already told all this before.”