Dark Places

depended on five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don’t even get out of bed five days in a row—I often don’t remember to eat five days in a row. Reporting to a workplace, where I would need to stay for eight hours—eight big hours outside my home—was unfeasible.
    “Seven hundred’s fine then,” I said.
    “Excellent. And there’ll be a lot of collectors there, so bring any souvenirs, uh, items from your childhood you might want to sell. Youcould leave with $2,000, easy. Letters especially. The more personal the better, obviously. Anything dated near the murders. January 3, 1985.” He recited it as if he’d said it often. “Anything from your mom. People are really … fascinated by your mom.”
    People always were. They always wanted to know: What kind of woman gets slaughtered by her own son?

Patty Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
8:02 A.M.
    H e was talking on the phone again, she could hear the cartoonish
mwaMWAwa
of his voice murmuring behind his door. He’d wanted an extension of his own—half his schoolmates, he swore, had their own listings in the phone book. They were called Children’s Lines. She’d laughed and then got pissed because
he
got pissed at her for laughing. (Seriously, a children’s phone line? How spoiled were these kids?) Neither of them mentioned it again—they were both easily embarrassed—and then a few weeks later he’d just come home, head tucked down, and showed her the contents of a shopping bag: a line splitter that would allow two phones to use the same extension and a remarkably light plastic phone that didn’t seem much different from the pink toy versions the girls used to play secretary. “Mr. Benjamin Day’s office,” they’d answer, trying to pull their older brother into the game. Ben used to smile and tell them to take a message; lately he just ignored them.
    Since Ben brought home his goodies, the phrase “goddang phone cord” had been introduced to the Day home. The cord corkscrewed from the kitchen outlet, over the counter, down the hall, and crimped under the crack of his door, which was always closed.Someone tripped on the cord at least once a day, and this would be followed by a scream (if it was one of the girls) or a curse (if it was Patty or Ben). She’d asked him repeatedly to secure the cord against the wall, and he’d just as repeatedly failed to do it. She tried to tell herself this was normal teenage stubbornness, but for Ben it was aggressive, and it made her worry he was angry, or lazy, or something worse she hadn’t even thought of. And who was he talking to? Before the mysterious addition of the second phone, Ben hardly ever got calls. He had two good friends, the Muehler brothers, overalled Future Farmers of America who were so reticent they sometimes just hung up when she answered—and then Patty would tell Ben that Jim or Ed just called. But there had never been long conversations behind closed doors until now.
    Patty suspected her son finally had a girlfriend, but her few hints in that direction made Ben so uncomfortable his pale skin turned blue-white and his amber freckles actually glowed, like a warning. She’d backed off completely. She wasn’t the kind of mother to jam open her kids’ lives too wide—it was hard enough for a fifteen-year-old boy to get privacy in a house full of women. He’d installed a padlock on his door after he’d returned home from school one day to find Michelle squirreling through his desk drawers. The lock installation, too, was presented as a done-deal: A hammer, some banging, and there it suddenly was. His own boy-nest, secured. Again, she couldn’t blame him. The farmhouse had gone girly in the years since Runner left. The curtains, the couches, even the candles were all apricot and lace. Little pink shoes and flowered undies and barrettes cluttered drawers and closets. Ben’s few small assertions—the curlicue phone cord and the metallic, manly lock—seemed understandable, actually.
    She heard a shot of laughter coming from behind his door, and it unnerved her. Ben wasn’t a laugher, not even as a kid. At age eight he’d looked at one of his sisters coolly and announced, “Michelle has a case of the giggles,” as if it was something to be fixed. Patty described him as stoic, but his self-containment went beyond that. His dad certainly didn’t know what to do with him, alternating between roughhousing (Ben stiff and unresponsive as Runner crocodile-rolled him on