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Dark Places

Titel: Dark Places Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Gillian Flynn
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something little girls wanted to be when they grew up, an operator, but I couldn’t remember why.
    A thin layer of bread pasted to the roof of my mouth, I finally reached a voice at the Bert Nolan Home, and was surprised to find it was Bert Nolan himself. I’d assumed anyone with a home named after him must be dead. I told him I was trying to find Runner Day, and he paused.
    “Well, he’s been in and out, mostly out the past month, but I’d be happy to give him a message,” Bert Nolan said in a voice like an old car horn. I gave my name—no recognition on his part—and started to give my phone number when Nolan interrupted me.
    “Oh, he’s not going to be able to phone long distance, I can tell you that right now. The men here tend to be big corresponders. By mail, you know? Less’n fifty cents for a stamp and you don’t have to worry about waiting in line for the phone. You want to leave your address?”
    I did not. I shivered at the idea of Runner clomping up my steps with his overstacked dress boots, his grimy hands around his little waist, grinning like he’d beaten me at a game.
    “If you want, I can take any message you have and you can giveme your address privately,” Bert Nolan said reasonably. “And once Runner finishes his letter to you, I can mail it for him, and he’ll never even know your zip code. A lot of family members do it that way. It’s a sad but necessary thing.” In the background, a soda machine rattled out a sodapop, someone asked Nolan if he wanted one, and he said
No thanks, trying to cut back
in the kindly voice of a town doctor. “You want to do that, Miss? Otherwise it’ll be hard to reach him. Like I said, he’s not really one to sit by the phone and wait for you to call back.”
    “And there’s no e-mail?”
    Bert Nolan grunted. “No, no e-mail, I’m afraid.”
    I’d never known Runner to be much of a letter writer, but he always wrote more than he phoned, so I guessed that would be my best shot, short of driving down to Oklahoma and waiting on one of Bert Nolan’s cots. “Would you tell him I need to talk about Ben and that night? I can come down to see him if he just gives me a day.”
    “OK … you said, Ben and
that night
?”
    “I did.”
    I KNEW LYLE would be too smug about my turnaround—semi-possible, potential turnaround—on Ben. I could picture him addressing the Kill Club groupies in one of his weird tight jackets, explaining how he convinced me to go see Ben. “She really was refusing at first, I think she was scared of what she might discover about Ben … and about herself.” And all those faces looking up at him, so happy about what he’d done. It irritated me.
    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 mymom’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

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