Dark Places

American Gothic style, for a good five seconds as the conversation trailed off and people started staring. An older woman with Brillo-wire hair in barrettes blinked at me with the force of someone giving a secret code, a smile frozen large on her face. A brunette in her early twenties, startlingly pretty, looked up from dishing peaches into a baby’s mouth and shetoo offered an expectant smile. One glaring old broad with a snowman’s build tightened her lips and fingered the crucifix on her neck, but everyone else in the room was clearly following orders: Be nice.
    They were all women, more than a dozen, and they were all white. Most looked care-worn, but a handful had the bright, full-hour-in-front-of-the-mirror look of the upper class. That’s how you pick ’em, not by the clothes or the cars, but by the extra touches: an antique brooch (rich women always have antique brooches) or lip-liner that was blended just the right amount. Probably drove in from Mission Hills, feeling magnanimous about setting foot north of the river.
    Not a single man there, it was what Diane would call a hen party (and then make that disapproving sinus sound). I wondered how they’d all found Ben, stuck in prison as he was, and what attraction he had for them. Did they sit in their tousled beds at night with their gelatined husbands snoring next to them and daydream about a life with Ben once they freed him? Or did they think of him as a poor kid in need of their altruism, a cause to be nurtured between tennis matches?
    Out of the kitchen stomped Magda, six foot tall, her frizzy hair almost as wide. I wouldn’t have been able to place her from the Kill Club meeting, where everyone’s face was smeared from my memory, a Polaroid yanked out too early. Magda wore a denim jumper dress over a turtleneck, and an incongruous amount of jewelry: dangly gold earrings, a thick gold chain, and rings on almost every finger but her wedding finger. All those rings unsettled me, like barnacles growing where they shouldn’t be. I shook Magda’s outstretched hand anyway. Warm and dry. She made a sound like
mmmaaahhhh!
and pulled me in for a hug, her big breasts parting and closing on me like a wave. I stiffened, then pulled away, but Magda held on to my hands.
    “Bygones be bygones. Welcome to my home,” she said.
    “Welcome,” called the women behind her, too close to unison.
    “You are welcome here,” Magda reasserted.
    Well, obviously, since I’d been invited, I wanted to say.
    “This, everyone, is Libby Day, Ben’s youngest sister.”
    “Ben’s only sister,” I added.
    The women nodded solemnly.
    “And that’s part of the reason we’re here today,” Magda addressed the room. “To help bring some peace to that situation. And help. Bring. Ben. Home!”
    I glanced at Lyle, who wrinkled his nose minutely. Beyond the living room, a boy of about fifteen, chubby in a less authoritative way than his mother, came down the carpeted stairs. He’d put on khakis and a button-down for the occasion, and he looked out into the room without making any eye contact, one thumb fiddling with the top of his belt.
    Magda sighted the kid but didn’t introduce him. Instead she said, “Ned, go in the kitchen and make more coffee.” The boy walked through the circle of women without moving his shoulders, staring at a spot on the wall no one else could see.
    Magda pulled me into the room, me pretending to cough so I could free my hand. She set me down in the middle of the sofa, one woman on each side of me. I don’t like sitting in the middle, where arms brush lightly against mine and knees graze my pant leg. I balanced on one buttock and then the other, trying not to sink into the cushion, but I’m so small I still ended up looking like a cartoon kid in an overstuffed chair.
    “Libby, I’m Katryn. I’m so sorry for your loss,” said one of the rich ladies next to me, looking down into my face, her perfume widening my nostrils.
    “Hi, Katherine.” I wondered when the time limit lapsed on expressing sadness for a stranger’s dead. I guess never.
    “It’s Kate-ryn,” she said with sugar, her gold flower brooch bobbling on its clasp. There’s another way to pick rich women: They immediately correct how their names are said. A-lee-see-a, not Al-eesh-a, Deb-or-ah, not Debra. I said nothing in response. Lyle was talking tightly with an older woman across the room, giving her his profile. I pictured her hot breath tunneling into his tiny snail