Sharp_Objects

will miss you. We love you, Natalie.”
    As Mrs. Keene walked back to her seat, her husband rushed up to her, but she seemed to need no steadying. As soon as she sat down, the boy was back in her arms, crying in the crook of her neck. Mr. Keene blinked angrily at the church pews behind him, as if looking for someone to hit.
    “It is a terrible tragedy to lose a child,” intoned the priest. “It is doubly terrible to lose her to such evil doings. For evil is what they are. The Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But let us not dwell on revenge. Let us think instead of what Jesus urged: Love thy neighbor. Let us be good to our neighbors in this difficult time. Lift up your hearts to God.”
    “I liked the eye for an eye stuff better,” grumbled a man behind me.
    I wondered if the tooth for a tooth part disturbed anyone else.
    When we emerged from the church into the day’s glare, I could make out four girls sitting in a row along a stumpy wall across the street. Long colt legs dangling down. Breasts rounded out by pushup bras. The same girls I’d run into at the edge of the forest. They were huddled together laughing until one of them, again the prettiest, motioned over at me, and they all pretended to hang their heads. Their stomachs were still jiggling, though.

    N atalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents’ names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.

    A fter the funeral, people gathered at the Keene home, a massive stone farmhouse, a moneyed vision of pastoral America. It was like nothing else in Wind Gap. Missouri money distances itself from bucolicry, from such country quaintness. Consider: In colonial America, wealthy women wore subtle shades of blues and grays to counter their crass New World image, while their wealthy counterparts in England tarted up like exotic birds. In short, the Keene home looked too Missouri to be owned by Missourians.
    The buffet table held mainly meats: turkey and ham, beef and venison. There were pickles and olives and deviled eggs; shiny, hard rolls; and crusted casseroles. The guests segregated themselves into two groups, the tearful and the dry. The stoics stood in the kitchen, drinking coffee and liquor and talking about upcoming city-council elections and the future of the schools, occasionally pausing to whisper angrily about the lack of progress in the murder cases.
    “I swear I see someone I don’t know coming near my girls, I’ll shoot the sumbitch before ‘Hello’ comes out his mouth,” said one spade-faced man, flapping a roast beef sandwich. His friends nodded in agreement.
    “I don’t know why the hell Vickery hasn’t emptied out the forest—hell, raze the whole goddam thing. You know he’s in there,” said a younger man with orange hair.
    “Donnie, I’ll go out there tomorrow with you,” said the spade-faced man. “We can just take it acre by acre. We’ll find the son of a bitch. Ya’ll wanna come?” The men muttered assents and drank more liquor from their plastic cups. I made a note to cruise past the roads near the forest in the morning, to see if hangovers had given way to action or not. But I could already picture the sheepish phone calls in the morning:
    You going?
    Well, I don’t know, I guess, you?
    Well, I promised Maggie I’d take down the storm windows….
    Agreements to meet for beers later, and the receivers compressed very slowly to muffle the guilty click.
    Those who wept, mostly women, did so in the front room, on plush sofas and leather ottomans. Natalie’s brother was there shaking in the arms of his mother, as she rocked him and cried silently, patting down his dark hair. Sweet kid, to cry so openly. I’d never seen such a thing. Ladies came by with paper-plate offerings of food, but mother and son just shook their heads no. My mother fluttered around them like a manic bluejay, but they took no notice, and soon she was off to her circle of friends. Mr. Keene stood in a corner with Mr. Nash, both of them smoking silently.
    Recent evidence of Natalie was still scattered around the room. A small gray sweater folded over the back of a chair, a pair