Sharp_Objects

pushed his tongue into my mouth. It was the first time I’d been kissed in almost three years. I ran my hands between his shoulder blades, the rose crumbling down his back. I pulled his collar away from his neck and licked him.
    “I think you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen,” he said, running a finger along my jawline. “The first time I saw you, I couldn’t even think the rest of the day. Vickery sent me home.” He laughed.
    “I think you’re very handsome, too,” I said, holding his hands so they wouldn’t roam. My shirt was thin, I didn’t want him to feel my scars.
    “I think you’re very handsome, too?” He laughed. “Geez, Camille, you really don’t do the romance stuff, huh?”
    “I’m just caught off guard. I mean, first of all, this is a bad idea, you and me.”
    “Horrible.” He kissed my earlobe.
    “And, I mean, don’t you want to look around this place?”
    “ Miss Preaker, I searched this place the second week I was here. I just wanted to go for a walk with you.”
    Richard also had covered the two other spots I had in mind, as it turned out. An abandoned hunting shed on the south part of the woods had yielded a yellow plaid hair ribbon that neither girl’s parents could identify. The bluffs to the east of Wind Gap, where you could sit and watch the distant Mississippi River below, offered a child’s sneaker print that matched shoes neither girl owned. Some dried blood was found dribbled over grass blades; but the type was the wrong match for both. Once again I was turning up useless. Then again, Richard didn’t seem to care. We drove up to the bluffs anyway, grabbed a six-pack of beer and sat in the sun, watching the Mississippi River glimmer gray like a lazy snake.
    This had been one of Marian’s favorite places to go when she could leave her bed. For an instant, I could feel the weight of her as a child on my back, her hot giggles in my ears, skinny arms wrapped tight around my shoulders.
    “Where would you take a little girl to strangle her?” Richard asked.
    “My car or my home,” I said, jolting back.
    “And to pull out the teeth?”
    “Somewhere that I could scrub down well. A basement. A bathtub. The girls were dead first, right?”
    “Is that one of your questions?”
    “Sure.”
    “They were both dead.”
    “Dead long enough there was no blood when the teeth came out?”
    A barge floating down the river began turning sideways in the current; men appeared on board with longpoles to twist it back in the right direction.
    “With Natalie there was blood. The teeth were removed immediately after the strangling.”
    I had the image of Natalie Keene, brown eyes frozen open, slumped down in a bathtub as someone pried her teeth from her mouth. Blood on Natalie’s chin. A hand on pliers. A woman’s hand.
    “Do you believe James Capisi?”
    “I truly don’t know, Camille, and I’m not blowing smoke at you. The kid is scared out of his wits. His mom keeps calling us to put someone on guard. He’s sure this woman is going to come get him. I sweated him a little bit, called him a liar, tried to see if he’d change his story. Nothing.” He turned to face me. “I’ll tell you this: James Capisi believes his story. But I can’t see how it can be true. It doesn’t fit any kind of profile I’ve ever heard of. It doesn’t feel right to me. Cop’s intuition. I mean, you talked to him, what did you think?”
    “I agree with you. I wonder if he isn’t just freaked out about his mom’s cancer and projecting that fear somehow. I don’t know. And what about John Keene?”
    “Profilewise: right age, in the family of one of the victims, seems maybe too broken up over the whole thing.”
    “His sister was murdered.”
    “Right. But…I’m a guy and I can tell you teenage boys will sooner kill themselves than cry in public. And he’s been weeping it up all over town.” Richard blew a hollow toot with his beer bottle, a mating call to a passing tugboat.

    T he moon was out, the cicadas in full jungle pulse, when Richard dropped me at home. Their creaking matched the throbbing between my legs where I’d let him touch me. Zipper down, his hand guided by mine to my clitoris and held there lest he explore and bump into the raised outlines of my scars. We got each other off like a couple of schoolkids ( dumpling thumping hard and pink on my left foot as I came) and I was sticky and smelling of sex as I opened the door to find my mother sitting on the