Free Dark Places by Gillian Flynn Page A

don’t leave me alone. I take things. You can catch me with your string of fine pearls clickering in my greedy little paws, and I’ll tell you they reminded me of my mother’s and I just had to touch them, just for a second, and I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me.
    My mom never owned any jewelry that didn’t turn her skin green, but you won’t know that. And I’ll still swipe the pearls when you’re not looking.
    I steal underpants, rings, CDs, books, shoes, iPods, watches. I’ll go to a party at someone’s house—I don’t have friends, but I have people who invite me places—and I’ll leave wearing a few shirts under my sweater, with a couple of nice lipsticks in my pocket, and whatever cash is floating inside a purse or two. Sometimes I even take the purse, if the crowd is drunk enough. Just sling it over a shoulder and leave. Prescription pills, perfume, buttons, pens. Food. I have a flask someone’s granddad carried back from WWII, I own a Phi Beta Kappa pin earned by some guy’s favorite uncle. I have an antique collapsible tin cup that I can’t remember stealing, I’ve had it so long. I pretend it’s always been in the family.
    The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can’t quite bear to look at. I like other people’s things better. They come with other people’s history.
    One item in my home I didn’t steal is a true-crime novel called
Devil’s Harvest: The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee Kansas
. It came out in 1986, and was written by a former reporter named Barb Eichel, and that’s all I really know. At least three semi-boyfriends have given me a copy of this book, solemnly, wisely, and all three of them were dumped immediately after. If I say I don’t want to read the book, I don’t want to read the book. It’s like my rule about always sleeping with the light on. I tell every man I sleep with that I always keep the lights on, and they always say something like, “I’ll take care of you, baby,” and then try to switch off the lights. Like that’s that. They somehow seem surprised that I actually sleep with the lights on.
    I dug out
Devil’s Harvest
from a leaning stack of books in the corner—I keep it for the same reason I keep the boxes of my family’s papers and crap, because maybe I’ll want it someday, and even if I don’t, I don’t want anyone else to have it.
    The opening page read:
    Kinnakee, Kansas, in the heart of America, is a quiet farming community where folks know each other, go to churchwith each other, grow old alongside each other. But it is not impervious to the evils of the outside world—and in the early hours of January 3, 1985, those evils destroyed three members of the Day family in a torrent of blood and horror. This is a story not just of murder, but of Devil worship, blood rituals, and the spread of Satanism to every corner of America—even the coziest, seemingly safest places.
    My ears started their hum with the sounds of that night: A loud, masculine grunt, a heaving, dry-throat wail. My mother’s banshee screams. Darkplace. I looked at the back-page photo of Barb Eichel. She had short, spiky hair, dangling earrings, and a somber smile. The biography said she lived in Topeka, Kansas, but that was twenty-some years ago.
    I needed to phone Lyle Wirth with my money-for-info proposal, but I wasn’t ready to hear him lecture me again about the murder of my own family.
(You really think Ben’s guilty!)
I needed to be able to argue with him instead of sitting there like some ignoramus with nothing useful to say. Which is basically what I was.
    I scanned the book some more, lying on my back, propped up on a twice-folded pillow, Buck monitoring me with watchful kitty eyes for any movement toward the kitchen. Barb Eichel described Ben as “a black-clad loner, unpopular and angry” and “obsessed with the most brutal form of heavy metal—called black metal—songs rumored to be little more than coded calls to the Devil