Iwas going to lose toes again. I sat outside a closed gas station for almost an hour, rubbing my ringing feet, waiting for Lyle. Every time a car went by I ducked behind the building in case it was Crystal and Diondra, out searching for me. If they found me now, I couldn’t run. They’d have me and it’d be done. I’d wanted to die for years, but not lately and definitely not by those bitches.
I had called Lyle collect from a phone outside the gas station I was sure wouldn’t work, and he’d started the conversation before the operator even got off the line: Did you hear? Did you hear? I did not hear. I don’t want to hear. Just come get me. I hung up before he started in with his questions.
“What happened?” Lyle said, when he finally pulled up, me in full bone-chatter, the air frosted. I threw myself in the car, my arms in a mummy wrap from the cold.
“Diondra’s definitely not fucking dead. Take me home, I need to get home.”
“You need to get to a hospital, your face is, it’s. Have you seen your face?” He pulled me under the dome light of his car to take a closer look.
“I’ve felt my face.”
“Or the police department? What happened? I knew I should have gone with you. Libby. Libby, what happened?”
I told him. The whole thing, letting him sort it out between my crying jags, ending with, and then they, then they tried to kill me … the words coming out like hurt feelings, a little girl telling her mom that someone was mean to her.
“So Diondra killed Michelle,” Lyle said. “We’re going to the cops.”
“No we’re not. I just need to go home.” My words were curdled with snot and tears.
“We’ve got to go to the cops, Libby.”
I started screaming, nasty things, slamming my hand on the window, yelling til spittle ran out my mouth, and that only made Lyle more sure he was taking me to the police.
“You’ll want to go to the police, Libby. When I tell you what I need to tell you, on top of this, you’ll want to go to the police.”
I knew that’s what I needed to do, but my brain was infected with memories of what happened after my family was murdered: the long, washed-out hours going over and over my story with the police, my legs hanging off oversized chairs, cold hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups, me unable to get warm, just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even your face is numb. And you can say all you want, it doesn’t matter because everyone’s dead anyway.
Lyle turned the heater on full blast, aimed every vent at me.
“OK, Libby, I have some, some news. I think, well, OK I’ll just say it. OK?”
“You’re freaking me out, Lyle. Just say it.” The dome light didn’t cast enough glow, I kept looking around the parking lot to make sure no one was coming.
“Remember the Angel of Debt?” Lyle began. “That the Kill Club was investigating? He’s been caught in a suburb of Chicago. He got nailed in the middle of helping some poor stockmarket sucker stage his death. It was supposed to look like a horseriding accident. The Angel got caught on one of the riding trails, going at the guy with a rock, bashing his head in. His name is Calvin Diehl. Used to be a farmer.”
“OK,” I said, but I knew more was coming.
“OK, so it turns out he’s been helping to kill people since the ’80s. He was smart. He has handwritten notes from everyone he murdered—thirty-two people—swearing they hired him.”
“OK.”
“One of those notes was from your mother.”
I bent over at the waist, but kept looking at Lyle.
“She hired him to kill her. But it was supposed to be just her. To get the life insurance, save the farm. Save you guys, Ben. They have the note.”
“So. What? No, that doesn’t make sense. Diondra killed Michelle. She had her diary. We just said it was Diondra—”
“Well, that’s just the thing. This Calvin Diehl’s playing himself off like a folk hero—I swear, there’s been a crowd outside the jail the past few days, people with signs, like, Diehl’s the Real Deal. They’ll be writing songs about him soon: helping people in debt die so the banks won’t get their property, screwing over the insurance companies to boot. People are eating it up. But, uh, he’s saying he won’t confess to murder on any of the thirty-two people, says they were all assisted suicide. Die with dignity. But he’s taking the rap for Debby. He says he’ll confess to Debby, says she wandered in, got in the middle, things went bad. He says that’s the only one he’s sorry for.”
“What about Michelle?”
“He says he never even saw Michelle. I can’t think why he’d lie.”
“Two killers,” I said. “Two killers the same night. That would be our luck.”
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE time I was hiding in the woods, then whimpering at the gas station, then bawling in Lyle’s car, and finally convincing a sleepy local sheriff’s deputy I wasn’t crazy (You’re who’s sister?), I wasted seven hours. Diondra and Crystal were clean gone by the morning, and I mean clean. They’d doused the place with gas, and it had burnt to the ground before the fire trucks even got out of the station.
I told my story a lot more times, the story taken with a mix of bemusement and doubt, and then finally a dash of credence.
“We’ll just need a little more, you know, to link her to your sister’s murder,” one detective said, pressing a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee in my hand.
Two days later, detectives appeared on my doorstep. They had photocopies of letters from my mom. Wanted to see if I recognized her handwriting, wanted to see if I wanted to see them.
The first was a very simple, one-page note, absolving Calvin Diehl of her murder.
The second was to us.Dear Ben, Michelle, Debby and Libby,I don’t think this letter will ever reach you, but Mr. Diehl said he’d hold it for me, and I guess that gives me some comfort. I don’t know. Your grandparents always told me, Make a useful life. I don’t feel I’ve really done that, but I can make a useful death. I hope you all forgive me. Ben, whatever happens, don’t blame yourself. Things got beyond our control, and this is what needed to be done. It seems very clear to me. I’m proud in a way. My life has been determined so much by accidents, it seems nice that now an “accident on purpose” will make things right again. A happy accident. Take good care of each other, I know Diane will do right by you. I’m only sad I won’t get to see what good people you become. Although I don’t need to. That’s how sure I am of my kids.Love you,
Mom
I felt hollowed out. My mom’s death was not useful. I felt a shot of rage at her, and then imagined those last bloody moments in the house, when she realized it had gone wrong, when Debby lay dying, and it was all over, her unsterling life. My anger gave way to a strange tenderness, what a mother might feel for her child, and I thought, At least she tried. She tried, on that final day, as hard as anyone could have tried.
And I would try to find peace in that.
Calvin DiehlJANUARY 3, 1985
4:12 A.M.
It was stupid, how wrong it had gone, so quickly. And here he’d been doing her a favor, the redhead farmgirl. Goddam, she didn’t even leave him enough money; they agreed on $2,000, she left an envelope with only $812 and three quarters. It was petty and small and stupid, the whole night. It was disastrous. He’d gotten lax, cocky, indulgent and it had led to … She’d have been so easy, too. Most people were picky about how they died, but all she asked was not to drown. She didn’t want to drown, please. He could have done it so many simple ways, like he’d always done. But then he’d gone to get a drink at the bar, no big deal, truckers went through here all the time, he never stood out. But her husband was there, and he was such a piece of shit peckerhead, such a little worthless rat man, that Calvin found himself listening pretty hard for what this Runner guy’s deal was, and people were telling all sorts of stories, about how the man had ruined the farm, ruined his family, was in debt up to his shirt-collar. And Calvin Diehl, a man of honor, had thought, why not?
Stab the woman through the heart on her doorstep, make this Runner guy sweat some. Let the cops question him, this sorry shit who took no responsibility. Make him take some. Ultimately it’d be written off as a random crime, as believable as the other stuff he’d pulled, car crashes and hopper collapses. Down near Ark City, he’d drowned a man in his own wheat, rigged it to look like a turnover. Calvin’s killings always worked with the seasons: drowning during spring floods, hunting accidents during autumn. January was the season for house robberies and violence. Christmas was over, and the new year just reminded you of how little your life had changed, and man, people got angry in January.
So stab her through the heart, fast, a big Bowie hunting knife. Be over in thirty seconds and the pain wasn’t bad at all, people said. Too much shock. She dies and it’s the sister that finds her, she’d made sure her sister was coming over early. She was a thoughtful lady that way.
Calvin needed to get back to his house, back over the Nebraska border, and clean his hair. He’d wiped himself down with chunks of snow, his head was smoking from the cold. But it was still sticky. He wasn’t supposed to get blood on him, and he needed it out, he could smell it in the car.
He pulled over to the side of the road, his hands sweating inside his gloves. He thought he saw a child, running in the snow up ahead, but realized he was just seeing the little girl he’d killed. Pudgy thing, her hair all still in braids, running, and him panicked, seeing her not as a little girl, not yet, but as prey, something that needed putting down. He didn’t want to do it, but no one got to see his face, he had to protect himself first and he had to get her before she woke the other kids up—he knew there were more, and he knew he didn’t have the heart to kill all of them. That wasn’t his mission, his mission was to help.
He saw the little girl turn to run and he got that axe suddenly in his hand—he saw the shotgun too, and he thought, the axe is more quiet, I can still keep this quiet.
And then, maybe he did go insane, he was so angry at the child—he chopped up a little girl—so angry at the redhead woman, for screwing this all up, for not dying right. He killed a little girl with an axe. He shot off the head of a mother of four instead of giving her the death she deserved. Her last moments were horror, nightmare in her house instead of him just holding her while she bled onto the snow and died with her face against his chest. He chopped up a little girl.
For the first time, Calvin Diehl thought of himself as a murderer. He fell back in his seat and bellowed.
Libby DayNOW
Thirteen days after Diondra and Crystal went missing, and the police had still not found them, had still not found any physical evidence to link Diondra to Michelle. The hunt was dissolving into an arson case, it was losing steam.
Lyle came over to watch bad TV with me, his new habit. I let him come if he didn’t talk too much, I made a big deal about him not talking too much, but I missed him on the days he didn’t come. We were watching some particularly grotesque reality show when Lyle suddenly sat up straighter. “Hey, that’s my sweater.”
I was wearing one of his too-tight pullovers I’d taken from the back of his car at some point, and it really did look much better on me.
“It really does look better on me,” I said.
“Man, Libby. You could just ask, you know.” He turned back to the TV, where women were going at each other like angry pound dogs. “Libby Sticky Fingers. Too bad you didn’t leave Diondra’s with, like, her hairbrush. We’d have some DNA.”
“Ah, the magic, magic DNA,” I said. I’d stopped believing in DNA.
On the TV, a blond woman had another blond woman by the hair and was pushing her down some steps, and I flipped the channel to a nature show on crocodiles.
“Oh, oh, my God.” I ran from the room.
I came back, slapped Diondra’s lipstick and thermometer on the table.
“Lyle Wirth, you are goddam brilliant,” I said, and then I hugged him.
“Well,” he said, and then laughed. “Wow. Huh, brilliant. Libby Sticky Fingers thinks I’m brilliant.”
“Absolutely.”
DNA FROM BOTH objects matched the blood on Michelle’s bedspread. The manhunt ignited. No wonder Diondra had been so insistent she was never remotely connected to Ben. All those scientific advances, one after another, making it easier and easier to match DNA: she must have felt more endangered each year instead of less. Good.
They nailed Diondra at a money-order dive in Amarillo. Crystal was nowhere to be found, but Diondra was nabbed, although it took four cops to get her in the car. So Diondra was in jail and Calvin Diehl had confessed. Even some skeevy loan agent had been rounded up, his mere name giving me the willies: Len. With all that, you’d think Ben might have been released from prison, but things don’t go that quickly. Diondra wasn’t confessing, and until her trial unfolded, they were going to hold on to my brother, who refused to implicate her. I finally went to visit him at the end of May.
He looked plumper, weary. He smiled weakly at me as I sat down.
“Wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me,” I said.
“Diondra was always sure you’d find her out. She was always sure of it. Guess she was right.”
“Guess she was.”
Neither of us seemed willing to go past that. Ben had protected Diondra for almost twenty-five years, I had undone all that. He seemed chagrined but not sad. Maybe he’d always hoped she’d be exposed. I was willing to believe that, for my own sake. It was easy not to ask the question.
“You’ll be out of here soon, Ben. Can you believe it? You’ll be out of prison.” This was by no means a sure thing—a strip of blood on a dead girl’s sheets is good, but a confession’s better. Still, I was hopeful. Still.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” he said. “It may be time. I think twenty-four years may be enough. It may be enough for … standing by. Letting it happen.”
“I think so.”
Lyle and I had put together pieces of that night from what Diondra had told me: They were at the house, ready to run away, and something happened that unraveled Diondra, she killed Michelle. Ben didn’t stop her. My guess is, Michelle somehow learned of the pregnancy, the secret baby. I would ask Ben one day, ask for the details. But I knew he’d give me nothing now.
The two Days sat looking at each other, thinking things and swallowing them. Ben scratched a pimple on his arm, the Y of the Polly tattoo peeking out from his sleeve.
“So: Crystal. What can you tell me about Crystal, Libby? What happened that night? I’ve heard different versions. Is she, is she wrong. Bad?”
