The Novels of Gillian Flynn by Gillian Flynn Page B

ten, huh? We’re already running late.” Kansas City looked at me one more time. “Sure you don’t want a lift, Bill?”
    Vickery said nothing, just shook his head.
    “Who’s your friend, Bill? I thought I’d met all the pertinent Wind Gappers already. Or is it … Wind Gapians?” He grinned. I stood silent as a schoolgirl, hoping Vickery would introduce me.
    Bang!
Vickery was choosing not to hear. In Chicago I would have jabbed my hand out, announced myself with a smile, and enjoyed the reaction. Here I stared at Vickery and stayed mute.
    “All right then, see you at the station.”
    The window zipped back up, the car pulled away.
    “Is that the detective from Kansas City?” I asked.
    In answer, Vickery lit another cigarette, walked off. Across the street, the old man had just reached his top step.

Chapter Four
    S omeone had spray-painted blue curlicues on the legs of the water tower at Jacob J. Garrett Memorial Park, and it was left looking oddly dainty, as if it were wearing crochet booties. The park itself—the last place Natalie Keene was seen alive—was vacant. The dirt from the baseball field hovered a few feet above the ground. I could taste it in the back of my throat like tea left brewing too long. The grasses grew tall at the edge of the woods. I was surprised no one had ordered them cut, eradicated like the stones that snagged Ann Nash.
    When I was in high school, Garrett Park was the place everyone met on weekends to drink beer or smoke pot or get jerked off three feet into the woods. It was where I was first kissed, at age thirteen, by a football player with a pack of chaw tucked down in his gums. The rush of the tobacco hit me more than the kiss; behind his car I vomited wine cooler with tiny, glowing slices of fruit.
    “James Capisi was here.”
    I turned around to face a blond, buzz-cut boy of about ten, holding a fuzzy tennis ball.
    “James Capisi?” I asked.
    “My friend, he was here when she got Natalie,” the kid said. “James saw her. She was wearing her nightgown. They were playing Frisbee, over by the woods, and she took Natalie. It would’ve been James, but he decided to stay here on the field. So Natalie was the one right by the trees. James was out here because of the sun. He’s not supposed to be in the sun, because his mom’s got skin cancer, but he does anyway. Or he did.” The boy bounced the tennis ball, and a puff of dirt floated up around him.
    “He doesn’t like the sun anymore?”
    “He doesn’t like nothing no more.”
    “Because of Natalie?”
    He shrugged belligerently.
    “Because James is a pussy.”
    The kid looked me up and down, then suddenly threw the ball at me, hard. It hit my hip and bounced off.
    He blurted out a little laugh. “Sorry.” He scrambled after the ball, dove on top of it dramatically, then leapt up and hurled it against the ground. It bounced about ten feet in the air, then dribbled to a stop.
    “I’m not sure I understood what you said. Who was wearing a nightgown?” I kept my eye on the bouncing ball.
    “The woman who took Natalie.”
    “Wait, what do you mean?” The story I’d heard was that Natalie had been playing here with friends who left to go home one by one, and that she was assumed to have been abducted somewhere along her short walk home.
    “James saw the woman take Natalie. It was just the two of them, and they were playing Frisbee, and Natalie missed and it went into the grasses by the woods, and the woman just reached out and grabbed her. Then they were gone. And James ran home. And he don’t come out since.”
    “Then how do you know what happened?”
    “I visited him once. He told me. I’m his buddy.”
    “Does James live around here?”
    “Fuck him. I might go to my grandma’s for the summer anyway. In Arkansas. Better’n here.”
    The boy threw the ball at the chain-link fence outlining the baseball diamond, and it lodged there, rattling the metal.
    “You from here?” He began kicking dirt in the