Gillian Flynn - Sharp Objects: A Novel

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2006 by Gillian Flynn

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Shaye Areheart Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flynn, Gillian, 1971

Sharp objects : a novel / Gillian Flynn.1st ed.

1. Women journalistsFiction. 2. MissouriFiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3606.L935S53 2006

813'.6dc22 2005035046

eISBN-13: 978-0-307-35148-7

eISBN-10: 0-307-35148-3

v1.0

For my parents,
Matt and Judith Flynn

Chapter One

M y sweater was new, stinging red and ugly. It was May 12 but the temperature had dipped to the forties, and after four days shivering in my shirtsleeves, I grabbed cover at a tag sale rather than dig through my boxed-up winter clothes. Spring in Chicago.

In my gunny-covered cubicle I sat staring at the computer screen. My story for the day was a limp sort of evil. Four kids, ages two through six, were found locked in a room on the South Side with a couple of tuna sandwiches and a quart of milk. Theyd been left three days, flurrying like chickens over the food and feces on the carpet. Their mother had wandered off for a suck on the pipe and just forgotten. Sometimes thats what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping. Id seen the mother after the arrest: twenty-two-year-old Tammy Davis, blonde and fat, with pink rouge on her cheeks in two perfect circles the size of shot glasses. I could imagine her sitting on a shambled-down sofa, her lips on that metal, a sharp burst of smoke. Then all was fast floating, her kids way behind, as she shot back to junior high, when the boys still cared and she was the prettiest, a glossy-lipped thirteen-year-old who mouthed cinnamon sticks before she kissed.

A belly. A smell. Cigarettes and old coffee. My editor, esteemed, weary Frank Curry, rocking back in his cracked Hush Puppies. His teeth soaked in brown tobacco saliva.

Where are you on the story, kiddo? There was a silver tack on my desk, point up. He pushed it lightly under a yellow thumbnail.

Near done. I had three inches of copy. I needed ten.

Good. Fuck her, file it, and come to my office.

I can come now.

Fuck her, file it, then come to my office.

Fine. Ten minutes. I wanted my thumbtack back.

He started out of my cubicle. His tie swayed down near his crotch.

Preaker?

Yes, Curry?

Fuck her.

Frank Curry thinks Im a soft touch. Might be because Im a woman. Might be because Im a soft touch.

C urrys office is on the third floor. Im sure he gets panicky-pissed every time he looks out the window and sees the trunk of a tree. Good editors dont see bark; they see leavesif they can even make out trees from up on the twentieth, thirtieth floor. But for the Daily Post, fourth-largest paper in Chicago, relegated to the suburbs, theres room to sprawl. Three floors will do, spreading relentlessly outward, like a spill, unnoticed among the carpet retailers and lamp shops. A corporate developer produced our township over three well-organized years196164then named it after his daughter, whod suffered a serious equestrian accident a month before the job was finished. Aurora Springs, he ordered, pausing for a photo by a brand-new city sign. Then he took his family and left. The daughter, now in her fifties and fine except for an occasional tingling in her arms, lives in Florida and returns every few years to take a photo by her namesake sign, just like Pop.

I wrote the story on her last visit. Curry hated it, hates most slice-of-life pieces. He got smashed off old Chambord while he read it, left his office smelling like raspberries. Curry gets drunk fairly quietly, but often. Its not the reason, though, that he has such a cozy view of the ground. Thats just yawing bad luck.

I walked in and shut the door to his office, which isnt how Id ever imagined my editors office would look. I craved big oak panels, a window pane in the doormarked Chiefso the cub reporters could watch us rage over First Amendment rights. Currys office is bland and institutional, like the rest of the building. You could debate journalism or get a Pap smear. No one cared.

Tell me about Wind Gap. Curry held the tip of a ballpoint pen at his grizzled chin. I could picture the tiny prick of blue it would leave among the stubble.

Its at the very bottom of Missouri, in the boot heel. Spitting distance from Tennessee and Arkansas, I said, hustling for my facts. Curry loved to drill reporters on any topics he deemed pertinentthe number of murders in Chicago last year, the demographics for Cook County, or, for some reason, the story of my hometown, a topic I preferred to avoid. Its been around since before the Civil War, I continued. Its near the Mississippi, so it was a port city at one point. Now its biggest business is hog butchering. About two thousand people live there. Old money and trash.

Which are you?

Im trash. From old money. I smiled. He frowned.

And what the hell is going on?

I sat silent, cataloguing various disasters that might have befallen Wind Gap. Its one of those crummy towns prone to misery: A bus collision or a twister. An explosion at the silo or a toddler down a well. I was also sulking a bit. Id hopedas I always do when Curry calls me into his officethat he was going to compliment me on a recent piece, promote me to a better beat, hell, slide over a slip of paper with a 1 percent raise scrawled on itbut I was unprepared to chat about current events in Wind Gap.

Your moms still there, right, Preaker?

Mom. Stepdad. A half sister born when I was in college, her existence so unreal to me I often forgot her name. Amma. And then Marian, always long-gone Marian.

Well dammit, you ever talk to them? Not since Christmas: a chilly, polite call after administering three bourbons. Id worried my mother could smell it through the phone lines.

Not lately.

Jesus Christ, Preaker, read the wires sometime. I guess there was a murder last August? Little girl strangled?

I nodded like I knew. I was lying. My mother was the only person in Wind Gap with whom I had even a limited connection, and shed said nothing. Curious.

Now another ones missing. Sounds like it might be a serial to me. Drive down there and get me the story. Go quick. Be there tomorrow morning.

No way. We got horror stories here, Curry.

Yeah, and we also got three competing papers with twice the staff and cash. He ran a hand through his hair, which fell into frazzled spikes. Im sick of getting slammed out of news. This is our chance to break something. Big.

Curry believes with just the right story, wed become the overnight paper of choice in Chicago, gain national credibility. Last year another paper, not us, sent a writer to his hometown somewhere in Texas after a group of teens drowned in the spring floods. He wrote an elegiac but well-reported piece on the nature of water and regret, covered everything from the boys basketball team, which lost its three best players, to the local funeral home, which was desperately unskilled in cleaning up drowned corpses. The story won a Pulitzer.

I still didnt want to go. So much so, apparently, that Id wrapped my hands around the arms of my chair, as if Curry might try to pry me out. He sat and stared at me a few beats with his watery hazel eyes. He cleared his throat, looked at his photo of his wife, and smiled like he was a doctor about to break bad news. Curry loved to barkit fit his old-school image of an editorbut he was also one of the most decent people I knew.