Excerpt: 'Sharp Objects'

When we emerged from the church into the day's glare, I could make out four girls sitting in a row along a stumpy wall across the street. Long colt legs dangling down. Breasts rounded by push-up bras. The same girls I'd run into at the edge of the forest. They were huddled together laughing until one of them, again the prettiest, motioned over at me, and they all pretended to hang their heads. Their stomachs were still jiggling, though.

Here's what I filed that night:

In tiny Wind Gap, Missouri, posters pleading for the return of 10-year-old Natalie Jane Keene were still hanging as they buried the little girl on Tuesday. A vibrant funeral service, at which the priest spoke of forgiveness and redemption, did little to calm nerves or heal wounds. That's because the healthy, sweet-faced honor student was the second victim of what police presume to be a serial killer. A serial killer who's targeting children.

The residents also try to heal themselves. ''I don't want to talk to anyone,'' says Jeannie Keene. ''I just want to be left alone. We all want to be left alone.''

I slept late into Wednesday, sweaty sheets and blankets pulled over my head. Woke several times to phones ringing, the maid vacuuming outside my door, a lawn mower. I was desperate to remain asleep, but the day kept bobbing through. I kept my eyes closed and imagined myself back in Chicago, on my rickety slice of a bed in my studio apartment facing the brick wall of a supermarket. I had a cardboard dresser purchased at that supermarket when I moved in four years ago, and a plastic table on which I ate from a set of weightless yellow plates and bent, tinny flatware. I worried that I hadn't watered my lone plant, a slightly yellow fern I'd found by my neighbors' trash. Then I remembered I'd tossed the dead thing out two months ago. I tried to imagine other images from my life in Chicago: my cubicle at work, my superintendent who didn't know my name, the dull green Christmas lights the supermarket had yet to take down. A scattering of friendly acquaintances who probably hadn't noticed I'd been gone.

I hated being in Wind Gap, but home held no comfort either.

I pulled a flask of warm vodka from my duffel bag and got back in bed. Then, sipping, I assessed my surroundings. I'd expected my mother to pave over my bedroom as soon as I'd left the house, but it looked exactly as it was more than a decade before. I regretted what a serious teenager I'd been: There were no posters of pop stars or favorite movies, no girlish collections of photos or corsages. Instead there were paintings of sailboats, proper pastel pastorals, a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt. The latter was particularly strange, since I'd known little about Mrs. Roosevelt, except that she was good, which at the time I suppose was enough. Given my druthers now, I'd prefer a snapshot of Warren Harding's wife, ''the Duchess,'' who recorded imaginary offenses in a little red notebook, and avenged herself accordingly. Today I like my first ladies with a little bite,

I drank more vodka. There was nothing I wanted more than to be unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away. I felt swollen with potential tears, like a water balloon filled to burst. Begging for a pin prick. Wind Gap was unhealthy for me. This home was unhealthy for me.

From SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn. Copyright (c) 2006 by Gillian Flynn. Published by Shaye Areheart Books, a division of Random House, Inc.