Sharp Objects

Camille is walking around Jacob J. Garrett Memorial Park, the last place Natalie Keene was seen alive. Camille recalls that when she was in high school it was “the place everyone met on the weekends to drink beer or smoke pot or get jerked off three feet into the woods” (47). Here she meets a little boy who tells her that his friend, James Capisi, saw a woman take Natalie into the woods.

Camille looks up Capisi in the thin Wind Gap phone book and drives to the Capisi house in the middle of the low-rent section of town. While observing the poverty around her, Camille notes that most of the people “work at the nearby pig factory-farm, a private operation that delivers almost 2 percent of the country’s pork” (49). She also admits that her mother owns the farm, and despite letting other people run it, Adora makes $1.2 million annually.

Once at the Capisi house, Camille talks to James through an open window. James’s mother is sick with cancer, and is nowhere to be found. James tells Camille that he saw an old, pale woman with white hair take Natalie into the woods. He says that the old woman smiled at him and then put her finger to her lips, gesturing at him to be quiet.