Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Dirt’

Detective Richard Willis is learning that his logic doesn’t necessarily apply in Wind Gap, Mo. Early in this week’s episode of “Sharp Objects,” he visits the alley where Natalie Keene’s body was dumped and notices that someone has been leaving fresh flowers there. “Might be the sign of a guilty conscience,” he tells an old-school barber, midway through a shave. “Round here we just call it bein’ nice,’” says the man. The barber’s theory is that the mystery mourner is superstitious: “They figure if they honor the dead, maybe their kids won’t end up like them two girls did.”

When Willis points out that this is magical thinking, the barber relates the bizarre story of how a group of townspeople hauled boulders out of the creek where Ann Nash’s body was found and destroyed them. Later in the episode, Camille encounters a kindly middle-aged lady taking down posters of Natalie so that the girl’s family won’t have to see her face all over town. She did the same after Ann’s death, the woman says, but she just couldn’t bring herself to throw them away.

The impression we’re left with is of a town that twists reality to suit its superstitions, pieties and (often warped) ideas about the way the world works. The insistence by Camille’s mother, Adora, that Camille shield her from talk of the investigation — particularly her announcement in last week’s episode that she was going to treat her adult daughter’s reporting trip like a summer vacation — is the ultimate testament to the determination of Wind Gap residents to ignore facts that don’t jibe with their preferences.

Like any good detective, Willis is an empiricist — to the extent that, when he finds out the murderer removed the girls’ teeth with pliers, he buys the head of a pig (presumably one that spent its life on the Crellins’ farm) to see how much strength such an extraction would require. But do his methods stand a chance in a place like this? When he tries to engage Chief Vickery in some theorizing about why the perp left Ann’s body in the forest but dumped Natalie’s in town, the police chief dismisses Willis’s line of inquiry as a “‘Silence of the Lambs’ routine.”