Heart-shaped box (20 page)

Angus hurled himself against the dresser and put his front paws on the top of it, barking furiously at the face in the mirror. The force of his
weight rocked the dresser onto its rear legs. The mirror could be rotated forward and back, and now it swung back, tilting to show its face to the ceiling. Angus dropped to all fours, and an instant later the dresser did the same, coming down onto its wooden legs with a ringing crash. The mirror swung forward, pivoting to show Georgia her own reflection once more. It was only her reflection. The blood—and the black blindfold—were gone.

I
n the late-afternoon cool of the room,
Jude and Georgia stretched out together on the twin bed. It was too small for the both of them, and Georgia had to turn on her side and throw a leg over him to fit beside him. Her face nestled into his neck, the tip of her nose cold against his skin.

He was numb. Jude knew he needed to think about what had just happened to them, but he could not seem to turn his thoughts back to what he’d seen in the mirror, back to what Anna had been trying to tell them. His mind wouldn’t go there. His mind wanted away from death for a few moments. He felt crowded by death, felt the promise of death all around, felt death on his chest, each death a stone heaped on top of him, driving the air out of him: Anna’s death, Danny’s, Dizzy’s, Jerome’s, the possibility of his own death and Georgia’s waiting just down the road from them. He could not move for the weight of all those deaths pressing down on him.

Jude had an idea that as long as he was very still and said nothing, he and Georgia could stay in this quiet moment together indefinitely, with the shades flapping and the dim light wavering around them. Whatever
bad thing that was waiting for them next would never arrive. As long as he remained in the little bed, with Georgia’s cool thigh over him and her body clasped to his side, the unimaginable future wouldn’t come for them.

It came anyway. Bammy thumped softly on the door, and when she spoke, her voice was hushed and uncertain.

“You all right in there?”

Georgia pushed herself up on one elbow. She swiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Jude had not known until now that she’d been crying. She blinked and smiled crookedly, and it was
real,
not a smile for show, although for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what she had to smile about.

Her face had been scrubbed clean by her tears, and that smile was heartbreaking in its easy, girlish sincerity. It seemed to say,
Oh, well. Sometimes you get a bad deal
. He understood then that she believed what they’d both seen in the mirror was a kind of vision, something that was going to happen, that maybe they could not avert. Jude quailed at the idea. No. No, better Craddock should get him and be done with it than Georgia should die gasping in her own blood, and why would Anna show them that, what could she want?

“Honey?” Bammy asked.

“We’re fine,” Georgia called back.

Silence.

Then: “You aren’t fightin’ in there, are you? I heard bangin’ around.”

“No,”
Georgia said, sounding affronted by the very suggestion. “Swear to God, Bammy. Sorry about the racket.”

“Well,” Bammy said. “Do you need anything?”

“Fresh sheets,” Georgia said.

Another silence. Jude felt Georgia trembling against his chest, a sweet shivering. She bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. Then he was fighting it, too, was overcome with a sudden, convulsive hilarity. He jammed a hand into his mouth, while his insides hitched with trapped, strangled laughter.

“Jesus,” said Bammy, who sounded like she wanted to spit. “Jesus Christ.” Her tread moving away from the door as she said it.

Georgia fell against Jude, her cool, damp face pressed hard to his neck. He put his arms around her, and they clutched each other while they gasped with laughter.

A
fter dinner Jude said he had some phone calls
to make and left Georgia and Bammy in Bammy’s living room. He didn’t really have anyone to call but knew that Georgia wanted some time with her grandmother and that they would be more themselves without him there.

But once he was in the kitchen, a fresh glass of lemonade before him and nothing to occupy himself with, he found the phone in his hand anyway. He dialed the office line to pick up his messages. It felt queer, to be busy with something so entirely grounded in the ordinary after all that had happened in the day, from their run-in with Craddock at Denny’s to the encounter with Anna in Georgia’s bedroom. Jude felt disconnected from who he’d been before he first saw the dead man. His career, his living, both the business and the art that had preoccupied him for more than thirty years, seemed matters of no particular importance. He dialed the phone, watching his hand as if it belonged to someone else, feeling he was a passive spectator to the actions of a man in a play, an actor performing the part of himself.

He had five messages waiting for him. The first was from Herb Gross, his accountant and business manager. Herb’s voice, which was usually oily and self-satisfied, was, in the recording, grainy with emotion.
“I just heard from Nan Shreve that Danny Wooten was found dead in his apartment this morning. Apparently he hanged himself. We’re all dismayed here, as I’m sure you can imagine. Will you call me when you get this message? I don’t know where you are. No one does. Thank you.”

There was a message from an Officer Beam, who said that the Piecliff police were trying to reach Jude about an important matter, and would he call back. There was a message from Nan Shreve, his lawyer, who said she was handling everything, that the police wanted to collect a statement from him about Danny, and he should call as soon as he could.

The next message was from Jerome Presley, who had died four years ago, after he drove his Porsche into a weeping willow at just under a hundred miles an hour. “Hey, Jude, I guess we’re getting the band back together soon, huh? John Bonham on drums. Joey Ramone on backup vocals.” He laughed, then went on in his familiar, weary drawl. Jerome’s croak of a voice had always reminded Jude of the comic Steven Wright. “I hear you’re driving a souped-up Mustang now. That’s one thing we always had, Jude—we could talk cars. Suspensions, engines, spoilers, sound systems, Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Chargers, Porsches. You know what I was thinking about, night I drove my Porsche off the road? I was thinking about all the shit I
never
said to you. All the shit we didn’t talk about. Like how you got me hooked on your coke, and then you went and got straight and had the balls to tell me if I didn’t do the same, you’d throw me out of the band. Like how you gave Christine money to set herself up with her own place after she left me, when she ran off with the kids without a word. How you gave her money for a lawyer. There’s loyalty for you. Or how you wouldn’t make a simple fucking loan when I was losing everything—the house, the cars. And here I let you sleep on the bed in my basement when you were fresh off the bus from Louisiana and you didn’t have thirty dollars in your pocket.” Jerome laughed again—his harsh, corrosive, smoker’s laugh. “Well, we’ll get a chance to finally talk about all that stuff soon. I guess I’ll be seeing you any day.
I hear you’re on the nightroad now. I know where that road goes. Straight into a fucking tree. They picked me out of the branches, you know. Except for the parts I left on the windshield. I miss you, Jude. I’m looking forward to putting my arms around you. We’re going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”

There was a clattering sound as Jerome took the phone from his ear and held it out so Jude could hear. What came through the line was a noise like no other Jude had ever heard before, alien and dreadful, a noise like the hum of flies, amplified a hundred times, and the punch and squeal of machinery, a steam press that banged and seethed. When listened to carefully, it was possible to hear words in all that fly hum, inhuman voices calling for Mother, calling for it to stop.

Jude was primed to delete the next message, expecting another dead person, but instead it was a call from his father’s housekeeper, Arlene Wade. She was so far from his thoughts that it was several moments before he was able to identify her old, warbly, curiously toneless voice, and by then her brief message was almost done.

“Hello, Justin, it’s me. I wanted to update you on your father. Hasn’t been conscious in thirty-six hours. Heartbeat is all fits and starts. Thought you’d want to know. He isn’t in pain. Call if you like.”

After Jude hung up, he leaned over the kitchen counter, looking out into the night. He had his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the window was open, and the breeze that drifted in was cool on his skin and perfumed with the smell of the flower garden. Insects hummed.

Jude could see his father in his head: the old man stretched out on his narrow cot, gaunt, wasted, his chin covered in a mangy white bristle, his temples sunken and gray. Jude even half believed he could smell him, the rank bad sweat, the stink of the house, an odor that included but was not limited to chicken shit, pig, and the ashtray smell of nicotine absorbed into everything—curtains, blankets, wallpaper. When Jude had finally lit out of Louisiana, he’d been fleeing that smell as much as escaping his father.

He had run and run and run, made music, made millions, spent a lifetime trying to put as much distance between himself and the old man as he could. Now, with a little luck, he and his father might die on the same day. They could walk the nightroad together. Or maybe they would ride, share the passenger seat of Craddock McDermott’s smoke-colored pickup. The two of them sitting so close to each other that Martin Cowzynski could rest one of his gaunt claws on the back of Jude’s neck. The smell of him filling the car. The smell of home.

Hell would smell like that, and they would drive there together, father and son, accompanied by their hideous chauffeur, with his silver crew cut and Johnny Cash suit and the radio turned to Rush Limbaugh. If hell was anything, it was talk radio—and family.

In the living room, Bammy said something in a low, gossipy murmur. Georgia laughed. Jude tilted his head at the sound and a moment later was surprised to find himself smiling in automatic response. How it was she could be in stitches again, with everything that was up against them and everything they’d seen, he couldn’t imagine.

Her laughter was a quality he prized in her above all others—the deep, chaotic music of it and the way she gave herself over to it completely. It stirred him, drew him out of himself. It was just after seven by the clock on the microwave. He would step back into the living room and join the two of them for a few minutes of easy, pointless talk, and then he would get Georgia’s attention and shoot a meaningful look at the door. The road was waiting.

He had made up his mind and was turning from the kitchen counter when a sound caught his attention, a lilting, off-key voice, singing:
byebye, bay-bee
. He turned on his heel, glanced back into the yard behind the house.

The rear corner of the yard was lit by a street lamp in the alley. It cast a bluish light across the picket fence and the big leafy oak with the rope hanging from one branch. A little girl crouched in the grass beneath the tree, a child of perhaps six or seven, in a simple red-and-white-checkered
dress and with her dark hair tied in a ponytail. She sang to herself, that old one by Dean Martin about how it was time to hit the road to dreamland, digya in the land of nod. She picked a dandelion, caught her breath, and blew. The seed parachutes came apart, a hundred drifting white umbrellas that soared out into the gloom. It should’ve been impossible to see them, except that they were faintly luminescent, drifting about like improbable white sparks. Her head was raised, so she seemed almost to be staring directly at Jude through the window. It was hard to be sure, though. Her eyes were obscured by the black marks that jittered before them.

It was Ruth. Her name was Ruth. She was Bammy’s twin sister, the one who had disappeared in the 1950s. Their parents had called them in for lunch. Bammy had come running, but Ruth lingered behind, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her…alive.

Jude opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but found himself unable to speak. The breath caught in his chest and stayed there.

Ruth stopped singing, and the night went still, no sound even of insects now. The little girl turned her head, to glance into the alley behind the house. She smiled, and a hand flapped up in a small wave, as if she’d just noticed someone standing there, someone she knew, a friendly neighborhood acquaintance. Only there wasn’t anyone in the alley. There were old pages from a newspaper stuck to the ground, some broken glass, weeds growing between the bricks. Ruth rose from her crouch and walked slowly to the fence, her lips moving—talking soundlessly to a person who wasn’t there. When had Jude become unable to hear her voice? When she gave up singing.

As Ruth approached the fence, Jude felt a rising alarm, as if he were watching a child about to stray onto a busy highway. He wanted to call to her but could not, couldn’t even inhale.

He remembered then what Georgia had told him about her. That people who saw little Ruth always wanted to call to her, to warn her that
she was in danger, to tell her to run, but that no one could manage it. They were too stricken by the sight of her to speak. A thought formed, the sudden, nonsensical thought that this was every girl Jude had ever known who he hadn’t been able to help; it was Anna and Georgia both. If he could just speak her name, get her attention, signal to her that she was in trouble, anything was possible. He and Georgia might beat the dead man yet, survive the impossible fix they had got themselves in.

And still Jude could not find his voice. It was maddening to stand there and watch and not be able to speak. He slammed his bandaged, injured hand against the counter, felt a shock of pain travel through the wound in his palm—and still could not force any sound up through the tight passage of his throat.

Angus was at his side, and he jumped when Jude pounded the counter. He lifted his head and lapped nervously at Jude’s wrist. The rough, hot stroke of Angus’s tongue on his bare skin startled him. It was immediate and real and it yanked him out of his paralysis as swiftly and abruptly as Georgia’s laughter had pulled him out of his feeling of despair only a few moments before. His lungs grabbed some air, and he called through the window.

“Ruth!” he shouted—and she turned her head. She heard him. She
heard
him. “Get away, Ruth! Run for the house! Right now!”

Ruth glanced again at the darkened, empty alley, and then she took an off-balance, lunging step back toward the house. Before she could go any farther, her slender white arm came up, as if there were an invisible line around her left wrist and someone was pulling on it.

Only it wasn’t an invisible line. It was an invisible hand. And in the next instant, she came right off the ground, hauled into the air by someone who wasn’t there. Her long, skinny legs kicked helplessly, and one of her sandals flew off and disappeared into the dark. She wrestled and fought, suspended two feet in the air, and was pulled steadily backward. Her face turned toward Jude’s, helpless and beseeching, the marks over
her eyes blotting out her desperate stare, as she was carried by unseen forces over the picket fence.

“Ruth!” he called again, his voice as commanding as it had ever been onstage, when he was shouting to his legions.

She began to fade away as she was hauled off down the alley. Now her dress was gray-and-white checks. Now her hair was the color of moonsilver. The other sandal fell off, splashed in a puddle, and disappeared, although ripples continued to move across the shallow muddy water—as if it had fallen, impossibly, right out of the past and into the present. Ruth’s mouth was open, but she couldn’t scream, and Jude didn’t know why. Maybe the unseen thing that was tugging her away had a hand over her mouth. She passed under the bright blue glare of the street lamp and was gone. The breeze caught a newspaper, and it flapped down the empty alley with a dry, rattling sound.

Angus whined again and gave him another lick. Jude stared. A bad taste in his mouth. A feeling of pressure in his eardrums.

“Jude,” Georgia whispered from behind him.

He looked at her reflection in the window over the sink. Black squiggles danced in front of her eyes. They were over his eyes, too. They were both dead. They just hadn’t stopped moving yet.

“What happened, Jude?”

“I couldn’t save her,” he said. “The girl. Ruth. I saw her taken away.” He could not tell Georgia that somehow his hope that they could save themselves had been taken with her. “I called her name. I called her name, but I couldn’t change what happened.”

“Course you couldn’t, dear,” said Bammy.