Heart-shaped box (22 page)

J
essica McDermott Price’s house
was in a new development, an assortment of handsome Colonials and Capes with vinyl siding in various ice-cream-shop colors—vanilla, pistachio—laid out along streets that twisted and looped in the way of intestines. They drove by it twice before Georgia spotted the number on the mailbox. Home was a Day-Glo yellow, like mango sherbet, like the caution light, and it wasn’t in any particular architectural style, unless big, bland, American suburban was a style. Jude glided past it and continued down the block about a hundred yards. He turned into an unpaved driveway and rolled across dried red mud to an unfinished house.

The garage had only just been framed, beams of new pine sticking up from the cement foundation and more beams crisscrossing overhead, the roof covered in plastic sheeting. The house attached to it was only a little further along, plywood panels nailed up between the beams, with gaping rectangles to show where windows and doors belonged.

Jude turned the Mustang so the front end was facing the street and backed into the empty, doorless bay of the garage. From where they parked, they had a good view of the Price house. He switched off the engine. They sat for a while, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

They had made good time coming south from Bammy’s. It was just going on one in the morning.

“Do we have a plan?” Georgia asked.

Jude pointed across the street, at a couple large trash cans on the curb. Then he gestured down the road, toward more green plastic barrels.

“Looks like tomorrow is garbage day,” Jude said. He nodded toward Jessica Price’s house. “She hasn’t brought her cans out yet.”

Georgia stared at him. A streetlight down the road cast a wan beam of light across her eyes, which glittered, like water at the bottom of a well. She didn’t say anything.

“We’ll wait until she carries out the trash, and then we’ll make her get in the car with us.”

“Make her.”

“We’ll drive around awhile. We’ll talk some—the three of us.”

“What if her husband brings out the trash?”

“He isn’t going to. He was in the reserves, and he got wiped out in Iraq. It’s one of the few things Anna told me about her sister.”

“Maybe she has a boyfriend now.”

“If she’s got a boyfriend, and he’s a lot bigger than me, we wait and look for another shot. But Anna never said anything about a boyfriend. The way I heard it, Jessica was just living here with their stepdad, Craddock, and her daughter.”

“Daughter?”

Jude looked meaningfully at a pink two-wheeler leaned against Price’s garage. Georgia followed his gaze.

Jude said, “That’s why we’re not going in tonight. But tomorrow is a school day. Sooner or later Jessica is going to be alone.”

“And then?”

“Then we can do what we need to do, and we don’t have to worry about her kid seeing.”

For a while they were both quiet. Insect song rose from the palms
and the brush behind the unfinished house, a rhythmic, inhuman pulsing. Otherwise the street was quiet.

Georgia said, “What are we gonna do to her?”

“Whatever we have to.”

Georgia lowered the seat all the way back and stared into the dark at the ceiling. Bon leaned into the front and whined urgently in her ear. Georgia rubbed her head.

“These dogs are hungry, Jude.”

“They’ll have to wait,” he said, staring at Jessica Price’s house.

He was headachy and his knuckles were sore. He was overtired, too, and his exhaustion made it difficult to follow any one line of reasoning for long. His thoughts, instead, were black dogs that chased their own tails, going around and around in maddening circles without ever getting anywhere.

He had done some bad things in his life—putting Anna on that train, for starters, sending her back to her kin to die—but nothing like what he thought might be ahead of him. He wasn’t sure what he would have to do, if it would end in killing—it might end in killing—and he had Johnny Cash in his head singing “Folsom Prison Blues,” Momma told me be a good boy, don’t play with guns. He considered the gun he had left at home, his big John Wayne .44. It would be easier to get answers out of Jessica Price if he had the gun with him. Only, if he had the gun with him, Craddock would’ve persuaded him to shoot Georgia and himself by now, and the dogs, too, and Jude thought about guns he’d owned, and dogs he’d owned, and running barefoot with the dogs in the hillocky acres behind his father’s farm, the thrill of running with the dogs in the dawn light, and the clap of his father’s shotgun as he fired at ducks, and how his mother and Jude had run away from him together when Jude was nine, only at the Greyhound his mother lost her nerve and called her parents, and wept to them, and they told her to take the boy back to his father and try to make peace, make peace with her husband and with God, and his father was waiting with the shotgun on the porch when
they returned, and he smashed her in the face with the gun stock and then put the barrel on her left breast and said he’d kill her if she ever tried to run away again, and so she never ran away again. When Jude—only he was Justin then—tried to walk inside the house, his father said, “I’m not mad at you, boy, this ain’t your fault,” and caught him in one arm and hugged him to his leg. He bent for a kiss and said he loved him, and Justin automatically said he loved him back, a memory he still flinched from, a morally repugnant act, an act so shameful he could not bear to be the person who had done it, so he had eventually needed to become someone else. Was that the worst thing he’d ever done, planted that Judas kiss on his father’s cheek while his mother bled, taken the worthless coin of his father’s affection? No worse than sending Anna away, and now he was back where he’d started, wondering about tomorrow morning, wondering if he could, when he had to, force Anna’s sister into the back of his car and take her away from her home and then do what needed to be done to make her talk.

Although it was not hot in the Mustang, he wiped at the sweat on his brow with the back of one arm, before it could drip into his eyes. He watched the house and the road. A police car went by once, but the Mustang was tucked well out of sight, in the shadows of the half-built garage, and the cruiser didn’t slow.

Georgia dozed beside him, her face turned away. A little after two in the morning, she began fighting something in her sleep. Her right hand came up, as if she were raising it to get the attention of a teacher. She had not rebandaged it, and it was white and wrinkled, as if it had been soaking in water for hours. White and wrinkled and terrible. She began to lash at the air, and she moaned, a cringing sound of terror. She tossed her head.

He leaned over her, saying her name, and firmly but gently took one shoulder to jostle her awake. She slapped at him with her bad hand. Then her eyes sprang open, and she stared at him without recognition, gazed up with complete, blind horror, and he knew in those first few moments she was seeing not his face but the dead man’s.

“Marybeth,” he said again. “It’s a dream.
Shh
. You’re all right. You’re all right now.”

The fog cleared from her eyes. Her body, which was clenched up and rigid, sagged, the tension going out of it. She gasped. He brushed back some hair that was stuck to the sweat on her cheek and was appalled at the heat coming off her.

“Thirsty,” she said.

He reached into the back, dug through a plastic bag of groceries they’d picked up at a gas station, found her a bottled water. Georgia unscrewed the top and drank a third of it in four big swallows.

“What if Anna’s sister can’t help us?” Georgia asked. “What if she can’t make him go away? Are we gonna kill her if she can’t make Craddock go away?”

“Why don’t you just rest? We’re going to be waiting awhile.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone, Jude. I don’t want to use my last hours on earth to murder anyone.”

“These aren’t your last hours on earth,” he said. He was careful not to include himself in that statement.

“I don’t want you to kill anyone either. I don’t want you to be that person. Besides, if we kill her, then we’ll have two ghosts hauntin’ us. I don’t think I can take any more ghosts after me.”

“You want some radio?”

“Promise me you won’t kill her, Jude. No matter what.”

He turned on the radio. Low on the FM dial, he found the Foo Fighters. David Grohl sang that he was hanging on, just hanging on. Jude turned the volume low, to the faintest of murmurs.

“Marybeth,” he began.

She shivered.

“You okay?”

“I like when you call me by my real name. Don’t call me Georgia anymore, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I wish you didn’t first see me takin’ my clothes off for drunks. I wish we didn’t meet in a strip club. I wish you could’ve known me before I started with that kind of thing. Before I got like I am. Before I did all the things I wish I could take back.”

“You know how people pay more money to buy furniture that’s been roughed up a little? What do they call it? Things that have been distressed? That’s because something that’s seen a little wear is just more interesting than something brand-new that hasn’t ever had a scuff on it.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Attractively distressed.” She was shivering again, steadily now.

“How you holding up?”

“Okay,” she said, voice trembling along with the rest of her.

They listened to the radio through the faint hiss of static. Jude felt himself settling, his head clearing, felt muscles he hadn’t known were knotted up beginning to loosen and relax. For the moment it didn’t matter what was ahead of them or what they would have to do come morning. It didn’t matter what was behind them either—the days of driving, the ghost of Craddock McDermott with his old truck and his scribbled-over eyes. Jude was somewhere in the South, in the Mustang, with the seat cranked back and Aerosmith on the radio.

Then Marybeth had to ruin it.

“If I die, Jude, and you’re still alive,” she said, “I’m gonna try to stop him. From the other side.”

“What are you talking about? You aren’t going to die.”

“I know. I’m just sayin’. If things don’t break our way, I’ll find Anna, and us girls will try and make him stop.”

“You aren’t going to die. I don’t care what the Ouija board said or what Anna showed you in the mirror either.” He had decided this very thing a few hours back down the road.

Marybeth frowned thoughtfully. “Once she started talking to us, it got cold in my room. I couldn’t stop shakin’. I couldn’t even feel my hand on the pointer. And then you’d ask Anna somethin’, and I’d just know
how she was gonna answer. What she was tryin’ to say. I wasn’t hearin’ voices or anything. I just knew. It all made sense then, but it doesn’t now. I can’t remember what she wanted me to do or what she meant by bein’ a door. Except…I think she was saying that if Craddock can come back, so can she. With a little help. And somehow I can help. It’s just—and I got this loud and clear—I might have to die to do it.”

“You aren’t going to die. Not if I have any say in it.”

She smiled. It was a tired smile. “You don’t have any say in it.”

He didn’t know how to reply, not at first. It had crossed his mind already that there was
one
way he could assure her safety, but he wasn’t about to put it into words. It had occurred to him that if
he
died, Craddock would go away and Marybeth would live. That Craddock only wanted him, maybe only had a claim on this world as long as Jude was alive. After all, Jude had bought him, paid to own him and his dead man’s suit. Craddock had spent most of a week now trying to make Jude kill himself. Jude had been so busy resisting he hadn’t stopped to wonder if the price of surviving would be worse than giving the dead man what he wanted. That he was sure to lose, and that the longer he held out, the more likely he would drag Marybeth with him. Because the dead pull the living down.

Marybeth stared at him, her eyes a wet, lovely ink in the dark. He stroked the hair away from her forehead. She was very young and very beautiful, her brow damp with her fever sweat. The idea that her death should precede his was worse than intolerable, it was obscene.

He slid toward her, reached and took her hands in his. If her forehead was damp and too warm, her hands were damp and too cold. He turned them over in the gloom. What he saw was a nasty sort of shock. Both of her hands were pruned up, white and shriveled, not just the right one—although the right was more terrible, the entire pad of her thumb a glistening, rotted sore and the thumbnail itself gone, dropped off. On the surface of both palms, red lines of infection followed the delicate branches of her veins, down into her forearms, where they spread out, to etch diseased-looking crimson slashes across her wrists.

“What’s happening to you?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know. It was the story of Anna’s death, written on Marybeth’s skin.

“She’s a part of me somehow: Anna. I’m carryin’ her around inside me. I have been for a while, I think.” A statement that should’ve surprised but didn’t. He had sensed it, on some level, that Marybeth and Anna were coming together, merging somehow. He’d heard it in the way Marybeth’s accent had resurfaced, becoming so like Anna’s laconic, country-girl drawl. He had seen it in the way Marybeth played with her hair now, like Anna used to. Marybeth went on, “She wants me to help her back into our world, so she can stop him. I am the doorway—she told me that.”

“Marybeth,” he began, then couldn’t find anything else to say.

She closed her eyes and smiled. “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out. Actually. On second thought. Go ahead and wear it out. I like when you say it. The way you say all of it. Not just the Mary part.”

“Marybeth,” he said, and let go of her hands and kissed her just above the left eyebrow. “Marybeth.” He kissed her left cheekbone. She shivered—pleasantly this time. “Marybeth.” He kissed her mouth.

“That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s who I want to be. Mary. Beth. Like you’re gettin’ two girls for the price of one. Hey—maybe you really are gettin’ two girls now. If Anna’s inside of me.” She opened her eyes and found his gaze. “When you’re lovin’ me, maybe you’re lovin’ her, too. Isn’t that a good deal, Jude? Aren’t I one hell of a bargain? How can you resist?”