Heart-shaped box (23 page)

“Best deal I’ve ever had,” he said.

“Don’t you forget it,” she said, kissing him back.

He opened the door and told the dogs to get, and for a while Jude and Marybeth were alone in the Mustang, while the shepherds lay about on the cement floor of the garage.

H
e started awake,
heart beating too fast, to the sound of the dogs barking, and his first thought was,
It’s the ghost. The ghost is coming.

The dogs were back in the car, had slept in the rear. Angus and Bon stood on the backseat together, the both of them peering out the windows at an ugly yellow Labrador. The Lab stood with her back rigid and her tail up, yapping repetitively at the Mustang. Angus and Bon watched her with avid, anticipatory expressions and barked occasionally themselves, booming, harsh woofs that hurt Jude’s ears in the close confines of the Mustang. Marybeth twisted in the passenger seat, grimacing, not asleep anymore, but wishing she were.

Jude told them all to shut the fuck up. They didn’t listen.

He looked out the windshield and straight into the sun, a copper hole punched through the sky, a bright and merciless spotlight pointed into his face. He made a complaining sound at the glare, but before he could lift a hand to shade his eyes, a man stepped in front of the car, and his head blocked the sun.

Jude squinted at a young man wearing a leather tool belt. He was a literal redneck, skin cooked to a fine, deep shade of carmine. He frowned at
Jude. Jude waved and nodded to him and started the Mustang. When the clock on the radio face lit up, he saw it was seven in the morning.

The carpenter stepped aside, and Jude rolled out of the garage and around the carpenter’s parked pickup. The yellow Lab chased them down the driveway, still yapping, then stopped at the edge of the yard. Bon woofed back at her one last time as they pulled away. Jude eased past the Price house. No one had put the garbage out yet.

He decided there was still time and drove out of Jessica Price’s little corner of suburbia. He walked first Angus, then Bon, in the town square, and got tea and doughnuts at a Honey Dew Drive-Thru. Marybeth rebandaged her right hand with some gauze from the dwindling supplies in the first-aid kit. She left her other hand, which at least had no visible sores, as it was. He gassed up the car at a Mobil, and then they parked at one edge of the concrete apron and snacked. He tossed plain crullers to the dogs.

Jude steered them back to Jessica Price’s. He parked on the corner, half a block from her house, on the opposite side of the street and a long walk down the road from the construction site. He didn’t want to take a chance on being seen by the laborer who’d been hovering over the car when they woke up.

It was after seven-thirty, and he hoped Jessica would bring the garbage out soon. The longer they sat, the more likely they were to draw attention, the two of them in their black Mustang, dressed in their black leather and black jeans, with their visible wounds and their tattoos. They looked like what they were: two dangerous lowlifes staking out a place where they planned to commit a crime. A
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
sign on a nearby lamppost stared them in the face.

By then his blood was flowing and his head was clear. He was ready, but there was nothing to do except wait. He wondered if the carpenter had recognized him, what he would say to the other men when they arrived on-site.
I still can’t believe it. This guy who looks just like Judas Coyne, sleepin’ it off in the garage. Him and some amazingly hot chick. He looked so much like the real guy, I almost asked him if he was takin’ requests.
And then Jude thought that the carpenter was also one more person who could positively identify them, after they were done doing whatever it was they were about to do. It was hard to live the outlaw life when you were famous.

He wondered idly who among rock stars had spent the most time in jail. Rick James, maybe. He did—what?—three years? Two? Ike Turner had done a couple years at least. Leadbelly had been in for murder, broke rocks for ten years, then was pardoned after putting on a good show for the governor and his family. Well. Jude thought if he played his cards right, he could do more time than all three of them put together.

Prison didn’t frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.

The garage door at the end of Jessica McDermott Price’s concrete driveway rumbled open. A weedy girl, about eleven or twelve years old, her golden hair clipped into a short, flouncy bob, hauled a garbage can down to the side of the road. The sight of her gave him a tingle of surprise, the resemblance to Anna was so close. With her strong, pointy chin, towhead, and wide-spaced blue eyes, it was as if Anna had stepped out of her childhood in the eighties and straight into the bright, full morning of today.

She left the trash can, crossed the yard to the front door, and let herself in. Her mother met her just inside. The girl left the door open, allowing Jude and Marybeth to watch mother and daughter together.

Jessica McDermott Price was taller than Anna had been, her hair a shade darker, and her mouth bracketed by frown lines. She wore a peasant blouse, with loose, frilly cuffs, and a crinkly flower-print skirt, an outfit that Jude surmised was meant to make her look like a free spirit, an earthy and empathic Gypsy. But her face had been too carefully and professionally made up, and what he could see of the house was all dark, oiled, expensive-looking furniture and seasoned wood paneling. It was the home and the face of an investment banker, not a seer.

Jessica handed her little girl a backpack—a shiny purple-and-pink thing that matched her windbreaker and sneakers as well as the bike
outdoors—and air-kissed her daughter’s forehead. The girl tripped out, slammed the door, and hurried over the yard, pulling the pack onto her shoulders. She was across the street from Jude and Marybeth, and on her way by she shot them a look, measuring them up. She wrinkled her nose, as if they were some litter she’d spotted in someone’s yard, and then she was around the corner and gone.

The moment she was out of sight, Jude’s sides began to prickle, under his arms, and he became aware of the tacky sweat gluing his shirt to his back.

“Here we go,” he said.

He knew it would be dangerous to hesitate, to give himself time to think. He climbed out of the car. Angus bounded after him. Marybeth got out on the other side.

“Wait here,” Jude said.

“Hell, no.”

Jude walked around to the trunk.

“How we goin’ in?” Marybeth asked. “Were we just gonna knock on the front door? Hi, we’ve come to kill you?”

He opened the trunk and pulled out the tire iron. He pointed it at the garage, which had been left open. Then he slammed the trunk and started across the street. Angus dashed ahead, came back, raced ahead again, lifted a leg, and pissed on someone’s mailbox.

It was still early, the sun hot on the back of Jude’s neck. He held one end of the tire iron in his fist, the socket-wrench end, and clasped the rest of it against the inner part of his forearm, trying to hide it alongside his body. Behind him a car door slammed. Bon lunged past him. Then Marybeth was at his side, short of breath and trotting to keep up.

“Jude. Jude. What if we just…just try and talk to her? Maybe we can…persuade her to help us willingly. Tell her you never…never wanted to hurt Anna. Never wanted her to kill herself.”

“Anna didn’t kill herself, and her sister knows it. That’s not what this is about. Never has been.” Jude glanced at Marybeth and saw she had
fallen a few steps behind him, was regarding him with a look of unhappy shock. “There’s always been more to this than we figured at first. I’m not so sure we’re the bad guys in this story.”

He walked up the driveway, the dogs loping along, one on either side of him, like an honor guard. He took a passing glance at the front of the house, at windows with white lace curtains in them and shadows behind. If she was watching them, he couldn’t tell. Then they were in the gloom of the garage, where a cherry two-door convertible with a vanity plate that read
HYPNOIT
was parked on the clean-swept concrete floor.

He found the inside door, put his hand on the knob, tilted his head toward the house, and listened. The radio was on. The most boring voice in the world said blue chips were down, tech stocks were down, futures all across the spectrum were looking down. Then he heard heels clicking across tile, just on the other side of the door, and he instinctively leaped back, but it was too late, the door was opening and Jessica McDermott Price was coming through.

She almost walked right into him. She wasn’t looking. She had her car keys in one hand and a garishly colored purse of some kind in the other. As she glanced up, Jude grabbed the front of her blouse, gathering a bunch of silky fabric in his fist, and shoved her back through the door.

Jessica reeled backward, tottering in her heels, then twisted an ankle, her foot coming out of one shoe. She let go of her small, unlikely purse. It fell at their feet, and Jude kicked it aside, kept going.

He drove her across the mudroom and into a sun-splashed kitchen in the rear of the house, and that was when her legs gave out. The blouse tore as she went down, buttons popping off and ricocheting around the room. One of them nailed Jude in the left eye—a black spoke of pain. The eye watered over, and he blinked furiously to clear it.

She slammed hard against the island in the center of the kitchen and grabbed the edge to stop her fall. Plates rattled. The counter was at her back—she was still turned to face Jude—and she reached behind her
without looking and grabbed one of the plates and broke it over Jude’s head as he came at her.

He didn’t feel it. It was a dirty plate, and toast crusts and curds of scrambled egg went flying. Jude shot out his right arm, let the tire iron slip down, grabbed the upper end, and, holding it like a club, swatted her across her left kneecap, just below the hem of her skirt.

She dropped, as if both legs had been jerked out from under her. Started to shove herself up, and then Angus flattened her again, climbed on top of her, paws scrabbling against her chest.

“Get off her,” Marybeth said, and grabbed Angus by the collar, wrenched him back so hard he flipped over, rolling in one of those faintly ridiculous doggy somersaults, his legs kicking in the air for an instant before getting up on his paws again.

Angus heaved himself at Jessica once more, but Marybeth held him back. Bon ambled into the room, shot a guilty-nervous look at Jessica Price, then stepped over pieces of shattered plate and began snarfing up a toast crust.

The droning voice on the radio, a small pink boom box on the counter, said, “Book clubs for kids are a hit with parents, who look to the written word as a place to shelter their children from the gratuitous sexual content and explicit violence that saturate video games, television programs, and movies.”

Jessica’s blouse was torn open to the waist. She wore a lacy peach-colored bra that left the tops of her breasts exposed, and they shuddered and fell with her breath. She bared her teeth—was she grinning?—and they were stained with blood.

She said, “If you came to kill me, you ought to know I’m not afraid of dying. My stepfather will be on the other side to receive me with open arms.”

“I bet you’re looking forward to that,” Jude said. “I get the picture you and him were pretty close. Least until Anna was old enough and he started fucking her instead of you.”

O
ne of Jessica McDermott Price’s eyelids
twitched irregularly, a drop of sweat in her lashes, ready to fall. Her lips, which were painted the deep, almost black red of bing cherries, were still stretched wide to show her teeth, but it wasn’t a grin anymore. It was a grimace of rage and confusion.

“You aren’t fit to speak of him. He scraped uglier messes than you off the heel of his boot.”

“You got that about half right,” Jude said. He was also breathing fast, but a little surprised by the evenness of his own voice. “You both stepped in a pile when you screwed with me. Tell me something, did you help him kill her, to keep her from talking about what he did? Did you watch while your own sister bled to death?”

“The girl who came back to this house wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t anything like her. My sister was already dead by the time you got through with her. You ruined her. The girl who came back to us was poison inside. The things she said. The threats she made. Send our stepdaddy to prison. Send me to prison. And Craddock didn’t harm a hair on her goddam disloyal head. Craddock loved her. He was the best, the best man.”

“Your stepdaddy liked to fuck little girls. First you, then Anna. It was right in front of me the whole time.”

He was bending over her now. He felt a little dizzy. Sunlight slashed through the windows above the sink, and the air was warm and close, smelled overpoweringly of her perfume, a jasmine-flavored scent. Just beyond the kitchen, a sliding glass door was partly open and looking out onto an enclosed back porch, floored in seasoned redwood and dominated by a table covered in a lace cloth. A gray longhaired cat was out there, watching fearfully from up on the table, fur bristling. The radio voice was droning now about downloadable content. It was like bees humming in a hive. A voice like that could hum you right to sleep.

Jude looked around at the radio, wanting to give it a whack with the tire iron, shut it off. Then he saw the photograph next to it and forgot about taking out the radio. It was an eight-by-ten picture in a silver frame, and Craddock grinned out from it. He wore his black suit, the silver-dollar-size buttons gleaming down the front, and one hand was on his fedora, as if he were about to lift it in greeting. His other hand was on the shoulder of the little girl, Jessica’s daughter, who so resembled Anna, with her broad forehead and wide-set blue eyes. Her sunburned face, in the picture, was an unsmiling, unreadable blank, the face of someone waiting to get off a slow elevator, a look that was entirely empty of feeling. That expression caused the girl to resemble Anna more than anything, Anna at the height of one of her depressions. Jude found the similarity disturbing.

Jessica was squirming back over the floor, using his distraction to try to get some distance between them. He grabbed her blouse again as she pulled away, and another button flew. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulders now, open to the waist. With the back of one arm, Jude wiped at the sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t done talking yet.

“Anna never came right out and said she’d been molested as a kid, but she worked so hard to avoid being asked it was kind of obvious. Then, in her last letter to me, she wrote that she was tired of keeping secrets, couldn’t stand it anymore. On the face of it, sounds like a suicidal
statement. It took me a while to figure out what she really meant by it, that she wanted to get the truth off her chest. About how her stepfather used to put her into trances so he could do what he liked with her. He was good—he could make her forget for a while, but he couldn’t completely wipe out the memories of what he’d done. It kept resurfacing, whenever she’d have one of her emotional crack-ups. Eventually, in her teens, I guess, she tipped to it, understood what he’d been up to. Anna spent a lot of years running from it. Running from him. Only I put her on a train and sent her back, and she wound up facing him again. And saw how old he was and how close to dying. And maybe decided she didn’t need to run from anything anymore.

“So she threatened to tell what Craddock did to her. Is that right? She said she’d tell everyone, get the law after him. That’s why he killed her. He put her in one more trance and cut her wrists in the bath. He fucked with her head and put her in the bath and slashed her open and watched her bleed out, sat there and watched—”

“You shut up about him,” Jessica said, her voice spiking, high-pitched and harsh. “That last night was awful. The things she said and did to him were awful. She spat on him. She tried to kill him, tried to shove him down the stairs, a weak old man. She threatened us, all of us. She said she was going to take Reese away from us. She said she’d use you and your money and your lawyers and send him to jail.”

“He was only doing what he had to, huh?” Jude said. “It was practically self-defense.”

An expression flickered across Jessica’s features, there and gone so quickly Jude half thought he’d imagined it. But for an instant the corners of her mouth seemed to twitch, in a dirty, knowing, appalling sort of smile. She sat up a little straighter. When she spoke again, her tone both lectured and crooned. “My sister was sick. She was confused. She’d been suicidal for a long time. Anna cut her wrists in the bath like everyone always knew she was going to, and there isn’t anyone who can say different.”

“Anna says different,” Jude said, and when he saw the confusion on Jessica’s face, he added, “I been hearing from all kinds of dead folks lately. You know, it never did make sense. If you wanted to send a ghost to haunt me, why not her? If her death was my fault, why send Craddock? But your stepfather isn’t after me because of what
I
did. It’s because of what
he
did.”

“Who do you think you are, anyway, calling
him
a child molester? How many years you got on that whore behind you? Thirty? Forty?”

“Take care,” Jude said, hand tightening on the tire iron.

“My stepfather deserved anything he asked of us,” Jessica went on, couldn’t shut up now. “I always understood that. My daughter understood it, too. But Anna made everything dirty and horrible and treated him like a rapist, when he didn’t do anything to Reese she didn’t like. She would’ve spoiled Craddock’s last days on this earth, just to win favor with you, to make you care about her again. And now you see where it gets you, turning people against their families. Sticking your nose in.”

“Oh, my God,” Marybeth said. “If she’s sayin’ what I think she’s sayin’, this is about the most wrong fuckin’ conversation I ever heard.”

Jude put his knee between Jessica’s legs and forced her back against the floor with his bad left hand. “That’s enough. I hear any more about what your stepdaddy deserved and how much he loved all of you, I’m going to puke. How do I get rid of him? Tell me how to make him go away, and we’ll walk out of here, and that’ll be the end of it.” Saying it without knowing if it was really true.

“What happened to the suit?” Jessica asked.

“What the fuck does it matter?”

“It’s gone, isn’t it? You bought the dead man’s suit, and now it’s gone, and there’s no getting rid of him. All sales are final. No returns, especially not after the merchandise has been damaged. It’s over. You’re dead. You and that whore with you. He won’t stop until you’re both in the ground.”

Jude leaned forward, set the tire iron across her neck, and applied
some weight. She began to choke. Jude said, “No. I do not accept that. There better be another fucking way, or—Get the fuck off me.” Her hands were tugging at his belt buckle. He recoiled from her touch, drawing the tire iron off her throat, and she began to laugh.

“Come on. You already got my shirt pulled off. Haven’t you ever wanted to say you fucked sisters?” she asked. “I bet your girlfriend would like to watch.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Listen to you. Big tough man. Big rock star. You’re afraid of me, you’re afraid of my father, you’re afraid of yourself. Good. You ought to be. You’re going to die. By your own hand. I can see the death marks on your eyes.” She flicked her glance at Marybeth. “They’re on you, too, honey. Your boyfriend is going to kill you before he kills himself, you know. I wish I could be there to see it happen. I’d like to see how he does it. I hope he cuts you, I hope he cuts your little hooker face—”

Then the tire iron was back across Jessica’s throat and he was squeezing as hard as he could. Jessica’s eyes popped open wide, and her tongue poked out of her mouth. She tried to sit up on her elbows. He slammed her back down, banging her skull on the floor.

“Jude,” Marybeth said. “Don’t, Jude.”

He relaxed the pressure on the tire iron, allowed her to take a breath—and Jessica screamed. It was the first time she’d screamed. He pushed down again, cutting off the sound.

“The garage,” Jude said.

“Jude.”

“Close the door to the garage. The whole fucking street is going to hear.”

Jessica raked at his face. His reach was longer than hers, and he leaned back from her hands, which were bent into claws. He rapped her skull against the floor a second time.

“You scream again, I’ll beat you to death right here. I’m going to ease this thing off your throat, and you better start talking, and you better be
telling me how to make him go away. What about if you communicate with him directly? With a Ouija board or something? Can you call him off yourself?”

He relaxed the pressure again, and she screamed a second time—a long, piercing note, that dissolved into a cackle of laughter. He drove a fist into her solar plexus and knocked the air out of her, shut her up.

“Jude,” Marybeth said again, from behind him. She had gone to shut the garage door but was back now.

“Later.”

“Jude.”

“What?” he said, twisting at the waist to glare at her.

In one hand Marybeth held Jessica Price’s shiny, squarish, brightly colored purse, holding it up for him to look at. Only it wasn’t a purse at all. It was a lunch box, with a glossy photo of Hilary Duff on the side.

He was still staring at Marybeth and the lunch box in confusion—didn’t understand why she wanted him to see it, why it mattered—when Bon began to bark, a full, booming bark that came from the deepest part of her chest. As Jude turned his head to see what she was barking at, he heard another noise, a sharp, steely click, the unmistakable sound of someone snapping back the hammer of a pistol.

The girl, Jessica Price’s daughter, had entered through the sliding glass door of the porch. Where the revolver had come from, Jude didn’t know. It was an enormous Colt .45, with ivory inlays and a long barrel, so heavy she could barely hold it up. She peered intently out from beneath her bangs. A dew of sweat brightened her upper lip. When she spoke, it was in Anna’s voice, although the really shocking thing was how calm she sounded.

“Get away from my mother,” she said.