Heart-shaped box (9 page)

He stood, swaying, flexed his right hand. The circulation was coming back into it, accompanied by a sensation of icy prickling. It was going to hurt like a bitch.

The light was different, had shifted to the other side of the room, pale and weak as it came through the lace curtains. It was hard to say how long he’d been asleep.

The smell, that stink of something burning, lured him down the darkened front hall, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The door to the backyard patio was open. Georgia was out there, looking miserably cold, in a black denim jacket and a Ramones T-shirt that left the smooth, white curve of her midriff exposed. She had a pair of tongs in her left hand. Her breath steamed in the cold air.

“Whatever you’re cooking, you’re fuckin’ it up,” he said, waving his hand at all the smoke.

“No I’m not,” she said, and flashed him a proud and challenging smile. She was, in that instant, so beautiful it was a little heartbreaking—the white of her throat, the hollow in it, the delicate line of her just-visible collarbones. “I figured out what to do. I figured out how to make the ghost go away.”

“How’s that?” Jude asked.

She picked at something with the tongs and then held it up. It was a burning flap of black fabric.

“The suit,” she said. “I burned it.”

A
n hour later it was dusk.
Jude sat in the study to watch the last of the light drain out of the sky. He had a guitar in his lap. He needed to think. The two things went together.

He was in a chair, turned to face a window that looked over the barn, the dog pen, and the trees beyond. Jude had it open a crack. The air that came in had a crisp bite to it. He didn’t mind. It wasn’t much warmer in the house, and he needed the fresh air, was grateful for the mid-October perfume of rotten apples and fallen leaves. It was a relief from the reek of exhaust. Even after a shower and a change of clothes, he could still smell it on him.

Jude had his back to the door, and when Georgia came into the room, he saw her in reflection. She had a glass of red wine in each hand. The swaddling of bandages around her thumb forced her to grip one of the glasses awkwardly, and she spilled a little on herself when she sank to her knees beside his chair. She kissed the wine off her skin, then set a glass in front of him, on the amp near his feet.

“He isn’t coming back,” she said. “The dead man. I bet you. Burning the suit got rid of him. Stroke of genius. Besides, that fucking thing had
to go.
Whoo-ee
. I wrapped it in two garbage bags before I brought it downstairs, and I still thought I was going to gag from the stink.”

It was in his mind to say,
He wanted you to do it,
but he didn’t. It wouldn’t do her any good to hear it, and it was over and done with now.

Georgia narrowed her eyes at him, studying his expression. His doubts must’ve been there in his face, because she said, “You think he’ll be back?” When Jude didn’t reply, she leaned toward him and spoke again, her voice low, urgent. “Then why don’t we go? Get a room in the city and get the hell out of here?”

He considered this, forming his reply slowly, and only with effort. At last he said, “I don’t think it would do any good, just to up and run. He isn’t haunting the house. He’s haunting me.”

That was part of it—but only part. The rest was too hard to put into words. The idea persisted that everything to happen so far had happened for reasons—the dead man’s reasons. That phrase, “psychological operations,” rose to Jude’s mind with a feeling of chill. He wondered again if the ghost wasn’t trying to make him run, and why that would be. Maybe the house, or something in the house, offered Jude an advantage, although, try as he might, he couldn’t figure what.

“You ever think
you
ought to take off?” Jude asked her.

“You almost died today,” Georgia said. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, but I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight ever again. Besides, your ghost hasn’t done anything to me. I bet he can’t touch me.”

But Jude had watched Craddock whispering in her ear. He had seen the stricken look on Georgia’s face as the dead man held his razor on a chain before her eyes. And he had not forgotten Jessica Price’s voice on the telephone, her lazy, poisonous, redneck drawl:
You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.

Craddock could get to Georgia. She needed to go. Jude saw this clearly now—and yet the thought of sending her away, of waking alone in the night and finding the dead man there, standing over him in the dark, made
him weak with dread. If she left him, Jude felt she might take what remained of his nerve with her. He did not know if he could bear the night and the quiet without her close—an admission of need that was so stark and unexpected it gave him a brief, bad moment of vertigo. He was a man afraid of heights, watching the ground lunge away beneath him, while the Ferris wheel yanked him helplessly into the sky.

“What about Danny?” Jude said. He thought his own voice sounded strained and unlike him, and he cleared his throat. “Danny thought he was dangerous.”

“What did this ghost do to Danny? Danny saw something, got scared, and ran for his life. Wasn’t like anything got done to him.”

“Just because the ghost
didn’t
do anything doesn’t mean he
can’t.
Look at what happened to me this afternoon.”

Georgia nodded at this. She drank the rest of her wine in one swallow, then met his gaze, her eyes bright and searching. “And you swear you didn’t go into that barn to kill yourself? You swear, Jude? Don’t be mad at me for asking. I need to know.”

“Think I’m the type?” he asked.

“Everyone’s the type.”

“Not me.”

“Everyone. I tried to do it. Pills. Bammy found me passed out on the bathroom floor. My lips were blue. I was hardly breathing. Three days after my last day of high school. Afterward my mother and father came to the hospital, and my father said, ‘You couldn’t even do that right.’”

“Cocksucker.”

“Yup. Pretty much.”

“Why’d you want to kill yourself? I hope you had a good reason.”

“Because I’d been having sex with my daddy’s best friend. Since I was thirteen. This forty-year-old guy with a daughter of his own. People found out. His daughter found out. She was my friend. She said I ruined her life. She said I was a whore.” Georgia rolled her glass this way and that in her left hand, watching the glimmer of light move around and
around the rim. “Pretty hard to argue with her. He’d give me things, and I’d always take them. Like, he gave me a brand-new sweater once with fifty dollars in the pocket. He said the money was so I could buy shoes to go with it. I let him fuck me for shoe money.”

“Hell. That wasn’t any good reason to kill yourself,” Jude told her. “It was a good reason to kill him.”

She laughed.

“What was his name?”

“George Ruger. He’s a used-car salesman now, in my old hometown. Head of the county Republican steering committee.”

“Next time I get down Georgia way, I’ll stop in and kill the son of a bitch.”

She laughed again.

“Or at least thoroughly stomp his ass into the Georgia clay,” Jude said, and played the opening bars of “Dirty Deeds.”

She lifted his glass of wine off the amp, raised it in a toast to him, and had a sip.

“Do you know what the best thing about you is?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Nothing grosses you out. I mean, I just told you all that, and you don’t think I’m…I don’t know. Ruined. Hopelessly fucked up.”

“Maybe I do and I just don’t care.”

“You care,” she said. She put a hand on his ankle. “And nothing shocks you.”

He let that pass, did not say he could’ve guessed the suicide attempt, the emotionally cold father, the family friend who molested her, almost from the first moment Jude saw her, wearing a dog collar, her hair hacked into uneven spikes and her mouth painted in white lipstick.

She said, “So what happened to you? Your turn.”

He twitched his ankle out of her grasp.

“I’m not into feel-bad competitions.”

He glanced at the window. Nothing remained of the light except for a
faint, reddish bronze flush behind the leafless trees. Jude considered his own semitransparent reflection in the glass, his face long, seamed, gaunt, with a flowing black beard that came almost to his chest. A haggard, grim-visaged ghost.

Georgia said, “Tell me about this woman who sent you the ghost.”

“Jessica Price. She didn’t just send him to me either. Remember, she tricked me into paying for him.”

“Right. On eBay or something?”

“No. A different site, a third-rate clone. And it only looked like a regular Internet auction. She was orchestrating things from behind the scenes to make sure I’d win.” Jude saw the question forming in Georgia’s eyes and answered it before she could speak. “Why she went to all that trouble I can’t tell you. I get the feeling, though, that she couldn’t just mail him to me. I had to agree to take possession of him. I’m sure there’s some profound moral message in that.”

“Yeah,” Georgia said. “Stick with eBay. Accept no substitutes.” She tasted some wine, licked her lips, then went on. “And this is all because her sister killed herself? Why does she think that’s your fault? Is it because of something you wrote in one of your songs? Is this like when that kid killed himself after listening to Ozzy Osbourne? Have you written anything that says suicide is okay or something?”

“No. Neither did Ozzy.”

“Then I don’t see why she’s so pissed off at you. Did you know each other in some way? Did you know the girl who killed herself? Did she write you crazy fan letters or something?”

He said, “She lived with me for a while. Like you.”

“Like me? Oh.”

“Got news for you, Georgia. I wasn’t a virgin when I met you.” His voice sounded wooden and strange to him.

“How long did she live here?”

“I don’t know. Eight, nine months. Long enough to overstay her welcome.”

She thought about that. “I’ve been living with you for about nine months.”

“So?”

“So have I overstayed mine? Is nine months the limit? Then it’s time for some fresh pussy? What, was she a natural blonde, and you decided it was time for a brunette?”

He took his hands off his guitar. “She was a natural psycho, so I threw her ass out. I guess she didn’t take it well.”

“What do you mean, she was a psycho?”

“I mean manic-depressive. When she was manic, she was a hell of a lay. When she was depressive, it was a little too much work.”

“She had mental problems, and you just chucked her out?”

“I didn’t sign on to hold her hand the rest of her life. I didn’t sign on to hold yours either. I’ll tell you something else, Georgia. If you think our story ends ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ then you’ve got the wrong fuckin’ fairy tale.” As he spoke, he became aware that he’d found his chance to hurt her and get rid of her. He had, he understood now, been steering the conversation toward this very moment. The idea recurred that if he could sting her badly enough to make her leave—even if it was just for a while, a night, a few hours—it might be the last good thing he ever did for her.

“What was her name? The girl who killed herself?”

He started to say “Anna,” then said “Florida” instead.

Georgia stood quickly, so quickly she tottered, looked as if she might fall over. He could’ve reached out to steady her but didn’t. Better to let her hurt. Her face whitened, and she took an unsteady half step back. She stared at him, bewildered and wounded—and then her eyes sharpened, as if she were suddenly bringing his face into focus.

“No,” she breathed softly. “You’re not going to drive me away like that. You say any shitty thing you want. I’m sticking, Jude.”

She carefully set the glass she was holding on the edge of his desk.
She started away from him, then paused at the door. She turned her head but didn’t quite seem able to look into his face.

“I’m going to get some sleep. You come on to bed, too.” Telling him, not asking.

Jude opened his mouth to reply and found he had nothing to say. When she left the room, he gently leaned his guitar against the wall and stood up. His pulse was jacked, and his legs were unsteady, the physical manifestations of an emotion it took him some time to place—he was that unused to the sensation of relief.

G
eorgia was gone.
That was the first thing he knew. She was gone, and it was still night. He exhaled, and his breath made a cloud of white smoke in the room. He shoved off the one thin sheet and got out of bed, then hugged himself through a brief shivering fit.

The idea that she was up and wandering the house alarmed him. His head was still muddy with sleep, and it had to be close to freezing in the room. It would’ve been reasonable to think Georgia had gone to figure out what was wrong with the heat, but Jude knew that wasn’t it. She’d been sleeping badly as well, tossing and muttering. She might have come awake and gone to watch TV—but he didn’t believe that either.

He almost shouted her name, then thought better of it. He quailed at the idea that she might not reply, that his voice might be met with a ringing silence. No. No yelling. No rushing around. He felt if he went slamming out of the bedroom and rushing through the unlit house, calling for her, it would tip him irrevocably toward panic. Also, the darkness and quiet of the bedroom appalled him, and he understood that he was afraid to go looking for her, afraid of what might be waiting beyond the door.

As he stood there, he became aware of a guttural rumble, the sound of an idling engine. He rolled his eyes back, looked at the ceiling. It was
lit an icy white, someone’s headlights, pointing in from the driveway below. He could hear the dogs barking.

Jude crossed to the window and shifted aside the curtain.

The pickup parked out front had been blue once, but it was at least twenty years old and had not seen another coat in all that time, had faded to the color of smoke. It was a Chevy, a working truck. Jude had whiled away two years of his life twisting a wrench in an auto garage for $1.75 an hour, and he knew from the deep, ferocious mutter of the idling engine that it had a big block under the hood. The front end was all aggression and menace, with a wide silver bumper like a boxer’s mouthpiece and an iron brush guard bolted over the grill. What he had taken at first for headlights were a pair of floods attached to the brush guard, two round spots pouring their glare into the night. The pickup sat almost a full foot off the ground on four 35s, a truck built for running on washed-out swamp roads, banging through the ruts and choking brush of the Deep South, the bottoms. The engine was running. No one was in it.

The dogs flung themselves against the chain-link wall of the pen, a steady crash and clang, yapping at the empty pickup. Jude peered down the driveway, in the direction of the road. The gates were closed. You had to know a six-digit security code to get them open.

It was the dead man’s truck. Jude knew the moment he saw it, knew with a calm, utter certainty. His next thought was,
Where we going, old man?

The phone by the bed chirped, and Jude half jumped in surprise, letting go of the curtain. He turned and stared. The clock beside the phone read 3:12. The phone rang again.

Jude moved toward it, tiptoeing quickly across cold floorboards. Stared down at it. It rang a third time. He didn’t want to answer. He had an idea it would be the dead man, and Jude didn’t want to talk to him. Jude didn’t want to hear Craddock’s voice.

“Fuck it,” he said, and he answered. “Who is it?”

“Hey, Chief. It’s Dan.”

“Danny? It’s three in the morning.”

“Oh. I didn’t know it was so late. Were you asleep?”

“No.” Jude fell silent, waited.

“I’m sorry I left like I did.”

“Are you drunk?” Jude asked. He looked at the window again, the blue-tinted glare of the floodlights shining around the edges of the curtains. “Are you calling drunk because you want your job back? Because if you are, this is the wrong fuckin’ time—”

“No. I can’t…I can’t come back, Jude. I was just calling to say I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I said anything about the ghost for sale. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“Go to bed.”

“I can’t.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m out walking in the dark. I don’t even know where I am.”

Jude felt the back of his arms prickling with goose bumps. The thought of Danny out on the streets somewhere, shuffling around in the dark, disturbed him more than it should’ve, more than made sense.

“How’d you get there?”

“I just went walking. I don’t even know why.”

“Jesus, you’re drunk. Take a look around for a street sign and call a fuckin’ cab,” Jude said, and hung up.

He was glad to let go of the phone. He hadn’t liked Danny’s tone of spaced-out, unhappy confusion.

It wasn’t that Danny had said anything so incredible or unlikely. It was just that they’d never had a conversation like it before. Danny had never called in the night, and he’d never called drunk. It was difficult to imagine him going for a walk at 3:00
A.M.
, or walking so far from his home as to get lost. And whatever his other flaws, Danny was a problem solver. That was why Jude had kept him on the payroll for eight years. Even shitfaced, Danny probably wouldn’t call Jude first if he didn’t know where he was. He’d walk to a 7-Eleven and get directions. He’d flag down a cop car.

No. It was all wrong. The phone call and the dead man’s truck in the driveway were two parts of the same thing. Jude knew. His nerves told him so. The empty bed told him so.

He glanced again at the curtain, lit from behind by those floods. The dogs were going crazy out there.

Georgia. What mattered now was finding Georgia. Then they could figure out about that truck. Together they could get a handle on the situation.

Jude looked at the door to the hallway. He flexed his fingers, his hands numb from the cold. He didn’t want to go out there, didn’t want to open the door and see Craddock sitting in that chair with his hat on his knee and that razor on a chain dangling from one hand.

But the thought of seeing the dead man again—of facing whatever was next—held him for only a moment more. Then he came unstuck, went to the door, and opened it.

“Let’s do it,” he said to the hallway before he had even seen if anyone was there.

No one was.

Jude paused, listening past his own just slightly haggard breathing to the quiet of the house. The long hall was draped in shadows, the Shaker chair against the wall empty. No. Not empty. A black fedora rested in the seat.

Noises—muffled and distant—caught his attention: the murmur of voices on a television, the distant crash of surf. He pulled his gaze away from the fedora and looked to the end of the hallway. Blue light flickered and raced at the edges of the door to the studio. Georgia was in there, then, watching TV after all.

Jude hesitated at the door, listening. He heard a voice shouting in Spanish, a TV voice. The sound of surf was louder. Jude meant to call her name then, Marybeth—not Georgia, Marybeth—but something bad happened when he tried: His breath gave out on him. He was able to produce only a wheeze in the faint sound of her name.

He opened the door.

Georgia was across the room in the recliner, in front of his flat-screen TV. From where he stood, he couldn’t see anything of her but the back of her head, the fluffy swirl of her black hair surrounded by a nimbus of unnatural blue light. Her head also largely blocked the view of whatever was on the TV, although he could see palm trees and tropical blue sky. It was dark, the lights in the room switched off.

She didn’t respond when he said, “Georgia,” and his next thought was that she was dead. When he got to her, her eyes would be rolled up in their sockets.

He started toward her, but had only gone a couple of steps when the phone rang on the desk.

Jude could view enough of the TV now to see a chubby Mex in sunglasses and a beige jogging suit, standing at the side of a dirt track in jungly hill country somewhere. Jude knew what she was watching then, although he hadn’t looked at it in several years. It was the snuff film.

At the sound of the phone, Georgia’s head seemed to move just slightly, and he thought he heard her exhale, a strained, effortful breath. Not dead, then. But she didn’t otherwise react, didn’t look around, didn’t get up to answer.

He took a step to the desk, caught the phone on the second ring.

“That you, Danny? Are you still lost?” Jude asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said with a weak laugh. “Still lost. I’m on this pay phone in the middle of nowhere. It’s funny, you almost never see pay phones anymore.”

Georgia did not glance around at the sound of Jude’s voice, did not shift her gaze from the TV.

“I hope you aren’t calling because you want me to come looking for you,” Jude said. “I’ve got my hands full at the moment. If I have to come looking for you, you better hope you stay lost.”

“I figured it out, Chief. How I got here. Out on this road in the dark.”

“How’s that?”

“I killed myself. I hung myself a few hours ago. This road in the dark…this is dead.”

Jude’s scalp crawled, a trickling, icy sensation, almost painful.

Danny said, “My mother hung herself just the same way. She did a better job, though. She broke her neck. Died instantly. I lost my nerve at the last second. I didn’t fall hard enough. I strangled to death.”

From the television across the room came gagging sounds, as if someone were strangling to death.

“It took a long time, Jude,” Danny went on. “I remember swinging for a long time. Looking at my feet. I’m remembering lots of things now.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“He made me. The dead man. He came to see me. I was going to come back to the office and find those letters for you. I was thinking I could at least do that much. I was thinking I shouldn’t have bailed out on you like I did. But when I went in my bedroom to get my coat, he was waiting there. I didn’t even know how to knot a noose until he showed me,” Danny said. “That’s how he’s going to get you. He’s going to make you kill yourself.”

“No he’s not.”

“It’s hard not to listen to his voice. I couldn’t fight it. He knew too much. He knew I gave my sister the heroin she OD’d on. He said that was why my mother killed herself, because she couldn’t live knowing what I had done. He said I should’ve been the one to hang, not my mom. He said if I had any decency, I would’ve killed myself a long time ago. He was right.”

“No, Danny,” Jude said. “No. He wasn’t right. You shouldn’t—”

Danny sounded short of breath. “I did. I
had
to. There was no arguing with him. You can’t argue with a voice like that.”

“We’ll see,” Jude said.

Danny had no reply for that. In the snuff film, two men were bickering in Spanish. The choking sounds went on and on. Georgia still did not look away. She was moving just slightly, shoulders hitching now and then in a series of random, almost spastic shrugs.

“I have to go, Danny.” Still Danny said nothing. Jude listened to the faint crackle on the line for a moment, sensing that Danny was waiting for something, some final word, and at last he added, “You keep walking, boy. That road must go somewhere.”

Danny laughed. “You aren’t as bad as you think, Jude. You know that?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell.”

“Your secret is safe,” Danny said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Danny.”

Jude leaned forward, gently set the phone back in its cradle. As he was bent across the desk, he glanced down and behind it and saw that the floor safe was open. His initial thought was the ghost had opened it, an idea he discarded almost immediately. Georgia, more likely. She knew the combination.

He pivoted, looked at the back of her head, at the halo of flickering blue light, at the television beyond.

“Georgia? What are you doin’, darlin’?”

She didn’t reply.

He came forward, moving silently across the thick carpet. The picture on the flat-screen came into view first. The killers were finishing off the skinny white kid. Later they would get his girlfriend in a cinder-block hut close to a beach. Now, though, they were on an overgrown track somewhere in the bush, in the hills above the Gulf of California. The kid was on his stomach, his wrists bound together by a pair of white plastic flexi-cuffs. His skin was fish-belly pale in the tropical sunlight. A diminutive, walleyed Anglo, with a clownish Afro of crinkly red hair, stood with one cowboy boot on the kid’s neck. Parked down the road was a black van, the back doors thrown open. Next to the rear fender was the chubby Mex in the warm-up suit, an affronted expression hung on his face.

“Nos estamos yendo,” said the man in the sunglasses. “Ahora.”

The walleyed redhead made a face and shook his head, as if in disagreement, but then pointed the little revolver at the skinny kid’s head
and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flashed. The kid’s head snapped forward, hit the ground, bounced back. The air around his head was suddenly clouded with a fine spray of blood.

The Anglo took his boot off the boy’s neck and stepped daintily away, careful to get no blood on his cowboy boots.

Georgia’s face was a pale, rigid blank, her eyes wide and unblinking, gaze fixed on the television. She wore the Ramones T-shirt she’d had on earlier, but no underwear, and her legs were open. In one hand—the bad hand—she had clumsy hold of Jude’s pistol, and the barrel was pushed deep into her mouth. Her other hand was between her legs, thumb moving up and down.

“Georgia,” he said, and for an instant she shot a sidelong glance at him—a helpless, pleading glance—then immediately looked back to the TV. Her bad hand rotated the gun, turning it upside down, to point the barrel against the roof of her mouth. She made a weak choking sound on it.

The remote control was on the armrest. Jude hit the power button. The television blinked off. Her shoulders leaped, a nervous, reflexive shrug. The left hand kept working between her legs. She shivered, made a strained, unhappy sound in her throat.

“Stop it,” Jude said.

She pulled the hammer back with her thumb. It made a loud snap in the silence of the studio.

Jude reached past her and gently pried the gun out of her grip. Her whole body went abruptly, perfectly still. Her breath whistled, short and fast. Her mouth was wet, glistening faintly, and it came to him then that he was semihard. His cock had begun to stiffen at the smell of her in the air and the sight of her fingers teasing her clit, and she was at just the right height. If he moved in front of the chair, she could suck his dick while he held the gun to her head, he could stick the barrel in her ear while he shoved his cock—