Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (17 page)

“
It’s not easy. The oldest is in community college, but she does a lot for her sisters. I don’t want to get her all worn out before she’s even twenty, though.” Jim looked as if he were going to say something more, but instead he patted Claire on the shoulder. “I’d better let you get going before it gets too hot out here. I can tell it’s going to get pretty warm today. Driving an unairconditioned truck has at least taught me that much.”

Claire thought she heard a note of sadness in his voice. A half-forgotten conversation floated through her head. Hadn’t he once told her he wanted to be an astronaut? And now here he was, over twenty years later, piloting a beer truck instead of a rocket ship. Nineteen seventy nine had probably been about the last year that an unplanned pregnancy had led to a shotgun marriage. Nowadays no one cared. Nearly half the births were to single women, many teenagers, and it was only the girls - and their children - who were made to suffer for bad choices.

“
It was good talking to you, Jim,” she said, meaning it. “Maybe I’ll see you around the amusement park later, okay?”

“
Yeah. Catch you then. And be careful out here, okay? Don’t go where you will be alone.”

Claire wasn’t worried. It was broad daylight, she wasn’t drunk, and she couldn’t think of one enemy - or frustrated would-be lover - she had in the world. “I’ll keep safe.” Jim surprised her by ducking in and depositing a quick kiss on her cheek. She inhaled in surprise, but he had already pushed open the swinging door and disappeared into the lobby.

ICUNIYQ

Chapter Nineteen

Pressing the button on her Walkman, Claire began to run, accompanied by John Mellencamp singing about lost loves, lost lives and lost chances. She had been a fan back in the days when the record company had tried dubbing him John Cougar. After only a hundred yards, she knew it was too hot. It was already over seventy degrees, and she didn’t like to run when it was much warmer than that. Still, she kept on.

As she put one foot in front of the other, Claire thought about what the Walkers and Jim had told her. Could Kevin Sanchez have killed his wife? His anguish had been genuine, she was sure of that. If he was acting, he must be such a sociopath that even he didn’t know the truth. But could it be that the genuine anger and grief he had felt at Cindy’s death had really been directed at himself?

Over and over, Claire’s thoughts kept returning to Cindy, not as she had been in life, but the parts of her death had left behind. The loose spill of her breasts. The awkward angle of her tanned legs. The blood layered over her lipstick. Claire saw again the bruises that had encircled Cindy’s neck, crosshatched by the raw furrows where she had clawed at her own throat while she slowly starved for air.

Why had someone killed Cindy? She had been casually cruel to so many - but would that cruelty have still hurt enough, twenty years later, to cause someone to put their hands around Cindy’s throat and not stop squeezing no matter how much she struggled? And what did it mean that both Claire and Cindy - as well as nearly half a dozen other women - had gotten identical heart-shaped boxes with their photos in them? What did they have in common, other than that they had all graduated from Minor High the same year? The group of them hadn’t been friends, hadn’t even existed on the same social plane.

Were they all marked for death, as Jessica had initially feared? Was the heart shape of the box a private joke of a killer’s? Claire tried to remember who had taken woodshop twenty years ago, who might still have the skill to carve two halves of a box so that they neatly matched up. The thought of the sharp tools that such a task must require caused a shiver to dance over her skin, despite the heat of the day. In some ways, the idea of a knife - slicing, stabbing, flesh parting before the silver shine of it - was more frightening than that of a gun.

Another runner crested a hill and ran toward her, a skinny man with long arms and legs. It was easy to see why he was thin, as he wasted so much energy in excess motion. Instead of pumping like efficient pistons, his arms flapped and flailed like broken-winged birds. The aviator sunglasses he wore threw her for a moment, but Claire finally recognized who it was. Richard Crane, which was kind of a surprise. He hadn’t been the athletic type in high school. Then again, neither had she. A second later she realized that was the first time she had thought of him as Richard first, not Dick.

They both paused as they came even with each other, jogging in place. Richard pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, exposing his pale face and the dark circles under his eyes. He said something that she couldn’t make out over John Mellencamp.

Claire pulled off her headphones. “Pardon?” Waves of warmth were radiating from him, and she took what she hoped was a subtle step back.

“
You shouldn’t be out here alone, Claire. Where’s that guy you were with last night - your, um, husband?” His face reddened.

“
Boyfriend. And he’s still asleep.”

“
Then let me run with you. You know, just to be safe?”

The street was busy with cars, and Claire wanted to be alone with her thoughts. “That’s okay. I’m being careful.”

His face coloring even more, he looked away. “I didn’t mean to be pushy.” Richard was the kind of guy who didn’t have a clue about people, Claire thought. He’d rather be tinkering with something mechanical. In high school it had been cameras and now it was computers.

“
I don’t know if I buy that Cindy’s being killed has anything to do with those boxes we all got.” While she was talking, Claire wiped the sweat off her forehead and then dried her palm on the bottom of her shirt. “Although I have found myself trying to remember which guys took woodshop in high school. You weren’t one of them, were you?” Claire said it in a teasing way. Woodshop had been known as a great place to fashion your own bongs and pipes. The only people who had taken woodshop at Minor High had been the hoods, the goat-ropers, the ones destined to be mill rats. People like Jim, she remembered suddenly. When she looked up, Richard was shaking his head violently.

“
What are you saying? I never took woodshop.” He looked frightened.

“
I was just teasing, Richard.” She patted his sweaty forearm “You seem like you’re still pretty upset about everything. How are you doing?”

He had stopped jogging and now his shoulders curled over, forming a little cave for his heart. “I can’t stop thinking about Cindy. She was always so - alive. I mean, one minute she’s showing me one of the new cheerleading routines.” Claire had her own recollection of Cindy bouncing around in front of Richard, and she saw that his memories were probably more flattering. He hadn’t seen the same Cindy that Claire had - drunk, wobbling, a little loud, trying desperately to get his attention now that he was one of the richest men in America. Obviously, she had succeeded. “And she just looked - great! And then less than an hour later to see her like that - .” He waved one arm, his words trailing off, then swiped at his eyes. “Damn! Even the sweat-proof sunscreens still get in your eyes.” He looked up at the merciless sky, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed some emotion.

Richard had loved Cindy, Claire realized. Or thought he had. Twenty-year old memories, carefully edited and lovingly hand-colored. “Hey, I’ve got to go before it gets too hot altogether, but I’ll catch you later, okay? And I promise I’ll be careful.”

She managed to run the rest of the long access road that led from the parking lot without anyone else wanting to talk to her, and then turned out onto the highway, the half-mile that separated Minor proper from Ye Olde Pioneer Village. The side of the road was made up of palm-sized smooth stones that skittered under her feet, so Claire ran just on the edge of the macadam, facing traffic. The occupants of the few beat-up cars and jacked-up trucks passing her stared openly, as if they had never seen a runner. Maybe they hadn’t. After all, Minor wasn’t Portland yet, despite the spillover from the city. Claire amused herself by looking for vanity plates. The HE WON plate on a nearly new Chevy Blazer hinted at a story. AMBER fell into the most common, and boring, category that Claire used to have pass across her desk - that of people’s first names. Then she saw one that truly made her smile - a white VW Rabbit with a plate reading ML8ML8.

Her body had found its rhythm now, breathing easy, arms loose, legs scissoring past each other. She kept one eye out for groups of men in pickups and the other for the glint of broken beer bottles. Her heart leaped in her chest when a green Geo blew past, barely grudging Claire an inch. The woman driving it gave Claire the finger. After it passed she saw that it sported a bumper sticker reading, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty.”

Pumping her hot fists, she mouthed along with “What If I Came Knocking?” a song that asked a would-be lover if they would risk everything for a chance at love. It helped keep her mind off the too-stiff heel notch in her new Nikes that was chafing her left Achilles tendon.

She was in Minor proper, now, although she didn’t recognize anything. Nothing in this section was more than five years old. She tried to find a straight street to run along, but it was all curving cul-de-sacs lined with cookie cutter two-story houses in beiges and tans. “French colonials” no Frenchman would ever recognize, each dominated by a two- or even three-car garage. In Portland, the style was known as a “snout house,” and had been recently banned by the city council.

The streets were Sunday morning quiet, even though it was only Saturday. A few people were out working in their gardens. Claire reached behind her and turned the music up a tick. Her legs settled into a fast, easy pace, and she felt the body-wide equivalent of a smile engulf her. Sometimes this happened when she was running. It was a wholly physical feeling that began and ended in her body. It didn’t involve thought at all. You couldn’t count on it or coax it, although it did help to be running downhill and listening to some favorite music. It was like the non-sexual equivalent of an orgasm. She’d never mentioned it to other runners. She’d read about runners who would get a blast of endorphins at the nineteenth mile of a marathon, but this feeling sometimes happened to her on the second mile of a five-mile run. If the secret ever got out, maybe there would be more runners.

She looped back onto the highway. Up ahead, she saw the neon signs for Ye Olde Pioneer Village. As she reached the end of the access road, Claire glanced right and left, checking for cars before she entered the acres of parking lot around the casino.

A red pickup stood alone at the edge of the parking lot. Something about it seemed out of place. She stopped to look closer. Her breath caught. What she saw threw her in a panic. Sprawled on the bench seat was the still form of Jessica McFarland, her head thrown back at an unnatural angle, her dress pushed up around her thighs. A thin edge of white showed at the edge of her eyes.

Claire found herself tiptoeing as she went closer, holding her breath as if someone could hear her, as if it would make a difference. She looked around, but she was all alone. She pulled off her headphones and turned off the music, her gaze never leaving the sight of her old friend’s body.

So Jessica hadn’t been paranoid after all.

HEBGBZ

Chapter Twenty

Claire wasn’t aware she had made a sound until it reached her ears. The panic she heard in her own half-strangled sob notched up her fear at the sight of Jessica’s broken body, graceless in death. Hearing herself made Claire realize this was real. Her arms prickled as the hair along them rose.

She and Jessica had been so close when they were twelve. Did she owe it to her dead friend to open the pickup door and check for a pulse, see how cold Jessica’s body was? Or would she only replace whatever fingerprints the killer might have left at the scene with her own?

While Claire was still debating what to do, Jessica’s white hand rose slowly in the air, then dropped to her face and rubbed her still half-open eyes.

Claire jumped back with a little shriek.

Jessica’s own screech echoed Claire’s. She pushed herself into a sitting position, her face washing scarlet. The window was open two inches, and now she rolled it down the rest of the way. “Oh, God, where am I?” Her voice was a brittle rasp.

“
In a truck in the parking lot,” Claire answered. Jessica still looked blank. Had someone drugged her and left her here to die? Claire elaborated. “You’re at the Minor High Twentieth Reunion. Specifically, you’re in the parking lot for Ye Olde Pioneer Village.” Still shivering, Claire crossed her arms. “I thought you were dead. You were lying all crooked with your eyes half-open.”

Jessica scrubbed her face with her hands. “Just dead to the world. And the eye thing is the price I have to pay for having such big ones. It used to drive my college roommate crazy.” She batted her lashes at Claire

“
Did you spend the night out here?” Jessica’s silence was answer enough. Claire took a step back and looked at the pickup. “Whose truck is this, anyway?”

“
I’d rather not say.” Jessica’s tone was less controlled than her words. She sounded pleased with herself. Unlocking the door, she opened it and hopped out, pulling her denim mini skirt down into place as she did so.

“
You were making out in a car all night? What’s the matter with going into the hotel? At least it’s got nice soft beds and privacy.”

“
And no gear shift,” Jessica added. Her lips curved up into a private smile. “You’ve got to understand that what happened last night - finding Cindy’s body - was a shock to the system. I mean, seeing someone dead! Touching them with your own hands.” She spread her hands, with their French-manicured nails, in front of her and regarded them as if they didn’t belong to her. “It’s - it’s primal. Something you feel deep in your gut - and you react from your gut. At first we came out here just to talk about Cindy, about how we felt. And then one thing led to another. We both forgot about who we were in high school, and just remembered who we are now. A man and a woman. Alone together.”