Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (23 page)

Claire shook her head, knowing even as she spoke that she was wasting her breath. “It’s not Satan, Mrs. West. There’s something physically wrong with Logan’s brain. It’s just as real as any other physical illness. Besides, he doesn’t hear the voices any more. He told me that.”

“
He did, did he?” The older woman raised one eyebrow. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

As she recognized the old words of the marriage sacrament, Claire felt a chill. Dante leaned forward. “Do you think God put the voices in Logan’s head?”

Mrs. West addressed her answer to Claire. “Everything is foreordained. You know that. It’s why our church doesn’t bother with proselytizing. Were you meant to spend eternity in heaven, you would already have believed.”

“
But if you believe everything is predetermined, why did you sit down and read the Bible with Logan?” Claire asked. “Why did you do that if you thought it wouldn’t do any good?”

Her eyes were small and anguished. “He’s my boy, isn’t he? It took me a long time to submit myself to God’s yoke.”

“
Can you give me his phone number?” Claire leaned forward. “It wasn’t in the book.”

“
He doesn’t have a phone,” the older woman said, giving Claire an idea of how bleak Logan’s life must be, when every house had more than one telephone and even twelve-year-olds carried their own cell phones.

“
Did Logan come here last night, Mrs. West? Or have you heard from him?”

“
I told you, I don’t know where he is.” Her yellow-gloved hands twisted on her lap.

“
Even so, I want to leave this with you.” Claire got up and put a slip of paper on top of her suddenly still hands. “It’s got my room number and phone number at the hotel. The hotel even has voicemail, so he could leave me a message. And I also wrote down my home phone number in Portland.”

In the car, she put her head in her hands. They drove back to the casino without speaking while Dante rested one palm lightly on her back. After he had had turned off the ignition, they both sat in the still and stuffy confines of the car. Finally, Claire said, “I think he was there, Dante. I think even if Mrs. West thinks Logan is lost in the next life, she still cares what happens to him in this one. I think Logan was there and he heard every word we said.”

Chapter Twenty-six

A blast of hot air met Vanessa when she opened the door to the hotel room she was sharing with her mother. It felt like when you stuck your head too far inside the oven to see if your Papa Murphy’s pizza was done. Making a face, Vanessa walked over to the heating unit underneath the window. The little dial had been cranked all the way to the left. What had her mom been thinking? There wasn’t a thermostat, but Vanessa bet the room was at least one hundred degrees. She turned off the heat, and then turned up the air-conditioning to the maximum setting.

Where
was
her mother? Vanessa decided that Belinda must have changed her mind and gone to the reunion. In a way, it was a relief that she was someplace else, instead of here, sitting in a chair staring in the direction of a TV game show while tears rolled down her red and swollen face.

Her mom was beginning to act like Aunt Cindy really
had
been her best friend. Belinda thought Vanessa didn’t notice things, but she did. Like Vanessa noticed how Aunt Cindy – what she had always called her, even though Cindy wasn’t her real aunt - always treated her mom, paying her no attention unless she wanted something. Then she could be as sweet as pie. And since her dad left, Vanessa had noticed something else. Twice she had picked up the upstairs phone to find it already in use - and her mother talking to Uncle Kevin in a low voice.

Vanessa walked into the bathroom and leaned over the counter cluttered with two-dozen cosmetics. Looking at her face, she was torn between self-criticism and exultation. Despite her slinky name, which conjured up images of a smoldering-eyed dark beauty, Vanessa had inherited her mother’s pale and pudgy looks. For once in her life, though, Vanessa thought she looked like a woman, not a girl. Her eyes were shadowed, her lips swollen from kissing. She thought she looked like a woman who had spent all day and all night doing exactly what Junior had so badly wanted to do.

Vanessa didn’t know what she wanted or didn’t want. After meeting in the video arcade the night before, she and Junior had spent the rest of the evening talking in the Snak Shak. In just half an hour, he was holding her hand, and by the end of the night she was sitting in his lap, exchanging lingering kisses until the fat old woman who ran the place told them to knock it off.

When Vanessa had finally come back to the hotel room last night, she had found her mother hysterical. Not because of how late it was, but because she had been the one to find Aunt Cindy’s body. Vanessa shivered at the thought. She hadn’t really liked Aunt Cindy, but it was scary and strange to think of her lying dead. Vanessa hadn’t known how to comfort her mother, who had wept and cried out all night long, even after she finally slept. It had been a relief to leave this morning.

Today she and Junior had spent most of their time on the amusement park rides, kissing in anything that offered a moment of darkness. They had only split up a few minutes ago to get ready for what promised to be a big evening out. Junior planned to borrow his father’s credit card and take Vanessa out to dinner in the casino’s fanciest restaurant - The End of the Trail.

But what would she wear? First she looked at her own clothes, but none of them were right. They were all too babyish. Then she turned to her mother’s clothes, which were not only nicer but less wrinkled, since she had hung them in the closet. Their figures were similar enough that she could freely borrow from her mother’s wardrobe. And since Vanessa’s father had taken off, there was more to borrow. Belinda now favored low-cut tops that showed off her ample freckled cleavage.

Vanessa finally chose a cream-colored knit top with cap sleeves and a narrow slit that would end just above the little bow in the center of her bra. After a moment’s consideration, she took Belinda’s black leather jacket from the back of a chair, even though her mother had expressly said she was never to wear it.

Shimmying out of her clothes, she kicked them in the direction of her open suitcase. Her T-shirt ended up half-under the bed. Had she bent down to pick it up, Vanessa would have seen her mother’s body stuffed under the bed frame, seen Belinda’s purpling face, her eyes wide and unblinking, the whites pink from broken blood vessels. Had she spent another ten minutes primping, she might have answered the door when the killer knocked on it. Instead, Vanessa left her T-shirt were it lay and left the room, going back to the arms of Wade’s oldest child, Wade Junior, at seventeen two entire exotic years older than Vanessa.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Several months prior to the reunion, Claire had gone shopping for a new dress to wear to Saturday night’s big dinner and dance. But after a few perilous moments in a Saks dressing room where she had actually considered wearing a backless dress cut so low it would have ruled out wearing any undergarments at all, she had come to her senses. The first time she had gone to New York City she had both met Dante and bought a beautiful dress. She had worn it only once, to dinner with another man, a man who turned out to be a charming fraud and swindler.

The dress, though, was a keeper. Cut from apricot-colored satin, its sleeves and bodice were made of sheer netting. The color set off her hair, and the dozen darts that nipped in her waist made her look curvy rather than lanky. Dante had asked whether he should pack a tux for the reunion (he owned several because he often attended fund-raising events for the Met), but Claire had told him just to bring a dark suit. This was Minor, after all, a place where the women might dress up, but the men never would.

In fact, she had worried that she might be overdressed, but the Westward Ho! banquet room glittered with sequins, bugle beads and gold lame. The outfits looked a little out of place among the room’s decorations - hay bales, bleached cow skulls and fake cactuses sporting bandannas. A few of the men were dressed in Levi’s and T-shirts, but most were wearing suits (although some of them looked like the last time they had been out of the closet was for high school graduation). One side of the room was a dance floor. The other was filled with large round tables covered with white tablecloths. As a centerpiece, each was topped with an old cowboy boot filled with strawflowers. Along one wall was the banquet, ending with planked salmon. While it was probably more likely the pioneers had been subsisting on wormy hardtack by the time they reached Oregon, Claire figured that idea wasn’t nearly as marketable.

Flash! Claire started as a roving cameraman ducked in to take her and Dante’s picture. She was reminded of how Richard Crane had always hid behind his camera, taking so many pictures for the yearbook that he faded into the scenery.

She and Dante found a place at a table with Maria and Sunny, who by coincidence were both wearing cream-colored pantsuits. Jessica, a vision in a midnight blue off-the-shoulder silk dress, snagged the chair on the other side of Claire. Dressed in a black sleeveless dress with a mandarin collar, Rebecca took a seat directly across from them. Claire was beginning to feel that the man-to-woman ratio was distinctly unbalanced, until Rebecca cajoled a passing Wade to sit next to her, and Richard stopped by and asked if he could sit with “all you lovely ladies.” He looked embarrassed when they chorused agreement. Jessica patted the chair next to her and immediately launched into full flirt mode.

By the time Dante and Claire joined the buffet line, it snaked all the way to the entrance doors. Behind them, people began applauding and whistling. Claire turned to find Tyler, red in the face, being hailed as a hero. Finally, flushed and nodding, he put his hands up to still the noise, then walked over to the bar in the corner.

“
Hold my place, would you?” Claire asked Dante, then followed Tyler. His face soured when he saw her, but he turned toward her and away from the others who still crowded around him, slapping him on the back and offering to buy him drinks.

“
What’s the matter, Claire - you want to stick your nose in things again?” His words were loud enough that several people turned to look at her. She saw that he was already a little drunk, even though he had just walked in the door. “You should be happy that the bad guy is locked up and the rest of us are safe.”

At that a couple of the men raised their glasses in tribute. “Here, here.”

She put her hand on his arm. “I didn’t come here to criticize you.”

At Claire’s touch, Tyler softened immediately. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m dead on my feet. I was up all night.”

“
Maybe you should go home.”

“
What - and wait another ten years before I see everybody?”

Claire guessed that Tyler was also enjoying the limelight. She said, “I did have a couple of things I was wondering about.”

He groaned theatrically, but didn’t walk away.

“
Like how did Kevin know to come back just when you were taking that guy to jail?”

Tyler looked away. There were lines of fatigue etched on his face. “Kevin called me early this morning. He was angry, saying why hadn’t I arrested anyone yet for Cindy’s murder. Screaming that the statistics show that if someone isn’t arrested for murder in the first twenty-four hours, then chances are good no one’s gonna ever be.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I got defensive, told him that this morning we would take someone into custody. I didn’t tell him where, though, but I guess it was probably easy enough to figure out that whoever did it was probably still here at Ye Olde Pioneer Village.”

“
I’ve been thinking - are you sure it was this dishwasher guy? He just seems so - little. Cindy’s probably two inches taller and at least his weight. Wouldn’t it have been hard to strangle her? It seems like she could have easily fought him off.”

Unconsciously, Tyler began to twist his hands together, reminding Claire of the marks on Cindy’s neck. “Maybe. Except for two things. We’ve got the blood alcohol level back on her. It was point-one-three, making her well over the legal limit. Kind of explains the cheerleading routine thing.” They looked at each other, remembering Cindy shaking her pompoms - and her breasts - in Richard Crane’s face. “And the other is that the pathologist says her airway was already compromised before she went out in that parking lot. She’s got asthma, and it wasn’t very well controlled - at least it wasn’t last night.” Claire flashed back to the blue inhaler she and Nina had seen in Cindy’s hand. “This Juan guy might not even have meant to kill her.”

“
What does he say about what happened?”

Looking down at his shoes, Tyler ran the back of his thumbnail over his lower lip. “We probably won’t be asking him any more questions for a while.”

“
Is he still unconscious?”

Reluctantly, Tyler nodded. “He seems to respond to his name. And he’s squeezed his wife’s hand a few times. There’s some bleeding in the brain. The doctors say they don’t know when he’ll wake up - or what kind of shape he’s gonna be when he does.”

“
And is Kevin already out on bail?” Claire couldn’t hide the anger in her voice.

“
Hey - the judge made the decision about bail, not me, Claire. He’s one of Minor’s most prominent citizens. Or at least one of the richest. He’s not considered a flight risk. And there’s a lot of sympathy for a man who finds himself going temporarily off on the creep who murdered his wife.”