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.”
Jessica looked past Claire, at the horizon, as if she beheld a vision. “After seeing death, well, I think anyone is entitled to go a little crazy. Cindy was young and beautiful, but that didn’t stop her from dying. It makes you realize how fleeting life is. And then you find yourself clutching at life.” Her gaze dropped back to Claire. “Plus he talked the bartender into selling him a bottle of Wild Turkey to go. Seeing how this was an emergency and all.” Jessica seemed to be perking up. Her face was animated, her eyes alight with the thought of how naughty she had been. How many times had Claire seen the same expression on her face in high school? Jessica self-esteem had always been found in a man’s arms. She had slept with the rich-boy sons of doctors and lawyers, the ones who owned brand-new convertibles, the ones who skied competitively or who had, at seventeen, already traveled extensively through Europe. Claire guessed that this latest conquest had also been a member of Minor’s ruling class. Twenty years ago, Claire had gotten a vicarious thrill hearing about Jessica’s conquests. Now she just wondered when Jessica would grow up.
“So you end up making out in a car in a parking lot? Right next to a hotel that’s full of soft beds with clean sheets?” Jessica was silent, so Claire filled in the explanation herself. Her latest conquest must have had a wife waiting for him in one of those beds. “And your Romeo leaves you sound asleep in a car when there’s a murderer on the loose?”
Jessica looked away. She spoke to the shimmering asphalt. “I must have fallen asleep and he didn’t want to wake me. We watched the sun come up, so it’s not like he left me alone in the dark. And he locked the doors before he left. Besides, he was sure that the person who killed Cindy did it because it was Cindy, not because they were a homicidal maniac. “
“But it’s hot in there. Hasn’t he read those stories about kids dying in locked cars in the summer?”
Jessica shot Claire a sullen look, the same one she was prone to giving Claire twenty-plus years ago, whenever Claire pointed out that having sex with someone didn’t necessarily mean he would talk to you at school. “He cracked the windows, didn’t he?” She tugged her fingers through her hair, the side of her mouth pulled upward by a personal smile. “There’s one good thing about being thirty-eight. I don’t have to worry about being grounded.” Her tilted her head as she looked at something past Claire’s shoulder. “Hey - what’s going on?”
Claire turned. A small crowd had gathered in front of the hotel, next to a black and white police car. The lights were flashing, but the siren was off.
“Let’s go see what’s up,” Jessica said. They walked across the parking lot and joined the crowd.
“What’s going on?” Claire asked the man standing next to her.
He didn’t take his eyes off the main door. “I hear they got him.”
“Got who?” she said, but just then Tyler shouldered open the door. Ahead of him he pushed a handcuffed Hispanic man. He was short and young and slender, with dusky skin and black straight hair that looked like he trimmed it himself. He was dressed like a dishwasher or a busboy, in black polyester pants and a white shirt topped with a grimy white apron. His eyes were wide and confused, and he seemed to be talking to himself. “No. Madre de Dios! No mate a nadie!”
Claire understood a few of the words, courtesy of her Let’s Learn Spanish! tape that she had listened to a few times and then had shoved in her glove compartment and never taken out again, another self-improvement scheme abandoned. No! Mother of God! I didn’t kill anybody!
He tried his English out now, appealing to the crowd that watched him silently, avidly. “I didn’t kill no womens!”
Everyone turned at the sound of screeching tires. A black Mercedes SUV raced through the parking lot straight toward where they were gathered. The door was flung open even before it came to a halt. Kevin jumped out and ran toward Tyler and his prisoner, so single-minded that he didn’t even bother to close his door or take his keys from the ignition. Behind him, the car beeped impotently. Kevin’s hands were balled into fists, his face a mask of anger, his lips pulled back in a snarl. Before Tyler or the police officer following him could react, Kevin launched himself at the man being arrested for the murder of his wife.
His fist caught the smaller man on the side of the head. The dishwasher would have fallen forward if Tyler hadn’t kept him upright by yanking on his handcuffs. The other cop started forward, hand resting on the butt of his gun, but he was too slow. Kevin was already raining a flurry of blows down on the prisoner’s face. Bright red blood splattered the man’s stained apron and Kevin’s white polo shirt, first spurting from the smaller man’s nose and then from a seam that Kevin opened up on his cheek.
The crowd was stunned into silence, so that Claire could hear the sound of every punch landing, the grunts each of the two men made as the blows were given and received, even the drops of blood falling like rain on th
e sidewalk. Only a few seconds had elapsed, but the Hispanic man seemed on the verge of unconscious. His head lolled, whipped back and forth with every punch.
A shriek cut through the awful sounds, and Belinda ran out the front door of the hotel. She wore only a white terry cloth bathrobe, and her feet were bare. Her eyes were like two holes burned in a blanket, and her hair was an uncombed mess. She stopped a few feet away and reached her arms out, imploring.
“No, Kevvie! No! This won’t bring her back.”
With his left hand, Kevin made a shooing motion, as if Belinda were a pesky fly. With the other hand, he landed another blow, this one to the dishwasher’s ribs. Claire thought she heard a muffled snapping sound.
Finally realizing he was hurting more than he was helping, Tyler let go of his prisoner, who fell to his knees and then sideways onto the sidewalk. His head made a sickening, hollow thunk. Kevin paused for a moment, his hands fisted, one foot raised, torn between punching or kicking. In that moment, Tyler took two quick steps around the fallen man and grabbed Kevin in a bear hug. Off-balance, the two men staggered together. Meanwhile, Tyler’s sidekick had drawn his gun. Now he held it out before him in a two-handed grip. First he pointed it at the prisoner, but he was still, except for a thin stream of crimson blood beginning to wend down the sidewalk. Then he focused it on the two struggling men.
“Halt!” he yelled out. “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
At first, his words had no affect, but when he repeated his threat, Kevin sagged, his arms still draped around Tyler’s shoulders so that they looked like a pair of drunken dancers.
“Belinda’s right, man. This won’t solve anything,” Tyler said. His words were soft, pitched for Kevin’s ears, but the crowd was still hushed, so everyone heard them.
“But he killed her! He killed her!” Kevin’s voice was more of a moan than a shout. His eyes were so wide the whites showed all the way around, and his mouth was pulled down at the corners, a rictus of sorrow and anger. “He killed my wife.”