Heart-Shaped Box

  She reached for the phone, but didn’t pick it up. Would Mrs. West even talk to her? The older woman had been fiercely religious, convinced that everyone was going to hell, except for the twenty or so people who attended her particular church. Once, Mrs. West had smugly explained it all to her, about how Claire was preordained to spend eternity drowning in a lake of fire. The eerie thing had been how Mrs. West had smiled at the thought.

  When she looked up from the phone book, she saw that Dante was awake.

  “Before we get ready for dinner, I think I need to go for another trip down memory lane,” she told him. “Would you mind driving?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you want to drive?”

  “I’m starting to live in the past so much I’m having trouble seeing what’s really here. If you drive, you won’t get confused by how much everything has changed in this town, the way I would.”

  Claire didn’t even attempt to give Dante directions, letting him pick up a map from the hotel’s front desk instead. As a result, while it might have taken her an hour of driving in confused circles, it took him less than ten minutes to arrive at her old house.

  Back in the days when Minor had been a small town surrounded by farm fields, Claire and her mother and sister had lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Now that Minor was home to expensive three thousand square foot homes, their old neighborhood was more like the wrong side of the moon. The yards were filled with old appliances, cars up on blocks, and the remnants of children’s plastic toys.

  Claire hadn’t thought of their old rental home in years, but now here it was, looking like it belonged in a ghost town. It had needed painting even when she lived there, but it seemed as if no one had taken a brush to it in the intervening twenty years. The boards were now a weathered gray decorated with long, curling strips of deep green paint. More flakes of paint littered the ground along the edges of the house. The other houses around it were only in marginally better condition.

  One house stood out from all the rest. A freshly painted doll-sized two-story not much bigger than the separate garage that sat next to it, it had an eerily perfect bright green lawn. Claire had a sudden memory of Mrs. West picking up fallen leaves by hand, one by one. She had harbored some belief that a rake would injure the grass.

  As they went up the walk, Claire thought she saw a curtain twitch in Logan’s old room on the second floor. Lifting the shiny brass knocker, she let it fall with a hollow thud. It was a long moment before she was sure she heard movement inside the house, and then Claire couldn’t tell if the sounds she heard came from someone coming down the stairs or down the hall. Finally the door opened soundlessly to reveal a woman wearing a blue house dress, white apron and yellow rubber gloves. Her swollen legs ended in white slippers.

  “Hello, Mrs. West. Do you remember me? I’m Claire Montrose. I used to live next door. And this is” - she hesitated, uncertain what title to give him, and finally settled for none at all -”Dante Bonner.”

  As she spoke, Claire held out her hand, but it was ignored. She had forgotten that it would be.

  “Oh, I remember you all right,” Mrs. West said. Her tone was not at all welcoming. Underneath a black hairnet, she had the same tight, blue-white home permanent that she had had when Claire was growing up. Maybe there was a thirty-year stockpile of Toni down in the basement. Now she wiped her gloved hands on her apron and walked back into the house.

  She left the door open, though, so after hesitating a moment, Claire and Dante followed. Out of habit, Claire kicked her shoes off at the door. Watching her, Dante did the same. They left them on the mat, next to two identical pairs of run-over brown loafers, and followed the clear vinyl runner to the living room. Mrs. West was slowly settling herself into a dark blue armchair covered in a heavy plastic slipcover.

  Claire and Dante perched on the very edge of the couch. It crinkled under their weight. The floral pattern looked as fresh and unfaded as the day it had come into the room, twenty-two years before. Like the recliner, the couch had been swathed in specially fitted heavy duty plastic with an odd, pebbled texture. Everything in the house that could be protected, was. Clear plastic runners crisscrossed the blue shag rug. The cream-colored shades of the two floor lamps were still wrapped in the plastic that had swathed them in the furniture store. Underneath a black cloth slipcover squatted the long rectangle of a console television.

  In high school, Claire had just seen Mrs. West as frugal. Now she supposed the older woman would be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. With Mrs. West’s conviction that everything should be wrapped up tight against the real world, that flesh should never touch flesh, it was a wonder that Logan had managed to come into the world at all. Logan’s father had died of cancer when his son was twelve, and with him had gone the last brakes on Mrs. West’s beliefs.

  “I came because I was worried about Logan,” Claire began.

  “He hasn’t lived here since he first went into that hospital.” With a sigh, Mrs. West leaned her head against a white antimacassar draped on the back of the chair, over the plastic covering. She pushed a lever on the side and the footrest swung out to elevate her grossly distended legs.

  Maybe he hadn’t lived here, but Claire was sure Logan still kept in touch with his mother. “I need to talk to him.” She spoke a little louder than necessary, in case Logan was somewhere in the house, listening. “It’s about what happened at the reunion.”

  “Bad business.” Mrs. West nodded her head, looking not at all perturbed. “Heard about that on the radio.”

  “Well, that Tyler Kraushaar who was in our class - maybe you remember him?” Claire interrupted herself, but got no reply from Mrs. West. “He’s chief of police here now. This morning he arrested someone for Cindy Sanchez’s murder. It looks like a dishwasher at the casino killed her and stole her purse.” Even as Claire made sure her words were crisp and carrying, she thought about what Sawyer had seen twenty years before, Logan with his hands around some other girl’s neck. She hadn’t told Dante, not wanting to taint Logan in his eyes. “So Logan doesn’t need to worry about anyone blaming him for anything.”

  “Maybe they should,” Mrs. West said. “Satan talks to that boy - don’t you know that? I tried to get him to sit down and read the Bible with me, but it didn’t do any good whatsoever.”

  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 st
ill 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.”