Heart-Shaped Box

  As they realized what had happened, the other carnies stopped their rides and let off their passengers, too, so that by the time the gate to Richard’s car was finally opened, a couple of hundred people had gathered around the Ferris Wheel. When he dropped his hands to push himself off the seat, it was clear Richard had been weeping. The eerie silence was broken by someone hissing as Tyler stepped forward with a pair of handcuffs.

  That hiss heralded an explosion of nearly unmanageable anger. People began to scream at Richard, shouting “Murderer!” and “Killer!” Richard had never been close to anyone in high school, so there was nothing to balance the bloody reality of Jessica’s death. Next to Claire, Tomisue suddenly bent over, her hands on her knees. Claire thought the other woman was overcome by emotion, until she straightened up with a small stone in her hand and threw it straight-armed like the softball star she used to be. It opened a cut just above Richard’s eyebrow.

  Tyler whirled around, his hand on the butt of his gun. “Calm down, people!” he shouted, but his voice was drowned out by a chorus of catcalls, boos and threats.

  Martha pushed her way through the crowd and put her own body in front of Richard’s. She screamed back at his tormentors, shouting at them to leave him alone. But her pleas were unanswered. The crowd was rapidly becoming a mob.

  Another stone whistled past Tyler’s ear. He cupped his free hand around his mouth. “If you people don’t disperse now, I will charge you with inciting a riot!” While no one threw any more rocks, his threat did not result in anyone leaving.

  Then Sawyer, hampered by his limp, cut through the crowd and put himself between Tyler and Richard. His strong orator’s voice rose above the shouts and catcalls of the crowd. “Stop! This must stop! People, we are not a lynch mob! Would you dishonor Jessica’s memory with more blood?”

  Sawyer was perhaps the only person the mob would have paid attention to. At his words, it quieted and became a crowd again. Into the silence, Richard said, “I gave those boxes out of love. Not hate. Out of love. Don’t you understand?” His gaze went from to Nina and Rebecca as he spoke, and finally to Claire, his dark eyes pleading. While he spoke, blood continued to run down his cheek and plop into the dust. “I didn’t kill anyone. Why would I want to kill the girls that I loved?”

  Before he could say anything more, Tyler pushed on his shoulder and marched him away. Richard’s head was bowed so low that the dark sweep of his hair covered both his eyes.

  With no place to focus their anger, the crowd began to disperse. Martha was left standing alone, tears streaking down her face, her hands hanging empty by her sides. Her expression wasn’t sad or shocked, though - it was angry. And she was staring at Claire so fiercely that Claire finally felt she had to say something.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry!” Martha spat out the word. “You know Richard. Do you really think he is capable of killing anyone?”

  “How well did any of us really know him?”

  Claire’s question had been rhetorical, but Martha treated it as if it were real. “I knew him. We were on yearbook staff together. We spent hours in the school darkroom, just talking. He has the most brilliant mind of anyone I’ve ever known, but he never figured out women.” Shaking her head, she summoned up a smile, tears sparkling on her eyelashes. “He never saw that I was interested in him, for example. I don’t think he ever even noticed that I was a girl. I was just his pal, that’s all. I used to watch him, you know, while he developed photos of all of you. Cindy, Sunny, Maria, Nina - all of you.” Martha added, almost to herself, “Except Belinda. I don’t ever remember him talking about her. But there must have been something that attracted him. Cindy and Maria were cheerleaders, Jessica was an actress - but sometimes it was something little.” Her mouth quirked down at the corners. She reached out her hand in the direction of Claire’s curls. “With you, it was your hair.”

  Dante spoke up. “Why did he give those women the boxes?”

  “I think he gave those boxes to single women he had had crushes on in high school - or women he thought were single - and hoped that one of them might love him back. I don’t think he really knows any women now. Most of the people in his line of work are men, and he has so much money now I think that it insulates him from meeting anyone new. Maybe high school was the last place Richard actually met girls. Maybe he’s living in the past. But that doesn’t mean he would kill anyone.”

  “How can you say that?” Dante’s voice was gentle. “You saw him push Jessica out of the Ferris wheel.”

  Claire answered before Martha did. “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

  Dante turned to her. “You saw it happen, Claire. So did a hundred other people.”

  But while Martha had been talking, Claire had been replaying the scene in her own mind. What had she seen? When the four of them - Claire and Dante, Tyler and Marc - had first entered the amusement park, they had fanned out, searching for Jessica and Richard. Then had Dante shouted and pointed at the Ferris wheel and the two dark heads close together in one of the cars. They had begun to run toward the Ferris wheel, Tyler and Marc drawing their guns, but it had felt as ineffectual as running in a dream.

  As Claire had watched Richard and Jessica, something changed between them. She had been able to see it even from several hundred feet away, how they drew apart, how they both stiffened and their mouths opened wide as they seemed to shout at each other. And then there had been a sudden blur of bodies. And the next thing Claire knew, Jessica had been dangling from Richard’s hand, her free hand clawing at the side of the swaying basket.

  Now Claire said, “What if Richard didn’t push Jessica? What if she jumped instead, and he tried to catch her?”

  A few people had been watching them curiously, but Martha paid them no attention. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you guys.”

  “Why would she jump?” Dante asked, his expression skeptical.

  “Say Richard gave several women - including me - boxes,” Claire began, thinking out loud. “Like Martha said, it was his way of showing some kind of old affection toward us. But then two of those women turn up dead. So now he’s frightened. But Jessica has been acting like she’s his new best friend. He thinks he can go to her and she’ll listen to him. So Richard decides to tell her about this horrible coincidence, perhaps ask for her help or advice -.”

  “-But Jessica jumps to conclusions and thinks he’s confessing to being the murderer,” Dante finished for her. “So she makes a split-second decision and tries to get away from him by jumping out of the Ferris wheel, but instead it all goes wrong. It could be.” He slowly nodded his head. “It might have happened that way. Jessica is - was - an excitable person. But isn’t it a huge coincidence that someone is killing the same women Richard gave his boxes to?”

  Suddenly, more pieces of the puzzle fell into place for Claire. Martha didn’t remember Richard developing pictures of Belinda. Jessica had said her box had gone missing. And in her mind’s eye, Claire saw Belinda’s body again, how it had been laid out on the bed almost as if it were on display, the heart-shaped box in her dead hand. And Claire remembered something else about the photo inside that open box. She was sure she had seen the dark edge of another photo on the back where the picture had curled up, away from the box. But the backs of the other photos - the ones in the boxes which had all been turned over to Tyler - had been white. Could someone have stolen Jessica’s box, cut Belinda’s picture from the annual, and used it to try to cast suspicion on Richard?

  Claire sketched out her idea to Martha and Dante. Then she said to Martha, “If they’ll let you talk to Richard, ask him if he gave Belinda a box. And if he didn’t, ask Tyler to look at the back of the photograph in that box. I think someone is trying to frame Richard for these murders.” Claire realized that if she were right, the irony would be that the murderer had probably gotten his idea from Jessica, with her hysterics over her own heart-shaped box after they had discovered one in Cindy’s dead hand.

&n
bsp; “You could be right,” Dante said. “But aren’t you forgetting something? If Richard didn’t kill Cindy and Belinda, who did?”

  Martha didn’t answer with words. Instead, she just cut her gaze to Claire.

  “You think it’s Logan, don’t you?” It was hard for Claire to say the words.

  Martha had pulled her keys from her pocket, and now she looked up at Claire, her gray eyes serious and sad. “Jim told me that Belinda said Logan was watching Cindy Friday night, just staring at her. She said he scared her.”

  Claire protested. “But everyone was watching Cindy. That’s what Cindy wanted.”

  “So then why has Logan disappeared?”

  “I don’t think he could handle seeing Cindy’s body. He’s - fragile.” Claire hesitated, realizing she might be damning her old friend with her own words. Was Logan so fragile that something could have snapped inside him, leading him to murder? She thought again about what Sawyer had told her, Logan with his hands around another woman’s neck twenty years before. A wave of exhaustion swept over her. There was no other answer. Logan must be guilty.

  Martha held her car key at the ready. “I don’t know the real answer, Claire. All I know is that Richard didn’t do it. And that I’m going to do everything that I can to help him. Thanks for giving me something that might just do that.” Her determination lit her from within, turning her plainness into a fierce beauty. She walked off without saying good-bye.

  Dante said, “I hope Richard finally sees her for who she is.”

  Claire watched the other woman walk around knots of people with long strides. “He would have to be blind if he didn’t.”

  ###

  The entire amusement park had to be shut down for several hours while it was evaluated as a crime scene. Hastily, the hotel management moved the survivors of Minor High Class of ‘79 into the Feed Trough, where they delivered a quickly prepared speech about the wonders of spending more time at Ye Olde Pioneer Village. Clearly, management was afraid of the impact on business when word got out that there had been three murders at their resort in as many days.

  Those who opted to stay would not only get free lodging that night, but the bill for their entire stay would be torn up. Each guest who chose to remain would also receive a coupon good for a three-day stay at a later date. As an added enticement, they were reminded of the glories that evening’s fireworks show - the biggest, they were assured, in Oregon. Possibly even west of the Mississippi, according to one of the more eager assistant managers. There were more inducements offered - casino scrip, a midnight buffet - but looking around, Claire thought that they probably weren’t needed. Most of her old classmates wanted nothing more than to be with each other, to tell each other the stories of where they had been when each event had taken place, to rehearse again their terror and relief.

  ###

  Claire and Dante, on the other hand, decided to leave. Claire felt she would only be able to finally sleep in her own house, in her own bed. But as they packed, she moved more and more slowly as she began to see the holes in Martha’s theory that Logan must be the killer. For one thing, if Belinda had really been so afraid of Logan, would she have even let him into her room?

  And why had Belinda left her room? Vanessa had said when she came back to their shared hotel room to change for dinner, her mother had been gone. As she sobbed in Claire’s arms, the girl had said she thought her mother had decided to attend the reunion, even though Belinda had been a weepy mess just a few hours before. And Tyler had said that a surveillance tape had showed Belinda walking past the casino in the early evening. But could there be another explanation?

  Claire finished packing and sat down on the edge of the bed. “How much would you say Belinda and her daughter looked alike?”

  “Quite a -” Dante stopped as he saw where she was going. “You’re thinking about the tape, aren’t you?”

  “What if Tyler just assumed Belinda was on that tape because Vanessa had already told him her mother wasn’t in the room? But you’ve seen how much they look alike. And what about what Vanessa was wearing last night?”

  “That black leather jacket.” Dante stopped folding the pair of slacks he held in his hands.

  “Belinda’s jacket. And then there’s something else. Vanessa told me that when she went in their hotel room to get ready for dinner, the heat had been turned up until it was incredibly hot. She had to turn off the heat and crank up the air-conditioning to make it bearable.”

  “But why would Belinda do that?” Dante asked. He put his pants in the suitcase and then zipped it closed.

  “Maybe Belinda didn’t.” Claire’s brain was racing so far ahead that she didn’t bother to explain what she was thinking. “How does Tyler know when she was killed?” she demanded. “How do they fix the time of death?”

  Dante sat down in the chair opposite Claire. She had his full attention now. “Partly by when she was last seen, I would think.”

  “But we know that might be wrong.”

  “Don’t they look at the stomach contents during the autopsy?” He answered his own question. “Except for she was so upset she might not have eaten anything. So - what other way is there?”

  Claire was so excited that her answer crowded Dante’s question. “I think they take the temperature of the body to see how long it’s been cooling. And if the body was someplace hot for a while -.”

  “Then that might screw things up.” Dante tilted his head. “But Vanessa was in that room and said her mother wasn’t there. So where was Belinda?” He hefted his suitcase and opened the door to the room.

  Claire picked up one of her own and followed him out the door. After making sure there was no one in the hallway, she answered Dante’s question. “Maybe her body was in the closet or under the bed.”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure how much Tyler would welcome another theory from you. Are you going to call him and tell him that Logan must have hid Belinda’s body for a while?” Dante held the elevator door for her as Claire went inside the empty car.

  “Logan?” Claire echoed. “But Logan couldn’t think like that. I mean, if the theory is that he went crazy and ran around killing people, why would he go to all the trouble of planting a box on Belinda or messing with the estimated time of death?”

  “Why couldn’t it be Logan? You said he was one of the smartest kids in school.”

  “But he doesn’t need to supply himself with an alibi by screwing up the time of death. He already doesn’t have an alibi, since no one has seen him.” As they stepped outside, Claire thought of something else. “But someone who was at the reunion banquet would have a reason. Maybe they wanted people to think there was no way they could have done it because at the time of death, they were surrounded by three-hundred people.” Outside, even though the sun had already gone behind the hills, the heat was still oppressive. Claire’s mind was ticking away. She was missing something, something important, but what was it?

  “You need to get this lock fixed,” Dante said as he opened the trunk without benefit of a key and put his suitcase inside. “So you still think it was someone you went to school -.”

  Claire interrupted him. “An older man!” She threw her bag in, not even minding when a zipper opened and some clothes spilled out.

  “What?”

  “Jim said Cindy was also sleeping with an older man. Someone she really had to keep a big secret.” The last piece of the puzzle fell into place as she realized Belinda would probably have known all about Cindy’s secret lover. No wonder she had had to die. Claire slammed the hatchback closed. “He thought it was one of her parents’ friends, but -.”

  Someone called her name in a hoarse whisper. “Claire!”

  They both turned toward the sound, Dante stepping ahead of her. When a man’s head popped up over the edge of the adjacent car, Claire let out a muffled shriek.

  It was Logan. He still wore the clothes he had the night of Cindy’s murder, although the suit jacket and red tie were gone. Even in the rapidl
y fading light, it was clear he was a mess. His once-white dress shirt was now stained and splotched, his pants dirty at the knees. His hair stood up in tufts. Logan looked like he hadn’t bathed or slept indoors since Friday night.

  “I need to talk to you. I’ve been watching your car. I need to tell you something.” His voice was only a shade above a whisper, and his eyes kept darting around, although there was no one in sight.

  “I think I know what it is. You saw something Friday night, didn’t you?”

  Logan was silent, but Claire thought she could read the answer in his eyes.

  “What did you need to tell us, Logan?” Dante prompted. Claire could hear the tension in his voice. He still thought Logan was guilty of the killings. Overhead, there was a sudden rolling boom, and they all jumped before they realized it was just the first fireworks. Gold flickers spread across the sky. Behind the wooden stockade fence, the crowd shouted approval.

  When Logan didn’t reply, Claire said, “You know what happened to Cindy and Belinda, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer her directly. “I’ve tried to kill myself so many times. I’ve walked out into traffic. I’ve put a knife against my own throat while I watched in the mirror. Jumped into the river wearing my winter coat and a pair of work boots. But I’ve never tried to hurt someone. Never. You have to believe me, Claire.” His eyes blazed at her, lit up by the burst of silver fireworks. “Tell me you believe me.”

  She had to raise her voice to be heard over the thunder of the fireworks. “I believe you, Logan. So what do you want to tell me?”