Heart-Shaped Box

  “I was out here that night. Friday night. In this parking lot.” He smacked his lips, reared his head back, then continued, “I was walking through the parking lot with a cigarette. The whole reunion thing was overwhelming. I just had to get away for a while. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong in the world anymore. I’ve never used an ATM card, a CD player, the Internet. There’s people from our high school with grandchildren, and I’ve never been on a date.”

  Claire nodded her head as she looked into his burning eyes. Above them, a firework exploded red, then another one, higher up, dripped white sparks, followed by a third one, higher still, that turned into blue pinwheels.

  “And then I heard someone running. I crouched down, I don’t know why. Well, I do know why. I was embarrassed. I had been talking to myself out there, trying to talk myself into going back. And then I see him go running by me, and he’s got this black rectangular thing in his hand.” His hands sketched a shape in the air. “It was a woman’s wallet.”

  “Who was it that you saw?” Dante asked.

  Claire answered for him. “It was Sawyer, wasn’t it?” Sawyer, the one who had told her that Logan had been violent toward women in the past. Sawyer, Cindy’s walk on the wild side.

  Nodding, Logan made a sound that was a cross between a bray and a moan. “I didn’t know what it meant then. But when I saw Cindy’s body, I knew who had killed her. And I knew I had to leave. Because who would believe me? The word of a crazy man against our next governor?” For a minute, there was only the sound of his labored breathing. “Do you know how much I looked up to him?”

  Dante asked, “Did he see you?” His shoulders had relaxed, and Claire could tell that he finally believed Logan.

  “No. I don’t think so. But if he had looked me in the eye, then he would have known. I couldn’t hide my thoughts from him.”

  This sounded too much like the old Logan to Claire. “I have to ask you something, Logan. Have you stopped taking your meds? Are you hallucinating again?”

  His answer was firm and his gaze didn’t waver. “No.”

  “Why now? Why are you telling us now?”

  “Because my mom told me about Dick being arrested. And I knew I couldn’t let that happen. You have to go with me, Claire. You have to tell them I’m not crazy anymore.” He opened his mouth to say something more.

  At first, before Logan crumpled to the ground, Claire thought the sound she had just heard was another firework. But then her brain put together the sound together with the red blossoming across Logan’s T-shirt, and she realized that he had been shot. Claire screamed, but the sound was lost in the explosion of fireworks and the gasps of the crowd behind them.

  In the next burst of fireworks, she saw Sawyer standing behind Logan’s fallen body, coolly taking aim at her and Dante with a handgun. At the same moment Dante jerked her to one side, pulling her down to safety behind a car. She felt more than heard the bullet whistle past her ear.

  “Come on and keep low!” Dante hissed in her ear, and they took off running in a half crouch, zigzagging between the rows of parked cars. It was impossible to shout for help, to hear their pursuer, or even to know if Sawyer were firing at them. The boom and hiss of the fireworks offered perfect concealment. The only thing they had going for them was that Sawyer would be hobbled by his old injuries - but his gun meant that he didn’t need to get close to kill them.

  All too soon, they came to the edge of the parking lot and a fence Claire had never noticed in the daytime. Both of them were crouched behind a red Ford Festiva, not the best car for hiding behind. To their left lay the glass doors of the hotel, radiating golden light one hundred yards away. Behind those doors lay help - but could they get to it before they were killed? Somewhere to their right was Sawyer. Dante raised himself a couple of inches and peeked through the car window, then settled back down again. His lips brushed against Claire’s ear. “We’ll have a better chance if we separate. You keep along the edge of the fence and I’ll make for the doors.”

  She put as much force into her whisper as she could. “No. We stay together.” She was afraid that Dante planned to sacrifice himself to save her.

  Their decision was made for them when a bullet sang above their heads, close enough that her ears rang. Dante tugged her to the right, and they ran down one row, up another, their heads bowed so low that they almost brushed their knees, left, then right, then left again, until finally Claire had no idea where they were in relation to anything. Where was the hotel, the fence line, or even the amusement park?

  Claire turned her head and realized that the only important thing to know where they were in relation to was Sawyer. Because where he was only thirty feet away, holding the gun straight out in front of his body with both hands. The round eye of the gun looked back at her. She lunged forward frantically, praying she could move an inch or two out of the path of the bullet. The gun cracked just as the toe of her sneaker caught on something. Claire landed in a heap.

  “No!” Dante screamed from behind her. She heard him run past, but whatever happened next was covered by the sound of a firework exploding overhead in a shower of silver sparks.

  Frantic as a bug on its back, Claire struggled to her feet. As she pushed herself up, the fingers of her right hand caught the edge of whatever had tripped her, something cool and slender that glinted in the light of the fireworks. A broken car antenna. She turned and ran after Dante.

  Dante was on the ground, with Sawyer on top of him. Sawyer’s back was to Claire. The gun was in Sawyer’s fist, but Dante’s hand was wrapped around the barrel, so that it pointed up, midway between the two men. As Claire watched in horror, Sawyer began to force the gun downward, twisting it so it pointed right at Dante’s head.

  Now thankful for the noise of the fireworks, Claire ran up behind Sawyer, looped the antennae around his neck, and pulled. Sawyer gurgled a scream, reaching up with one hand to try to pull the antenna away from his neck. The thought flashed through Claire’s mind that this must be how Sawyer had felt while he strangled Cindy and Belinda. She began to drag him off Dante.

  And then the antenna snapped in half.

  And that changed everything. It left Sawyer with a bloody furrow on either side of his neck. It let Claire go sprawling backward, the two broken halves of the antenna in her hand. It let Dante succeed in bucking the other man off. And it somehow left Sawyer sitting on the ground holding the gun.

  He looked at them, shaking his head, and to Claire’s amazement, a smile played about his lips. Then, still smiling, Sawyer shrugged and leveled the gun at her again, not even bothering to get to his feet. There was no place to go, no hiding place, no bargain to make, no options left. She squeezed her eyes closed, wondering how much it would hurt, or if she would feel any pain at all. She realized she couldn’t die like this. There must be something she could do. Maybe if she rushed Sawyer, she could buy time for Dante, if not herself.

  All this had taken only a second, but when Claire opened her eyes again, Logan was staggering up behind Sawyer. In his upraised hand was Claire’s jack. There were still about fifteen feet separating them. Was there anyway she could buy time? Could she claim she was pregnant, tell Sawyer she had always loved him, offer him money? Then Dante shouted, “I thought you were for gun control!” Claire realized he was trying to draw Sawyer’s attention.

  Sawyer’s grin broadened and his gun never wavered. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

  The tire iron caught him right above the temple. Then Logan collapsed on top of the ex-teacher he had admired so much.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Friday, July 2, 11:40 pm

  He was about ready to leave - it was nearly one in the morning and he wasn’t a kid any more, despite what some of the others at the reunion seemed to think - when she caught his arm outside the restrooms,

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

  Cindy was even drunker than she had been earlier, he realized, as he looked at her red, red mou
th and the smear of lipstick across her front teeth. She held his arm for balance as much as to get his attention, although he noted that she didn’t miss the opportunity to press her cleavage up against him.

  “We need to talk, don’t we?” Her wink was as broad as a vaudevillian’s.

  “We do?” he echoed. An icy shard of fear pierced his heart. There was a good reason he had been with groups of people all day, never alone, never accessible. He didn’t want any old memories being trotted out.

  “I got what you sent me.

  “Sent you?” Her words put him off balance. “But I didn’t...”

  “Come on - let’s not talk in here.” She pulled him along behind her, through the brass-bound glass door, out into the warm night, past the silent sleeping rows of cars. He let himself be towed, fearing any resistance would attract the kind of attention he most definitely didn’t want.

  In a darkened corner at the far edge of the parking lot, she was in his arms before he knew it, pressing herself against him. For a second he met her with lips open in surprise. But when her tongue slipped into his mouth, he put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her away.

  “Cindy, I’m sorry, but this isn’t” -.

  “Isn’t what?” Her smile faltered.

  “Some things are better left in the past.”

  “What are you talking about? You send me this box with our picture in it, then you act like you don’t even want to know me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Their picture? They had never been photographed together, he was sure of it. Such a thing could have ended everything.

  She pressed a wooden box in his hand. It was shaped like a heart, with a hinged lid. And when he thumbed it open, he saw Cindy’s face, and a sliver of the back of the dark-haired man who held her in his arms.

  “This is me?” he asked. Shot from the back. Shot in the back is more like it. He never knew that picture was taken.

  “Remember?” Smiling at the memory, she took the box back from him. “I was with Wade that night. But I pulled you out on the floor and made you dance with me. Just one dance. When I got the package you sent and saw what was inside, it was like it all happened yesterday. Remember,” she said, wobbling on her high heels, grinning at him sloppily, her lust reasserting itself as she pressed herself against him again, “remember that time in the art supply room?” In her heels Cindy was only an inch or two shorter than he was. Now she stepped behind him and kissed the back of his neck. “Remember how you kissed me like this and you wouldn’t let me turn around and then you put your hands up under my shirt and ...”

  He spun around to face her. “No, I don’t remember, Cindy. I don’t want to remember. That was all a long time ago. I’m married now. We both are. We were just kids then.”

  “Kids?! You weren’t any kid. You were a man. That’s why I liked you better than those boys in school. You knew what you were doing. Remember when we used to sit underneath that old pine tree or fir tree or whatever in the hell it was? The one where the branches came all the way to the ground like a tent? And we would get high and then you would take off all my clothes piece by piece and just look at me.” Her voice softened with the memory.

  He had kind of forgotten some of this himself. This did not seem good at all. The press would have a field day if she came to them. Did Top Gov. Candidate Have Sex, Use Drugs with H.S. Girl?. And maybe she picked up on his thoughts, because the next thing she said was, “Think of that Kennedy, the one who was putting it to the baby-sitter. That was the end of his political career, wasn’t it?”

  “Cindy,” he appealed to her, knowing already that his tone wasn’t right. “come on, sshh, let’s not make waves.”

  She was angry now, eyes blazing, breathing even more audibly than when she was aroused. “I could make some waves. I could make some goddamn waves. I could tell them all about how you pressured me to get an abortion, how I was never able to have kids after that!”

  In the distance, a car door slammed. They both froze for a second.

  Then Cindy said, loud enough to be overhead, deliberately provocative, “So I’m not good enough for you to fuck anymore, is that it, Sawyer? But I was in high school, wasn’t I? I was good enough for you when I was seventeen!”

  With every word, his panic rose. His ears filled with the sound of his own heartbeat - but did he also hear footsteps? He grabbed her to calm her down, then clapped his hand over her mouth. Not hard, no, but more as a reminder that they were in a very public place. “Be quiet,” he hissed into her ear. “Someone’s coming.”

  Instead of doing what he asked, Cindy struggled harder and let out a muffled scream. Worse and worse. He couldn’t have people finding them like this, not when Cindy was angry and feeling rejected. She’d shout out the old sordid details to the next person who came along. He pulled her back against his chest, his left hand still over her mouth, and wrapped his right arm around her shoulders. She was fighting in earnest now.

  “Hush,” he tried to whisper in her ear, to calm her the way he used to calm the children when they were babies. Sometimes a whisper worked better than a shout. “Hush.”

  But she wouldn’t or couldn’t hush, instead intent on fighting him. He could feel the screams trying to push their way out of her throat, and all he could think of was making her be quiet, before everything went even more horribly off-track. If he could just make her be quiet, then he could explain it to her, explain that things were different then, that times were different then, that he had gone to war a boy but come back a man who had seen too much and done too much and who sometimes needed to seek sweet solace in the arms of a girl who knew nothing of the world.

  And suddenly Cindy was unmoving in his arms, too still, her body slumping forward. Dead weight.

  And finally, he did what he must do, almost mechanically. His memories were not of twenty years before, but of nearly thirty, and the ghosts that accompanied him wore black and came barely to his shoulder. In Vietnam he learned to separate what it was necessary for his body to do from what his heart was feeling. He took his heart and put it away in a box, to keep it safe. He learned that accidents happen. That there was more than one way to consider any given situation.

  Before he walked away, he leaned down toward Cindy. “Hush,” Sawyer said again, and now she couldn’t contradict him. “Hush.” Then he walked away.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  In the next few days, the facts of what had happened were teased out, then pieced together with a few guesses to make a complete story. Sawyer’s two killings seemed not to have been premeditated, but rather the result of a sudden terror that secrets were about to be revealed. The first murder had covered up his two-decade old affair with a high school girl. Like many another killer before him, Sawyer had found murdering one person had led him to kill again, for fear that the first crime would be revealed.

  Once his killing fear had passed, though, he had proven adept at covering up his tracks. He had ripped at Cindy’s clothes the way a rapist would, then left her wallet where it would be sure to be found by the banquet staff. But once Cindy’s body had been found, Sawyer realized that his fingerprints might be in places they shouldn’t be. Pretending to worry about the dead woman’s modesty, he had leaned down to pull her shirt closed - and thus created an explanation for any prints that might be found on her buttons, or even the cloth of the shirt itself. It was the same reason he had been sure to touch - in front of witnesses - the heart-shaped box Cindy had been holding in her hand.

  In the case of Belinda, Sawyer had used several ruses to throw off the scent. First, he had read enough crime reports to know that the time of death would be estimated by taking the body’s liver temperature, which would cool at a given rate. His hope had been to interrupt that cooling process long enough to provide himself with an alibi. Hiding Belinda’s body under the bed, he had turned up the heat as high as it would go. Sawyer had guessed that Belinda’s daughter would return, sooner or later, and that she would both turn down the
heat and note that her mother was gone.

  Later in the evening he had snuck out of the dance for five minutes, the stolen key card in his back pocket, just long enough to arrange Belinda’s body on the bed, heart-shaped box in hand. Sawyer knew, from Jessica’s boasting, where he could procure a box. (His own annual had yielded the necessary picture.) He got help from an unexpected corner when Vanessa borrowed Belinda’s leather jacket, and was later identified as her own mother on a blurry surveillance tape.

  It looked like Sawyer’s wife, Elaine, might be charged as an accessory, for she had been the one who had stolen Jessica’s box from her purse after having offered to keep an eye on it while the other woman went to the bathroom. Elaine now claimed to have been told by Sawyer that he wanted the box so he turn it in to the police. She had bolstered her claim by filing for divorce and moving out.

  As for Logan, the doctor said he would have an ugly scar and lose some of the range of motion in his right arm. Tyler had pulled a few strings and arranged for a job to be waiting at the Minor library for Logan as soon as he was discharged from the hospital. When Claire and Dante had visited him in the hospital, Logan had confided in them his dream to become a social worker. Somehow, Claire had a feeling - or maybe it was only a hope - that he might make it.

  ###

  “Just one more kiss,” Dante requested. The flight attendant standing at the airport gate ten feet away made a show of looking at her watch. She had already made the last call for boarding, but it would be a long six weeks before Claire or Dante saw each other again. Closing her eyes to block out the other woman’s face, Claire complied with Dante’s request. Finally, she came up for air.

  “I never told you, but I thought the reason you spent so much time talking to Jessica was that you had a crush on her.”

  Dante laughed. “I know a million Jessicas in New York. They all worry too much about what people will think about them to be who they are. And you, well, you talk to waiters and women in supermarket lines and strange dogs. I kind of like that in a girl.”