Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (19 page)

A note propped on her pillow told Claire to meet Dante in the dining room. Filling the sink with cold water, she put her T-shirt to soak. Scarlet billowed in the water, so much that the whole sink soon seemed as if it were filled with undiluted blood. Seeing it, Claire’s empty stomach convulsed. She swallowed hard. Her whole body was trembling, shaking with the need for food, sleep, and at least a few hours without the sight of bodies, real or imagined.

She took quick shower, averting her eyes from the sink when she pulled back the curtain. After dressing in tan cargo shorts, Birkenstocks and a scoop-necked white T-shirt, Claire went back to the Feed Trough.

At first she looked for Dante by scanning the now nearly full room for a dark-haired man eating alone. She finally spotted him at a table with three other people. Claire blinked. Twenty years ago, no one would have imagined Tomisue Borders and Alex Fogel sharing a table. Tomisue had been the daughter of a mill rat, and even at fourteen she had possessed a reputation, breasts of startling proportions and tiny blue eyes raccooned with mascara. Alex had been a star athlete, equally good at football, basketball and baseball - enough to guarantee his popularity at Minor.

It was more than likely that the two of them had never spoken in high school, but now they seemed to be having a good time. Looking well-fed and sleek, Alex was dressed in an expensive golf shirt and slacks. A huge diamond ring glittered on his pinkie. Tomisue sat next to a man who was clearly with her, since they looked like a matching set, both blond and denim clad. While Claire watched, a smiling Tomisue said something to Alex, shaking her exaggerated mane of blonde hair, teased tawny curls streaked with platinum. She lightly punched Alex’s shoulder, which just made everyone laugh harder.

Tomisue pushed her chair back and went to the buffet line, passing by Claire without noticing her. Her petite frame was balanced on high-heeled cowboy boots, and from the aroma that accompanied her it was easy to guess that the only reason she fit in her tiny jeans was that she chain-smoked three packs a day.

“
Good morning,” Claire said as she pulled out the empty chair beside Dante. Everyone said hello back, including Tomisue’s companion. His collar-length hair was blonde, too, and also dyed, although not as aggressively. His denim shirt was open to the nipple line, and he wore a gold pendant.

“
I’ll give you the rundown,” Dante said, “and spare you the trouble of asking. Alex here,” Alex inclined his head with exaggerated graciousness, “is currently managing a golf club in Phoenix. And Tomisue” - she smiled as she sat down, her plate stacked high with pancakes - “is a checker at that Safeway store we passed on the way here. And next to Tomisue is her husband, who’s a welder. His name used to be Tommy, which caused some confusion, but now it’s The New K103 FM. The New K103 FM, I’d like you to meet Claire Montrose.”

“
What?” Claire thought she had been following the conversation, but clearly she had been wrong.

The New K103 FM spoke around a mouthful of quiche. “It was a contest. I changed my name for Super Bowl tickets.”

“
Ticket,” Tomisue corrected him around a mouthful of pancakes. “You won one ticket. We still had to pay for my ticket and the airfare.”

“
And you had to keep the name?” Claire asked. “Even after the contest was over?”

He shrugged. “It was part of the contract I had to sign to get the tickets.” Tomisue tossed him a look. “Ticket. But everyone always remembers me now. That didn’t used to happen before.”

“
What do people call you for short?” Claire asked.

“
Mostly K. Or the K-man. Or if they forget my name, they call me ‘Super Bowl guy’ or ‘radio station guy.’”

Claire sneaked an embarrassed glance at Dante, but he didn’t look as if he thought these people were weird. And, she guessed, they weren’t any weirder than the people he knew in New York. After all, was it any stranger to christen yourself after a radio station than it was after an insect? Dante’s friend Ant had done just that, and ever since the CD from Ant’s band Muck had been in the Billboard Top 100.

“
You just missed the meeting,” Dante said. “They took a vote to see if people wanted to cancel the reunion.”

“
And what was the result?” Claire asked.

“
It’s still on,” Alex said. “A lot of us didn’t fly back here just to turn around and fly home again. Besides, if Cindy were here, she would want us to do it. She always liked a party.” Tomisue and her husband nodded solemnly.

“
I told Dante that I saw you out there with Rachel Munroe,” Tomisue said. “Helping that guy that killed Cindy. Is he gonna live?”

Dante touched her hand under the table. He quirked an eyebrow at her, and she could tell he was concerned with how she was feeling after seeing so much violence in less than twelve hours.

“
I don’t know. He’s unconscious. Rachel was mostly worried that he might have some kind of head injury.”

“
Cindy’s husband clocked him pretty hard,” The New K103-FM said.

“
I think I’m glad I wasn’t there to see it,” Dante said. He turned to Claire. “When Tomisue told me what happened, I went back and tried to find you, but everyone was already gone. You doing okay?”

Claire gave a shrug. She didn’t know how she feeling.

After an exaggerated scan of the room, Alex leaned forward. In a low voice, he said, “I was kind of surprised to see who they arrested.”

“
Then who did you think did it?” Tomisue asked.

Claire could tell that Alex was the kind of guy who liked to gossip, all winks and suggestive nods. Had she known that about him in high school? Had she ever talked to him in high school?

“
Well, Wade was pretty mad at Cindy back when she broke up with him.”

Claire stated the obvious. “But that was twenty years ago.”

“
Yeah, but a couple of people told me that they saw him and her fighting last night, not that long before she was killed,” Alex said, ticking his index finger. “Then a little while later I happened to be looking for Wade, and I couldn’t find him. Wherever he was, he wasn’t in the Hoe-Down Room.” Now his middle finger joined his index. “And about ten minutes later I went into the bathroom and someone was in the handicap stall, choking and moaning. And you know what I saw when I looked under the door?” Around the table, heads shook or shoulders shrugged. “Cole-Haan tasseled loafers.”

“
So?” The New K103 FM asked.

“
So! Those are the same kind Wade was wearing last night. I noticed them because I’ve got a pair just like them at home in my closet.”

“
But what was he doing?” Tomisue wrinkled her nose.

“
Before this guy got arrested, I was thinking maybe Wade argued with Cindy, accidentally killed her, and then got sick. See, if we won a game, he used to swagger around afterwards. But if we lost, he would hide in the bathroom, puking his guts out - and making noises just like that.”

Tomisue shook her head. “I had my money on that guy, Logan.” She must have caught the look on Claire’s face. “Of course now I know that isn’t what happened.”

Claire’s stomach growled loud enough that everyone could hear it. “Excuse me. I’d better go feed the beast.”

Tomisue cocked her head. “You mean you’re pregnant?”

Claire felt herself flush to her hairline. The curse of the fair-skinned. “No, no. I just meant my stomach was empty.” The smells of eggs, potatoes and Sterno mingled as she waited her turn for the breakfast buffet. Tomisue’s question made her pay more attention to the children in the room than she normally would have. Her classmates all seemed to have offspring of one kind or another - from kids who were on the verge of graduating high school themselves to babes in arm. A women sitting in a corner of the room, the wife of a guy Claire vaguely remembered from her history class, was lumpily pregnant. In Minor, though, the pregnant woman was in a definite minority. People tended to have their kids young.

If it weren’t for Susan Sarandon and the fact that Claire’s new ob/gyn had confided that she had had both her kids after she turned 35, Claire would have felt depressed as she looked at the evidence of her classmates’ fecundity. It was one thing to be a late bloomer and it was another to wither on the vine.

As Claire was walking back to her table, someone called her name. It was Rachel, damp again from another shower, her hair a mass of black and silver springy tendrils.

“
I’d like you to meet my husband, Chad. He’s a pediatrician, too. We’re in practice together.” Chad, a man with short, dark receding hair, half-stood to take her hand in a firm grip. “And these are my kids, Jeremy and Melanie.” The kids, Claire guessed, were about five and seven, with bright blond hair that matched neither of their parents. Rachel smiled at her children, then turned her attention to Claire. Her face wore what Claire imagined was the assessing gaze of a physician. “I wanted to see how you were feeling after what happened this morning - and what happened last night.”

“
All right, I guess. The whole thing just doesn’t seem real. None of it. Not finding Cindy, and not seeing her husband beat that guy up.”

“
I appreciated that you were there to help this morning. Everyone else was ready to let that guy die.”

Claire shrugged, feeling she had been little more than a pair of gloved hands to hold various bandages as Rachel taped them into place while they waited for the ambulance. After it had screamed off with the still unconscious Juan deJesus, Rachel had made sure that Claire washed her hands and even her knees with soap and hot water. Then she had examined them closely, looking for the tiniest cut or scrape that might have exposed Claire to HIV if the dishwasher carried it. Claire didn’t know who had been more relieved to find that her skin was unbroken - her or Rachel.

Claire realized that Rachel might know the answer to a question she had considering since the night before. “Since you work with kids, I was wondering if you see many with schizophrenia? Isn’t that when you get it - when you’re a teenager?”

Rachel nodded. “Probably all pediatricians follow a certain number of patients with schizophrenia. You’re thinking of Logan, aren’t you? I heard everyone was talking about him last night. The high-risk years are fifteen to twenty-five. They used to blame it on parenting - especially the mother. They called them ‘refrigerator mothers.’ Now we know it’s genetic. To be schizophrenic is to be terribly isolated. I wish I had had more understanding back when we were in school. Instead, like everyone else, I avoided Logan.”

Again, Claire found herself wishing that she had done more for Logan, not let him slip from the grasp of friendship. “People last night were ready to blame Logan for Cindy’s death. Do you think he could be violent?”

Rachel shook her head. “Very few schizophrenics are violent - only about four percent. Those are the ones you hear about, but that’s one reason you hear about those incidents - because they are so unusual.” Looking thoughtful, she added, “However, if drugs or alcohol are involved, then the probability of violence skyrockets.” Claire wondered if Rachel had remembered the squat glass in Logan’s hand last night, complete with a slice of lime. “For the most part, though, it’s not that schizophrenics are a danger to others, it’s that they are a danger to themselves. For some reason, most of their hallucinations ridicule them, put them down, frighten them.”

Claire nodded. “I remember once when I was with him and he was yelling out that he wasn’t ugly, wasn’t stupid. It didn’t matter how much you argued with him - he still heard that. It must have been so hard to have those voices always battering at him.”

Chad had been listening intently. Now he leaned forward. “At the same time, to be schizophrenic is to have a strange sort of power. Some of my patients tell me that schizophrenia makes you feel special. Everywhere you go, people are talking about you. You turn on David Letterman, he’s talking about you. You go to the shopping mall and someone’s on the loudspeaker, talking about you. Sure, they are hallucinations. But they feel real. Some people find they can’t give that specialness up. In some ways, it’s kind of hard to settle for ordinary life where no one is talking about you, where you’re not powerful, not special.”

Claire thought of Logan’s new life - friendless, working at Arby’s surrounded by co-workers who could have been his children. Was there enough in this life to keep him from returning to his old one? “Logan did say something about missing the voices. He said it was hard to get used to them being gone.”

Rachel nodded. “That’s one reason people stop taking their meds. Another is the side effects. We just got this new class of drugs, but before that people were really zoned. I noticed Logan still has trouble with lip smacking. The scientific name is tardive dyskinesia. That’s probably left over from the old meds.”

“
But he’s on the new ones,” Claire objected.

“
We’ve found that some people still have the old side effects even after they change meds.” She looked at her children, then dropped her voice so that they couldn’t hear. “Sometimes when I look at them, I find myself praying that nothing will go wrong inside them.”

As Claire took her leave, she thought that must be one of the unwanted gifts of becoming a doctor - a familiarity with all the ways your body could betray you. When she got back to her table, Claire found that her scrambled eggs and pancakes, never that hot to begin with, were now cool. She ate them anyway, while Dante watched with an amused smile. Sometimes he teased her, telling her she had an appetite like a trucker’s. Maybe if Claire had learned how to do the ‘girl’ things, learned how to push away a half-eaten salad, learned how to pick at the main course and refuse the desert, she wouldn’t need to run to keep her figure. But she would rather eat what she wanted and exercise, if the alternative were going through life without tasting, without savoring, without sweating. In fact, Claire decided, she deserved a cinnamon roll. She asked Dante if he wanted one, but he waved her off with a laugh.