Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (20 page)

Jessica joined her at the buffet line. She raised one eyebrow. “So, what did you make of all that ‘Kevvie’ stuff?”

“
You mean what Belinda said? But they’ve known each other for probably twenty years.”

“
We’ve both known lots of people twenty years. But would you call any guy named Kevin, Kevvie, unless your relationship involved something more along the lines of ‘knowing’ in the Biblical sense? Besides, I happened to see them out in the hall last night, and they looked like they had been kissing.”

“
You’re kidding!” This did put a whole new light on things.

“
And there’s something else to consider. What happened was pretty convenient, don’t you think?”

“
What are you talking about?” Claire asked. “Convenient for who?”

“
They arrest a guy who swears he’s innocent, and the first thing that happens is that someone beats him unconscious. He’s certainly not doing any talking now. Do you think that could be because Cindy’s husband didn’t want anyone to hear what the guy had to say?”

MR E

Chapter Twenty-two

“
What’s next on the agenda?” Dante asked with a lazy grin. He bunched the pillow under his head. After breakfast, they had returned to their room, where Dante had given Claire a long, comforting hug. One thing had led to another—and after that to a much-needed hour-long nap.

“
Hmm?” Claire answered absently. Wearing only a pair of panties, she sat on a chair and paged through the annual, trying to put old names and faces together with the people she had seen last night and this morning. More and more names were coming back to her, even if they were now connected with people who bore very little resemblance to the teenagers she remembered.

“
I asked what we were supposed to do next.”

Claire looked up from the rows of painfully young faces. “We’re supposed to hang out at the amusement park - and there’s also a picnic and picnic-type games. It should be pretty low-key, at least until this evening.”

“
After what’s happened already, anything would be low-key,” Dante said. “Why are you looking at your annual?”
“I’m still trying to figure out why some of us got those boxes. We didn’t run in the same circles, we didn’t have the same friends and we certainly weren’t all friends.”

“
Same hobbies or after-school activities?”

“
No. I worked after school, and the rest did everything from ride horses to grow pot in the basement.”

Dante raised an eyebrow. “Did you all have one class in common?”

“
No. I probably was in one class with each one of those women, but we weren’t all together in any class that I can remember.” Claire thought of something else. “Although maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s not that we all took the same class - maybe it’s that somebody took classes with each of us.”

“
You certainly don’t look much alike.”

“
Not now. But maybe we did then.” Claire had marked the relevant pages with the free postcards the hotel provided, and now she got back on the bed and showed him her picture, as well as those for Cindy, Jessica, Nina, Rebecca, Sunny and Maria.

Dante slid the annual closer to him on the bed and turned it around. Again, Claire looked at the relevant photos as, one by one, he considered them. Maybe superficially there had been a certain look to them. Or maybe they had looked the way all young people look- slightly unfinished, open to the world.

“
The hair,” Dante finally said. “You all had hair in the lighter half of the spectrum. Even that Maria’s hair is a light brown. And it’s all longish, with these curled-up bangs.

“
I guess we did have pretty much the same haircut. There were only about three places to get your hair cut in Minor, so we might even have had the same hairdresser. I think that style was supposed to look like Farah Fawcett’s in
Charlie’s Angels
. It always took a while for fads to catch on in Minor. They are probably just now discovering those women’s suits with big padded shoulders.” Claire kept her voice light, but inside she felt a roll of nausea as she suddenly remembered Ted Bundy’s victims, close enough in looks to pass for sisters. What if Juan de Jesus wasn’t the real killer? What if Cindy had been murdered by a serial killer who telegraphed his intentions beforehand? Didn’t serial killers go after a certain type and then keep killing and killing and killing? She shook her head, but she couldn’t shake the thought away.

Dante continued to page through the annual, stopping when he came to the photos of the prom. “So who did you go with to the prom?” He must have seen her face tighten. “Or did you go?”

“
No. I went. With Logan. Neither of us had any real prospects of a date. We were both kind of on the edges of Minor. I was too tall, too skinny and too smart. And he was just too weird. He brought me this huge orchid wrist corsage. I still remember how strong it smelled every time we danced a slow dance. And when we slow danced, we were careful not to let our bodies touch very much. We’d always just been buddies, and that was the reason we went together. It was like a pact. If you can’t find anyone else to go with, we can go together. I think we were both taken aback a little bit to see the other person all dressed up, looking like a grown-up. We were pretty self-conscious.”

“
And was he, you know - normal that night?”

“
For the dance he was. Then later, we went to this party at someone’s house whose parents were out of town. Everyone was drunk off their butts on this stuff they called bug juice. You take a new plastic garbage can and fill it with Koolaid and whatever alcohol people can steal from their parents’ liquor cabinets. The result pretty much takes off the back of your head. It’s a miracle none of us ended up in the emergency room for alcohol poisoning. But it did change Logan. He got angry, crazy angry, and started fighting with some other boy. I tried to stop it, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He was shouting out, I guess at the voices.”

Claire still remembered that night clearly. The two young men had fought in the unlit back yard, scuffling in the darkness, the stars flung too far overhead to give off any light. When someone told her what was happening, she ran outside to try to stop it, her feet slipping in the grass where someone had vomited. Growling at Claire like a rapid dog, Logan had shaken off her arm and then returned to his fight. The ring of onlookers had watched silently, made sullen and immobile by drink. She could still hear the sounds of that night - grunts, the smacking sound of flesh on flesh, and all the while Logan shouting out that he wasn’t stupid, wasn’t bad, while the other boy mocked him, echoing everything he said - “I’m not stupid!” “You
are
stupid!” Not caring that Logan wasn’t reacting to anything that existed in the temporal world.

“
Is this the photo that was in Cindy’s box?” Dante asked.

“
Yes,” Claire agreed, glad of the interruption of her thoughts.

“
Who was she dancing with?”

“
Wade. They didn’t break up until just before we graduated.”

“
But this can’t be Wade,” Dante said. “That Wade guy’s blond. And whoever Cindy is dancing with in this picture is brunette.”

2N2R4

Chapter Twenty-three

Once they were in the amusement park, Claire didn’t have time to wonder who Cindy had been photographed with at the prom. She couldn’t walk more than a few feet without someone she barely remembered running up to her with squeal, then throwing their arms around her and hugging her tight. Around her, the same scene was repeated dozens of times, as a kind of giddiness infected the reunited graduates of Minor High Glad. Cries of reunion mingled with the cries of the carnival barkers touting three throws for only a dollar. People smiled for no reason and laughed at the slightest excuse. They had survived a brush with death and lived to tell the tale.

Overhead, the delighted screams of riders being whipped through the air only highlighted how lucky they all were to be alive and able to scream for the pleasure of it. Everyone’s kids were out in full force, which added to the energy. A few had even managed to coax their parents into trying out the roller coaster, with its double loop.

As she looked at the amusement park rides, Claire guessed it had been impossible to find many that fit the pioneer theme. Oh sure, there was a little kids’ ride where toddlers sat in plastic hollowed-out logs that floated slowly through a trough filled with six-inches of scummy water, but most of the rest was same kind of set-up you could see at any traveling carnival passing through a small town - bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, a ride called the Egg Beater that whirled madly through the air trailing screams. The rides were either meant for toddlers who were happy to go slowly in circles, or for teenagers whose bodies had not yet learned the meaning of the term “motion sickness.”

As she took in the ride operators, Claire wondered why Tyler hadn’t begun his questioning here. The scrawny, weathered carnies all had the furtive look of ex-cons. Smoking pinched-down hand-rolled cigarettes, they wore faded jeans and blue polyester short-sleeved shirts that exposed the tattoos on their wrinkled arms. And that was just the women.

Claire had planned on avoiding the rides, but when she turned around to say so to Dante, he was already coming back from the ticket booth with two green-colored wristbands in his hand.

“
Whole place is free to Minor graduates and their guests,” he told her, grinning as he slipped the band over her hand. “So what do you want to go on first?”

Claire didn’t like heights and she didn’t like speed and she didn’t like knowing someone else was at the controls. Although this pretty much ruled out her enjoying any amusement park ride, she also didn’t want to admit her fears to Dante. Finally, she picked what looked like the safest of the rides - the haunted coal mine. They climbed into a seat designed to look like a coal car and with a lurch they were in darkness. Dante took advantage of the absence of light to sneak in a kiss or two, so Claire missing seeing most of the leaping plastic skeletons and the wailing white-sheeted ghosts. When the car jerked back into the sunlight again, they broke apart. Next they rode the Ferris wheel. Claire endeavored to hide how the sway of the gondola holding them made her stomach lurch. She tried to keep her eyes closed, but Dante wanted her to point out as many Minor landmarks as she recognized. But the old Minor that Claire remembered seemed to be gone, swallowed up by subdivision after subdivision of pale-colored, two-story houses.

Dante’s next choice was the Round-Up, a contraption shaped like a giant metal wheel that held people in place by centrifugal force. Claire passed on his invitation, telling him to meet her in the picnic area. Over the picnic tables a big banner reading “Welcome Minor High Class of ‘79!” drooped in the heat. A buffet offered potato and macaroni salads (both the same unnatural shade of bright yellow), as well as corn-on-the-cob, plasticy-looking dinner rolls and pale slices of watermelon. Circling a grill the size of a garage door, a teenager wearing a paper chef’s hat flipped burgers and hot dogs.

The enervating heat pressed down on Claire. The effect was like going up into the attic and having someone drop a heavy quilt over your head. Drooping a little, she realized just how tired she was. Instead of attending this afternoon’s pool party, she decided she would take another nap, even longer than the one she had taken this morning.

“
Hey, there Claire. I hear you’re like some kind of super hero. I saw you go running this morning, and then I heard you helped that guy Kevin beat up. I’m proud of you for stepping forward. We don’t want to go back to the days where people dragged prisoners out of jail and hung them on the nearest tree - despite how guilty they look.”

Claire opened eyes she hadn’t realized had been closed. Sawyer was standing in front of her, smiling his easy grin. Beside Sawyer was his wife, who gave Claire an approving smile. Claire realized that she had yet to hear the woman speak. Looking at her hair-sprayed perfection, Claire straightened up, hoping she hadn’t been drooling on her T-shirt. Wiping her hand across her lips, she was relieved to find them dry. “I think I’m getting too old for this much excitement.”

“
Have you noticed lately that there are a lot less ancient people around, and a lot more people like us?”

“
Tell me about it. Jessica and Elaine and I were talking about that yesterday.” The three of them looked over at Jessica, who was regaling a dozen people with some story that had everyone looking interested. Having survived his bout on the Round-Up, even Dante was circling around. Jessica seemed to have rushed in to fill the popularity vacuum caused by Cindy’s death.

“
I heard that she’s on Broadway now that her soap has been canceled,” Sawyer said.
“It wasn’t canceled. Her character died. But, yeah, she’s acting on Broadway.” Claire couldn’t help feeling colorless in comparison.

“
And what about you? What are you doing these days?”

She wished she had a more glamorous answer. “I volunteer with SMART. It’s a program to teach at-risk kids to read.”

“
That’s a wonderful organization. I’ve made funding it the centerpiece of my agenda for children. That kind of early intervention saves so much trouble down the road.” The look in his hazel eyes warmed her. “Say, have you heard anything from Logan?”

Claire shook her head. “I was thinking of trying to call his mother later, see if I can get his phone number. He must have freaked out about seeing Cindy’s body and taken off. Maybe he was even afraid of being blamed.”