Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (22 page)

“
Maybe now is a bad time,” he ventured, leaning forward. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I only know I want to help you in whatever way I can. Is there anyone you would like me to call to be with you? Or do you want me to go away and leave you alone?”

“
No,” Her answer crowded his query. “No, I don’t want to be alone. There’s only been a couple of people who have stopped by, and they don’t stay for long. Maybe people don’t know what to say. So don’t go. ‘Cause when I’m by myself, then I just keep thinking about it and thinking about it. If only I had gone out to my car a few minutes before. Maybe that would have been enough. Tyler told me they think that the dishwasher guy must have done it right before I came out there. If I had gone out twenty minutes earlier, maybe Cindy would have been still alive. Twenty minutes earlier and maybe I could have frightened that guy off. That’s all. Twenty minutes. And now Cindy’s dead.”

“
You can’t think about that,” he said, more harshly than he had intended. “You’ll just go crazy.” He himself had been awake most of the night, playing out different scenarios. Imagining himself reasoning with Cindy instead of panicking. Imagining that he had never agreed to go out in the parking lot at all. Imagining that twenty years ago, he hadn’t made the mistake of allowing himself to be seduced by her. “And look at what you did this morning. You were there for Cindy’s husband. If you hadn’t stopped him, he might have killed that guy. Then where would he be? His wife would still be dead and he would be doing ten to forty. He didn’t need that.”

“
I couldn’t let Kev - Kevin keep hitting him. Even though it makes me sick to think about that Mexican guy putting his hands around Cindy’s neck, I couldn’t just let him get killed in front of me. At least the judge let Kevin out on bail so Alexa didn’t have to be alone. She’s only eleven, you know.”

He steepled his fingers. “Maybe you should think about going home. It must be very stressful, being in the same place where - it all happened.”

“
What am I going to do if I go home? At least here, there are a few people who understand. Like you.” She gave him a wet-eyed, trusting look.

He leaned forward and gave her knee a pat, careful to avoid the place where she had wiped her hand. “That’s why I came by to see you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about what you’ve lost. You and Cindy were so close. Best friends for more than twenty years.”

“
Yes,” she agreed. “Yes.” She was starting to sob again in earnest, high-pitched little yips.

“
I can understand how upset you are. Especially when you think that you must have been out there right after it happened. Too bad you didn’t see anything.”

She shook her head. “That’s what Tyler kept saying. He kept bugging me, saying I must have seen something. But I told him I didn’t see anything.”

“
Nothing?” he asked, keeping his face carefully composed. “Maybe you saw something little. Something so small it didn’t mean anything. Maybe there was, I don’t know, a note by her body that blew away before the cops got there. Or you heard something, heard the guy’s voice, heard him talking to Cindy. Or maybe you saw this guy’s car, you know, saw his car when he drove away.”

“
A car.” Belinda sat up straighter on the bed. “I had forgotten about it until you said that, but I do remember a car going by right before I saw Cindy. I remember looking up, thinking it was going too fast, but then I saw the, you know, the body - and I stopped thinking about anything but that.” She looked at the phone. “I’ll have to call Tyler. He was talking about hypnotizing me.”

He remembered how, in a panic, he had started to drive away, before he realized that his absence would betray him, before he realized that the only possible solution was to go back and act as if nothing had happened. Now he put his hand out and touched Belinda’s wrist. “Hypnotize you?”

“
Yeah. He said a hypnotist can take you back in time and freeze everything in your mind. You know, like pressing the pause button on the VCR when you want to see the movie credits. He said they could make it be so that I could see the details around me for every step of that walk, turn my head to the left and see everything that in real life was just a blur. And like a video, he said you could zoom in and out. He said that you can read the license plates of cars, or see tiny scars on people’s faces.” She pulled her hand back and looked at him, some bit of intelligence flickering briefly in her eyes. “Why are you asking me all this?”

“
Cindy and I were, were close.” He folded his hands and dropped his gaze.

Her next words froze his blood. “I know how close you were,” Belinda said softly. “She told me about it. Maybe Cindy is looking down and smiling right now. You helped me remember about seeing that car. Maybe there was a reason you were supposed to come and talk to me today.”

“
I think you’re right. There is a reason.” He opened his arms to her and leaned forward. She paused, eyeing him uncertainly. He could tell Belinda thought he was going to hug her. Instead, he yanked on her bathrobe tie, pulling it from around her waist. “What?” she began, reflexively clutching the edges of her robe together. In one quick motion, he wrapped the tie around her neck.

He was on her so fast, his knees pinning her shoulders to the bed, there wasn’t even time for her to scream. He did what he had to do, but he turned his face away. He didn’t want to watch Belinda’s bulging eyes accuse him as her mouth twisted, silently screaming his name.

He spent the next five minutes wiping everything down with a wet washcloth he found in the sink. And while he worked, he had an idea. It entailed a bit of risk, but if it worked out the way he thought it would, then no one would suspect him. It was, he decided as he polished the doorknob, a perfectly wonderful idea. He giggled a little at the thought of it, until he caught himself And then, in silence, he leaned down and gathered up Belinda into his arms.

Chapter Twenty-five

Claire woke up from her second nap of the day feeling about as tired as she had when she lay down. With the curtains drawn, the room was dim and undefined, just like her thoughts. She had dreamed about Logan, that much she was sure of. The old Logan, skinny and funny and smart. Where was he? Why had he disappeared? Was he all right, or had Cindy’s death pushed him back into the place where the voices whispered in his ear?

The bedside table held a directory of hotel services, a
TV Guide
, postcards of glamorous-looking people playing slot machines (although from what Claire had seen, the instant the photos were finished the models had been replaced by elderly matrons in polyester), and the Minor phonebook. Claire had forgotten that an entire phone book - both yellow and white pages - could be less than an inch thick.

There were three entries under West - but none of them were Logan or started with an L. There was an E. West, though, who lived on Ash Creek Road. Claire couldn’t remember Logan’s mom’s name, but she did remember the name of her old street. When she was little, the older kids had called it “Ass Creek” and when Claire had repeated it, Jean had threatened to wash her mouth out with soap.

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.”