Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (29 page)

Down on the ground, she saw four people pushing their way through the crowd, running whenever there was a bit of open ground. She squinted. Claire and Dante, accompanied by Tyler and another cop in uniform. As Jessica watched, Claire pointed up in their direction. The two police officers drew their guns, and the crowds began to part before them.

“
No.” The word was torn from Jessica. Had Richard told Cindy how much he admired her, sweet-talked Belinda until she let him into her room? Shaking her hand until he finally freed it, Jessica scooted back as far from him as she could. The gondola swayed under them. Her stomach lurched as the car began to fall forward, toward the ground

“
No, Jessica!” Richard cried, his face twisting. He only had eyes for her, not for the policemen who were too far away to offer her any help. “You don’t understand!”

The car was now at the lowest point in its revolution. Making a split-second decision, Jessica put her head down and ducked under the silver restraining bar. She looked to the operator, but his attention was caught by the people running toward him. The platform was only a few feet beneath her, but the car was beginning to ascend. She had to jump now, before it was too late. She put her right hand on the edge of the car. With a sob, Jessica vaulted her legs over.

And was stopped short as Richard leaned forward and grabbed her left arm, shouting, “What are you doing?” Jessica had braced herself for the ten-foot fall, but now she was halted with a jerk that felt as thought it would rip off her arm. The car continued its inexorable rise as she hung, dangling. Red-hot pain sliced through her arm and shoulder. The two people in the car below them were screaming for the ride operator to stop while they stared at her dangling feet. But the Ferris wheel continued to turn. The momentum of her leap had turned her body into a pendulum that swayed from side to side. The car rocked violently back and forth in response. With a pop, she felt something give in her shoulder.

Jessica’s focus narrowed to her arm, to the ring of pain around her shoulder and the second ring where Richard’s hand dug desperately into her arm. Originally he had grabbed her forearm, but now his hand had slid until it was just above her wrist. And, she realized, she was still slipping within his grasp.

“
Hold still!” she heard him shout. There was no one whose eyes she could look into, no one she could plead with or gain reassurance from. All she could see were the giant spidery red arms of the Ferris Wheel, and the backs of the baskets directly opposite. As their gondola rose higher and higher, she saw that the ride operator was finally, frantically pulling at a lever.

With a tremendous lurch, the ride came to an abrupt stop.

“
Jessica! No!” she heard Richard scream, just as she was torn from his grasp. And then the ground was rushing up to meet her.

She had a split second to think that they would find her just as broken as Belinda and Cindy. And then Jessica didn’t have any time to think about anything else.

Chapter Thirty-five

After the crowd watched Jessica struggle with Richard and then fall to her death, it was all Tyler and the other cop could do to prevent a lynching. While the two men trained their guns on Richard, the ride operator followed their shouted instructions and let off the passengers, car by car. Sobbing and staggering, the riders got off, averting their gaze from the horrific sight of Jessica’s broken body. As his gondola slowly made its way around the circle, Richard sat slumped, his hands over his eyes.

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.

“
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.