Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

He found the inside door, put his hand on the knob, tilted his head toward the house, and listened. The radio was on. The most boring voice in the world said blue chips were down, tech stocks were down, futures all across the spectrum were looking down. Then he heard heels clicking across tile, just on the other side of the door, and he instinctively leaped back, but it was too late, the door was opening and Jessica McDermott Price was coming through.

She almost walked right into him. She wasn’t looking. She had her car keys in one hand and a garishly colored purse of some kind in the other. As she glanced up, Jude grabbed the front of her blouse, gathering a bunch of silky fabric in his fist, and shoved her back through the door.

Jessica reeled backward, tottering in her heels, then twisted an ankle, her foot coming out of one shoe. She let go of her small, unlikely purse. It fell at their feet, and Jude kicked it aside, kept going.

He drove her across the mudroom and into a sun-splashed kitchen in the rear of the house, and that was when her legs gave out. The blouse tore as she went down, buttons popping off and ricocheting around the room. One of them nailed Jude in the left eye—a black spoke of pain. The eye watered over, and he blinked furiously to clear it.

She slammed hard against the island in the center of the kitchen and grabbed the edge to stop her fall. Plates rattled. The counter was at her back—she was still turned to face Jude—and she reached behind her without looking and grabbed one of the plates and broke it over Jude’s head as he came at her.

He didn’t feel it. It was a dirty plate, and toast crusts and curds of scrambled egg went flying. Jude shot out his right arm, let the tire iron slip down, grabbed the upper end, and, holding it like a club, swatted her across her left kneecap, just below the hem of her skirt.

She dropped, as if both legs had been jerked out from under her. Started to shove herself up, and then Angus flattened her again, climbed on top of her, paws scrabbling against her chest.

“Get off her,” Marybeth said, and grabbed Angus by the collar, wrenched him back so hard he flipped over, rolling in one of those faintly ridiculous doggy somersaults, his legs kicking in the air for an instant before getting up on his paws again.

Angus heaved himself at Jessica once more, but Marybeth held him back. Bon ambled into the room, shot a guilty-nervous look at Jessica Price, then stepped over pieces of shattered plate and began snarfing up a toast crust.

The droning voice on the radio, a small pink boom box on the counter, said, “Book clubs for kids are a hit with parents, who look to the written word as a place to shelter their children from the gratuitous sexual content and explicit violence that saturate video games, television programs, and movies.”

Jessica’s blouse was torn open to the waist. She wore a lacy peach-colored bra that left the tops of her breasts exposed, and they shuddered and fell with her breath. She bared her teeth—was she grinning?—and they were stained with blood.

She said, “If you came to kill me, you ought to know I’m not afraid of dying. My stepfather will be on the other side to receive me with open arms.”

“I bet you’re looking forward to that,” Jude said. “I get the picture you and him were pretty close. Least until Anna was old enough and he started fucking her instead of you.”

37

One of Jessica McDermott Price’s eyelidstwitched irregularly, a drop of sweat in her lashes, ready to fall. Her lips, which were painted the deep, almost black red of bing cherries, were still stretched wide to show her teeth, but it wasn’t a grin anymore. It was a grimace of rage and confusion.

“You aren’t fit to speak of him. He scraped uglier messes than you off the heel of his boot.”

“You got that about half right,” Jude said. He was also breathing fast, but a little surprised by the evenness of his own voice. “You both stepped in a pile when you screwed with me. Tell me something, did you help him kill her, to keep her from talking about what he did? Did you watch while your own sister bled to death?”

“The girl who came back to this house wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t anything like her. My sister was already dead by the time you got through with her. You ruined her. The girl who came back to us was poison inside. The things she said. The threats she made. Send our stepdaddy to prison. Send me to prison. And Craddock didn’t harm a hair on her goddam disloyal head. Craddock loved her. He was the best, the best man.”

“Your stepdaddy liked to fuck little girls. First you, then Anna. It was right in front of me the whole time.”

He was bending over her now. He felt a little dizzy. Sunlight slashed through the windows above the sink, and the air was warm and close, smelled overpoweringly of her perfume, a jasmine-flavored scent. Just beyond the kitchen, a sliding glass door was partly open and looking out onto an enclosed back porch, floored in seasoned redwood and dominated by a table covered in a lace cloth. A gray longhaired cat was out there, watching fearfully from up on the table, fur bristling. The radio voice was droning now about downloadable content. It was like bees humming in a hive. A voice like that could hum you right to sleep.

Jude looked around at the radio, wanting to give it a whack with the tire iron, shut it off. Then he saw the photograph next to it and forgot about taking out the radio. It was an eight-by-ten picture in a silver frame, and Craddock grinned out from it. He wore his black suit, the silver-dollar-size buttons gleaming down the front, and one hand was on his fedora, as if he were about to lift it in greeting. His other hand was on the shoulder of the little girl, Jessica’s daughter, who so resembled Anna, with her broad forehead and wide-set blue eyes. Her sunburned face, in the picture, was an unsmiling, unreadable blank, the face of someone waiting to get off a slow elevator, a look that was entirely empty of feeling. That expression caused the girl to resemble Anna more than anything, Anna at the height of one of her depressions. Jude found the similarity disturbing.

Jessica was squirming back over the floor, using his distraction to try to get some distance between them. He grabbed her blouse again as she pulled away, and another button flew. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulders now, open to the waist. With the back of one arm, Jude wiped at the sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t done talking yet.

“Anna never came right out and said she’d been molested as a kid, but she worked so hard to avoid being asked it was kind of obvious. Then, in her last letter to me, she wrote that she was tired of keeping secrets, couldn’t stand it anymore. On the face of it, sounds like a suicidal statement. It took me a while to figure out what she really meant by it, that she wanted to get the truth off her chest. About how her stepfather used to put her into trances so he could do what he liked with her. He was good—he could make her forget for a while, but he couldn’t completely wipe out the memories of what he’d done. It kept resurfacing, whenever she’d have one of her emotional crack-ups. Eventually, in her teens, I guess, she tipped to it, understood what he’d been up to. Anna spent a lot of years running from it. Running from him. Only I put her on a train and sent her back, and she wound up facing him again. And saw how old he was and how close to dying. And maybe decided she didn’t need to run from anything anymore.

“So she threatened to tell what Craddock did to her. Is that right? She said she’d tell everyone, get the law after him. That’s why he killed her. He put her in one more trance and cut her wrists in the bath. He fucked with her head and put her in the bath and slashed her open and watched her bleed out, sat there and watched—”