Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

He frowned. She had a perfectly ordinary sort of name, but for some reason it caught his attention. He didn’t think he had ever heard it before, but it was so inherently forgettable it was hard to be sure.

Jude put the receiver to his ear and nodded. Danny pressed the button again to take it off hold.

“Jessica. Hello. Judas Coyne.”

“How’d you like your suit, Mr. Coyne?” she asked. Her voice carried a delicate southern lilt, and her tone was easy and pleasant…and something else. There was a hint in it, a sweet, teasing hint of something like mockery.

“What did he look like?” Judas asked. He had never been one to take his time getting to the point. “Your stepfather.”

“Reese, honey,” the woman said, talking to someone else, not Jude. “Reese, will you turn off that TV and go outside?” A girl, away in the background, registered a sullen complaint. “Because I’m on the phone.” The girl said something else. “Because it’s private. Go on, now. Go on.” A screen door slapped shut. The woman sighed, a bemused, “you know kids” sound, and then said to Jude, “Did you see him? Why don’t you tell me what you think he looks like, and I’ll say if you’re right.”

She was fucking with him. Fucking with him.

“I’m sending it back,” Jude told her.

“The suit? Go ahead. You can send the suit back to me. That doesn’t mean he’ll come with it. No refunds, Mr. Coyne. No exchanges.”

Danny stared at Jude, smiling a puzzled smile, his brow furrowed in thought. Jude noticed then the sound of his own breath, harsh and deep. He struggled for words, to know what to say.

She spoke first. “Is it cold there? I bet it’s cold. It’s going to get a lot colder before he’s through.”

“What are you out for? More money? You won’t get it.”

“She came back home to kill herself, you asshole,” she said, Jessica Price of Florida, whose name was unfamiliar to him, but maybe not quite as unfamiliar as he would’ve liked. Her voice had suddenly, without warning, lost the veneer of easy humor. “After you were done with her, she slashed her wrists in the bathtub. Our stepdaddy is the one who found her. She would’ve done anything for you, and you threw her away like she was garbage.”

Florida.

Florida. He felt a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach, a sensation of cold, sick weight. In the same moment, his head seemed to come clear, to shake off the cobwebs of exhaustion and superstitious fear. She had always been Florida to him, but her name was really Anna May McDermott. She told fortunes, knew tarot and palmistry. She and her older sister both had learned how from their stepfather. He was a hypnotist by trade, the last resort of smokers and self-loathing fat ladies who wanted to be done with their cigarettes and their Twinkies. But on the weekends Anna’s stepfather hired himself out as a dowser and used his hypnotist’s pendulum, a silver razor on a gold chain, to find lost objects and to tell people where to drill their wells. He hung it over the bodies of the ill to heal their auras and slow their hungry cancers, spoke to the dead with it by dangling it over a Ouija board. But hypnotism was the meal ticket: You can relax now. You can close your eyes. Just listen to my voice.

Jessica Price was talking again. “Before my stepfather died, he told me what to do, how I should get in touch with you and how to send you his suit and what would happen after. He said he’d see to you, you ugly, no-talent motherfucker.”

She was Jessica Price, not McDermott, because she had married and was a widow now. Jude had the impression her husband had been a reservist who bought it in Tikrit, thought he recalled Anna telling him that. He wasn’t sure Anna had ever mentioned her older sister’s married name, although she’d told him once that Jessica had followed their stepfather into the hypnotism trade. Anna had said her sister made almost seventy thousand dollars a year at it.

Jude said, “Why did I have to buy the suit? Why didn’t you just send it to me?” The calm of his own voice was a source of satisfaction to him. He sounded calmer than she did.

“If you didn’t pay, the ghost wouldn’t really belong to you. You had to pay. And, boy, are you goin’ to.”

“How’d you know I’d buy it?”

“I sent you an e-mail, didn’t I? Anna told me all about your sick little collection…your dirty little oh-cult pervert shit. I figured you couldn’t help yourself.”

“Someone else could’ve bought it. The other bids—”

“There weren’t any other bids. Just you. I put all those other bids up there, and the biddin’ wasn’t goin’ to be done until you made an offer. How do you like your purchase? Is it what you were hopin’ for? Oh, you have got some fun ahead of you. I’m goin’ to spend that thousand dollars you paid me for my stepdad’s ghost on a bouquet for your funeral. Goin’ to be one hell of a nice spread.”

You can just get out, Jude thought. Just get out of the house. Leave the dead man’s suit and the dead man behind. Take Georgia for a trip to L.A. Pack a couple suitcases, be on a flight in three hours. Danny can set it up, Danny can…

As if he had said it aloud, Jessica Price said, “Go ahead and check into a hotel. See what happens. Wherever you go, he’ll be right there. When you wake up, he’ll be settin’ at the foot of your bed.” She was starting to laugh. “You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth.”

“So Anna was living with you when she killed herself?” he said. Still in possession of himself. Still perfectly calm.

A pause. The angry sister was out of breath, needed a moment before she could reply. Jude could hear a sprinkler running in the background, children shouting in the street.

Jessica said, “It was the only place she had. She was depressed. She’d always been bad depressed, but you made it worse. She was too miserable to go out, get help, see anyone. You made her hate herself. You made it so she wanted to die.”

“What makes you think she killed herself because of me? You ever think it was the pleasure of your company drove her over the edge? If I had to listen to you all day, I’d probably want to slash my wrists, too.”

“You’re going to die—” she spat.

He cut her off. “Think up a new line. And while you’re working on that, here’s something else to think about: I know a few angry souls myself. They drive Harleys, live in trailers, cook crystal meth, abuse their children, and shoot their wives. You call ’em scumbags. I call ’em fans. Want to see if I can find a few who live in your area to drop in and say hello?”

“No one will help you,” she said, voice strangled and trembling with fury. “The black mark on you will infect anyone who joins your cause. You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.” Reciting it through her anger, as if it were a speech she had rehearsed, which perhaps she had. “Everyone will flee from you or be undone like you will be undone. You’re goin’ to die alone, you hear me? Alone .”

“Don’t be so sure. If I’m going down, I might like some company,” he said. “And if I can’t get help, maybe I’ll come see you myself.” And banged the phone down.

8

Jude glared at the black phone,still gripped in his white-knuckled hand, and listened to the slow, martial drumbeat of his heart.

“Boss,” Danny breathed. “Ho. Lee. Shit. Boss. ” He laughed: thin, wheezing, humorless laughter. “What the hell was all that?”

Jude mentally commanded his hand to open, to let go of the phone. It didn’t want to. He knew that Danny had asked a question, but it was like a voice overheard through a closed door, part of a conversation taking place in another room, nothing to do with him.