Jar of Hearts
Page 2
The trial isn’t over, but Geo’s part in it is. The next time she sees her father, it will be when he visits her in prison. The bailiff leads her back to the holding cell. She takes a seat on the bench in the back corner, and when the bailiff’s footsteps recede, she reaches into her pocket.
It’s a torn piece of yellow notepad paper. On it, Calvin has scrawled a note in his small, neat handwriting.
You’re welcome.
Beside the two words, he’s drawn a small heart.
She crumples it up into a tiny bead and swallows it. Because the only way to get rid of it is to consume it.
Geo sits alone in the cell, immersed in her thoughts. The past, present, and future all mingle together, the inner voices chattering alongside the actual voices of the police officers down the hallway. She can hear them discussing last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and wonders randomly if they’ll show Grey’s Anatomy in prison. She has no idea how much time has passed until a shadow appears on the other side of the cell bars.
She looks up to see Detective Kaiser Brody standing there. He’s holding a paper bag from a local burger joint, and a milkshake. Strawberry. The bag is covered in grease spots, and immediately her mouth waters. She hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, just a small bowl of cold oatmeal served on a dirty metal tray here in the holding cell.
“If that’s not for me, then you’re just cruel,” she says.
Kaiser holds up the bag. “It is for you. And you can have it … so long as you tell me what Calvin James slipped you in court.”
Geo stares at the bag. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He took your hand, and he gave you something.”
She shakes her head. She can smell grilled beef. Fried onions. French fries. Her stomach growls audibly. “He didn’t give me anything, Kai, I swear. He grabbed my hand, said it was good to see me, and I yanked my hand away and didn’t say anything back. That’s it.”
The detective doesn’t believe her. He signals the guard, who unlocks the metal door. He checks her hands, then checks the floor. He motions for her to stand up, and she complies. He pats her down, checking her pockets. Resignedly, he hands her the bag. She tears it open.
“Easy.” He takes a seat beside her on the cold steel bench. “There’s two burgers in there. One’s for me.”
Geo already has hers unwrapped. She takes a giant bite, the grease from the ground beef dribbling onto the front of her designer dress. She doesn’t care. “Is this allowed?”
“What? The burger?” Kaiser removes the top of his burger bun and places fries on top of the patty. He replaces the bun and takes a large bite of his own. “You signed your plea agreement, nobody cares if I talk to you.”
“I can’t believe you still do that.” She looks at his burger in mock distaste. “Fries inside your burger. That’s so high school.”
“In some ways, I’ve changed,” he says. “In some ways, I haven’t. Bet you can say the same.”
“So what are you doing here?” she asks a few minutes later, when she’s eaten half her burger and her stomach has stopped hurting.
“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted you to know that I don’t hate you.”
“You’d have every reason to.”
“Not anymore,” Kaiser says, then sighs. “I finally have closure. I can now let it go. I’d advise you to do to the same. You kept that secret a long time. Fourteen years … I can’t imagine what that did to you. It’s a punishment all its own.”
“I don’t think Angela’s parents would agree with you.” But she’s glad he said it. It makes her feel like less of a monster. But only a little.
“But that’s why you’re going to prison. So you can do your time and then get out and start over, fresh. You’ll survive this. You always were strong.” Kaiser puts his burger down. “You know, it’s funny. When I found out what you’d done, I wanted to kill you. For what you did to Angela. For what you put everyone through. For what you put me through. But when I saw you again…”
“What?”
“I remembered how it used to be. We were all best friends, for fuck’s sake. That shit doesn’t go away.”
“I know.” Geo looks at him. Underneath the tough cop exterior, she sees kindness. There’s always been kindness at Kaiser’s core. “I wanted to tell you back then what happened, what I did, so many times. You would have known what to do. You were always my…”
“What?”
“Moral compass,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of shitty things, Kai. Pushing you away was one of them.”
“You were sixteen.” Kaiser heaves another long sigh. “Just a kid. Like I was. Like Angela was.”
“But old enough to know better.”
“Looking back, a lot of things make sense now. The way you were after that night. The way you pulled back from me. Dropping out of school for the rest of the year. Calvin really did a number on you. I didn’t realize how bad it was.” Kaiser touches her face. “But today you told the truth. It’s done now. Finally.”
“Finally,” she repeats, taking a big bite of her burger even though she’s no longer hungry.
It’s easier to lie when your mouth is full.
2
There are three types of currency in prison: drugs, sex, and information. While the last of the three tends to be the most valuable, crank and blow jobs are always the most reliable. And since Geo doesn’t do drugs, cash will have to do. There are things she needs to survive prison, which she’ll procure as soon as she’s able, once she’s assigned a unit and a job.
Every new or returning inmate at Hazelwood Correctional Institute—or Hellwood, as it’s sometimes called—spends their first two weeks in receiving while their assessment is being completed. A battery of psychological tests, along with a couple of interviews and a thorough background check, are performed in order to determine where the inmate will sleep and work. Geo’s hoping for medium security and a job in the hair salon. But what she can realistically expect, according to her first meeting with the prison counselor, is maximum security for the first three years and a job in janitorial services.
“It’s not a bad thing,” the counselor says, in an attempt to reassure her. The name plate on the desk says P. MARTIN. “There are more guards in maximum. Minimum comes with privileges, but maximum comes with protection.”
It sounds like bullshit to Geo, but as she’s never been to prison before, she’s in no position to argue. It’s been three hours since she arrived at Hazelwood, and the counselor is the first person she’s spoken to who isn’t wearing a uniform. P. Martin—Pamela? Patricia? there’s no indication of the woman’s first name anywhere in the room—seems to genuinely care about the inmates’ well-being. Geo wonders what brought her here. It can’t be the money. The counselor’s pantsuit is cheap; the fabric of her jacket pulls around the armpits and there are loose threads along the seams.
“Who’s your support system?” the counselor asks. When Geo doesn’t answer, she rephrases. “Who’ll be visiting you in here? Who are you looking forward to seeing when you get out? Because that day will come, and you should be thinking about those people every day that you’re in here. It’ll keep you focused.”
“My dad,” Geo says. She never had many friends, and after the trial, it was safe to say she had none. “I was supposed to get married, but … that’s not happening now.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died. When I was five.”
“One last question,” Martin says. “Which race do you identify with? You look white, but your intake form says ‘other.’”
“Other is correct,” Geo says. “My mother was half Filipino, and my dad is a quarter Jamaican. I’m mixed.”
Clicking her pen, the counselor nods and jots something down in her file. “It’s sixty-five percent white in here, and since you look white, you’ll blend in. But if you’re part black, you can make black friends. That’s good.”
“I’m also a quarter Asian.”
“If I say yes, does that mean I can go home?”
The counselor chuckled. “Good. A sense of humor. Hold on to that.” She slaps the file folder shut. “All right, kiddo. We’re done for now. I’ll talk to you in a week. You need me before that, tell a guard.”
The first two weeks pass without incident, although all new inmates are on suicide watch because prison is a fucking depressing place. Geo keeps her head down and speaks only when spoken to, spending the majority of her time alone. On the morning of the day she’s to be integrated into the general population, she’s awake well before the morning bell.
It’s hard to believe that just over six months ago, she was interviewed for an article in Pacific Northwest magazine profiling Shipp Pharmaceuticals in their annual “Top 100 Companies to Work For” feature. At thirty, Geo was the youngest female executive at Shipp by a decade, and the article was titled, “Steering the Shipp in a New Direction: The Young Face of One of America’s Oldest Companies.” The photo they used showed Geo sitting on the edge of the long table inside the thirty-fourth-floor glass-enclosed boardroom, legs crossed, skirt hem well above the knee, red soles of her high heels visible, smiling into the camera. The theme of the write-up was diversity in the workplace, though, ironically, not one mention was made of Geo’s mixed-race heritage. The article focused solely on her youth and her gender—both of which were enough to make her a standout in the old white-boys’ club of Big Pharma—and her plans to expand the lifestyle-and-beauty division of the company.
She suspected the majority of the executive team at Shipp hated that photo, that she was the one chosen to represent them, though nobody ever said so to her face.
The day of her arrest, Geo was speaking in that boardroom. The doors swung open and a tall man in dark jeans and a battered leather jacket strode in, accompanied by three uniformed Seattle PD officers. A flustered administrative assistant followed, her hands gesturing apologetically as she tried to keep up with them. The twelve heads sitting at the giant table turned at the sound of the commotion.
“I’m sorry, they wouldn’t wait for me to knock,” said the breathless administrative assistant, a young woman named Penny who’d only been with the company for a month.
The man in the leather jacket stared at Geo. He looked extremely familiar, and her mind raced frantically to place him. There was a detective’s shield clipped to his breast pocket, and she could see the slight bulge of his holstered gun near the hem of his jacket. He was tall and quite fit, a far cry from how he looked in high school, when he was forty pounds skinnier and half a foot shorter.…
Kaiser Brody. Holy hell.
It hit Geo then, and her heart stopped. Her knees felt weak and the room spun a little, forcing her to lean against the table for support. The boardroom, cool and airy only seconds before, was suddenly hot. The detective caught her reaction and smirked.
“Georgina Shaw?” he said, but he knew damn well it was her. He headed toward her, making his way around the long oval table with the uniformed officers in tow, past the shocked faces of the executives. “You’re under arrest.”
Geo didn’t protest, didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound. She simply closed her laptop, her presentation disappearing from the large projection screen behind her. The detective took out his handcuffs. The sight of them made her wince.
“It’s protocol,” he said. “I’d apologize, but you know I’m not sorry.”
The members of the executive team seemed not to know what do with themselves, and they watched in stunned silence as the detective pulled her arms behind her back, snapped on the cuffs, and began marching her out of the room. Their confusion was understandable. The Georgina Shaw they knew wasn’t the kind of woman who got arrested for anything. She was the new face of Shipp, after all. She was a VP of the company. She was Andrew Shipp’s goddamned fiancée, and everything about this looked completely wrong.
The CEO’s voice rang out loud and clear, and everyone turned. Andrew Shipp hadn’t been part of the meeting, but his office was just down the hall, and clearly someone had told him what was going on. He was standing at the boardroom doors, barring their way.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Andrew tried to reach for her, but a young police officer blocked him. The CEO’s face reddened, no doubt because nobody had ever dared to block him from anything before. “This is ludicrous. What are the charges? Get her out of those handcuffs immediately. This is ridiculous.”
Geo tried to smile at him, tried to reassure him that she was okay, but Andrew wasn’t looking at her at all. He was glaring at the police officers, every inch of his body radiating that special blend of outrage and self-entitlement one can only have if one grew up with serious money.
But the police officers didn’t care. They didn’t care that the woman in handcuffs had a corner office two floors down, or that her wedding reception was going to take place at the pretentious golf club her fiancé’s family belonged to, or that she thought it was insane they were charging four hundred dollars a plate for dinner for what basically amounted to steak and French fries. They didn’t care that she’d picked pink peonies for her bouquet or that her wedding dress was being flown in from New York. They didn’t give one righteous shit. As they shouldn’t. Because none of it mattered anymore. And it probably never did.
The detective walked her out of the boardroom. His hand was on the small of her back, not pushing, but guiding firmly. Kaiser Brody didn’t smell anything like she remembered. The boy she’d known back in the day never wore cologne, but she could detect a sweet, musky scent on him now, which she recognized immediately as Yves Saint Laurent. She always did have a great nose. She bought the same cologne for Andrew once, but he never wore it, complaining it gave him a headache. A lot of things gave Andrew a headache.
The cuffs jangled around her wrists. They were loose enough that with some maneuvering, she could probably have wriggled out of them. Kaiser had put them on just for show, to make a point. To cause a scene. To humiliate her.
Andrew was walking backward in an attempt to impede their path, and Kaiser waved an arrest warrant in his face.
“Detective Kaiser Brody, Seattle PD. The charge is murder, sir.”
Andrew snatched the warrant from him and read through it with bulging eyes. Even in his two-thousand-dollar suit, he was just short of handsome, with his soft frame, his round face, his thinning hair. Andrew’s strength came from a different place. But while being rich and well-connected could accomplish a lot, he couldn’t fix this.
“Say nothing,” he said to her. “Not a word. I’ll call Fred. We’ll take care of this.”
Fred Argent was head of Shipp’s in-house counsel. He handled corporate strategy, contracts, litigation issues. He wasn’t a criminal-defense attorney by any stretch, and that’s what Geo needed. But there was no time to have that discussion. The detective was hustling her out of the boardroom as the rest of the executive team stood frozen, mouths gaping open.
Andrew kept up with them all the way to the elevator, which was down the hallway and around the corner. Word of Geo’s arrest seemed to spread faster than they were walking. She passed her assistant Carrie Ann’s desk and said, “Call my father. I don’t want him to see it on the news.” The younger woman nodded, her eyes wide, the small spot of spilled coffee still noticeable on her skirt even after her vigorous attempt to remove it earlier that morning. Less than an hour ago, they’d had a discussion about how best to get that stain out, searching the office for one of those Tide pens as Geo talked about the new restaurant she and Andrew had gone to the evening before.
That life was over now. Everything she’d worked for, everything she’d created, the life she’d built on top of the secret she tried to keep hidden … it was all evaporating right before her eyes.<
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“It’s going to be okay,” Andrew said to her at the elevator. “Say nothing, do you hear me? Nothing. Fred will meet you at the police station. We’ll get you the best attorney. Don’t worry about anything.” He glared at Kaiser, his face full of fury. The detective returned the look with a mild one of his own. “This charge is utter bullshit, Detective. You’ve made a gigantic mistake. Chief Heron, your boss, is a member of my golf club, and I’m going to call him personally. Prepare yourselves for a lawsuit.”
The detective said nothing, but once again the corners of his mouth lifted up slightly. Another smirk. Did he have that smirk in high school? Geo couldn’t remember.
The elevator doors closed on Andrew yelling for his assistant to bring him his cell phone. For the next minute, she and the detective stood motionless in front of the mirrored doors. The music from the hidden speakers played softly. Geo could hear one of the uniformed officers breathing behind her. A soft wheeze, with a slight whistling sound behind it. Deviated septum, probably. Kaiser’s hand was still resting on the small of her back. She didn’t mind. The pressure was reassuring.
No Muzak instrumental background tunes for Shipp; the elevators were fancy, wired into Pandora, which was set to play a selection of easy-listening tracks by the artists of yesterday and today. Mostly yesterday. The numbers on the screen counted down silently to the soft strains of Oasis, a band Geo liked back in high school. One of the other officers, a younger woman whose septum sounded fine, sang along quietly. Geo did not sing along to “Wonderwall,” even though she knew all the words.
TODAY IS GONNA BE THE DAY
THAT THEY’RE GONNA THROW IT BACK TO YOU
The numbers continued to change as they passed each floor, hurtling toward the bottom. Maybe she’d get lucky. Maybe the elevator would hit the ground and explode. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen …
“You don’t seem surprised I’m here,” Kaiser said, watching her in the mirror.
Geo said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She had played this scenario out a million times in her head, but never had any of her fantasies cast her old friend in the role of arresting police officer. She didn’t even know Kaiser had become a cop, but she had to admit he wore the badge well. There was only a hint of the boy she used to know. Scruff covered the jawline where there used to be acne. The angles of his face were sharper. But the eyes were the same. Haunted. Disappointed.