“Dominic—”
“All right,” he says. “Deep breath. You were sixteen. That’s two years younger than me now, and I remember what a basket case I was two years ago. I get it, Georgina, I really do.” He pauses. “Wait. That sounds weird. Should I be calling you Georgina?”
“You can call me whatever you want,” she says, stifling her sobs. “Geo is fine.”
“Geo,” he says. “I like that. Do you have any more pictures? Of my grandparents? Do I have aunts or uncles? Cousins? Tell me more about the family.”
“There are a few photo albums upstairs in my dad’s room,” Geo says. She stands up, grateful for the opportunity to take a couple of minutes to compose herself. “But when I get back, there’s still something I need to tell you.”
She heads up the stairs and straight for the bathroom. She locks the door, then turns the cold water faucet on full blast. She cries hard for exactly two minutes, sobbing like a child, then forces herself to stop, splashing water on her face until the spasms subside. She stares at herself in the mirror, her skin blotchy, her eyeliner smudged. She wipes it away with a tissue.
Yes, it’s all a disaster. But what the hell did she think would happen?
She didn’t think, that was what. Years of her baby’s childhood, spent with parents who didn’t truly love him, or each other, as it turned out. A father who abandoned him. A mother with an alcoholic boyfriend who abused him. Indifferent relatives. Foster care. A biological mother who goes to prison for covering up a murder. A biological father who’s a serial killer.
And the best part is—the cherry on the sundae as Walter Shaw would say—that she hasn’t even had a chance yet to tell her son that his life is in grave danger.
Before exiting the bathroom, she glances out the small window to check if the police car is still parked at the curb. It is, and from the awkward angle of his neck, the officer appears to be sleeping. Nice. Way to protect and serve. She makes a mental note to complain to Kaiser.
On her way back to the staircase, she sees a figure in her bedroom. Dominic has ventured upstairs, and he’s sitting on the foot of her bed, looking through one of her old high school yearbooks. She pauses at the doorway, and at the sight of him, a wave of vertigo hits her.
Sitting there casually, not a care in the world, when her father’s not home. Just like Calvin.
He glances up, smiles, and it’s as if the horrible conversation they’d had downstairs three minutes earlier never happened. He pats the place beside him.
“Sit,” he says, as if he’s the parent and she’s the child. “This is cool. Your sophomore yearbook, I think. I couldn’t find your junior yearbook … which I suppose makes sense because you would have been pregnant with me.”
She takes a seat beside him on the bed. “Yes, I finished my year here at home.”
“This was her?” he says, pointing to a grainy black-and-white photo of Geo with Angela. It was taken after one of the Friday night football games, a candid shot of the two them laughing, ponytails swinging, white pompoms in hand, dressed in matching long-sleeved sweaters and tiny skirts with the Bulldogs emblem. “This was Angela?”
“Yes,” Geo says. She hasn’t seen that picture in decades, and it hurts to see it now.
“She was beautiful,” he says, and again, his voice contains no trace of judgment. “But so were you.”
“I didn’t think so back then.”
“I can see why,” he says, and she looks up at him. “And not because there was anything wrong with you. I counted at least ten pictures of her in this yearbook. Her star burned really bright, am I right? I can imagine it would make anything else—even another star—look pale in comparison.”
“That’s sweet of you to say.” She smiles. “And rather poetic.”
“How did you meet my father?”
Geo tells him the story of the 7-Eleven, how she was smitten from the moment she laid eyes on him.
“We spent a lot of time together,” she says. “My grades were slipping. I was staying out late. Sometimes he’d sneak in here, if my dad was home early and I couldn’t go out. But we never … he was a gentleman.”
“Up until he wasn’t.”
She nods.
“It’s the little things that have me curious,” Dominic says, closing the yearbook. “I’ve read a lot about the two of you. The case was reported pretty thoroughly in all the major newspapers here in the Northwest. It was easy to access that stuff from the Vancouver library, and when we moved back to Seattle, it got even easier. But there’s a lot the papers don’t say.”
“What do you want to know?”
He shrugs. “Like I said, little things. I remember reading a profile about him once, and it mentioned that he loved cinnamon hearts. Me, too.” He reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a small pack. It’s already open, and half are gone. He offers her one, and once again, a wave of déjà vu hits her.
“No, thanks, I can’t stand them,” Geo whispers, and though it wasn’t intended as a joke, Dominic laughs. “Little things, let’s see … he always smelled good. He was good with cars. He loved live music, we went to a few concerts together. Soundgarden. Pearl Jam.”
“So he had good taste in bands, then.” Dominic nods his approval and pops a candy into his mouth. He puts the pack away. “So. Where do you think he is now?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Geo says, and just like that, it’s time to tell him. This is the moment. She takes a deep breath and turns so she’s facing him directly. “Dominic, obviously you know that Calvin escaped from prison five years ago, shortly after I went away. So the police have been looking for him.”
“I know.”
“But they’re not looking for him just because of the prison escape. He’s done some things.…” Geo takes another breath. “Calvin has committed four more murders. Two women … and their children.”
Dominic freezes.
“His children,” Geo says, her voice cracking. “His flesh and blood. He’s hunting them down, and he’s killing them. And I’m afraid … I’m afraid he’s going to come after you. That’s why there’s a police car outside. It’s for my protection. And yours.”
Dominic’s expression is hard to read. She can’t tell if he’s shocked or not. Her son has Walter’s stoicism, that’s for damned sure.
“So those bodies I’ve been reading about in the paper, Calvin killed them?” Dominic leans back a little, the yearbook slipping off his lap and falling onto the floor. Neither of them make a move to pick it up. “He’s the one who cut up those women, and strangled the children, and then drew hearts on the kids with lipstick? It all makes total sense now. Sick fucker. Wow.”
“Yes,” Geo says, her heart aching. He’s only eighteen, for Christ’s sake. It’s too much for him. It’s too much for anyone. “At least that’s what the police think. I know it’s what I think.”
He nods, his face expressionless. “Do the cops know I’m here? Your high school friend, the one who arrested you—does he know I’m here?”
“No,” she says, surprised again. He really has done his research if he knew that she and Kaiser were friends in high school. “I wanted to tell you first, alone. But I do think I should call him now. He’s going to want to put you somewhere safe. I need to go downstairs and get my phone.”
She moves to leave, but Dominic puts a hand on her arm. “Don’t call.”
“I have to.” She meets his gaze. “You’re not safe. We’re not safe. You read about what he did to his other children—”
It hits her then. The thing her son just said, about the lipstick, about the hearts on the chest. That detail wasn’t reported anywhere, not in any newspaper or TV broadcast. Kaiser was the one who’d told her about it. Nobody outside the investigation knew.
Dominic’s eyes are fixed on her face, and she sees it change as the realization of what he said dawns on him, too. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about the lipstick. He isn’t supposed to know anything about it.
But h
e knows. And now he knows that she knows.
She springs off the bed, but before she can take a step, she’s yanked back down onto the mattress in one forceful swoop. She feels strands of hair rip out of her head. He’s strong, stronger than maybe even Calvin was back in the day, and he’s on top of her, pinning her down with his body weight as she kicks and squirms. His hands are around her throat, squeezing so hard it feels like her trachea might break in half.
He licks the side of her face languorously, the tip of his tongue moving from her chin to her cheekbone, his hot sweet breath smelling of cinnamon fire.
“Mother,” he breathes, looking directly into her eyes. “Do you see me?”
He keeps one hand at her throat while the other yanks her leggings down, and then his jeans, never looking away.
Calvin’s eyes were green. Dominic’s eyes are brown. Like her own. It’s like she’s staring into herself.
She fights hard, harder than she’s ever fought before, struggling with every inch of her body, understanding on some level that it has come full circle. That this will end where it started, and that this was always her destiny, to be destroyed by the beast of her own creation.
Every decision she’s made, everything she’s done, has led to this. Her son is a monster, yes. But he didn’t get it all from his father.
Some of it, he got from her.
When the new bodies turned up, cut into pieces, she should have known it wasn’t Calvin.
32
It was almost two A.M. by the time they got Angela’s body rolled up into the plaid comforter and out the door. The street was quiet, the neighbors asleep. Calvin hoisted the body over his shoulder and made his way down the stairs of his studio to the driveway, the wood creaking beneath his feet. Geo followed behind him, wearing one of his sweatshirts over her thin cotton dress. When they got to the driveway, he handed her the keys. She opened the trunk, standing aside as he stuffed the most popular girl in school inside it.
It took him a while to arrange Angela’s body so that the trunk would close. Geo stood away from the car, closer to the curb, taking deep breaths. A heavy fog had descended, not unusual for this time of year, and it felt both protective and suffocating even with the light of the full moon. The streetlamps were on, and hazy domes of light emanated from each one, dotting the sidewalk in either direction. Her house was a twenty-minute walk away, about sixteen blocks. She could start walking. She could go home, call 911, report a death.
Report a murder.
It was easy to picture what would happen if she did. She’d seen enough movies to understand the basic timeline of how things would go. Cop cars with flashing lights would descend on her house, and then Calvin’s, and then the whole neighborhood as the police officers drove around, hunting him down. Arrests would be made. Hers, Calvin’s. The interrogation. Questions and more questions, all night long. Her father sitting beside her, still wearing his hospital scrubs, his face a mask of horror and disappointment, unable to understand or process what happened. The newspaper headlines, shouting in black capital letters what Calvin and Geo had done, their grainy pictures printed beneath them, the two of them looking like fresh-faced criminals, Angela looking impossibly gorgeous. The gossip at school would flourish, everybody knowing what she did, the whispers, the rumors, Tess DeMarco insisting that Geo was always jealous of her supposed best friend and that she’s not a bit surprised that Angela was dead. The sobbing faces of Mr. and Mrs. Wong, turning angry and accusing when they ask Geo why she didn’t stop him, why their little girl was gone. A trial. More newspaper headlines. Jail time, certainly. She was sixteen, not fourteen, and surely she’d go to jail.
“Get in,” Calvin said, his breath coming out in one long, white stream. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but if he was cold, he didn’t look it. His color was high, his cheeks flushed from the exertion of moving a dead body from the top floor of the house to his car. The trunk of the Trans Am was closed, and it was hard to picture that inside it was the body of a girl she’d loved almost her whole life. “Hurry up.”
Geo took one last look down the street. It was so quiet, so still. Everybody was asleep, warm in their beds, oblivious to the horror that had already taken place, and unaware of the horror that was still to come. The fog, heavy and white in the soft light of the streetlamps, obscured her long view; she couldn’t see beyond the fifth or sixth house. She turned and looked in the other direction. Foggy there, too.
Visibility greatly reduced.
There was no clear path.
She got into the car.
* * *
Geo knew the area better than Calvin did; she grew up here, he didn’t. She directed to him to her street, and as he turned onto Briar Crescent, she said, “Cut the lights.”
He did, and they were cast into darkness. Briar Crescent had no streetlamps. The fog surrounded them like a cocoon.
“I can’t see anything,” he said.
She could smell the sweat coming off him. Like ripe onions and salt. “Keep driving straight. Go slow.”
He drove down the street until they reached the end of the cul-de-sac. Only then did he seem to realize where they were.
“This is your house,” he said. “You’re going home?”
She glanced through the window in the direction of the house, the one she’d lived in since she was born. Nobody was home. The porch light was on, and through the fog she could see the faint blue of the front door.
“Not yet,” she said.
They got out of the car and Calvin popped the trunk. Every noise seemed loud in the stillness of the night. They took Angela’s body out of the trunk, and Calvin once again hoisted it over his shoulder. He handed her the penlight on his keychain, but Geo didn’t need it. She knew where the path was, and it was nothing formal, just worn-out grass leading deep into the woods she used to play in when she was a small child. The light of the moon was just enough.
Geo knew that at any point, a neighbor coming home late from a party could have seen them pulling something long and heavy and wrapped in a blanket out of the trunk of Calvin’s car. At any point, a neighbor with a full bladder could wake up to use the bathroom, glance out the window, notice the Trans Am parked at the edge of the cul-de-sac, and feel compelled to come outside to investigate. At any point, a neighbor who couldn’t sleep might put her book down to go look out the window at the thick fog that had descended, to contemplate its secrets and wonder what it was hiding. At any point, any of the people living anywhere on Briar Crescent might catch a glimpse of shapes moving through the fog, at the end of the street, near the mouth of the woods, and decide to call 911 just to be on the safe side.
But nobody did.
Nobody saw or did a goddamned thing.
They stopped when they reached a small clearing about a hundred yards deep into the woods, the length of a football field. Geo hadn’t realized how much she was sweating until she swiped an errant hair out of her face, only to realize it was soaked with perspiration. She finally clicked on the penlight, the beam bright but small, using it to look around.
“This is the only place we can put her,” she said. “Everywhere else, there’s too many trees.”
He nodded his agreement. The shift was so subtle almost neither of them noticed it had happened. Geo was in control now. Though unspoken, it was clear.
“Go back to my house and go into the shed in the backyard. It’s not locked. Get both shovels and grab two pairs of gloves. My father isn’t home, but be quiet and be quick because the shed door rattles when you open and close it. Go.”
She handed him the penlight and stood with the body in the dark fog, feeling the cold air bounce off her hot sweat. She felt like she was steaming. The ground felt springy beneath her feet, and the smell was earthy, moist. The air tasted much the same, and she inhaled deeply. Somewhere beyond, there was a scuffle, a rustling of leaves, but the smallness of the sound told her it was a squirrel or a chipmunk. She didn’t panic. She didn’t move. It was almost lik
e she was deep inside herself, away from the chaos, all the way into that place everyone has inside them but hardly ever taps into.
The place where you feel nothing.
Calvin was back with the shovels a few moments later, and they put the gloves on. They started digging. At first it was easy—the soil on the surface was dense, but soft. About a foot down, though, the earth felt hard. Rocky. It wasn’t long before Geo’s arms and hands were aching from the exertion. She paused to rest, letting Calvin continue for another few minutes until finally he had to stop, too. They had started digging two holes next to each other, separated by a foot of what felt like pure stone. There seemed to be no way to connect them to create the grave they were intending to dig.
“I’m three feet down, but I can’t seem to go any deeper or wider,” he said. “There’s too many rocks.”
“We have to keep digging,” Geo said calmly, and though she said we, they both knew she meant you.
“I can’t. I’d need a bulldozer.”
“Go back to my house and go back to the shed. Get a saw. There are three hanging on the wall at the back. Bring back the big one. You’ll know it when you see it.” Even though Geo recognized her own voice, it felt like someone else was speaking. With the detached but direct tone of her voice, she could have been reading the news.
He was back again in a few moments, saw in hand, his T-shirt sticking to his skin. He’d been back and forth and back again. With every passing minute their risk of being found out grew.
But again, somehow, nobody saw.
He looked at her, awaiting instruction. It didn’t matter in that moment that he was the one who raped and killed Angela, that he was twenty-one and she was only sixteen. She was in charge. He needed her to tell him what to do.
“Cut her up,” Geo said.
“What?” Calvin said, staring at her. “I—”
“I’ll start digging another hole. If we can’t dig one big hole, we’ll have to dig a few. Cut her up.”
Jar of Hearts Page 29
