Page 88 of Jar of Hearts
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 wantedto 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 he knows. And now he knows thatsheknows.
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 thiswas 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 twoA.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.
***
