Page 14 of Jar of Hearts
Thirty seconds later, the letter is stuffed is back inside its envelope, and the envelope is shoved into the middle of a book that she’s read twice already. The book is then placed on the shelf above her desk, never to be touched again.
She looks down at her hands; they’re shaking.He wrote to her. Goddammit. The memories threaten to flood in, to break the barrier that Geo has spent years constructing around her head and her heart. She doesn’t want to think about him; it’s always been so much easier to pretend he’s not out there somewhere. Her ability to compartmentalize the different pieces of her life is the only fucking reason she’s sane.
No. No no no. Goddammit.
She feels something on her face and touches it, and is shocked to discover that she’s crying.
Goddammit.
“Bad time?” The inmate from the cell next door is standing inher open doorway, watching her with a concerned expression. The older woman is in her late fifties, a sprite of a lady with bright burgundy curls and an expressive mouth that’s always laughing, eating, or cussing. Sometimes all three at the same time. Ella Frank might be Geo’s business associate, but Cat Bonaducci is Geo’s friend. The first real girlfriend she’s had in a long time.
The last one was Angela.
“Kind of,” Geo says, but she waves her in. “What’s up?”
“I want to take a new picture. For the pen pal thing I told you about. Can you do my hair?” She holds up a box of Nice’n Easy hair color, the only kind you can purchase from commissary.
“Write-A-Prisoner? You sure it’s not really called Date-A-Prisoner?” Geo wipes her eyes. “Sure. I have a bit of time before my first appointment.”
Cat follows Geo out of the cell. They buzz to be let out and head down to the education wing, where the prison hair salon is located. Cat also brings her small bag of cosmetics; she’ll probably ask for help with her makeup, too. Inmates are technically allowed only six makeup items each, but it’s a moronic rule that the prison never enforces. The better women look, the better they feel. The better they feel, the higher the overall morale. And when morale is high, incidents of violence are low.
The salon is really just a small, plain room with a wash sink, chair, small desk, and mirror. Inmates have to buy their own hair color from commissary, and Geo only has access to the shears after a CO unlocks the drawer and signs them out. She opens the box of Nice’n Easy and starts mixing Cat’s color.
“What’s going on with you?” Cat asks as Geo begins to apply the hair color to her friend’s gray roots. “Were you crying?”
Geo doesn’t answer. She doesn’t want to talk about the letter. The past needs to stay in the past; it’s the only way to keep moving forward. “Maybe. Now shut up and let me work my magic.”
“You never did tell me how you got so good at doing hair and makeup,” Cat says, closing her eyes as Geo works. The fumes are strong. “I thought you had a desk job on the outside.”
“I went to beauty school for a year. In between college and my master’s degree.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Geo smiles. “That’s the exact same thing my dad said. When I told him after graduation that I’d enrolled at the Emerald Beauty Academy, he thought I was joking. He thought it would be a waste of time.”
Actually, the exact thing Walter Shaw had said to her was, “Beauty school is for people who can’t get into college, Georgina. You have a degree, for Christ’s sakes, and you’re attending a school that takes high school dropouts?” But she doesn’t want to say this to Cat, who never finished high school.
“It was fun,” she says instead. “I spent five days a week learning everything there was to learn about makeup and hair. After that, I landed an internship at Shipp Pharmaceuticals, and the rest, as they say, is history. They have an MBA reimbursement program, so I took advantage of it and worked my way up.”
Telling Cat the story makes her think of Andrew. It’s been two months, and her ex-fiancé’s name is still on her approved-visitors list. She never bothered to take it off. It means going down to the visitor’s office and telling them to remove his name, and Andrew Shipp—bless his rich, white, entitled ass—doesn’t deserve the ounce of energy that would take. Not that she wishes him ill. She just doesn’t wish him anything at all. Her dad always said that you only get one real chance at love, and if that was true, Geo had wasted hers at the age of sixteen on a boyfriend who’d turned out to be a serial killer known as the Sweetbay Strangler.
She remembers thinking it was such as a silly name when Kaiser Brody first told her about it, the day he’d come to arrest her. They were sitting across from each other in the interrogation room at Seattle PD. Fred Argent, the head of Shipp’s in-house counsel, was seated beside her, way out of his depth as Kaiser explained what her old boyfriend Calvin James had done.
It didn’t sound so silly anymore.
“Wait,” Fred had said, looking every inch the corporate attorneyhe was trained to be—late fifties, white, and completely outraged at the thought that one of Shipp’s own was being treated like a common criminal. “I thought you were arresting Miss Shaw for the murder of someone named Angela Wong.”
“We are, but that’s not the only crime Calvin James has been charged with,” Kaiser said. “He’s murdered three other women that we know of over the past decade.”
Geo drew in a sharp breath. Immediately, Fred leaned over to whisper in her ear. His breath was rank with stale whiskey; it was no big secret that the old lawyer kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his desk drawer. He’d probably taken a couple of shots before meeting her here. “I’ve called Daniel Attenbaum, the best criminal defense attorney in Seattle. He’ll be here shortly. Andrew said not to worry about anything. He’ll cover all the expenses out of his personal account. In the meantime, say nothing, okay?”
Geo nodded. Kaiser was watching the two of them with amusement. Then he opened the manila file folder on the table and pulled out the photos.
Two of them, both eight by tens, full color. Keeping them side by side, he pushed them across the table. “Angela Wong,” he said.
Fred Argent looked at the photos and blanched, his eyes darting back and forth between the two pictures several times. Geo glanced down, drew in another breath, and then averted her gaze. It was exactly as horrific as she imagined it would be.
“My god.” The lawyer put a hand over his mouth. “Is that…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t. Fred spent most of his day in a cushy office, drafting contracts, reading fine print, and discussing the legal aspects of the pharmaceutical business. He looked positively traumatized.
