Page 3 of Jar of Hearts
Also by Jennifer Hillier
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For Mox
PART ONE
DENIAL
“I don’t even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.”
~ J. D. Salinger,The Catcher in the Rye
1
The trial has barely made a dent in the national news. Which is good, because it means less publicity, fewer reporters. But it’s also bad, because just how depraved do crimes have to be nowadays to garner national headlines?
Pretty fucking bad, it seems.
There’s only a brief mention of Calvin James, a.k.a. the Sweetbay Strangler, in theNew York Timesand on CNN, and his crimes aren’t quite sensational enough to be featured inPeoplemagazine or be talked about onThe View. But for Pacific Northwesters—people in Washington state, Idaho, and Oregon—the trial of the Sweetbay Strangler is a big deal. The disappearance of Angela Wong fourteen years ago caused a noticeable ripple throughout the Seattle area, as Angela’s father is a bigwig at Microsoft and a friend of Bill Gates. There were search parties, interviews, a monetary reward that increased with each passing day she didn’t come home. The discovery of the sixteen-year-old’s remains all these years later—only a half mile away from her house—sent shockwaves through the community. The locals remember. #JusticeForAngela was trending on Twitter this morning. It was the ninth or tenth most popular hashtag for only about three hours, but still.
Angela’s parents are present in court. They divorced a year after their daughter was reported missing, her disappearance the last threadin a marriage that had been unraveling for a decade. They sit side by side now, a few rows back from the prosecutor’s table, with their current spouses, united in their grief and desire to see justice served.
