Heart-Shaped Box

sister stumbled trying to keep up, catching the banister to avoid a pratfall down the staircase.

“Wait—Anna—stop!” Jessica said, steadying herself, then lunging up the stairs to catch at her sister’s shirtsleeve. “You’re hysterical—”

“No I’m not don’t touch me,” Anna said, all one sentence, no punctuation. She yanked her arm away.

Anna reached the landing and turned toward her older sister, who stood rigid two steps below her, in a pale silk skirt and a silk blouse the color of black coffee. Jessica’s calves were bunched up, and the tendons showed in her neck. She was grimacing, and in that moment she looked old—not a woman of about thirty but one approaching fifty—and afraid. Her pallor, especially at her temples, was gray, and the corners of her mouth were pinched, webbed with crow’s-feet.

“You are. You’re imagining things, having one of your terrible fantasies. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. You can’t go anywhere like you are.”

Anna said, “Are these imaginary?” Holding up the envelope in her hand. “These pictures?” Taking out Polaroids, fanning them in one hand to show Jessica, then throwing them at her. “Jesus! It’s your daughter. She’s eleven.”

Jessica Price flinched from the flying snapshots. They fell on the steps, around her feet. Jude noticed that Anna still held one of them, which she shoved back into the envelope.

“I know what’s real,” Anna said. “First time ever, maybe.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said, her voice weak, small.

Anna went on, “I’m going. Next time you see me, I’ll be back with his lawyers. To get Reese.”

“You think he’ll help you?” Jessica said, her voice a tremulous whisper. He? His? It took Jude a moment to process that they were talking about him. His right hand was beginning to itch. It felt puffy and hot and insect-bitten.

“Sure he will.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said again, her voice louder now, wavering.

A door popped open, down the dark hallway to Jude’s right. He glanced toward it, expecting to see Craddock, but it was Reese instead. She peeked around the edge of the doorframe, a kid with Anna’s pale golden hair, a long strand of it hanging across one of her eyes. Jude was sorry to see her, felt a twinge of pain at the sight of her large, stricken eyes. The things some children had to see. Still—it was not as bad as some of what had been done to her, he supposed.

“It’s going to come out, Jessie. All of it,” Anna said. “I’m glad. I want to talk about it. I hope he goes to jail.”

“Craddock!” Jessica screamed.

And then the door directly across from Reese’s room opened, and a tall, gaunt, angular figure stepped into the hallway. Craddock was a black cutout in the shadows, featureless except for his horn-rimmed spectacles, the ones he seemed to put on only every now and then. The lenses of his glasses caught and focused the available light, so they glowed, a faint, livid rose in the gloom. Behind him, back in his room, an air conditioner was rattling, a steady, cyclical buzzing sound, curiously familiar.

“What’s the racket?” Craddock asked, his voice a honeyed rasp.

Jessica said, “Anna’s leaving. She says she’s going back to New York, back to Judas Coyne, and she’s going to get his lawyers—”

Anna looked down the hall, toward her stepfather. She didn’t see Jude. Of course she didn’t. Her cheeks were a dark, angry red, with two spots of no color at all showing high on her cheekbones. She was shaking.

“—get lawyers, and police, and tell everyone that you and Reese—”

“Reese is right here, Jessie,” Craddock said. “Calm yourself. Calm down.”

“—and she…she found some pictures,” Jessica finished lamely, glancing at her daughter for the first time.

“Did she?” Craddock said, sounding perfectly at ease. “Anna, baby. I’m sorry you’re worked up. But this is no time of day to run off upset like you are. It’s late, girl. It’s almost nightfall. Why don’t you sit down with me, and we’ll talk about what’s bothering you. I’d like to see if I can’t put your mind at ease. You give me half a chance, I bet I can.”

Anna seemed to be having trouble finding her voice all of a sudden. Her eyes were flat and bright and frightened. She looked from Craddock to Reese and finally back to her sister.

“Keep him away from me,” Anna said. “Or so help me I’ll kill him.”

“She can’t go,” Jessica said to Craddock. “Not yet.”

Not yet? Jude wondered what that could mean. Did Jessica think there was more to talk about? It looked to him as if the conversation was already over.

Craddock glanced sidelong at Reese.

“Go to your room, Reese.” He reached out toward her as he spoke, to put a reassuring hand on her small head.

“Don’t touch her!” Anna screamed.

Craddock’s hand stopped moving, hung in the air, just above Reese’s head—then fell back to his side.

Something changed then. In the dark of the hall, Jude could not see Craddock’s features well, but he thought he detected some subtle shift in body language, in the set of his shoulders or the tilt of his head or the way his feet were planted. Jude thought of a man readying himself to grab a snake out of the weeds.

At last Craddock spoke to Reese again, without turning his gaze away from Anna. “Go on, sweetheart. You let the grown-ups talk now. It’s nightfall, and it’s time for the grown-ups to talk without little girls underfoot.”

Reese glanced down the hall at Anna and her mother. Anna met her gaze, moved her head in the slightest of nods.

“Go ahead, Reese,” Anna said. “Just grown-ups talkin’.”

The little girl ducked her head back into her room and pulled her door shut. A moment later the sound of her music came in a muffled blast through the door, a barrage of drums and a screech of train-coming-off-the-tracks guitar, followed by children jubilantly shrieking in rough harmony. It was the Kidz Bop version of Jude’s last Top 40 hit, “Put You in Yer Place.”

Craddock jerked at the sound of it, and his hands closed into fists.

“That man,” he whispered.

As he came toward Anna and Jessica, a curious thing happened. The landing at the top of the staircase was illuminated by the failing sunshine that shone through the big bay window at the front of the house, so that as Craddock approached his stepdaughters, the light rose into his face, etching fine details, the tilt of cheekbone, the deep-set brackets around his mouth. But the lenses of his spectacles darkened, hiding his eyes behind circles of blackness.

The old man said, “You haven’t been the same since you came home to us from living with that man. I can’t tell what’s got into you, Anna darling. You’ve had some bad times—no one knows that better than me—but it’s like that Coyne fella took your unhappiness and cranked up the volume on it. Cranked it up so loud you can’t hear my voice anymore when I try and talk to you. I hate to see you so miserable and mixed up.”

“I ain’t mixed up, and I ain’t your darlin’. And I am tellin’ you, if you come within four feet of me, you’ll be sorry.”

“Ten minutes,” Jessica said.

Craddock whisked his fingers at her, an impatient, silencing gesture.

Anna darted a look at her sister, then back to Craddock. “You are both wrong if you think you can keep me here by force.”

“No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want,” Craddock said, stepping past Jude.

His face was seamed and his color bad, his freckles standing out on his waxy-white flesh. He didn’t walk so much as shuffle, bent over with what Jude guessed was some permanent curvature of the spine. He looked better dead.

“You think Coyne is going to do you any favors?” Craddock went on. “I seem to recall he threw your ass out. I don’t think he even answers your letters anymore. He didn’t help you before—I don’t see why he will now.”

“He didn’t know how. I didn’t know myself. I do now. I’m gonna tell him what you did. I’m gonna tell him you belong in jail. And you know what? He’ll line up the lawyers to put you there.” She flicked a look at Jessica. “Her, too—if they don’t put her in the nut farm. Doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they stick her a long way off