Heart-Shaped Box

from Reese.”

“Daddy!” Jessica cried, but Craddock gave his head a quick shake: Shut up.

“You think he’ll even see you? Open the door when you come knocking? I imagine he’s shacked up with someone else by now. There’s all sorts of pretty girls happy to lift their skirts for a rock star. It’s not like you have anything to offer him he can’t get elsewhere, minus the emotional headaches.”

At this a look of pain flickered across Anna’s features, and she sagged a little: A runner winded and sore from the race.

“It doesn’t matter whether he’s with someone else. He’s my friend,” she said in a small voice.

“He won’t believe you. No one will believe you, because it just isn’t true, dear. Not a word of it,” Craddock said, taking a step toward her. “You’re getting confused again, Anna.”

“That’s right,” Jessica said fervently.

“Even the pictures aren’t what you think. I can clear this up for you if you’ll let me. I can help you if—”

But he had gone too close. Anna leaped toward him. She put one hand on his face, snatching off his round, horn-rimmed spectacles and crushing them. She placed the other hand, which still clutched the envelope, in the center of his chest and shoved. He tottered, cried out. His left ankle folded, and he went down. He fell away from the steps, not toward them—Anna had come nowhere near throwing him down the staircase, no matter what Jessica had said about it.

Craddock landed on his scrawny rear with a thud that shook the whole corridor and jarred the portrait of him on the wall out of true. He started to sit up, and Anna put her heel on his shoulder and shoved, driving him down onto his back. She was shaking furiously.

Jessica squealed and dashed up the last few steps, swerving around Anna and dropping to one knee, to be by her stepfather’s side.

Jude found himself climbing to his feet. He couldn’t sit still any longer. He expected the world to get bent again, and it did, distending absurdly, like an image reflected in the side of an expanding soap bubble. His head felt a long way off from his feet—miles. And as he took his first step forward, he felt curiously buoyant, almost weightless, a scuba diver crossing the floor of the ocean. As he made his way down the hall, though, he willed the space around him to recover its proper shape and dimensions, and it did. His will meant something, then. It was possible to move through the soap-bubble world around him without popping it, if he took care.

His hands hurt, both of them, not only the right. It felt as if they were swollen to the size of boxing gloves. The pain came in steady, rhythmic waves, beating in time with his pulse, thum-thum- thum, like tires on blacktop. It mingled with the rattle and buzz of the air conditioner in Craddock’s room, to create an oddly soothing chorus of background nonsense sound.

He wanted desperately to tell Anna to get out, to get downstairs and out of the house. He had a strong sense, though, that he could not shove himself into the scene before him without tearing through the soft tissue of the dream. And anyway, past was past. He couldn’t change what was going to happen now any more than he’d been able to save Bammy’s sister, Ruth, by calling her name. You couldn’t change, but you could bear witness.

Jude wondered why Anna had even come upstairs, then thought that probably she wanted to throw some clothes in a bag before she left. She wasn’t afraid of her father and Jessica, didn’t think they had any power over her anymore—a beautiful, heartbreaking, fatal confidence in herself.

“I told you to stay away,” Anna said.

“You doin’ this for him?” Craddock asked. Until this moment, he had spoken with courtly southern inflections. There was nothing courtly about his voice now, though, his accent all harsh twang, a good ol’ boy with nothing good about him. “This all part of some crazy idea you have to win him back? You think you’re going to get his sympathy, you go crawlin’ off to him, with your sob story about how your pop made you do terrible things and it ruined you for life? I bet you can’t wait to boast to him ’bout how you told me off and shoved me down, an old man who cared for you in times of sickness and protected you from yourself when you were out of your mind. You think he’d be proud of you if he was standin’ here right now and saw you attack me?”

“No,” Anna said. “I think he’d be proud of me if he saw this.” She stepped forward and spat into his face.

Craddock flinched, then let out a strangled bellow, as if he’d caught an eyeful of some corrosive agent. Jessica started to haul herself to her feet, fingers hooked into claws, but Anna caught her by the shoulder and shoved her back down next to their stepfather.

Anna stood over them, trembling, but not as furiously as she had been a moment before. Jude reached tentatively for her shoulder, put his bandaged left hand on it, and squeezed lightly. Daring finally to touch her. Anna didn’t seem to notice. Reality warped itself out of shape for an instant when his hand settled upon her, but he thought everything back to normality by focusing on the background sounds, the music of the moment: thum-thum-thum, rattle and hum.

“Good for you, Florida,” he said. It was out before he could catch himself. The world didn’t end.

Anna wagged her head back and forth, a dismissive little shake. When she spoke, her tone was weary. “And I was scared of you.”

She turned, slipping out of Jude’s grasp, and went down the hall, to a room at the end. She closed the door behind her.

Jude heard something go plink, looked down. His right hand was in the sock, soaked through with blood and dripping on the floor. The silver buttons on the front of his Johnny Cash coat flashed in the very last of the salmon-colored light of day. He hadn’t noticed he was wearing the dead man’s suit until just now. It really was a hell of a good fit. Jude had not wondered for one second how it was possible he could be seeing the scene before him, but now an answer to that unasked question occurred. He had bought the dead man’s suit and the dead man, too—owned the ghost and the ghost’s past. These moments belonged to him, too, now.

Jessica crouched beside her stepfather, the both of them panting harshly, staring at the closed door to Anna’s room. Jude heard drawers opening and closing in there, a closet door thudding.

“Nightfall,” Jessica whispered. “Nightfall at last.”

Craddock nodded. He had a scratch on his face, directly below his left eye, where Anna had caught him with a fingernail as she tore off his glasses. A teardrop of blood trickled along his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his hand and made a red smear along his cheek.

Jude glanced toward the great bay window into the foyer. The sky was a deep, still blue, darkening toward night. Along the horizon, beyond the trees and rooftops on the other side of the street, was a line of deepest red, where the sun had only just disappeared.

“What’d you do?” Craddock asked. He spoke quietly, voice pitched just above a whisper, still tremulous with rage.

“She let me hypnotize her a couple times,” Jessica told him, speaking in the same hush. “To help her sleep at night. I made a suggestion.”

In Anna’s room there was a brief silence. Then Jude distinctly heard a glassy tink, a bottle tapping against glass, followed by a soft gurgling.

“What suggestion?” Craddock asked.

“I told her nightfall is a nice time for a drink. I said it’s her reward for getting through the day. She keeps a bottle in the top drawer.”

In Anna’s bedroom a lingering, dreadful quiet.

“What’s that going to do?”

“There’s phenobarbital in her gin,” Jessica said. “I got her sleeping like a champ these days.”

Something made a clunking sound on the hardwood floor in Anna’s room. A tumbler falling.

“Good girl,” Craddock breathed. “I knew you had something.”

Jessica said, “You need to make her forget—the photos, what she found, everything. Everything that just happened. You have to make it all go away.”

“I can’t do that,” Craddock said. “I haven’t been able to do that in a long while. When she was younger… when she trusted me more. Maybe you…”

Jessica was shaking her head. “I can’t take her deep like that. She won’t let me—I’ve tried. The last time I hypnotized her, to help with her insomnia, I tried to ask her questions about Judas Coyne, what she wrote in her