Heart-shaped box Read Online Free PDF Page B

He had never been one to take his time getting to the point. “Your stepfather.”
    “Reese, honey,” the woman said, talking to someone else, not Jude. “Reese, will you turn off that TV and go outside?” A girl, away in the background, registered a sullen complaint. “Because I’m on the phone.” The girl said something else. “Because it’s private. Go on, now. Go on.” A screen door slapped shut. The woman sighed, a bemused, “you know kids” sound, and then said to Jude, “Did you see him? Why don’t you tell me what you think he looks like, and I’ll say if you’re right.”
    She was fucking with him. Fucking with him.
    “I’m sending it back,” Jude told her.
    “The suit? Go ahead. You can send the suit back to me. That doesn’t mean he’ll come with it. No refunds, Mr. Coyne. No exchanges.”
    Danny stared at Jude, smiling a puzzled smile, his brow furrowed in thought. Jude noticed then the sound of his own breath, harsh and deep. He struggled for words, to know what to say.
    She spoke first. “Is it cold there? I bet it’s cold. It’s going to get a lot colder before he’s through.”
    “What are you out for? More money? You won’t get it.”
    “She came back home to kill herself, you asshole,” she said, Jessica Price of Florida, whose name was unfamiliar to him, but maybe not quite as unfamiliar as he would’ve liked. Her voice had suddenly, without warning, lost the veneer of easy humor. “After you were done with her, she slashed her wrists in the bathtub. Our stepdaddy is the one who found her. She would’ve done anything for you, and you threw her away like she was garbage.”
    Florida.
    Florida. He felt a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach, a sensation of cold, sick weight. In the same moment, his head seemed to come clear, to shake off the cobwebs of exhaustion and superstitious fear. She had always been Florida to him, but her name was really Anna May McDermott. She told fortunes, knew tarot and palmistry. She and her older sister both had learned how from their stepfather. He was a hypnotist by trade, the last resort of smokers and self-loathing fat ladies who wantedto be done with their cigarettes and their Twinkies. But on the weekends Anna’s stepfather hired himself out as a dowser and used his hypnotist’s pendulum, a silver razor on a gold chain, to find lost objects and to tell people where to drill their wells. He hung it over the bodies of the ill to heal their auras and slow their hungry cancers, spoke to the dead with it by dangling it over a Ouija board. But hypnotism was the meal ticket: You can relax now. You can close your eyes. Just listen to my voice.
    Jessica Price was talking again. “Before my stepfather died, he told me what to do, how I should get in touch with you and how to send you his suit and what would happen after. He said he’d see to you, you ugly, no-talent motherfucker.”
    She was Jessica Price, not McDermott, because she had married and was a widow now. Jude had the impression her husband had been a reservist who bought it in Tikrit, thought he recalled Anna telling him that. He wasn’t sure Anna had ever mentioned her older sister’s married name, although she’d told him once that Jessica had followed their stepfather into the hypnotism trade. Anna had said her sister made almost seventy thousand dollars a year at it.
    Jude said, “Why did I have to buy the suit? Why didn’t you just send it to me?” The calm of his own voice was a source of satisfaction to him. He sounded calmer than she did.
    “If you didn’t pay, the ghost wouldn’t really belong to you. You had to pay. And, boy, are you goin’ to.”
    “How’d you know I’d buy it?”
    “I sent you an e-mail, didn’t I? Anna told me all about your sick little collection…your dirty little oh-cult pervert shit. I figured you couldn’t help yourself.”
    “Someone else could’ve bought it. The other bids—”
    “There weren’t any other bids. Just you. I put