Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) Page 3

  What to wear was the one problem Claire still hadn’t solved. The reunion offered a million different forms of humiliation for people who were on the verge of forty - and who also happened to be stuck in the throes of remembering their youth. Things kicked off Friday night with a Western-themed social. Claire figured she could get by with a denim skirt, a T-shirt and a bandanna tied around her neck. But what was she supposed to wear to the next day’s pool party? Or the dress-up dance Saturday night? Or Sunday’s barbecue and salmon bake?” Fourth of July in Minor meant the weather would likely be ninety-plus degrees. No hiding less than perfect thighs under pants, or concealing “chicken wing” upper arms with long sleeves.

  At Meier and Frank, Claire had bought a swimsuit that, according to its hangtag, could correct six different figure flaws. It promised to nip in her waist, give her cleavage, elongate her torso and legs, minimize her butt and flatten her abdomen. The only problem was that it took twenty minutes to wrestle herself into it. And once she took it off, the red marks it left behind lasted for hours.

  On the same shopping trip she had come close to buying an evening dress that was cut in such a way that no underwear could be worn under it. She’d finally borrowed a dress from her old friend, Lori. Lori had insisted Claire try on the high-heeled pumps that matched the dress. At the sight of Claire’s awkward, mincing stride, her friend had doubled over with laughter. “You look like a transvestite!” she had managed to gasp out. “You’ll have to wear flats, like you always do.” Since Claire had planned to do so anyway, she didn’t bother pointing out that her strange gait had been mostly due to the fact that Lori’s shoes were two sizes too small for Claire’s own size ten feet.

  Something cold seeped onto her scalp. Claire opened her eyes. Susie was dipping a paintbrush into one of three pots of liquid color. Then she picked up another of the pulled-through sections of hair and began to paint it. “I’ll put more of the blond next to your face. It should make you look younger.”

  “Susie, at a reunion, everybody knows exactly how old you are.”

  “I know that,” Susie gave Claire’s shoulder a shove that was a little less than playful. “But you don’t have to look it, do you?”

  Could Susie be jealous? The only thing she had ever graduated from was beauty school. Their mother, Jean, had left high school at sixteen when Claire’s imminent arrival had made itself known. Both of Jean’s parents had grown up on farms, quitting school by tenth grade because their help was needed in the fields. Before that, the family history was a little hazy, but Claire wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was the first Montrose to graduate from high school.

  Susie picked up a box of tin foil and began to tear off inch-wide strips. When she had a couple of dozen, she started to wrap some of the sections of hair in twists of foil. “This will intensify the color a little bit. That way you’ll have two levels of three shades, for a total of six variations of color - in addition to the color of your own natural hair.” She caught Claire’s gaze in the mirror again. “Don’t worry. You’ll look great, and no one will have any idea that it didn’t grow that way. Plus, you won’t have to worry about roots.” She picked up the last piece of tin foil, twisted it into place, and looked at her watch. “Okay, this is going to have to set for forty-five minutes, and then I’ll rinse it out. I’ve got to run down to the store and get some pull-ups for Eric. I’ve tried everything to potty train him, but it’s not working. I even got him this special potty chair that plays a song when you pee in it.”

  Claire smiled. “That would definitely inspire me.”

  Susie shook her had. “He’s learned to get water from the sink and just pour it in instead. Then this other mother at the park told me I should make it into a game by floating Cheerios in the toilet and trying to get him to ‘drown’ them. I tried it, he wasn’t buying. And then I forgot to flush and J.B. found all these floating Cheerios and thought I’d gone crazy. The only thing that sort of works is to give him an M&M each time he pees, but now he’s figured out how to make one pee stretch into eight trips to the potty.”

  “All this talk of peeing is giving me ideas,” Claire said, and went down the hall. Confronted by her own image in the bathroom mirror, she let out a little shriek. She looked like a demented super hero or the bride of Frankenstein on an acid trip. It wasn’t just the silver plastic cape. The dye had stiffened her hair, so that it bristled out of the rubber cap at all angles. Light glinted off the sections wrapped in foil.

  When Claire came back, Susie had the car keys in her hand. “Why don’t you go lay out in the back and get a little color? You don’t want to show up at your reunion looking like a ghost.”

  Claire made a mental note to buy some self-tanner so that her legs wouldn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to something that crawled up from the cellar. “I think I’ll just stay inside.”

  “On a nice day like this? You’ve got to take advantage of the sunshine when you find it.”

  “I look like a nut case, Susie. I don’t want to take the chance of anybody seeing me like this.”

  “Come on, we’ve got a six-foot privacy fence back there. And I’ll loan you my latest issue of People and a pair of sunglasses.”

  It was beginning to sound tempting. Warm weather always made Claire lazy. “Maybe I’ll just go to sleep. But you’ll wake me up, won’t you?”

  “Don’t worry. If I let that stuff stay on for more than an hour, it might make your hair fall out.”

  “Fall out?” Claire froze.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back long before that.”

  Claire peeked out into the backyard before she opened the door all the way. Susie was right. No one would be able to see her here. Stretching out on the lawn chair’s white rubber tubes she closed her eyes. Claire put one forearm over her face and let herself relax. She thought of Dante, his dark curls, his smoothly muscled shoulders, the way his breath would catch when she kissed him in the cup of his left ear, just above the gold earring he wore. Even smiling, he looked slightly dangerous, since one of his front teeth had been broken and then mended with a flash of white. None of her old classmates was ever going to believe that he was a Met curator specializing in 16th century art.

  ###

  Claire was dreaming of Dante, of his slow smile and his gold-flecked eyes. They lay together in his bed, the noises of New York City muffled by the thick walls of the old apartment, built before the First World War. Enjoying the contrast between her paleness and his swarthiness, Claire pressed her body against him. He groaned in pleasure. Then the street sounds swelled in her ears, louder and louder, shouts, a woman screaming in fear.

  Claire opened her eyes. The sounds continued.

  “You bastard!” A grunt. The stinging sound of a palm against flesh.

  She rolled off the lawn chair and crept toward the fence. Peering out between the slats, Claire realized that a woman was being raped in the alley just outside Susie’s fence. The woman’s blond hair hung wild in her face and her long breasts were exposed to the world. The man already had his pants loosened around his hips. Bravely, the woman balled her fists and swung at the man, who had his broad back to Claire. The street was otherwise empty, although Claire wondered if a dozen other pair of eyes were also watching, evaluating, waiting to see if the man had a gun, or telling themselves to mind their own business. This was the kind of neighborhood where people thought the best way to stay out of trouble was not to notice things.

  Claire had seen enough. But the phone was inside the house. By the time she reached it, called the police and they arrived, this poor woman would probably be lying on the ground with her teeth kicked in and the man rutting away on top of her. She made a split-second decision to intervene. Even if the other neighbors wouldn’t get involved, surely there must still be some elderly busybody who lived on the street and could be counted on to call 9-1-1.

  Charlie had passed on a few tips from her Self-Defense for Seniors class. One of them was that screaming or shouting ga
ve you power. The other was that when you acted, you did so with all decisiveness. There was no turning back. Shrieking like a banshee, Claire opened the gate and ran toward the struggling pair.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” she yelled. Running up behind the man, she grabbed his right hand before he could strike again. She twisted it behind him and then jerked it up between his shoulder blades. He was a big guy, but most of his bulk was concentrated in the roll around his waist. As he twisted in her two-handed grasp, she was glad that she had begun lifting heavier weights.

  “You bastard! Leave her alone!” Claire screamed in his ear while the man groped behind him with his free hand, trying to force her to let him go. “Somebody call the police!” she yelled at the empty neighborhood. The only thing that answered her was a dog that began to bark farther down the block. She remembered reading in a magazine that people were more cooperative about calling the fire department than the cops, so she decided to hedge her bets. “Fire! Fire! Call the fire department! There’s a fire!”

  The woman gave Claire a strange look, and then made a fist and shook it in the man’s face. “Give me my money, asshole.”

  Before Claire could decipher the meaning of this, the woman punched the guy in the stomach. Accompanied by a hollow explosion of breath, the woman’s fist sank up to the wrist. Claire was reminded absurdly of Charlie punching down bread dough.

  The man doubled over and threw up on the woman’s scuffed white pumps. Fearful that she would break his arm, Claire made a split second decision and released it. He fell to his hands and knees.

  The woman reached down to her waist and tugged up the yellow tube top over her slack breasts. A tube top. Claire hadn’t seen one of those since she was in high school. Looking more closely at the young woman’s plump, sullen face, Claire saw that she probably hadn’t even been born yet the last time Claire had worn a tube top. The other woman ran her hands down her blue shorts with bright green polka dots, then pushed her frayed, dead-looking hair out of her eyes.

  “Thanks,” she said, then bent over and tugged the man’s wallet from his back pants pocket. She thumbed it open, but the money compartment gaped empty. The wallet bounced off the man’s hanging head. “That’s the last time you get anything before you pay for it, asshole!” She aimed a kick at his ample backside. His face skidded in the dirt. Then she turned to look at Claire again.

  “What in the fuck are you supposed to be? Some kind of superpimp or” -. A medley of sirens interrupted her question. Without wasting any more time on conversation, she began to cut across the neighbor’s lawn, heading in the direction of another alley that ran behind the houses.

  A fire truck and a police car pulled up beside Claire and the man, one right after another, sirens blaring, lights whirling. The noise was deafening. The man lifted his head from the dirt, a string of vomit still hanging from his mouth. His soft, blurred features looked familiar. Refreshed by her recent trip with Charlie down memory lane, Claire finally placed him. Good old Suede. Wade AKA “Suede” Merz, Minor High class of 1979. Head football player turned overweight used car salesman.

  The sirens were turned off, but the lights continued to strobe. The cop and two firemen reached them at the same time. Claire could see one of the firemen trying unsuccessfully not to laugh as he took in her silver plastic cape, rubber helmet and bristling spikes of color-streaked and foil-wrapped hair.

  The cop had a narrow, pale face, and he didn’t look any older than twenty-five. “What’s the problem here, folks?” he asked. He made a point of resting his hand on the butt of his gun. His gaze was fastened on Claire, not Wade. In the last few years, a number of mentally ill people in Portland had committed “suicide by cop.”

  Claire wasn’t sure what to answer. Was it her business to tell the cop that Wade had tricked a hooker into giving him something for free?

  While she hesitated, the cop leaned over Wade, who was sitting back on his heels. He’d even managed to zip up his pants. The red imprint of a hand was rising up on his cheek, and there was a smear of dirt on his chin.

  “Did this woman assault you, buddy?”

  When Wade looked at Claire, it was clear he was focused on her outfit, not her face. A slow smile spread across his face. “Just a little argument, officers. Nothing to be concerned about.”

  Everything seemed to be calming down until Susie’s old Chevette came tearing up. She was yelling before she even got the car door open. “Where’s the fire? Is the house okay?”

  “Everything’s fine, Susie. Just a little misunderstanding.”

  Susie’s confused glance went from the cop to the two fireman (who were now openly laughing) to Wade. He sat on the curb, the front of his starched white shirt stained yellow with vomit. Susie was still confused, but then she happened to catch sight of Claire’s wrist. She grabbed it to look at her watch. “It’s that late? We’ve got to rinse your hair out right now.” She began to pull Claire behind her.

  The cop put a hand on her shoulder. “Not so fast, ma’am. You’re interrupting an ongoing investigation. I’m going to have to ask you to allow me to continue without interference.”

  “If I don’t rinse her hair out now, it’s going to start falling out. In big clumps.”

  He stiffened. “All in good time, ma’am.”

  Great. Now the cop had stopped paying attention to Wade and Claire and was getting angry at Susie. Was it Claire’s imagination, or did her scalp suddenly feel tight, as if the follicles were reaching a critical breaking point? She couldn’t take that chance.

  “Wait a second. There’s no problem here, Officer. Right, Wade?”

  Wade started at the sound of his name. He gave Claire a puzzled look, but didn’t miss his cue. “Right. No problem,” he echoed.

  “So can I go?”

  “There’s still the little matter of disturbing the peace,” the cop said stubbornly.

  “Oh, leave it go, Riley,” one of the firemen said over his shoulder as the two men walked back to their truck. They climbed in, turned off the lights and drove away.

  The cop gave the three of them a long look. “I don’t know what the hell’s been happening here. You should be glad I don’t have the time to haul your butts in the way you deserve.” Then he turned on his heel and marched smartly back to his patrol car. The back of his neck was an ugly red.

  Wade stood up and gave Susie and Claire a half-bow. The palm of his right hand hovered over his shirt without touching it. “Ladies,” he said with a nod, then walked off, as dignified as if nothing had happened.

  -CSHFLW

  Chapter Four

  Friday, July 2, 5 p.m.

  Claire tilted the rearview mirror so that she could look at her hair one more time. Despite the heat, and her car’s lack of air-conditioning, she had driven to Minor with her window resolutely rolled up. Dante had felt no such compunction, however, so the right side of her hair was tousled. In a corner of the mirror, she caught a glimpse of a crumpled Tootsie Roll wrapper in the seat behind her, caught in a crack between the narrow bench seat and the seat back. She stretched back and quickly pocketed it. Normally, her car was cluttered with junk-food wrappers, but when Dante was in town she took pains to keep that side of herself hidden from him. Despite her best efforts, her car was like a real-life example of entropy or perhaps spontaneous generation, as candy and chip wrappers magically appeared even after she vacuumed it.

  Claire knew that people sometimes wondered why she still drove an eleven-year-old Mazda 323 with a trunk that no longer locked, why she still shopped at the bag-your-own Winco grocery store, why her quitting Specialty Plates was the only visible sign of the fact that she had inherited a multi-million dollar Vermeer. The answer was that Claire had given nearly all the proceeds from the painting’s sale to the World Jewish Restitution Organization. No one knew who had owned Vermeer before it made its way into Claire’s great-aunt’s possession in post-war Germany. Still, it wasn’t hard to figure out the reason no heirs had come forward, since the Nazis had str
ipped so many Jews of their art collections before disposing of their owners all together.

  They had even done the same thing to Charlie, taken a little Rembrandt that had been in her family for generations. It was because of Charlie that Claire had initially decided to keep none of the money, but then it had been Charlie who finally insisted that Claire keep a tiny fraction. A lawyer Charlie knew had set up a trust that provided Claire with just about the same amount of money she used to make when she vetted vanity license plates. And that wasn’t really enough to afford a better car.

  Her hair, at least, still looked good. Despite the best efforts of the police, the firemen, Wade, and the hooker Claire had privately christened “Earlene,” Claire’s hair had turned out just as Suzy had promised. Now as she looked in the rearview mirror, Claire ran her fingers through soft ringlets the colors of paprika and cinnamon, mustard seed and curry. Here and there a strand glinted with the spicy brightness of hot red pepper.

  “You look great,” Dante said. “You should stop worrying about it.”

  “I spent twelve years of my life with these people.” She pushed the mirror back in place. “I don’t know why, but it still matters what they think about me.”

  For an answer, Dante leaned over the parking brake and gave her a kiss. Claire began it with one eye half-open, but by the end she had surrendered to the feeling of his lips, surprisingly soft, on hers. It was Dante who finally broke apart. He gave her a cat’s slit-eyed smile of pleasure. “We’d better go and get a room before somebody yells, ‘Get a room!’ at us.”

  Claire’s car was parked in the acres of parking lot that Ye Olde Pioneer Village Inn. Despite the names, the complex wasn’t run by the descendants of pioneers, though, but by the last living remnants of the Tequamish tribe. One-hundred and fifty years ago, the white man had decimated the Tequamish through broken treaties and the simultaneous introduction of smallpox, measles and firewater. The Tequamish had fought back valiantly, but to no avail. Now, through Indian casino gambling, their sons and daughters had found a belated revenge. It was easier, less messy and a lot more profitable to separate the white man from his wallet than his scalp.