Read Heart-shaped box for Free Online Page B

the phone and curse her out, except he couldn’t get her on the phone, because she was dead.
    “Did she leave a note?” Danny asked.
    “I don’t know. I didn’t get much information from her sister. It wasn’t the world’s most helpful phone call. Maybe you noticed.”
    But Danny wasn’t listening. He said, “We used to go out for margaritas sometimes. She was one hell of a sweet kid. Her and her questions. She asked me once if I had a favorite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that? She made me shut my eyes and describe what it looked like outside my bedroom window when it was raining. For ten minutes. You never knew what she was going to ask next. We were big-time compadres. I don’t understand this. I mean, I know she was depressed. She told me about it. But she really didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t she have called one of us if she was going to do something like…? Wouldn’t she have given one of us a chance to talk her out of it?”
    “I guess not.”
    Danny had dwindled somehow in the last few minutes, shrunk into himself. He said, “And her sister…her sister thinks it’s your fault? Well, that’s…that’s just crazy.” But his voice was weak, and Jude thought he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.
    “I guess.”
    “She had emotional problems going back before she met you,” Danny said, with a little more confidence.
    “I think it runs in her family,” Jude said.
    Danny leaned forward again. “Yeah. Yeah . I mean—what the Christ? Anna’s sister is the person who sold you the ghost? The dead man’s suit? What the fuck is going on here? What happened that made you want to call her in the first place?”
    Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what he’d seen last night. In that moment—pushed up against the stony truth of Florida’s death—he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d seen last night anymore. The old man sitting in the hallway, outside his bedroom door at 3:00 A.M. , just didn’t seem as real now.
    “The suit she sent me is a kind of symbolic death threat. She trickedus into buying it. For some reason she couldn’t just send it to me, I had to pay for it first. I guess you could say sanity isn’t her strong suit. Anyway, I could tell there was something wrong about it as soon as it came. It was in this fucked-up black heart-shaped box and—this will maybe sound a little paranoid—but it had a pin hidden inside to stick someone.”
    “There was a needle hidden in it? Did it stick you?”
    “No. It poked Georgia good, though.”
    “Is she all right? Do you think there was something on it?”
    “You mean like arsenic? No. I don’t get the sense Jessica Price of Psychoville, Florida, is actually that stupid. Deeply and intensely crazy, but not stupid. She wants to scare me, not go to jail. She told me her stepdaddy’s ghost came with the suit and he’s going to get me for what I did to Anna. The pin was probably, I don’t know, part of the voodoo. I grew up not far from the Panhandle. Place is crawling with toothless, possumeating trailer trash full of weird ideas. You can wear a crown of thorns to your job at the Krispy Kreme and no one will bat an eye.”
    “Do you want me to call the police?” Danny asked. He was finding his footing now. His voice wasn’t so winded, had regained some of its self-assurance.
    “No.”
    “She’s making threats on your life.”
    “Who says?”
    “You do. Me, too. I sat right here and heard the whole thing.”
    “What did you hear?”
    Danny stared for a moment, then lowered his eyelids and smiled in a drowsy kind of way. “Whatever you say I heard.”
    Jude grinned back, in spite of himself. Danny was shameless. Jude could not, at the moment, recall why it was he sometimes didn’t like him.
    “Naw,” Jude said. “That’s not how I’m going to deal with this. But you can do one thing for me. Anna sent a couple letters after she went home. I don’t know what I did with them.