Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

She could have spared them fourteen years of sleepless nights. She could have told them what happened the night it actually happened. Geo could have done a lot of things.

Candace Wong Platten mailed Geo a Christmas card. A dozen cards, all signed the same way. Love, Angie’s mom.

They hate her now.

and once her testimony is given, she’ll be shipped to Hazelwood Correctional Institute to begin serving her five-year sentence.

Her fiancé doesn’t know what she’s done. He’ll soon find out.

Geo tells the court about their relationship back then, when they were boyfriend and girlfriend,

house, Calvin driving, Angela folded into the trunk of the car. The

“The ground was too … there were too many rocks. We couldn’t dig a large enough hole for … for … all of her.”

“And then you went on with your life like it never happened. You lied to the cops. You lied to her parents. You let them suffer for fourteen years, not knowing what happened to their only child.”

“You left your best friend buried in the woods, a mere hundred yards from the house you lived in, after your boyfriend cut her up into pieces.”

On it, Calvin has scrawled a note in his small, neat handwriting. You’re welcome. Beside the two words, he’s drawn a small heart.

It’s easier to lie when your mouth is full.

There are three types of currency in prison: drugs, sex, and information.

“What about your mother?” “She died. When I was five.”

“My mother was half Filipino, and my dad is a quarter Jamaican. I’m mixed.”

At thirty, Geo was the youngest female executive at Shipp by a decade,

No more carrying the secret around like the unbearably heavy two-ton block of cement it had come to be. Slowly exhaling the long breath she’d been holding for fourteen years, she allowed her shoulders to relax.

“He raped them first, then he strangled them, and then he buried their bodies in the woods. He probably figured he got away with it once and it turned him on, so why not do it again? And again. And again.

“The good news is, the DA doesn’t want you,” Kaiser said, saying the line that every cop used in the movies. “They want Calvin.”

“Testify,” Kaiser said. “The district attorney will agree to a plea deal in exchange for your testimony.

“The trial will be public, I’m sure. However, if I a sign a nondisclosure agreement—which I’m happy to do if the settlement is fair—we can prevent my personal situation from affecting Shipp.

“Because he escaped from prison,” Kaiser says, and just like that, Geo’s heart stops. “Three days ago.

Calvin James changed her life. He had changed all their lives … for the worse. He’d pulled off the prison escape of the decade, killing a prison guard and a counselor in the process.

“You remember your first one, right? You buried her body in the woods, after you chopped her up. She was a high school junior, a cheerleader.” Calvin said nothing, continuing to listen politely.

Except you didn’t dismember the others. Only Angela. Only the first one.” Calvin James’s lips twitched, but he said nothing.

“I said there were two bodies,” Luca says. “One’s a child.”

She’s his goddamned partner.

the crime scene now looks eerily similar to the one from back then. Only this time around, there are two victims: a woman and a child.

She’s buried in almost the exact same place as Angela Wong.

Walter Shaw,

Could he be the killer?

“Detective, the picture you just showed me is of Henry’s biological father.”

“Murder. Calvin James is the Sweetbay Strangler.” “Wait.… what?”

How do you explain to a sixteen-year-old girl who’s never been in love what love is supposed to feel like?

how quickly the abuse would start to feel normal.

All couples fought. Most of the time, he didn’t hurt her. When things were good, they were great. But when they were bad, they were terrible.

The rest are in a box upstairs, under the bed. Where secrets hide.

Why wouldnt she gjve them to him? It makes no sense

She wasn’t perfect, but neither was Angela. In every story, there’s a hero and villain. Sometimes one person can be both.

She didn’t return after Christmas break.

Georgina had a son from Calvin after he raped her. That is the killer.

her father told him that she was being treated for depression, and that he’d arranged for her to finish her junior year at home via tutor.

The following September, Geo was back at St. Martin’s for her senior year. It was like the previous year had never happened. She seemed quieter and more

Nineteen years later, it all makes complete sense, and

“I wasn’t … sexually active. It only happened one time.”

Yes, it was rape. No, she couldn’t tell anybody. If she told someone, and they arrested him,

Nori and Mark Kent.

“It’s a boy,” she heard one of nurses say. “Six pounds, thirteen ounces.”

letters from the son whom almost nobody knew she had. Dominic is now eighteen, older than she was when she had him.

“He’s the one who cut up those women, and strangled the children, and then drew hearts on the kids with lipstick? It all makes total sense now. Sick fucker. Wow.”

The hearts and lipstick is not common knowledge !

It hits her then. The thing her son just said, about the lipstick, about the hearts on the chest.

Kaiser was the one who’d told her about it. Nobody outside the investigation knew.

“Mother,” he breathes, looking directly into her eyes. “Do you see me?”