Summary

The short story, "Heat," written by Joyce Carol Oates focuses on the mystery murder of two eleven-year-old identical twins, Rhea and Rhonda Kunkel.  The story opens on a hot, midsummer's day as the girls are riding on their bicycles to Whipple's Ice.  In the next paragraph, the narrator is at the funeral parlor.  The narrator describes the twins in the caskets and says that the girls we the exact same and wanted it that way.  They thought the same, looked the same, and probably dreamt the same things.  The girls said they could never be apart from each other.  Others were jealous of Rhea and Rhonda because no one else had a twin.  The twins were powerful towards their friends but they were also very sweet and did nice gestures.

Rhea and Rhonda had stolen six dollars from their grandmother to buy some ice.  The two arrived together at Whipple's Ice.  Roger Whipple was in the barn working and the kids went down to beg him for ice and threatened to tease him if he didn't give them any.  Roger's parents said he was a good, gentle boy but he was also very strange.

The twins circled Roger Whipple on their bicycles  and he was sitting there laughing.  They would play games with him and see how close they could get to hitting him but for some odd reason, Roger wanted them to keep going.  The girls teased him and would throw ice cubes at him as he tried to catch the ice cubes and they would say "Here, doggie!"  After a while, Roger convinced the girls that he had secret things in his room and asked them if they would like to see.  He told them he could only take one of them into the room at once.  Rhea was always the first out of the two so she immediately dropped her bike and followed him to his room.  At first Rhoda was in fear that something was going to happen but she was also mad at Rhea because she wanted to go with them.  Rhea yelled back at Rhoda and told her to wait her turn.  Rhoda got tired of waiting so she began to ride home.  She was thinking about how much she hated Rhea and how she wished she was dead.  Before Rhoda got to the end of the driveway, she turned around because she felt scared so she went back to the house.  Rhoda went to the second floor of the house and called out for her sister.  The door was closed, the shade was down, and it seemed like Roger Whipple's room was empty.  After a few times of calling her sisters name, Roger Whipple opened the door as he was wiping his hands on his overalls, he was extremely sweaty and there her sister was laying on the floor with a flushed face.

Roger Whipple did not remember anything that had happened and over and over again he convinced people he did not recall anything so doctors from the state hospital examined him.  He remembered the twins being there but he could not explain why their bikes were at the bottom of his stairway and why he had bathed in the middle of the day (even though he was a clean person).  He couldn't explain the blood and the girls in his room but he acted differently and cried a lot.  The Whipple's called the police because they saw blood all over Roger Whipple's room and they found the girls bodies hidden in the icehouse.

The girls died the summer before entering seventh grade. The next scene explains that Roger Whipple was arrested and in custody and then the story goes to tell that he died at the state psychiatric hospital and was brought home to be buried in the same cemetery as the twins, the First Methodist.

The icehouse had been shut down and the business ended.  The narrator ends the story by admitting that she cheated on her husband with some man that she would meet at the abandoned icehouse.  While they would be in his car, she would think about the day that the twins died and what and happened upstairs in Roger Whipple's room.  After she made love to the man she would "feel her mind drift" and would have a flashback/replay of the incident.  The narrator explains that Roger Whipple told Rhoda that Rhea had gone home.  Rhoda fought back by saying that she would never leave without her and Roger Whipple came toward her and continued saying "yes she would" in an aggressive angry voice.  The story ends with the narrator skeptically saying, "I wasn't there, but some things you know."