Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  Tuxedo popped his head up and meowed seconds before the light rap on the door. Dana’s mother poked her head into the room.

  “I thought you might still be sleeping,” she said, letting herself in. “Did you get some rest?”

  “Sure,” Dana answered, not interested in mentioning that her sleep had been peppered with fragmented memories and dreams like scattershot fired from another dimension. All the changes in the last two days, all the newly remembered faces, all the fresh suggestions of what she should do and who she could be—all of it was overloading the circuits of her brain.

  “That was quite a surprise to see Tim again,” her mother said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I guess we just lost track of his family. You weren’t seeing him anymore, and both of you had gone away to school . . . I had heard his parents were splitting up, but . . . I guess there was no reason to keep in touch.”

  “I didn’t stay in contact with him either,” Dana said. “I don’t think he stayed in touch with me. I don’t remember that he did.”

  “He wasn’t too happy when you broke up with him. I don’t imagine he felt a need to keep in touch.”

  Dana frowned. “But we were both going away that fall. We both knew that was the end.”

  At least that was the way she was remembering it.

  Her mother picked a T-shirt off the pile of clothes and began to fold it. “Young men have tender egos. That summer was supposed to be his time to shine. You tarnished that for him a little bit breaking up with him when you did.”

  “Boys are such babies,” Dana said, the words falling strangely, as if a much younger version of herself had spoken them. “I was supposed to just be his arm candy all summer, then wait for him to pick the moment to break up with me when it was convenient for him?

  “That’s just stupid,” Dana declared. “He always wanted everything to be his idea.”

  “He was a little full of himself that spring,” her mother recalled. “But I remember that he could be very sweet, too, and he always had a great sense of humor. I always thought he would go far.”

  “He went far and came back,” Dana said. “That doesn’t make sense to me. He was all about his big career in the military. Remember?”

  He had been in every parade for fifty miles that summer. The big West Point cadet riding around in the back of a Cadillac convertible, waving to the crowds.

  “Sometimes big plans look better from a distance,” her mother said, folding another top. “Maybe the reality of that bigger life just wasn’t a good fit for him. I’m sure that wasn’t easy to admit or accept.

  “But he decided he wanted to come back here and make a difference,” she said. “I like what that says about him. Casey’s disappearance inspired him to a career that he feels strongly about. He’s dedicated to it and ambitious. It doesn’t sound like he settled for something. He just made a different choice.”

  A mischievous smile turned one corner of her mouth. She cut Dana a sideways glance as she made a neat stack of the T-shirts. “And he’s still pretty darn handsome, thinning hair notwithstanding.”

  “So I’m sure he has all the girlfriends he wants,” Dana said flatly. “Good for him.”

  “I’m not suggesting that,” her mother said. “But there’s no reason you can’t enjoy his friendship or his company. He made a point to come here and welcome you home.”

  “Mom, don’t go there. Really.”

  “The two of you were friends for a long time. You know each other. You’re comfortable together. It would be nice for you to have that friendship again. He could always make you laugh. I’d like to hear that again.”

  Dana said nothing but reached for a T-shirt from the pile and folded it. She hadn’t given any thought to having any kind of social life. Her focus was on her immediate self, on healing and therapy and finding something to do with her life. She hadn’t thought about having friends, male or female. She hadn’t thought about reconnecting with the world in a social way. The idea made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready.

  “He came here to ask me about Doc Holiday,” she said. “The flowers were a bonus.”

  Her mother’s back stiffened. Her expression hardened. “He did what?”

  “He did his job.”

  Dana pulled a purple hoodie from the pile. Tuxedo rolled onto his back and batted at the dangling hood strings with his white-mittened paws.

  “He asked me if I remembered seeing Doc Holiday around here before Casey went missing,” she said, and shrugged. “I don’t know what Doc Holiday looked like. I can’t remember him. I don’t want to remember him.”

  “You don’t have to,” her mother said. “I don’t want you to.”

  “You’re the only one,” Dana said, folding the sweatshirt and setting it aside. She pulled a jewelry pouch from the pile of belongings and dumped the contents in her lap.

  “Tim said Casey and I weren’t getting along before she disappeared,” she said. “Do you remember that?”

  Her mother’s brow knitted as she tried to recall. She smoothed her hands over the folded sweatshirt in her lap and sighed. “The usual teenage drama. There was plenty to go around. Breakups, makeups. I couldn’t keep up. You had broken up with Tim. Casey always had some drama with her boyfriend. You were upset because Casey was upset. Or you were upset with Casey for being upset. But you never stopped being friends. Casey stayed overnight here the night before she went missing.”

  Dana tried to pick a necklace from the jumble of jewelry. The chains of several necklaces had somehow woven themselves into a knot. She couldn’t tell which chain belonged to which charm bristling from the knot like the elaborate spines of some fantasy sea creature—a cross, a heart, a butterfly, a flower with a tiny pearl in the center.

  “I was out of town,” her mother said. “I was in Florida. Grandma was having surgery. I remember Roger complaining over the phone that two teenage girls was more than he could cope with.”

  “Roger’s a dick.”

  “Dana!”

  “Well, he is.”

  “That’s not true,” her mother argued. “I don’t know where this sudden animosity is coming from.”

  “I don’t think it’s sudden,” Dana said. “I think I just don’t have good impulse control anymore.”

  “That’s a fact. Maybe Dr. Burnette can help you with that. See if she can work on your sudden use of bad language, too.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be helpful with that,” Dana said as she continued to fuss with the necklaces.

  The necklace with the cross had been a gift for her confirmation when she was fourteen. The heart had been a gift from Casey. The flower with the pearl had belonged to her great-grandmother on her father’s side. The butterfly . . . She didn’t recognize the butterfly.

  She tried to pick the necklaces apart with her fingertips, tried to loosen something into a single recognizable thread—a task not unlike trying to make sense of the jumble of memories and thoughts in her mind.

  “That’s a mess,” her mother said. She reached out a hand. “Let me hold it while you untangle.”

  Dana dropped the ball of chains in her mother’s palm and used two hands to fuss with the necklaces, working the butterfly necklace free. She held it up to the light and studied the pendant, a butterfly rendered in intricate silver filigree.

  “That’s beautiful,” her mother said. “Where did you get that?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana murmured, staring at the butterfly as it turned in the light, a strange sense of apprehension stirring within. “I don’t remember ever having this.”

  Her mother reached out and fingered the end of the chain. “It’s broken. See where the latch is?”

  Dana examined the chain. The latch was in place and fastened, but two inches down from the latch, the chain separated. As she looked more closely,
she could see that the links had not pulled apart but had been cut.

  “That was in the bag,” her mother said. “I remember that was in the bag of your belongings at the hospital. You must have been wearing it when they found you. They must have cut the chain off in the ER that night.”

  Dana closed her hand around the butterfly, the points of the tiny wings digging into her palm, and a low current of anxiety hummed through her, though she didn’t know why. She opened her hand and looked at the marks that crossed the lines of her palm and wondered if somehow the necklace had made a similar impression on her life. Had it meant something to her? Had someone given it to her as a token of affection or to mark an occasion, as the other necklaces in the pouch had? They were all things with memories attached.

  But as she set the necklace aside on her nightstand, she had the uneasy feeling that she might not want to remember this one, even if she could.

  “What do you think happened to Casey?” she asked, taking the rest of the necklace knot from her mother to work at freeing the small heart.

  “I don’t know,” her mother said, getting up and taking the stack of tops to the closet. “I guess I want to believe she ran away. No one ever found evidence to the contrary. For her mother’s sake, I hope that’s what happened.”

  Dana followed her into the spacious walk-in and watched her sort the T-shirts and hoodies, arranging them neatly on the shelves.

  “Then again, I wouldn’t wish that not-knowing on anyone, either. It’s a terrible thing—not knowing where your child is. Is she alive? Is she in pain? The wondering, the speculation—it’s terrible. I can’t imagine living with that year after year. I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “Would you rather know I was dead?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  Dana shrugged. “That’s the alternative.”

  “I would rather nothing bad happen in the first place.”

  “But it did,” Dana said. “It happened to Casey and to me. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a terrible coincidence.”

  “Or not. If the same man took us.”

  “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,” her mother said, frustrated. She turned and left the closet, walking away from the issue. “He’s dead. It’s over. I don’t see the point in wondering about it. It’s time for everyone to move forward.”

  “Has Casey’s mom moved forward?” Dana asked, following her.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from Caroline in years. She moved to Hawaii.”

  “But you used to be friends.”

  “We were friends because our daughters were friends,” she said. She picked up an empty suitcase from the floor, put it on the foot of the bed, and zipped it shut, her movements quick and efficient. “After you went away to college . . . It was just too hard.”

  Dana sat down beside the suitcase. “Too hard for who?”

  “For both of us. The things we had in common were you girls and your activities. Then suddenly I had a daughter and Caroline didn’t. It was just too hard for both of us.”

  “Did you feel guilty?” Dana asked, more interested in having her questions answered than in her mother’s discomfort with them.

  “Of course I felt guilty. I had my perfect, smart, beautiful daughter, and Caroline . . . didn’t. How could I not feel guilty about that?”

  “But you abandoned her,” Dana said without thought.

  Her mother looked like she’d been slapped. “I did not!”

  “You didn’t want to be around her because you felt guilty, so you stopped being her friend. You just said so.”

  “She didn’t want to be around me, either,” she pointed out, taking the suitcase to the closet and setting it inside. “Why would she? So she could be reminded of what she’d lost? I tried to be there for her those first few months, but I could never say the right thing. I never knew what to do to help. She was living through something I couldn’t even imagine.”

  “But now you know.”

  “Yes. Now I know,” she said quietly as she came back to the bed and sat down beside Dana. “And I know there wasn’t anything I could have done to make it better for Caroline, because there isn’t anything that makes losing a child better. There’s nothing anyone can say or do that makes that okay or less than what it is. Nothing.

  “People try to give you some kind of comfort or some kind of divine explanation for what’s happening, and they can’t,” she said. “There is no explanation for evil. Bad things happen. They don’t happen for a reason. We have to deal with them as best we can. It doesn’t help to have someone try to tell you there’s some kind of greater plan,” she said. “Why would anybody tell a parent that?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana said. “Maybe it makes them feel like it can’t happen to them if the plan was meant for someone else.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Didn’t you think that when Casey went missing? Better her than me? Doesn’t everybody think that when they see a tragedy?”

  Her mother looked at her for a long moment as she processed the thought. She reached out a hand and stroked Dana’s short-cropped hair like she was delivering a blessing.

  “Everybody but a mother,” she said softly, tears misting her eyes. “Better me than you, little one. There’s nothing in this world or any other I wouldn’t protect you from if I could. If only we got to choose.”

  “Only the bad guy gets to choose,” Dana said. “The rest of us are just pieces in his game.”

  “Not anymore. No more,” her mother whispered, shaking her head. “Never again.”

  But even as her mother pulled her close and held her tight, Dana knew she couldn’t make that promise and keep it. The world was full of people with bad intentions. Her mother wanted to ignore that fact. She wanted to believe that once evil had touched their lives and they had somehow survived, they would now be immune, as if they had survived a disease and developed antibodies against reinfection.

  Dana knew that wasn’t true. She could still imagine the oily residue of evil on her skin. She could still smell it in her dreams. She could still sense it lurking just beyond the reach of the light as day faded beyond her window. She could still feel the pull of its energy, daring her to fight or to run.

  She didn’t want it to touch her. She didn’t want to go near it. But at the same time, she kept seeing Casey’s face from the terrible dream, confronting her, ridiculing her.

  You should have seen him coming . . . I died for nothing . . . I’m as dead as you are . . .

  She closed her eyes and saw the bloody infant that looked up at her with her own face. What did it mean? That she had become who she was at Casey’s expense? That she had pursued her career and found success because of what had happened to her friend? Had her own suffering at the hands of Doc Holiday somehow been payback for that? Or was finding the truth about what had happened to Casey her chance at redemption?

  That was a challenge she didn’t feel strong enough to accept. But even as she hid in the refuge of her mother’s arms, she had the terrible feeling it was a challenge she wouldn’t be able to escape.

  15

  In Shelby Mills, if a man wanted a job that paid cash with people who asked no questions, he went to the truck stop out by the interstate and hung around in the parking lot on the west side of Silva’s Garage. George Silva, a man who had built his life up from the dirt, let day laborers gather there around the picnic tables his mechanics used on their break time. The only rule was that no one make any trouble.

  First thing in the morning and at the end of the day, people would come looking to hire. The work offered was simple physical labor—digging ditches and heavy lifting, farmwork, and the like. The jobs might last a day or a week or as long as it took to pick all the apples in an orchard. They were generally the kinds of jobs that didn’t require much more than a strong
back. They were the kinds of jobs that didn’t require customer relations skills, or speaking English, for that matter. There were no benefits and there was no withholding. Pay was flat cash money.

  Most of the men who showed up at this spot were Hispanic with dubious documentation. Or they were local guys a little down on their luck, maybe just out of jail for petty stuff, or guys that drank too much from time to time who needed work between benders.

  John joined them reluctantly late in the day. He had no faith that Tony Tarantino would come through with another job for him. That would require an effort on Tony’s part—something Paula would squash like a bug. And seeing how she carried Tony’s balls around in a tiny little jar in her handbag, that would be the end of that.

  John parked his truck under the trees at the edge of the parking lot and went around to sit on the tailgate, staying away from the picnic tables and the other men. He hadn’t come for camaraderie or commiseration. He didn’t want to draw any attention or invite any conversation. He pulled his ball cap low over his eyes and hunched his shoulders up around his ears, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket.

  Anxiety stirred in his belly as he waited. From where he sat he could see his father’s black Chevy Avalanche parked in the line of cars by the garage. The old man worked as a mechanic for Silva. He would get off work between four and five, then go to the bar across the street and drink boilermakers until he was feeling good and mean. At some point in the evening he would come back to the truck stop, go to the Grindstone for dinner or for a piece of pie.

  John didn’t want his father seeing him here. He didn’t want to have to hear the old man crowing over the fact that he had gotten fired from Anthony’s. He didn’t need to hear the I-told-you-so bullshit. His father had been calling him a failure his whole life. It pissed John off no end that every once in a while the rotten bastard turned out to be right.

  Right now he was a loser. He was a failure. His father called him a quitter, but he had never been that. People quit on him, not the other way around. That had always been the case. His mother had quit on him. Teachers had quit on him. Casey had quit on him. The army had quit on him. But here he was, coming back for more.