Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  She felt sick in the pit of her stomach as she considered the possibility. If she was right, the tragedy doubled.

  Casey had made a plan to meet John that night to tell him something. Had John been building a rage all summer that might have spilled over that hot August night? It wasn’t difficult to imagine him that angry. He had always been a boy with a chip on his shoulder the size of Ohio. He had always resented Tim’s golden-boy status. But Casey had been his prize. Regardless of his troubles and his faults, having Casey for his girlfriend had meant something to him. Dana remembered thinking of them as Beauty and the Beast. Sweet, beautiful, kind Casey and brooding, tormented John from the wrong side of the tracks.

  If Casey told him she was dumping him forever for Tim Carver . . .

  It wasn’t all that hard to imagine him putting his hands around her throat and choking the life out of her. He had a violent temper.

  Last night someone had found a skeleton in a barrel in the back of a shed at the back of the Villante property.

  The rest of that story had still been a jumble at the time of the eleven o’clock news. Someone had been shot. Someone had gone to the hospital. Someone was being questioned. Too much was left to the imagination. Dental records would solve the biggest part of the mystery. They would likely know today whether or not the body in the barrel was Casey’s.

  “What are you doing out here?” her mother asked, padding across the damp flagstones in her bare feet.

  “Thinking,” Dana said.

  Her mother wrapped her arms around her and kissed her cheek. “Come do that inside before you catch pneumonia.”

  Dana climbed down from the table and they went back into the house together, Tuxedo tagging along at their heels.

  “You should go back to bed,” her mother said. “You’re not getting enough rest.”

  “I can’t. I’m awake now. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all going around and around in my head like a swarm of bees. I can’t make it stop.”

  Her mother’s face was a mask of concern. She started to fuss, touching Dana’s hair, damp from the fog, trying to rearrange the throw wrapped around her, her hands fluttering like the wings of a small distressed bird.

  “You should take your anxiety medication.”

  “No,” Dana said, shrugging off her touch. “I don’t like how it makes me feel. I know you gave me some last night. I feel like I’m walking through molasses.”

  “You were so distraught—”

  “I had good reason to be. That might be Casey, dead in a barrel for seven years. That’s horrible! I should be upset. Everyone should be upset.”

  “Of course we’re all upset.”

  “I don’t want to take a pill to make it stop. Because it doesn’t stop. The truth doesn’t go away because you take a pill. It all just keeps happening in slow motion, and I can’t feel it, and that’s wrong. I don’t want to go through life as a zombie.

  “That’s what he wanted me to be, isn’t it?” she asked, the memory striking her hard.

  Her mother looked stricken. Tears filled her eyes. She put her hand across her mouth to keep the pain from escaping as a sound.

  “Doc Holiday,” Dana said. “He didn’t want me to die. He wanted to leave me a zombie. Is that what you want, too?”

  “No!” her mother said. “I want you not to hurt. I want you not to have to remember it or feel it. I want none of it to have ever happened!”

  “But it did happen, Mom. It did happen, and here we are,” Dana said. “I’m not a broken doll you can glue back together and pretend I’m the same as before. I’m not the same. I’m never going to be the same. But I have to accept that and go on the way I am; otherwise, he might as well have killed me.”

  As her mother began to cry, Dana reached out. In that moment she realized it was her turn to offer comfort, to console her mother for the child she had lost. She would never be the same girl she had been before that cold January morning in a Minneapolis parking lot. Doc Holiday had taken that girl away from herself and away from everyone who loved her. They would all have to start again with the damaged young woman who had survived, and part of that process was mourning what they all had lost.

  They held each other for a long while as that truth settled over both of them.

  31

  It was dawn by the time John walked out of the ER. Despite his protests to the contrary, his body had betrayed him in the end. After more than an hour of questioning by the detective, Tubman, he had excused himself to go piss blood and had passed out five steps from his truck. He had come to quick enough, but the decision was out of his hands by then. Carver had driven him to the ER.

  There was no sign of him now as John walked out into the gloom. Another Liddell County cruiser sat at the curb. A young bulldog of a deputy he didn’t know got out of the car and called to him across the roof.

  “Can I drop you someplace, Mr. Villante?”

  “Home,” John said.

  The deputy shook his shaved head. “Can’t take you there. The whole place is a crime scene. It’s still being processed.”

  John tried to sigh, pain stabbing him in his cracked and bruised ribs, catching his breath short. “I just want to get my truck.”

  “’Fraid that’s not happening either. It’s part of the scene.”

  He had nowhere else to go. Home, such as it was, or his truck. Beyond those two choices, he had nothing and no one. All he had were the clothes on his back, filthy and stained with his own blood and the blood of his father.

  He had refrained from asking after the old man while he was in the ER. That hadn’t stopped him hearing, just the same. Multiple facial fractures and a skull fracture. He would live to fight another day. That figured. The son of a bitch was too damned mean to die, even if John had made a better effort. Belligerent and combative, the old man had been put in some kind of twilight state to keep him quiet through the worst of his concussion.

  John had fared little better. The bullet had indeed fractured his collarbone. His right arm now hung useless in a sling. He didn’t want to know how many stitches it had taken to close the trench the bullet had dug through the flesh of his shoulder. He had badly bruised and cracked ribs and a kidney that felt like it had been pounded with a mallet. The right side of his face was like something from a horror movie, the eye swollen nearly shut, the cheek glued together, all of it filled with fluid and discolored like a rotten peach.

  Even though his head was banging like a bass drum, he had refused the head CT against the doctor’s wishes. His brain was already a mess. He didn’t need a test to prove he had a fresh concussion in addition to the damage he’d already had. What difference would it make what Mack had done to him? If he was lucky, he would get a blood clot and die from it. But he was never that lucky.

  He heard the distant crackle of the cruiser’s radio and watched the young deputy speak into the remote unit on his shoulder.

  “Detective Tubman suggests you come in to the sheriff’s office to wait,” the deputy said. “We can make you comfortable there.”

  What good would it do to protest? He had nowhere else to go. As much as he would have liked to get on the first bus out of town, no one was going to let him do that either.

  Resigned, he eased himself into the backseat of the deputy’s car and closed his eyes against the pain as the car pulled away from the curb. His last thought before he passed out was to wonder what might have become of his dog.

  * * *

  HE CAME BACK AROUND as the deputy took hold of his damaged shoulder to shake him. John’s roar of pain sent the kid running backward.

  “Hey! Sorry, dude!”

  John said nothing as he worked his way out of the car.

  He was “made comfortable” in an interrogation room with no windows and nothing but a hard chair to sit on. John ignored the chair in favor of sitting on the floor, propped up in
the corner, facing the door. The deputy brought him a bottle of water and a couple of stale doughnuts and left him. He drank the water, ignored the doughnuts, and drifted in and out of consciousness, welcome, at least, for the quiet when it came.

  When he was awake, he worked to keep his mind quiet, to keep the flashbacks of what had happened from replaying over and over. He wanted to think nothing, to feel nothing. He tried to picture absolute darkness, but the blank screen was sporadically interrupted by blasts of sight and sound and feeling, so loud and so intense it made him flinch. Memories of last night, memories of his father, memories of war, memories of death— Bam! Bam! Bam! Flash-bang bright. So loud he wanted to cover his ears, but the sound was in his head, and there was no escape.

  Eventually, exhaustion overtook him, and he dozed for a while. He had no idea how much time had passed when Tubman showed up.

  “You should have stayed in the hospital,” the detective said as he pulled out a chair and seated himself next to the tiny round table. He promptly ate one of the doughnuts.

  “When can I go home?” John asked.

  “Remains to be seen.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means it won’t be anytime soon.”

  The detective munched on the second doughnut and stared at him.

  John let his eyes drift shut.

  “You want to tell us about that barrel?” Tubman asked.

  “No, sir. I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

  “How long has it been in that shed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know? You grew up there. You live there.”

  “I don’t go in that shed.”

  “Ever.”

  “Ever.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that.”

  John said nothing. He didn’t give a shit what this tub of lard thought, but even with a concussion he knew better than to say so.

  “You don’t know who that skeleton is,” Tubman said.

  “No, sir.”

  The detective opened the cover of a thick file and looked down through the lenses of his little wire-rimmed glasses at a typed page of something John couldn’t make out.

  “How is it nobody looked inside that barrel seven years ago when Casey Grant went missing?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You’d have to ask one of your own.”

  “Fucking Hardy,” Tubman muttered under his breath.

  Detective Hardy, John supposed. He hated the very name. Hardy had made his life a misery. It was half Hardy’s doing that he had ended up in the army. He might have thanked the man for that—right up until the moment the IED had gone off, flipping the Hummer he was in, scrambling his brain like an egg.

  “What’s the deal with you and your old man?” Tubman asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You clearly hate each other. Why is that?”

  John said nothing. He didn’t know how to begin to explain his relationship with his father. Looking back to his childhood, he knew that he had both loved and feared the old man. Even as a teenager, as much as he had hated the man, he had still known a pathetic need to make his father proud of him—something he had managed every once in a while on an athletic field. He might have thought his father was proud of his service in the military, but he had never heard it from the old man’s lips.

  Even last night, even after every other disappointment in his life, a little part of his heart had died looking down the barrel of his father’s gun. Surely he had known long before that his father didn’t love him in any sense of the word, and yet some small part of him had held out a tiny scrap of hope, secret even to himself.

  He didn’t have the energy to try to explain any part of that to Tubman.

  “How was he around your girlfriends?” Tubman asked. “Did he express an interest? Was he inappropriate in any way?”

  A strange wave of shame washed over John as he considered his answer. His father’s leering and inappropriate remarks had been the reason he had rarely taken Casey to his house. His lack of ability to do anything about his father’s behavior had left him feeling less of a man.

  “Yes, sir. He was a pig, sir,” he said.

  “Did he ever threaten Casey Grant? Did you ever see him make a physical advance on her? Did she ever express a fear of him?”

  “He made her uncomfortable,” John said. “I didn’t bring her around him much.”

  The detective referred back to his notes, licking the tip of a thick finger and paging through the file.

  “You think it’s Casey Grant in that barrel?” Tubman asked.

  He had considered the possibility. He had wondered over the years if his father could have had something to do with Casey’s disappearance. Her car had been found in the parking lot between Silva’s Garage and the woods. The old man had just laughed at him when John had confronted him about the possibility. He’d had an alibi. An alibi who had died in a fire a month later.

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said.

  “You sure about that?”

  And so it would begin again, John thought. The endless questions, the accusations, the twisting and turning of his words and deeds, the scrutiny of the media. The inevitability of it swarmed over him, sapping what little strength he had. He had barely weathered the storm seven years ago when his brain had been whole. In the intervening years he had grown from boy to man. He had been battle-tested and survived two wars. But he was so tired now, his body and his brain so beaten, the idea of having to face it all again made him want to cry.

  He hated Casey Grant in that moment—as he had hated her that summer seven years ago. She had been the one pretty, perfect thing in his otherwise ugly life. She had been his reward after a childhood of abandonment and abuse, finally someone to love him when no one else ever had or ever would, it seemed. Too good to be true, he had thought at the time, every time he looked at her as she held his hand or smiled at him or kissed him. Too good to be true. And so she had been. A pretty little liar, tired of his drama, done with her community service of being kind to the poor boy with no mother. He had ceased to be her charity, and she moved on to a brighter future with no real understanding of what that meant to him.

  She had broken his heart, had ruined his life, and she was about to do it all over again.

  “Sir?” he asked. “Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” Tubman said. “But it’s in your best interest to cooperate here.”

  With great effort and great pain, John pushed himself to his feet.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t believe it is. I’ll be going now.”

  32

  The waiting was terrible. Every minute was like a bubble that grew and grew, filling with anticipation only to burst so that another might begin to form and grow and grow. Dana had texted Tim with the single question: Is it her? And then waited and waited for him to text her back, only to receive: will let u know. An answer that wasn’t an answer.

  The story was all over the news. The local television stations all had reporters and cameras live at the scene. Each crew had staked out a patch of weedy ground outside the yellow barrier tape that cordoned off the Villante property on the ragged edge of town. They stood in the rain, bundled in their station-logo storm jackets, reporting the news of no news, regurgitating everything that had happened the night before.

  The one revelation of the day was the name of the person who had been hospitalized. John “Mack” Villante Sr. was in serious but stable condition with a head injury of some kind. John Jr. had been treated and released. There still had been no official explanation of the reported shooting that had initiated the call to the sheriff’s office.

  Dana sat at the kitchen table watching the coverage and checking her phone, checking the time, checking to make sure no messages had managed to sneak into it unnoticed, as if that was
even remotely possible. She watched the recounting of Casey’s disappearance, the rerunning of old footage from news stories seven years ago.

  There they all were, players in the drama—herself and Tim and John, their friends from school, Casey’s mother, the people in her life who wanted her found, and the people in her life who might have wanted her dead.

  It seemed so strange to see herself, Before Dana, just on the brink of going out in the world, trying so hard to seem like an adult, as frightened as a child at the sudden loss of her friend. And there was Tim, tall and straight, already carrying himself like the military cadet he was about to become. His hair thicker than now and combed just so with a razor-sharp part on the side. He seemed so serious and so earnest in his answers to the reporter’s questions about Casey. And there was John, lean and sullen, brows tugged low over his narrowed dark eyes, his broad shoulders hunched against the weight of accusation.

  All three of them had left Shelby Mills, left that time, and left the story of Casey Grant behind them. And here they were, seven years later, back in the town that had grown them, back in the wake of Casey’s vanishing.

  The television screen was full of still and video images of herself seven years ago, and a year ago, and three days ago. A photo chronicle of her growth and her tragedy. Then John took her place, and the photos were of him in a football uniform, then in an army uniform, then in the desert camouflage of a war half a world away. Images of Tim completed the segment. A still photo of him at eighteen was planted in the upper left of the screen as video rolled showing him today, in uniform, directing other sheriff’s personnel around the scene at the Villante property.

  There was no real neighborhood where the Villantes lived. Curbs and gutters ended a quarter of a mile from their driveway. Properties were irregular in size and shape and set apart from one another with no sense of community intended. The houses had been built in the fifties and sixties and neglected in recent decades, cracker boxes and ranch rectangles in aluminum siding and cheap brick. Detached garages and ramshackle sheds were the norm out there. A thick woods ran right up to the back of the Villante yard.