Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  Dana imagined John as a boy growing up there with no mother and a brute for a father. She remembered him as a third grader, always having bruises but never having much of anything to say. She had kept her distance from boys like John. She was the queen of the class, hosting tea parties for her circle of little ladies-in-waiting.

  Her mother brought a steaming cup of tea to the table now, set it down in front of her, and ran a hand over Dana’s hair.

  “No word?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  They both sighed and stared at the television. They jumped together when the doorbell rang. Dana popped out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box and hurried to the front door.

  Tim stood on the front step looking like he hadn’t slept in days, dark half-circles sagging beneath his blue eyes, the lines around his mouth etched deeper than his years accounted for.

  Dana’s heart caught in her throat and fluttered there like a trapped bird. She put her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from asking the question. She didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “We haven’t heard,” Tim said. “There’s some snafu finding her dental records.”

  “Oh my God,” Dana’s mother said, putting her hands on Dana’s shoulders. “Come in, Tim. You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  He took his cap off and shrugged out of his rain poncho and left both in the foyer to drip on the tile next to his wet boots.

  “Can you tell us what’s going on?” Dana asked as they went back to the kitchen.

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m not allowed to say much more than what you’ve probably seen on the news—if that much. We haven’t pieced it all together yet ourselves, at any rate. We haven’t been able to speak to Mack Villante yet.”

  “But you’ve spoken to John?” Dana said.

  “Yes. He apparently went to the house to get his stuff and move out. He ended up in that shed at the back of the property. His father—we don’t know if he mistook him for an intruder or what. John says his father knew it was him. Anyway, he took a shot at John and there was an altercation. That’s what we know.”

  “Oh my God,” Dana’s mother said, bringing a cup of coffee to him at the table. “He shot at his own son?”

  Tim made a pained face. “That’s what you might call a bad family dynamic there.”

  “Casey always said John’s father made her skin crawl,” Dana said.

  “But he’s the one in the hospital?” her mother asked. “I’m confused.”

  “John got the better of him,” Tim said. “You know, he’s a trained commando—Special Forces and whatnot in the army. He’s got a box full of medals. I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of a fight with him.”

  “What does John have to say about the skeleton?” Dana asked.

  “Nothing. He denies knowing anything about it. But I have to say I don’t think he’s telling us everything he knows. He walked out of an interview with our detective just a little while ago.”

  “He just walked out?” Dana’s mother said. “How can he do that?”

  “It was what we call a noncustodial interview,” he explained. “He’s not under arrest. That makes him free to get up and leave.”

  “He put his father in the hospital!”

  “His father shot him. Winged him pretty good. It looks like John was defending himself. He made the 911 call and was reasonably cooperative at the scene. We didn’t have grounds to arrest him. Not at that point, anyway.”

  “And now?” Dana asked.

  “And now things are getting complicated,” he said.

  He took a sip of his coffee as if to fortify himself. Dana could feel him holding something back. There was a tightness around his mouth like he was trying not to swallow medicine that was bitter on his tongue. He made a little gesture toward the television on the wall.

  “As you’ve seen, we’ve been going over the place with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “And what have you found?” Dana asked.

  “Something I need to have you look at,” he said.

  He reached into a big pocket on his coat and pulled out a clear evidence bag with chain-of-custody notes scribbled on the front of it.

  “I have to leave it in the bag,” he said. “But I think you might recognize it.”

  He flipped the bag over, notes side down, on the table and pushed it toward Dana.

  “We found this in the house,” he said.

  Dana stared at the piece of jewelry in the bag, every inch of her body suddenly ice-cold with dread. Just last night she had looked at the photograph of herself and Casey, each holding up the pendant of their friendship necklace. Two halves of the same heart, inscribed with a saying only complete when the halves were joined together.

  “Oh no,” she said in the tiniest voice.

  “Of course, this by itself doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Tim said. “She could have left it there by accident . . .”

  “No,” Dana murmured, fingering the necklace through the plastic bag. “We wore these every day. She had it on that day. We both did.”

  She could see it in her mind as she squeezed her eyes closed against the tears. She had taken her necklace off that day and put it away because she was angry. She had written about it in her journal.

  I’m not going to wear a friendship necklace shared by someone who isn’t a true friend.

  There couldn’t be an innocent explanation for Casey’s necklace being in the Villante home. Casey would never have left it anywhere voluntarily. John had said again and again that he never saw her that day. But someone in that house had seen her. Someone in that house had probably killed her.

  The tears welled up and spilled over Dana’s lashes. She turned to her mother. “Mom . . .”

  Her mother wrapped her up in a hug and kissed her hair and murmured, “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

  Tim waited for a moment before clearing his throat discreetly.

  “I need to get going with this,” he said as he got up. He tucked the bag back into his coat pocket. “Thank you for the coffee, Mrs. Mercer.”

  “Anytime.”

  Dana followed him to the foyer, wiping her cheeks on the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

  “I wish I hadn’t found it,” Tim said, glancing up at her as he pulled his boots on.

  “I guess the truth works its way out eventually,” Dana said. “Like a sliver. Sometimes it hurts worse coming out than it did going in.”

  “I think sometimes things are better left unknown,” he said. “She’s just as gone as she was before.”

  “But she’ll get justice now.”

  “If that’s her in that barrel. If we can prove John killed her.”

  “Or his father,” Dana said, thinking of what Hardy had told her about Mack Villante’s so-called alibi for the day Casey went missing.

  Tim shook his head. “My money’s on John. He told you his motive. Casey was dumping him for me. He always was jealous of everything I had.”

  True enough, Dana thought. Poor John Villante from the wrong side of the tracks. He had always worked twice as hard for half as much, while the sun rose and set on Tim Carver. How angry he must have been to know the only girl he’d ever loved was setting him aside for the golden boy of Shelby Mills.

  “But if the body in the barrel is Casey, and John put her there, why would he call 911?” Dana asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe that makes him look innocent while it makes his old man look guilty.”

  “Maybe his father is guilty.”

  “We’ll know soon enough if it’s Casey in that barrel,” he said. “As soon as her dental records turn up. Then we’ll figure out who put her there.”

  “God,” Dana said, hugging herself against an internal chill. “Now I want to hope some poor person I
don’t even know died a terrible death.”

  “Somebody died. It’s a sad story no matter what.”

  He pulled his rain poncho over his head, sending little water droplets scattering.

  “I’d better go.”

  Dana went to open the door, pausing with her hand on the doorknob. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “When did you and Casey get together?”

  His eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t look away.

  “Just then,” he said. “Like I told you. Why?”

  “John told me Casey had been cheating on him,” Dana said. “Past tense.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You might as well ’fess up,” she pressed. “What does it matter now?”

  The muscles in his jaw flexed. “If it doesn’t matter, why are you asking?”

  “It matters to me, not to anyone else,” she said. “I’ve been going back over my journal, and it just looks to me like something had been going on with her for a while. I thought that something might be you.”

  “We’d seen each other a couple of times,” he confessed. “She didn’t feel right about keeping it from you. That’s why she decided to just come out and talk to you about it. You and I had split up, Dana,” he said with an edge to his voice.

  “You and I,” she clarified. “Casey was still supposed to be my best friend. Best friends don’t lie to each other. We had never kept a secret from each other until that summer. Then she had a couple doozies.”

  “Let it go, Dee,” he said, weary of the conversation. “Just let it go. Remember the good times. We were kids, for God’s sake. We made mistakes. We shouldn’t have to pay for them for all eternity.”

  “Had she told you she was pregnant?”

  “What? No!” He shook his head. “Did she tell you that?”

  “No, she wouldn’t have. She would have known I would go ballistic. But I think she might have been. Something was wrong that summer. She was sick a lot. I made a remark one day—a joke—that she’d better not be pregnant. She laughed it off. I let it go. I never told anyone because I didn’t know. But looking back on it, I think she might have been.”

  “Not by me, she wasn’t,” he insisted. “We’d only just started seeing each other. Besides, you know I was careful. I never would have risked that. Did we ever have sex without a condom? Ever?”

  Which was all but an admission that they had slept together before Casey’s big attack of conscience. Salt in the already raw wound.

  “No,” Dana admitted. “Well, one more strike against John, then. Casey had arranged to see him that night. Maybe that’s what she was going to tell him.”

  “Jesus,” Tim muttered, driving a hand back over his thinning hair. “I don’t understand you, Dee. You don’t have enough bad shit in your life with everything that just happened to you? You have to go and stir all this up from the past, and guess that it was even worse than it really was? Stop it!”

  He took hold of her by the shoulders and said it again for emphasis. “Stop it. Casey loved you. Don’t think ill of her because she made a mistake. We were all human, Dee. Even you. Let it go.”

  He checked his watch and heaved a sigh. “I have to go. I’ll see you later. In the meantime, please don’t torment yourself. There’s no good going to come of it. The story is sad enough the way it is. Leave it be.”

  Dana turned away as he went to kiss her cheek. He gave her a long look, but whatever he might have been thinking, he kept to himself.

  She watched him dash through the drizzle to his county cruiser and waved at him as he backed out of the driveway.

  “I’m going to go take a nap,” she said, sticking her head into the kitchen, where her mother had started gathering ingredients to make dinner.

  But when she went downstairs she didn’t go to bed. She stopped in the hall and stared at the timeline, then took a marker and ran the line backward from the day Casey had disappeared. She wrote June and July a few feet apart on the line. She made notations referring to things she had read in her journal, things she had looked at one way when she was eighteen and the center of her own universe, things that looked different to her now. Things that Casey had said, times when she hadn’t seemed herself. She went to the other end of the line and noted the discovery of the barrel in the Villantes’ shed and the discovery of Casey’s friendship necklace in the house—half of a heart, incomplete without its partner.

  Dana went into her bedroom, to the shelves behind her desk, and started poking through mementos accumulated since childhood—odd little trinkets and toys from county fairs and family vacations, renaissance festivals and high school fund-raisers. She went through her desk drawers and the cupboards in her closet.

  She found it, finally, in a small, shell-encrusted jewelry box in the bottom drawer of her nightstand. With great care, she extricated the chain from a tangle of other necklaces and held it up to watch the pendant twist and turn, catching the light. Half a heart, incomplete without its partner. Half a heart with half an inscription.

  She imagined Casey sitting beside her, shoulder to shoulder, as close as sisters, sharing everything, including a heart. She imagined them fitting the pendants together and reading the inscription out loud.

  2 Lives

  1 Heart

  4-Ever

  As girls they had believed their friendship would transcend everything, that nothing would ever come between them, not time or distance, not parents or boys. Friends forever. Pinky swear it. And dot their i’s with hearts.

  Dana touched the pendant to her lips and closed her eyes and saw them as they had been—two little girls, one light haired, one dark, hand in hand, smiling the secret smile of friends.

  What could matter more than that? What could she need more than that now, when she felt that so much had been taken from her—her innocence, her youth, her optimism, her career, her beauty, herself. The friend she needed now would never be with her again. The hole in her heart felt a mile wide.

  With the necklace wrapped around one hand she dug her phone out of the pouch of her sweatshirt with the other, opened her contacts, and touched a name.

  The call went straight to voice mail. “Hardy.”

  33

  John made his way home in the rain, taking alleys and back streets, avoiding people in general and sheriff’s deputies in particular. He kept his head down and his collar up, shoulders hunched against the miserable drizzle. His pace was slow, every step jarring, setting off explosions of pain all through his body.

  He felt sick, the specific kind of sick that comes after a hard physical beating, when the body is trying to process and dispose of the toxins of tissue breakdown and internal bleeding. Every cell ached with it, and his head just kept pounding and pounding and pounding. He stopped a couple of times to puke up the meager contents of his stomach—bile and water. He stepped once behind a shed to take a piss and watched the rusty stream of blood-tinged urine exit his body, draining his damaged kidney.

  He approached his home from the woods behind the property, moving quietly among the dark trees and rain-softened brush. He had spent many hours back here as a boy, exploring, pretending he was in a faraway world, avoiding his father. He would watch from the cover of the woods as the old man worked on cars and bottles of bourbon in the backyard, getting drunker and louder and more belligerent as the afternoons wore on. John would wait until he had gone back into the house, knowing just how long it would take for him to pass out, and that it would then be safe for him to slip unnoticed into his bedroom.

  Finding a vantage point, he hunkered down, sheltered by a thick tangle of blackberry bushes, and waited. From there he could see the forensics people and the deputies swarming over the yard like ants, going in and out of the house and the garage and the shed, back and forth to the big mobile crime scene unit.

 
He could see a section of the road that led back toward town, crowded with news vans with rooftop satellite dishes, people in rain gear walking up and down. The Villantes were big, bad news today. He could only imagine what they were saying about him. John Villante Jr., once and future murder suspect with a psych discharge from the army. The deranged PTSD poster boy, so violent and unstable his own father had felt compelled to shoot him, then got his brains beat in for defending himself.

  That was how the story would go. That was how the old man would spin it as soon as he had the chance.

  The media might put a sympathetic slant on it. The sad plight of the forgotten veteran: good enough to send to war, then cast aside like everything else that was disposable in American society. But in the end he would still be considered violent and crazy no matter how many medals the army had pinned to his chest.

  All his life he had wished he could be someone else, somewhere else, never more so than now, as he sat alone in the woods in the rain contemplating a future with nothing good in it.

  He needed a plan, but he couldn’t focus on the task for the pain in his head. He had to live from one moment to the next moment to the next moment. Breathe in, breathe out. He dug his good hand through the pockets of his coat, searching every crease and corner, praying to find what he eventually found—the short end of a joint. He had a bottle full of pain pills but nothing in his stomach to help keep them down. A couple of hits might help the pain subside a bit for just a little while.

  He fixed the joint between his lips, flicked his lighter, and hoped that he could take a deep enough breath to get it going.

  The dog found him as the gray of afternoon darkened from battleship to charcoal. It approached him with caution, head lowered, tail down, belly skimming the ground. John just watched. He had nothing but time. But it wasn’t until he turned his attention back to the goings-on in the yard that the animal settled on the ground beside him.