Cold Cold Heart (27 page)

In the dream
the colors were so intense, so supersaturated, they made Dana's eyes hurt. She stood on the terrace at the nursery in exactly the same place she had stood that afternoon, but it seemed she could see for miles beyond, as if she was on a mountain. She could see the road winding down into town. She could see the rolling, wooded hills and the river.

Casey emerged from the ladies' room in the utility building and came toward her, smiling, laughing. She had no right to be so happy, so carefree. Dana felt her anger building like steam inside her head. Heat flushed through her whole body, hotter and hotter until sweat popped from her pores. She could see each bead of moisture as it emerged and swelled.

“You don't get to be mad, Dee,” Casey said. “It's all your fault.”

“That's not true. It's not my fault.”

“I'm dead because of you.”

“That's not true! I loved you!”

“You killed me.”

“No!”

The pressure in Dana's head was so much that she had to open her mouth and scream to release it. And then her hands were around Casey's throat and she was squeezing and squeezing. Casey's face
went red, then purple; then her eyes exploded. In the next instant she became a writhing snake that opened its mouth and hissed in Dana's face. Screaming, Dana let go and tried to run backward as the snake struck at her.

She fell with a thud to the floor of her bedroom, waking with a start, gasping for air, disoriented. She was drenched in sweat, dizzy, and nauseated.

Slowly she got up to her hands and knees and pulled herself into a tight ball on the carpet. Tuxedo hopped down from the bed and began rubbing himself against her, trilling and purring. After a moment, Dana rearranged herself, sitting on the floor, back against the bed, cat in her lap.

Images from the nightmare continued flashing through her mind like stark landscapes illuminated by lightning in the dead of night. She kept seeing the accusation in Casey's eyes. She kept hearing her voice—
It's all your fault . . . I'm dead because of you . . .

It turned her stomach to think she might have played any kind of role in what had happened, even if her only part had been to send Casey away at that particular moment on that particular day.

She kept hearing what John had said about Casey not wanting to appear imperfect in front of her. God, had she really been that much of a bitch? Had she really been that controlling? When she thought of her relationship with Casey, she thought of her as a sister, as someone she loved absolutely. John's impression of her had to be colored by the fact that she had never believed he was good enough for Casey. But she had only been looking out for her friend's best interests.

She thought of what he'd said about Casey cheating on him, and she couldn't make herself believe it. She and Casey had shared everything, had known everything about each other. But even as she denied it, the emotion that burned through her was anger—not at John, but at Casey.

They had argued about something that day. The memory of the
emotions she'd had remained like a faint bitter aftertaste. Was the actual memory of the event still in there somewhere? Hidden by guilt, or blocked out by the need to forget? If John had dumped Casey, had Casey wanted him to take her back? Had that been the argument she and Casey had had?

She closed her eyes and pictured the scene at the nursery again. Casey returning from the ladies' room, a funny little smile on her face.

Anxiety grew like an air bubble in the center of her chest. In the next moment of that memory they would be arguing. To escape that moment, she went back to her memory of their breakfast at the Grindstone. She had ordered her usual breakfast. Casey had ordered toast. The memories of sounds and smells came back to her. The picture of Casey smiling and chatting with people as she came back to the table from the restroom . . . The memory of the man Dana had photographed today . . .

Had she seen him before? Did he look like Doc Holiday?

She thought of the panic and the embarrassment she had felt today as she had run out of the restaurant and into John Villante's father. She could feel his big hands squeezing her arms, see his battered, angry face looming over her, twisting with disgust at the sight of her disfigured face.

All of it—the physical sensations, the fragments of memories, the wash of emotions—swirled inside her head like floodwaters rising. All of it set off by the sight of a man she didn't know and the thought of a monster she couldn't remember.

She tried now to remember the instructions to calm her nerves and slow the maelstrom of emotions in her mind.
Breathe deep . . . four counts in, four counts out . . .

Hardy said she was never going to get past her fear without confronting it. If she dragged Doc Holiday out of the shadows of her memory and looked at him in the light of day, would he lose his power to terrify her? Would the fact that he had put his pants on one leg at a time somehow negate the monstrousness of his deeds?

Would she look at Doc Holiday and somehow know that he had taken Casey? And if he had, would knowing that somehow bring a weird kind of relief? Would it bring a sense of closure to know that some foreign evil had reached into their lives, thereby absolving the people she knew, including herself?

Maybe it was time to find out. Maybe she was sick of hiding from it. Maybe, if she could look at Doc Holiday and know that he had taken Casey all those years ago, Casey would stop blaming her in her nightmares.

Setting Tuxedo aside, she got to her feet, went to the desk, and woke the computer. She knew as soon as she typed the name
Doc Holiday
, the search engine would cough up links to hundreds of articles. Literally hundreds of articles had been written about the serial killer who had tried to end her life. She knew that multiple books were in the works detailing his bloody exploits. The authors had contacted her parents and her colleagues from work to ask questions and angle for her participation.

It struck her as obscene that he had been made into a celebrity of sorts—just as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and a dozen other notorious murderers had been over the years. The public's fascination with killers seemed to be unquenchable. Was it because it seemed so inconceivable for a human being to cross that line—or because people wondered why they themselves hadn't crossed it?

What made a killer? Hardy claimed there wasn't a person on the planet who wasn't capable of it in the right circumstances. Dana couldn't imagine being angry enough to take another person's life, and yet she was famous for having killed Doc Holiday—not that she could remember doing it. What other terrible memories had she locked up in the deepest recesses of her mind?

She couldn't escape the images of the nightmare she'd just had, but at the same time, she wouldn't believe she could have harmed her best friend. The dream had to be some kind of metaphor. Or maybe it was nothing more than an electrical shitstorm in her
damaged brain, lighting up random thoughts and emotions and throwing them into a jumbled mix of half-remembered random images.

She and Casey might have argued. Casey might have left the nursery because of it. And after leaving the nursery something had happened to her.

That doesn't make me a murderer.

She would never have hurt Casey. She wanted to believe she would never have physically harmed anyone. But she knew that thought was a lie. She had killed the man who tried to kill her. She had no memory of it, but she had done it. She had taken a screwdriver and stabbed it into a man's temple.

Maybe Hardy was right. Given the right circumstances, anyone was capable of anything. All a person needed was a reason that made sense to him or her, the need to end a threat, or the need to avenge some terrible wrong.

She stared at the icons on the toolbar of the computer screen. Instead of clicking on the search engine to go in search of Doc Holiday, she clicked on the photo icon, opening a screenful of photo albums and choosing the one from senior year. She watched as the slideshow played, one picture melding into another and another as her favorite sappy pop song of that year played in the background. Pictures of herself succeeding and being popular. Pictures of herself, pretty and bright eyed, excited about life. Pictures of Casey. Pictures of the two of them.

One jumped out at her, and she clicked on it and it filled the screen. Herself and Casey, side by side, cheek to cheek, each of them holding out the pendant of the matching necklaces they wore—two halves of the same heart, engraved with words declaring their friendship. They had worn those necklaces every single day of their lives. Casey would have had it on the day she went missing. Dana still had hers, stashed away in a box of memories, a heart forever without its missing half.

She started the slideshow again, sending more photographs
sliding across the screen, spinning and bending, one dissolving into the next. Pictures of her and Tim, of Casey and John, of the four of them together going to the prom. Photos from an outdoor party a month or so after graduation—around the time she had broken up with Tim. He was off to the far right of the picture, sitting on top of a picnic table, hoisting a beer and grinning at the camera. Casey sat on the bench below him, facing away from the table, laughing. John sat to her right, a little separate, looking churlish.

The bubble of anxiety swelled again in Dana's chest. Two months after this picture was taken, Casey had vanished. What had happened in the interim? John said he had broken up with her. Why hadn't Casey told her? What had she been hiding? She had called John the afternoon of the day she went missing, asking to meet him that night. Why? It had to be because she wanted to get back together with him, Dana thought. Why? In another month they both would have been out of Shelby Mills and off to colleges in different parts of the state. On to new adventures. If Casey had been cheating on him, as John said, she couldn't have been that committed to the relationship.

Casey had been cheating on John. Dana couldn't bring herself to believe it. How would she not have known? He had to be lying. But why would he tell a lie that only gave him a greater motive to have harmed Casey? Was his male ego such that he couldn't admit she dumped him?

Restless, Dana clicked out of iPhoto, abandoned the computer, and went to her doorway to look at the timeline and the notes across the hall.

Her mother was upset that she'd done this—not so much because the wall would have to be repainted, but because it pointed to impulsive and obsessive behavior she didn't want to see in her daughter. She probably preferred the blankness of the adynamia that had plagued Dana during her months at the Weidman Center to this tunnel-vision focus on what had happened to Casey.

Dana stared at the notation regarding her alleged argument with Casey at the nursery, and the notation of the time when Casey had called Tim to complain about her afterward. She went and got a marker from her desk, returned to the wall, and drew a line from the circle around
Casey Called John
and wrote
John broke up with her??

On his timeline, Hardy had made note of the fact that on the day of her disappearance Casey had at some point returned to this house to pick up her things. Dana moved to that point on the wall, drew an arrow upward, and wrote
Where Was Roger?
She couldn't understand how Casey could have come back here to get her stuff and not have run into Roger. How would she have gotten into the house if Roger hadn't been here? Had he gone somewhere and left the door unlocked? That wasn't normal for him.

“You're scaring your mother with this behavior,” Roger said.

Dana startled. She had yet to fully regain the peripheral vision in her right eye. She hadn't seen him coming down the hall from the family room.

“I want to know what happened to my friend,” she said simply.

“In seven years, three law enforcement agencies haven't been able to find out what happened to Casey. What makes you think you'll figure it out?”

“Nothing. I just have to try; that's all.”

Hands on his hips, he looked at the timeline. Dana tried to watch where his eyes went, where his gaze lingered. His face was unreadable.

He was dressed for the evening's party in dark trousers and a brown suede jacket over a camel cashmere sweater. The casual, elegant man of the people.

“Dana, what happened today at the nursery can't happen again,” he said, turning to face her. “Whatever the source of your sudden animosity toward me, you need to keep that here, in the house, between family.”

“I had a question and you told me to ask it,” Dana said, genuinely not understanding why that was a bad thing. She had only done what he told her to do. She hadn't done it with bad intentions toward him.

A muscle flexed in his jaw. “Don't pretend you don't know exactly what you did there. You worked in news. In front of a reporter, you asked a question that implied I might have something to do with Casey's disappearance.”

“I did not! I only asked if you were here when she came back for her things. I don't understand how she could have gotten her things if you weren't here. And if you were here and let her in, then you must have seen her. I'm just trying to put the pieces of that day into order. I never accused you of anything.”

“You're more clever than that.”

“No, I'm not,” Dana said. “I have all I can handle just trying to function. Believe me, there's no cleverness involved. And if you didn't have anything to do with Casey's disappearance, why are you so worried people will think that you did?”

“Because people think whatever they want to think, and the majority of them want to think something bad. They want to think there's a conspiracy, a cover-up, that someone with money and power can get away with murder. I don't have an explanation as to why I didn't see Casey come back here to get her things. Maybe I was asleep. Maybe I was in the bathroom. Maybe I was on the phone. Those answers are not alibis.”