Cold Cold Heart (28 page)

“But how did she get in the house?” Dana asked.

Frustrated and angry, he lurched toward her and banged a fist against the wall a foot above her head. Dana's heart leapt into her throat.

“Stop it!” he shouted. “I had nothing to do with what happened to Casey! Oh my God! After all I've done for you! After everything I did for your boyfriend! He took that opportunity and threw it away without so much as an apology. Now you come here and fuck
up my reelection with this!” he said, throwing his hand in the direction of her impromptu marker board. “Stop it!”

Tears of fear flooded Dana's eyes. He must have seen them, must have read the panic in her face. He stepped back, working visibly to rein in his temper, breathing deeply and rubbing his hands over his face as if to scrub away his angry expression.

Calmer, he said, “Dana, I can't have you making people wonder if I did something to Casey Grant. I'm running for public office. Do you think that's going to help me in the polls? To have people suddenly doubt my integrity, to have them start wondering and speculating about my possible involvement in a horrible crime—do you think that's going to weigh in my favor?”

“I didn't think about it.”

“That's a problem,” he said. “You don't think first anymore. Or worse, you
do
think and you just say whatever comes into your head anyway. I can't have it. Do you understand me? I can't have it!”

“What do you want me to do?” Dana asked defensively. “It's not like I can predict how I'm next going to mess up because my brain doesn't always work right!”

“I'm sorry for what happened to you, Dana,” he said. “I am. But I can't have you mess up my political career because you no longer have a filter and just blurt out these outrageous things!”

He shook his head in frustration. “You know, I tried to tell your mother you needed to stay at Weidman until after the election.”

“Really?” Dana asked. “Because you seemed pretty damned happy putting your face in front of the cameras with my homecoming. What were your constituents thinking then? ‘Oh, look, that wonderful, handsome Senator Mercer. What a loving father he is to the brain-damaged ugly daughter of his dead partner who he probably pushed off a cliff!'”

“Dana! Stop it!” her mother shouted, arriving in the hallway at the worst possible moment. She was also dressed for the evening's party
in a flowing dark skirt and boots, a burgundy cowl-neck sweater, pearls at her throat. Her hair was done, her makeup perfect.

“I guess my party invitation got lost in the mail,” Dana said, looking down at her sweat-limp T-shirt and baggy yoga pants.

“You are most definitely not coming tonight,” Roger said. “If I had my druthers, you and your mother would be spending the next two weeks in Hawaii, starting tomorrow.”

“Frankie and Maggie are coming over,” her mother said, brushing past her husband's remark.

“I hope they have a lovely evening,” Dana said. “I'm going out.”

“Dana—”

“I'm meeting Tim Carver for dinner.”

The lie was out of her mouth before she realized she'd thought of it. It was a good one. She secretly congratulated herself as she watched her mother's concern soften.

“Are you sure you feel up to it?”

“I just had a nap. I'll be fine.”

She could see her mother reasoning through any possible objections. She knew Tim. She liked Tim. Tim was a responsible person, a sheriff's deputy. What could go wrong if she was with Tim? How much trouble could she get into?

“Lynda,” Roger said, checking his watch. “We have to get going. I'll go start the car. I'm done here.”

Dismissing them, he stalked off down the hall.

Dana's mother looked at her with concern. “This has to stop, Dana. You have to let go of all this paranoia. It's not good for you.”

“It's not good for
him
,” Dana said.

Roger's voice boomed back down the stairs, “Lynda! We have to go!”

“You'd better go,” Dana said. “Duty calls.”

Her mother bit her tongue on a retort. Dana saw her swallow it back. Instead, she leaned in and kissed Dana's cheek and brushed a hand over her hair. “Please be careful. And don't stay out too late.”

Like she was seventeen and going on a date.

Just like old times.

Dana went back into her room and sat back down at her desk. She stared at all the little icons that dotted the home screen of her computer, tiny thumbprint pictures and little blue file folders with cryptic names. She opened and closed them one by one, taking glimpses into the past—term papers and book reports, collections of juvenile poetry and short stories, school projects and her personal journal.

She had forgotten all about it. She hadn't looked at it in years. She had named the folder
Days of Our Lives
so anyone casually snooping would assume it had to do with the soap opera she and her friends had all been hooked on at the time.

She had kept the journal all through school, recording all the triumphs and tragedies of middle school and high school in the overly dramatic language of a child. She opened the folder now to find a long list of documents. Her senior year was broken down month by month and big event by big event. She clicked on August and began to read, starting with the entry she had made the day Casey went missing.

As she read, a strange feeling of hurt and sadness washed over her like rain. She could see why she wouldn't have mentioned it to anyone. The argument she had had with Casey couldn't have had anything to do with her disappearance, but it had everything to do with her own wounded pride and hurt feelings.

Dana grabbed her phone and Tim Carver's business card. He answered on the third ring.

“Can we meet somewhere?” she asked. “I need to talk to you.”

The old man
had locked the doors. Not just the main locks in the doorknobs and the deadbolts, for which John had keys. He had locked the extra locks—the Fort Knox locks, John called them. The locks his father had installed for extra security when he was feeling paranoid that some of the low-life losers he associated with might come to steal his guns or murder him in his sleep.

Apparently he now considered his own son to be counted among the lowlifes—although John would have never killed him in his sleep. In his fantasies he choked the life out of the old man face-to-face, so he could see every emotion that went through his head as he realized he was about to die at the hands of the son he had tormented all these years.

John heaved a sigh and walked down off the back porch. The dog was roaming the yard with its nose to the ground, racing after rabbit trails, tripping the motion-sensor security lights Mack had installed all over the place.

Out of old habit John went around the side of the house and tried the window to his room. The latch had been broken for years. He had broken it himself, on purpose, knowing his father would never bother to fix it. He had used it regularly during his high school years, sneaking in and out to avoid the old man's questions and
wrath. He had sneaked Casey in this way a few times when they had nowhere else to go to have sex. But she hadn't liked coming here because the old man made her nervous and she was always worried he would catch them.

He shoved up on the window, expecting it to rise, meeting resistance instead. Swearing under his breath, he tried again, able to budge it only an inch or so before it jammed hard, as if blocked by something.

The anger built quickly inside him, like a sudden storm blowing up, black and violent. All he wanted was to take his things and go. The old man didn't want him here, and yet he had to be so contrary as to make leaving more work than it had to be. The frustration wound and wound inside him like a spring. He could feel it in his head getting tighter and tighter. His pulse began to pound in his ears. He felt like his head might explode.

Fuck it. He'd spent his whole life tiptoeing around this house, trying to be quiet, trying to be invisible. What difference did it make now? What did he care now what his old man would think or do?

The dog came to check on him and jumped back with a yip as John wheeled around, cursing. He hustled around the corner and up the steps once again to the back door. He called on his army training and kicked the thing in, applying boot to door with explosive violence again and again until the old wood splintered like so much kindling.

Once inside, he stormed from room to room, memories from Iraq and Afghanistan flashing through his mind. His sense of the potential for danger dated back to his childhood but had been reinforced in war. The life experiences tumbled together now in his mind—his fear of his father in this house and his fear of the enemy as he and the other men from his unit raided buildings in war zones. His heart was pounding. His senses were achingly sharp. He wished for the security of a rifle in his hands.

Even though he knew his father was belly up to a bar, the old
man's energy lingered here in the air like the stink of his cigarettes. There was no telling when he would return. It all depended on his mood, and his moods were subject to change in a heartbeat. He could be regaling his cronies with the story of how he beat his kid and threw him out of the house, but one imagined slight and he would be out the door in a huff.

The anxiety and anger swirled in an oily mix in John's gut as he went down the hall to his bedroom. The door stood open. The room was empty of personal effects—no clothes, no shoes, no duffel bag. A note had been left on the bare mattress:
keeping your shit. U owe me rent—$2,000.

Un-fucking-believable,
John thought. He didn't know whether he should laugh at the ridiculousness of it or fly into a rage. The spiteful, hateful, stupid son of a bitch would go to the trouble of locking up his meager possessions and believe that John would—
could
—pay him two grand to get the stuff back. Two grand—like this shit hole was the fucking Ritz-Carlton! If he'd had two grand he never would have been staying here in the first place. The absurdity was mind-boggling and aggravating.

He went to the closet and moved the extra leaves from the dining room table, which had never been used in his memory, revealing the hidden small section of drywall he had cut out and replaced long ago. He removed the piece, reached into the wall, and dug out the few things he kept stashed away there in plastic bags: his dog tags, a bottle of whiskey, a couple hundred dollars rolled up and bound with a rubber band, a little horse-head pin that was the only thing he had of his mother's. He took a swig of the whiskey, stuffed the rest of the things in a coat pocket, and left the room.

The dog was sitting waiting for him as he went out the broken back door, ears up, eyes bright with interest. It followed him to the garage and sat in the doorway, watching as John rummaged around for the tools he wanted—a crowbar, a flashlight, a hammer. When he emerged from the garage, the dog jumped up and loped ahead a
few feet at a time, stopping and looking back as John strode toward the long shed at the back of the property.

The motion-sensor light popped on above the heavy metal-clad door, spotlighting the big padlock that kept thieves from stealing the worthless shit Mack Villante valued. John grabbed the lock and gave it a yank. There would be no picking it or prying it. It was a brand that boasted holding up to a gunshot. The frame of the door was another matter.

With no proper eaves on the shed, rainwater had run down behind the frame, softening the wood enough that he could work the crowbar in between the frame and the building. He put his back into the job, pushing and pulling, prying the frame away an inch or three at a time, the nails moaning as he wrenched them out.

The old man would call the cops on him for this. Breaking and entering. He'd file a complaint just to be a bastard. He'd sue for damages to this door and to the back door of the house, dragging him into court for what wouldn't amount to as much as his legal fees.

John fantasized that he might have the courage to use the crowbar on the miserable son of a bitch himself. The world would be a better place without him. It wasn't that hard to get rid of a body in these parts. There were gullies and sinkholes aplenty, and the river was known to have kept many a secret over the years.

Plenty of people hated Mack Villante. The trouble was that John would be number one on the top of that list, and he had no intention of sitting in prison for the rest of his life on account of his father. The life he'd lived here with the old man had been prison enough to last him.

The doorframe came away from the wall with a creaking and cracking, snapping off above the U-bolt that accommodated the padlock. Another planting of the crowbar, a heave and a pull, and the piece of wood with the U-bolt splintered away and the door swung inward.

John pushed his way inside and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. The backwash of the security light spilled dimly across the floor from the doorway. It cut a second band of light across the middle of the room from the small barred window in the wall.

From the back waistband of his jeans John pulled the heavy flashlight he'd swiped out of the garage and flicked it on, shining it all around. It was a big Maglite, like the cops carried—half flashlight, half billy club. He carried it high, up by his shoulder, swiveling the light as he moved his head.

He hadn't been in this building in years. Not since he was twelve or thirteen and had discovered the old man's collection of dirty magazines one summer day when his father had been too drunk to remember to lock the door. His father's reaction had been swift and violent, out of all proportion to the crime. John had spent the next week telling people he had taken a bad fall off his dirt bike to explain away the signs of his beating. He had never set foot in the shed again.

The building was about ten feet wide by twenty feet long, lined with tool benches and deep plywood shelves that were crammed with boxes and crates, filthy old car parts and stacks of dirty magazines—the hard-core stuff full of S and M and bondage. Lawn mowers and weed eaters, shovels and spades and post-hole diggers cluttered the floor space. One shelf held boxes and boxes and boxes of ammunition, stockpiled for the apocalypse, going to ruin in this damp shed.

The place smelled of mold and mildew, dust and mice, grease and gasoline. The roof had been leaking for who knew how long. Part of the ceiling was peeling down like old sheets of wet paper in the far back corner. Everything that was piled and stacked below the bad piece of roof was wet and stinking. Water pooled in a low spot on the concrete floor. A fifty-five-gallon drum stood in the wet corner, rust eating away a wide band of the steel around the bottom of the barrel.

The dog came in and started poking its long nose into the nooks and crannies, sniffing for mice, trying to reach a paw into narrow openings between containers and piles of junk.

“Pee on whatever you like,” John said as he shined the light around, looking for his duffel bag. “You'll probably improve the smell.”

A row of tall, narrow cupboards ran across one end of the room like lockers, each of the individual doors secured by a small, cheap padlock. Swearing under his breath, John set the flashlight aside and went to work prying the first of the locks off with the crowbar.

He was going to dismantle the whole building if he had to. He was set on it now, even though a small voice of logic in the back of his mind had begun to whisper that he should just leave, that Mack had probably chucked his stuff into the back of his truck and this demolition would be all for naught, just a waste of time that would get him caught and tossed in jail. What did he have to take with him anyway? Old clothes and a few books, a container with mementos from his time in the army, and another with a few things he'd kept from high school—his sports letters and pins, a few pictures. But the bigger part of his brain wouldn't let go of the mission or of the idea that he wasn't leaving anything of himself behind.

The flimsy latch gave way, and John pulled the door open. The cupboard was crammed with old hunting gear—coats and boots, a blaze-orange vest. A pile of stocking caps and gloves and camouflage masks tumbled out. John moved to the next door and pried the lock off.

The figure that lunged out at him as the door fell open was dark and tall. John's reaction was swift and instinctive, honed in combat. His right arm came up to block the assault as he struck with the crowbar still in his left hand.

The bar landed with a dull thump against dead weight. John jumped back in a crouch, his arms out in front of him. The duffel bag fell to the floor in the shaft of light that poured in through the
open door. It had been stuffed in the cupboard, on end, on top of a stack of junk.

Heart pounding as the adrenaline rush crashed, John stepped back and leaned against a workbench littered with tools. He felt the familiar watery rush of weakness run through his body as he let go of the tension on a big exhale. His hearing came back to him as his pulse slowed. The dog was whining and digging at something at the other end of the shed.

“Come on,” John said, pushing away from the bench. He grabbed the handle on the duffel bag and hefted it up. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

The dog whined and yipped, pouncing at something. John shined the flashlight back into the corner, the wet corner with the bad patch of roof and the rusted oil drum. The dog was scraping at the base of the rusted-out barrel. Mice had probably got inside of it.

“Come on,” John said again, more insistent. “Or I'll leave you to deal with the old man.”

Intent on its task, the dog ignored him and continued to pounce at, dig at, scratch at, and bark at the barrel.

John swore under his breath and set the duffel bag down.

“What you got back there? A rat?” he asked as he climbed over boxes and busted lawn mowers, the beam from the Maglite bobbing up and down.

The dog had hold of something and was trying to pull it through a rusted-out spot in the barrel.

“What the hell could be in there you want that bad?”

He squatted down beside the dog, shining the light at the bottom of the barrel. The dog shied sideways, out of the way, and the light fell on the last thing John would have expected to see in this shed in a million years. As bad a man as he believed his father to be, he had never imagined him doing anything like this.

Protruding from the crumbling base of the oil drum was a bone.

Every animal had bones, John told himself as he crouched lower,
getting closer to the barrel. Maybe something had crawled into the barrel and died. But the bone sticking out through the hole was too big to have belonged to a raccoon or a possum or anything else that would have found its way into this shed. Much bigger.

He shined the light through the lacework of rusted steel and his breath caught in his throat.

Staring back at him with empty eye sockets was a skull. It sat in the midst of a pile of bones that had once constructed a human being.

The hair rose on the back of John's neck. The dog began to growl.

“I told you never to come in this shed.” The voice came from behind him. “Now you're gonna end up just like her.”