Cold Cold Heart (8 page)

“So,” Dana said. “Did anybody catch me on the news? Was I the lead or the human interest story?”

Everyone froze for an almost comic second. Frankie glanced at Dana's mother as if asking silent permission to comment.

Lynda frowned. “Can't we just let that go for the evening?”

“Like it never happened?” Dana asked.

“Yes, exactly like that. I have no problem with that. Denial can be a wonderful thing.”

“Then I have to be the elephant in the room?” Dana said. “Everybody has to walk around on eggshells and pretend I didn't have a big meltdown in front of multiple TV cameras? I'd rather not. Might as well acknowledge the madness—mine and theirs. People still think I'm news, so I'm news,” she said. “There must not be much going on in the world today.”

“There's never anything much going on here,” Frankie said. “This is rural Indiana. The crop report is news. You survived a horrific ordeal, Dee. That would make you a headline anywhere. Here you're going to be ranked right behind the Second Coming of Christ.”

“Did I miss that while I was away?” Dana asked.

Frankie laughed. “No. The biggest thing you missed was the scandal of the Sweet Corn Festival Queen getting caught half-naked in a car with the high school baseball coach. You definitely beat that, Dee.”

“People are fascinated with stories of survival,” Maggie said. “As intrusive as it seems to us, you can't blame them.”

“Yes, I can blame them,” Lynda argued. “My daughter is not a curiosity.”

“Sure I am,” Dana said. “I'm a freak. Look at me.”

Her mother scowled harder. “Dana . . .”

“Lynda . . .”

“People are ghouls who slow down when they drive by car wrecks,” Frankie said. “It's lascivious voyeurism.”

“I don't think that's all of it,” Maggie countered gently, taking the seat next to Dana. “I think people hear Dana's story, and they want to know what does she have inside her that got her through it. They wonder if they would have that kind of strength and determination if they found themselves in that situation.”

“I think people are slugs who have no lives, and they like to look at the tragedies of other people so they can somehow justify their own choices to merely exist,” Frankie said.

“I think you're both right.”

The women turned and looked at Roger as he opened a beer and poured it into a pilsner glass.

Frankie made a face. “Spoken like a politician.”

“Nothing is black-and-white,” Roger said. “And we live in this age of instant stardom through electronic media. People all over the world know Dana's story. They've become attached to her. They've invested in her emotionally. They want to know more.”

“They should mind their own business,” Lynda grumbled as she dug silverware out of a drawer and dumped it on the island next to a stack of plates.

“That's not going to happen, Lynda,” Roger said. “And we might as well face it. We've had calls from
48 Hours, 20/20,
Dateline 
. . .”

Dateline.
There was irony, Dana thought. She had aspired to be on
Dateline
as an on-air personality. Now
Dateline
was calling her to be the subject of a story.

“If we ignore them, eventually they'll go away. And next week something horrible will happen to someone else, and
they'll
be news,” her mother said as the doorbell rang.

“That's probably
Dateline
now,” Frankie said. “Roger, you get it.
Maybe you can sidetrack Lester Holt onto a story about Indiana politics. Get some more bonus airtime.”

Roger frowned.

“I'm hoping it's the pizza,” Maggie said. “I'm starving. How about you, Dana? You've had a long day. You must be hungry.”

Dana shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe.”

“Sometimes she has trouble distinguishing between hunger and fatigue,” her mother said.

“Don't talk about me,” Dana said irritably. “God, that's so annoying. I'm right here.”

“And we're glad for it,” Frankie said, taking the seat on the other side of her. She reached an arm around Dana's shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “We're all so happy to have you home, Li'l Dee. Don't give us too hard a time for fussing over you and protecting you like we're a whole pack of mama bears. It's all because we love you so crazy much.”

The pungent aroma of garlic preceded the food coming into the kitchen. Frankie began chanting “Pi-zza! Pi-zza!” as she popped up out of her chair to help. Maggie got up as well, going to the island to help organize the dishes.

They had ordered enough food for an army. Roger came back into the kitchen, arms full of Anthony's bags, followed by the deliveryman with the pizzas.

Dana remained in her seat, her focus on the delivery guy. He looked familiar, but she couldn't place him because she didn't know any pizza deliverymen. Her brain repeated that truth over and over as she tried unsuccessfully to find another context for him. There was something familiar about the angle he held his head at, the set of his shoulders, the line of his jaw.

He kept his head down as he mumbled the amount due and handed a rumpled bill to Roger. His dark hair was military short, and he wore an army jacket with the collar flipped up.

She didn't know anyone in the military. She didn't know anyone
in the military, and she didn't know any pizza delivery guys—two strikes in her literal brain—but still, she felt the vague pull of recognition.

“Don't be cheap with the tip, Roger,” Frankie prodded. “They had to send the military to get through your media mob outside.”

Roger gritted out a smile. “The reporters are gone, but I always support our troops, Frankie.”

“Your voting record says otherwise,” Frankie muttered. She shot a sly look at the delivery guy. “Direct deposit is the way to go anyway, right, soldier? Skip the political red tape and put cash in hand.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the deliveryman mumbled, his head still down. He took the extra five Roger handed to him with a quiet “Thank you, sir.”

As he started to turn away, Frankie put a hand on his arm.

“Hang on,” she said. She turned to dig through a purse on the counter, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Roger. Five bucks?”

She came up with a ten and held it out.

“Thank you, ma'am.”

Dana's eye caught on the name tag on the chest of the jacket as he turned to accept the bill: Villante.

A strange mix of recognition and apprehension snaked through her. Fragments of memories flickered through her head like shooting stars, there and gone. High school. The name of a friend—her best friend—Casey. Frankie had mentioned Casey. A reporter in the throng outside the house had called out the name
Casey
. Casey Grant. As Dana looked at Villante the delivery guy, the name that came to her mind was
Casey.

Something cold and powerful surged through her, driving her to her feet.

“I know you,” she said.

He shot her a sideways glance, brows slashing low over dark eyes.

“I know you,” she said again, more firmly this time. She pulled her phone out of the pouch of her hoodie and snapped a picture of him.

“I have to go,” he mumbled, turning away from her, turning to leave.

“John,” Dana said. “John Villante.”

She came around the table, following him as he left the kitchen.

“I remember you,” she said as he pulled open the front door and bolted for the car parked at the curb.

“I remember you,” she said. “You killed my best friend.”

The memories came rushing
and tumbling over one another, caught up in an avalanche of emotion. He ran from them. He bolted and ran like a coward, out of the beautiful house, across the manicured yard, away from the specter rising from his past.

He ran to the ridiculous-looking car he drove for Anthony's—a VW Beetle wrapped in restaurant advertising and made to look like a tomato, right down to a green plastic stem and leaves sprouting from the roof. He slid behind the wheel and started the engine, glancing back at the house, half expecting the inhabitants to come pouring out of it in pursuit of him.

The ghost still stood in the open doorway, staring out at him.
I know you. You killed my best friend.

Her words had penetrated his head and echoed off the walls of his skull.
I know you. You killed my best friend. I know you . . . I-I-I-know-know-know-you-you-you . . . killed-killed-killed . . .

He threw the car in gear and hit the gas. As soon as he had escaped the cul-de-sac he began to question what had just happened. He half hoped at least part of it had been conjured up by his mind, part memory, part hallucination. His heart was pounding and he was drenched in cold sweat, the same as when he woke from his other nightmares.

The car's tires screeched as he turned out of the neighborhood onto the main road. He turned right instead of left—away from town instead of toward it. The VW's small engine protested his heavy foot on the gas pedal with a cartoonish high-pitched roar as it grudgingly pushed the speedometer past sixty.

John wished for more horsepower. He felt the need to get away faster than the Tomato Bug could take him. He needed to be alone. Fuck the Mercers and Dana Nolan. Fuck his job and his boss and his boss's bitch of a wife. The idea of returning to the restaurant with all its noise and chaos just added to the sick feeling in his stomach. He had to get away.

Of course, there was no escape, not truly. He couldn't escape what was in his head. He couldn't escape his past. He couldn't escape the present. The memories chased him from within. And now the memory of Dana Nolan's face chased him as well, down Forest Hill Road to Kanner to the dirt service road that ran through the woods to the cluster of sheds and garages tucked up alongside the edge of the state park.

A single dull light cut the darkness, illuminating the outlines of the buildings that housed maintenance equipment—tractors and mowers, tools and whatnot. The buildings were locked up tight behind a high fence topped with razor wire to keep out vandals and thieves. The gate was shut and bound with chains and padlocks. A big sign warned of video surveillance and the promise of prosecution of trespassers.

He pulled into the gravel parking area outside the fence and swung the car around to face the road, back end to the fence so no one could come up behind him. He just needed to be still and alone for a bit, to take the tangle of memories and emotions and straighten them out in a line to make sense of them.

He had recognized the name
Mercer
on the delivery slip and had recognized the home when he had pulled up in front of it. But he had not expected anyone there to recognize him. Most people were
focused on their food and getting their correct change. They didn't care who was standing on the other side of the bags and boxes. Besides that, it had been, what? Seven, eight years now? He had been a kid the last time any of those people had seen him. It had never occurred to him that Dana might be there.

You killed my best friend . . .

Dana Nolan. He never would have recognized her if he hadn't heard her name spoken, if he hadn't heard her voice, if she hadn't said his name. He remembered her being pretty: long blond hair and a heart-shaped face, big blue eyes and a beautiful smile. A cheerleader. The princess of this and the captain of that. Top of the class. Editor of the school paper. Little Miss Perfect. Too good for the likes of him, which meant her best friend, Casey, was also too good for him, too good by association—though Casey had felt otherwise.

He hadn't seen Dana Nolan since the summer after they graduated. The summer Casey Grant disappeared, never to be seen again. He had gone off to the army, off to war. He hadn't come back here—would never have come back here if things had worked out differently. Glad to be gone, he hadn't kept up with local news. Even since he'd come home, he did his job and minded his own business. His only focus was to make enough money to try to go someplace else.

You killed my best friend . . .

She didn't look like that girl anymore. The person who had stood in the Mercers' kitchen, staring out at him from inside the tunnel of a hood, bore little resemblance. She was the
Walking Dead
version of the Dana Nolan he had known, thin and scarred, with haunted eyes. He had no idea what had happened to her. Maybe she had been in a car wreck, put her face through a windshield or something.

Regardless of what she looked like, he hadn't expected to see her there. She had grown up and gone, like anyone with ambition and opportunity did. Miss Most Likely to Succeed had gone off to college and gone from there to make something bigger of herself than
anyone left in this town ever could—or so he imagined. And yet, there she was, accusing him.

You killed my best friend . . .

John jumped as his phone started buzzing and vibrating in the cup holder between the bucket seats. The caller ID showed one word:
WORK
. That would be Paula Tarantino, calling to bitch at him for being slow, or worse, to say Dana Nolan had called to complain about him. He could hear Paula's screechy nasal voice shrieking,
She said you killed her best friend! I should fucking fire you!

God, he hated Paula. He hated everything about her, from her leathery tan to her spray-starched peroxide blond bouffant to the pickled-sour expression that twisted her thin-lipped mouth into a puckered knot. He couldn't imagine how Tony hadn't strangled her by now. He had been tempted himself to put his hands around her throat and choke her until her bug eyes popped out of her bloated face.

The thought disturbed him now, on the heels of Dana Nolan's accusation. Could he really strangle a woman? He had a violent nature. He had been told that his entire life. He was the son of a violent man. The apple never fell far from the tree—at least not in the minds of people in a small town. The military had been the only place for him to go. Jail or the army had been his choices. The army could channel his rage. He could make himself useful to his country as a weapon.

But he wasn't useful anymore. A tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Years strung together by battles and deaths, deployments and medals thrown in a box. One well-placed improvised explosive device had ended his service. The IED explosion and the ride in the Humvee as it cartwheeled across the barren landscape had scrambled his brain inside his head, and here he was, back in Indiana with nothing and no future, driving a VW Bug made to look like a tomato, delivering pizzas like a sixteen-year-old kid.

The depression pressed down on him now, always worse when he
was tired or stressed. There seemed to be no bright side to his life even on his best day, and this was not his best day. Today he had seen a ghost and been accused of murder, and as his phone began to buzz and vibrate again, he had to think he had probably lost his job as well.

Headlights turned off Kanner and came toward him down the dirt road. A spotlight flooded the Tomato Bug, making him squint as the car pulled off the road and parked cattywampus in front of him, blocking his exit like a bully at the locker room door. A sheriff's deputy rounded the hood of the cruiser and came toward him with a Maglite flashlight held high, the way cops did, so they could quickly flip it over and use it for a club.

John ran down the window and heaved a sigh.

“What're you doing out here, son?” the deputy asked. John couldn't see his face behind the glare of the light, but from that angle, he seemed tall and thick around the middle from the bulletproof vest under his shirt.

“Nothing, sir,” John said.

“Nobody's getting a pizza delivered out here.”

“No, sir.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Just needed a minute,” John said. “I had to take a leak, sir.”

“And you come all the way out here to do it?”

John didn't answer.

“Maybe you've got some other kind of delivery to make,” the deputy suggested.

“No, sir.”

“I need to see your license and registration.”

People came out here all the time to make exchanges of all kinds, John knew. He'd bought his share of weed and alcohol out here when he was in high school. Crystal meth had become the drug of choice of area dealers. No doubt they used this spot as well. And kids probably still came out this way to park and exchange bodily fluids, as they had done for generations.

He dug the Tomato Bug's registration out of the glove box and handed it through the window along with his driver's license.

“John Villante?” the deputy said with an incredulous tone of voice. “Maybe you better get out of the car.”

John took a big breath but stifled the sigh. He could feel his patience burning down like the sizzling fuse of a firecracker. He climbed out of the car, keeping his hands out to the side, away from his body.

“I thought you joined the army.”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

The deputy changed the angle of the light so that the glow touched his own face. “Tim Carver. Deputy Carver now.”

Oh Jesus. This night just gets better and better
.

Tim Carver. Captain of the football team, Mr. All Everything. Dana Nolan's high school boyfriend. They had played together, he and Tim Carver—football, basketball, baseball. Their girlfriends had been best friends. But he and Carver had never really gotten on. Tim Carver was a leader, from a good family, had been destined for bigger things—West Point, to be precise. It had been a big deal all over town when Carver got accepted to the Point. John didn't ask him how he had ended up in a deputy's uniform.

He had the sudden thought that Dana Nolan had sent Carver after him, and the thought quickly festered into anger. All these years had passed. He had gone and served his country, had been respected by his peers, yet just like that he could be reduced to feeling like the outcast kid from high school all over again.

“What are you doing out here, John?”

“Like I said, I had to take a leak.”

“I don't like you being out here. You and I both know a whole lot of nothing good goes on out here at night.”

John shrugged. “You want to search me, go ahead. I got nothing for you.”

“How long you been back in town?”

“A few weeks.”

Carver gave him a long look. “Nobody's going to be happy you came back here, John.”

John said nothing. He had as much right to come back as anybody. All the same, he wouldn't have if he'd had any other place to go.

He had always resented Tim Carver—resented his better-than attitude, his smug assuredness that the world was his for the taking. Tim Carver had been going places in the big world outside of Shelby Mills. And yet, here he was, Mr. West Point, a Liddell County deputy prowling the back roads of nowhere, telling John he shouldn't be here. Fuck him.

John wanted nothing more in that moment than to grab Carver's head and slam his superior face down on an upthrusting knee. He wanted to spew obscenities and throw his fists and turn the valve wide open on the pressure his temper was building inside his head and chest. Who the fuck was Tim Carver to lord it over him?

In the cup holder of the Tomato Bug, his phone was buzzing and jumping again.

Fucking Paula.

His level of anxiety cranked up a notch.

“You got anything in this car you shouldn't have?” Carver asked.

“No, sir.”

“Then you won't mind if I have a look, right?”

“Nope,” John said, already formulating his denial for the joint he had stashed. It wasn't his. Someone else had driven the car. Or it probably belonged to that Mexican kid at the car wash . . .

Carver wouldn't believe him. They had both been out on this road buying weed and smoking it back in the day. Not that anybody would have believed John's version of the story.

Carver shined his Maglite into the car and went from window to window, sniffing like a bloodhound. The car reeked of pizza, the pungent aromas of tomato sauce and oregano overpowering a single little joint of marijuana.

Carver's shoulder-mounted radio crackled with gibberish from a dispatcher. Bigger trouble was brewing elsewhere in Liddell County.

He shined the light directly in John's eyes and stepped back toward his cruiser. “All right. I've got to go. I suggest you do, too, John.”

“I will.”

“Stay out of trouble . . . if you can.”

John chewed down hard on a big
Fuck you
. He watched Carver get back into the cruiser and drive away, then got back into the Tomato Bug and followed him down the service road. He kept to the speed limit, in no particular hurry to get either a ticket or back to Anthony's.

He looked over as he passed the illuminated carved sign for Bridlewood Estates, wondering what might have gone on in the Mercer house, what was going on there right now. Was Dana Nolan thinking about him? Talking about him? Telling anyone who would listen how she knew he must have done something terrible to Casey Grant all those years ago?

He wished he hadn't had to come back here. But he had nothing, and nowhere else to go. Here he had a place to live, anyway, and a job . . . for the moment.

He turned down the alley, parked behind the restaurant, and went in the back door, into the noise of clanging pans and shouted orders, the smell of oregano and tomato sauce. He hated the noise and the bustle. It unnerved him. He couldn't stand to be in such a small space with so many people and so many voices.