His Frozen Heart (37 page)

Not expecting a favorable response, I
asked, “I don’t suppose you know how to pick a lock, do
you?”

Mark shook his head, “Not my
specialty.”

I opened the passenger door, turned to
Mark and said, “Don’t leave.” I ran up to the front door. It was a
heavy steel door, and I pounded and kicked it mercilessly. The
sound of my plea to get in was muffled by the cinder block
structure. If Dave were inside, I wasn’t convinced he would have
heard me from the lobby, let alone from the second floor
apartment.

I grabbed a handful of snow and
launched the snowball at one of the second floor windows. The
snowball bounced off with a heavy thump. I sent a second one and
then a third. Nothing. A pile of white rock was setting under a
holly bush: I grabbed one and threw it hard against the window. If
he were in the apartment, it would be impossible for him to ignore
my onslaught.

Mark grabbed my hand as I was about to
send a second rock up to his window. “He’s not here. Stop before
you break something.”

“
He’s here. I know it. He’s
upstairs in the dark, all by himself. You didn’t see him yesterday.
He was angry with me. But that wasn’t the worst of it: his heart
froze when he learned that the one person he could love with his
whole heart didn’t want to see him.”

Mark’s eyes narrowed, “I never said I
didn’t want to see him. I said the timing was bad.”

“
I told him, but that’s not
what he heard.”

Mark shook his head and scowled at me.
He walked back toward the steel door examining the side. “If he
isn’t inside, you’re ready to face a breaking and entering
charge?”

“
He’s in there. I know
it.”

Rolling his eyes, Mark murmured, “This
is ludicrous.” He stomped back toward his car. Part of me wanted to
run in front of him and hold him in place because I thought he
intended to drive away. Just as he approached his car, the trunk
popped open. Mark dug through a compartment where his spare tire
was kept, removed a tire iron and a can of lubricant.

“
We’re fortunate that a
dimwit installed his front door backwards. The hinges are on the
outside rather than where they’re supposed to be on the inside.” He
shook his head at me as he walked back up to the garage’s front
door. “This won’t be elegant, but it’s better than a broken
window.” Mark sprayed the hinges for several seconds each. After
each one was saturated, he placed the tire iron under the lip of
the hinge and took each pin out with no more effort than inserting
a key in a door.

He placed the third pin on the ground
and turned to me. “If we go in and he’s not there, I’m leaving you
to explain to the alarm company why it was so imperative you get
inside.”

“
Deal.” My smile stretched
wide. A giddiness travelled through me as I had a sudden urge to
hug him. Mark shook his head then planted his foot hard against the
wall and pulled. His arms took the door completely off of its
resting place as a gaping hole now stood before us. He gestured for
me to go in first. No alarm sounded, and I wondered if that meant
we had triggered a silent one, or if one wasn’t
installed.

I had just made it through the lobby
and around the corner into the garage when Dave was flying off the
stairs with a baseball bat in his hand. I held up my hands and
shouted, “It’s me! Dave, it’s me!” I cowered as the bat was already
over his shoulder before he realized who “me” was. He let the bat
fall to the floor when he stopped at the bottom of the steps. From
the light of the Coke machine, I saw relief showing in his
eyes.

“
Candy? What are you doing
here?” He looked at the doorway to the dark lobby, then asked, “How
did you get in?”

Ignoring his question, I was unable to
contain my excitement, “He’s here. I found him. Well, he found me,
but he’s just outside.”

Mark’s voice called from the lobby,
“I’m not paying for a new door. This was her idea.”

Dave’s eyes grew wide. He walked
slowly from around the pop machine. He looked from me to the lobby
door, back to me, then his eyes rested on the lobby’s doorway. A
single word escaped him, “Mark?”

Mark was somewhere in the pitch black
lobby. He answered jovially, “In the flesh. Why don’t you have an
alarm system? Did you forget to pay your utility bill or
something?” The light flickered on in the lobby when Mark located
the switch, and a second later he stepped from the lobby into the
garage. The two brothers stood motionless for a second staring at
each other. Dave glanced back at me for a fraction of a second then
launched himself at Mark, taking him in a bear hug.

Neither spoke. They both clung to the
other. Their embrace was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
It was a full minute before they let go of each other. Mark was the
first to speak. “Sorry about your door. She was pretty adamant that
we were getting inside.”

Dave laughed, brushing moisture from
his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Her persistence is only
rivaled by a pit bull’s.”

Mark shared a warm smile with me, “You
have no idea.”

Dave motioned to his apartment
upstairs, “You want to come in?”

Mark said, “Just for a minute. I’m in
town on business, and as I tried to explain to Candy, I need to
meet with a client tonight.”

Before the two brothers could go up
the steps, I called their attention to the gaping hole in the front
of the building. “Um, should one of you put the door back on
first?”

Mark smiled, “Right. Need to keep the
riffraff out. So, do you always answer the door with a bat at
night?”

Still all smiles, Dave answered, “When
I heard the snowballs on the window, I thought it was just
neighborhood kids. I heard someone monkeying with the door and
thought it might be vandals, so I was coming to
investigate.”

“
With a bat?”

“
Better than a
gun.”

Mark raised a brow, “I’ll let Candy
fill you in on her day. I bumped into her on Windham Street and
offered to give her a ride to her car. Your pit bull analogy? Yes,
she was pretty adamant that I bring her here instead of to her
car.”

Dave smiled sweetly to me,
“Thanks.”

My eyes darted between the two
brothers. “Put the door back on already. It’s freezing out.” The
two of them went to the door and had it back on its hinges in less
than a minute. Dave turned on the lights in the garage and hit a
switch to illuminate the apartment, too. I didn’t want to intrude
on their reunion, so when they went upstairs, I took a seat in the
lobby and grabbed a magazine from a rack on the wall.

Motor Trend
had never been a favorite; in fact, I’d put it in
the same category as
Better Homes and
Gardens
. I had always liked cars, but was
far more interested in old school muscle instead of a showdown
between the latest BMW, Viper and Mercedes.

The five minutes I had begged Mark to
give came and went, so did fifteen, and after I had been in the
lobby for a full hour, curiosity began to get the better of me. I
tentatively walked toward the stairs. Hovering beside the steps
listening to the humming of the Coke machine, I strained to hear
the conversation upstairs.

Dave asked Mark, “Are you hungry? I’ve
got a roast and potatoes I can warm up.”

Mark’s voice was a little lower than
Dave’s when he commented, “Very domestic. I’m impressed. No, don’t
go to any trouble.” The rustling of a chip bag sounded. “I haven’t
had Wavy Lays in years. Remember how we used to make little ice
cream forts in our bowls and use the chips for fences?”

“
You’re stuck with just the
chips. I don’t have ice cream.”

“
No ice cream? You have a
roast and potatoes but you don’t keep ice cream in the freezer? You
aren’t as domestic as I had believed.”

Dave’s answer was strained. “I don’t
eat ice cream.”

“
You don’t eat ice cream?
You used to love ice cream. I used to bribe you with it to get you
to make your bed.”

“
Yeah, I remember.” Dave
paused for a few seconds before he added, “I haven’t eaten ice
cream since. . . well, you know.”

“
Since when?”

“
Since our case worker
asked me if I wanted to get ice cream and I followed her out to her
car.”

Mark didn’t answer, but I heard his
footsteps overhead. A muffled response echoed half a minute later,
“It’s not your fault. You were just a kid. Let it go.”

“
So, were you looking for
me, too?”

“
No.” A long pause hung in
the air before Mark added solemnly, “I told you, I thought you were
dead. I never considered my caseworker got it wrong.” Another long
pause before Mark said, “I’m glad she was wrong. Hey, listen, I’ve
got somewhere I need to be, but I promise I’ll be back
soon.”

I heard both men coming down the steps
and quickly made my way back to the lobby. Both were all smiles. I
marveled at their similarities: they were the same height, similar
builds, nearly identical features on their faces – in a glance it
would be next to impossible to tell them apart. Lucky the two did
not dress alike. The only discernable difference was the cut above
Dave’s brow that was still shiny from the glue he had used on
it.

Mark was the first one down the
stairs, his face all smiles when he grabbed me in a hug. Mark
whispered directly into my ear. “Thank you. I needed this meeting
as much as he did.”

Mark let go of me and took Dave in a
bone-crushing hug, “I’ll call you in a couple days, little
brother.”

Dave held onto Mark, but looking over
Mark’s shoulder, his eyes rested on me. When the two of them let
go, Mark turned to me, “You want that ride to your car
now?”

My eyes darted to Dave, not sure where
things were between us. He answered for me, “I’ll take her to it.
I’m pretty sure I made you late for whatever you had planned.” I
didn’t want to go to my car. I wanted for him to hold me the way he
had the last time I was here. I wanted him to tell me how important
I was to him, and most of all, I wanted him to tell me he wasn’t
angry with me anymore.

Mark tipped his head in a wordless
good-bye, then let himself out.

It was just Dave and I standing in his
garage. He walked up to me and leaned down as his lips softly
whispered against mine. As he eased away from me, his eyes widened,
he took a step away and reached for a hanging pedestal light above
a work bench and angled it in my direction. Perplexed, he asked,
“What happened to your neck?”

My hands slid to my throat as the
sting on my neck registered under my fingertips. Grey had hit me
hard in the throat behind the restaurant, and I had been able to
ignore the pain until Dave’s eyes stared at it. Before I could
answer, he instructed, “Wait here.”

He ran up the steps to his apartment
and returned holding a plastic bag of ice cubes. As Dave gently
pressed the cold bag to my neck, his eyes darted to my hands
covered in cuts and scrapes. His deep brown eyes looked sadly into
mine. “What happened to you?”

“
That Grey guy kidnapped me
from the restaurant today. I woke up in a shack in Pioneers’ Park
with him talking on the phone telling someone that he was going to
gut me. I bolted.”

Dave’s nostrils flared. “I’ll kill
him.”

I shook my head, “He’s gone. Mark told
him he had until Monday to get out of town.”

Dave answered menacingly, “That gives
me two days to find him.”

Dave carefully repositioned the ice on
my neck. I didn’t want Dave to go looking for Grey. I didn’t want
him to leave for any reason. The last two days had been unbearable
– I needed him to stay with me. “No. Don’t. Mark scared him. He’s
going to pay Libby’s medical bills, yours, too. Just let him
go.”

Dave eased his hand to the small of my
back to pull me toward him. I winced. Instead of asking me, he took
a step to my side, removed the too large jacket I was wearing and
lifted the back of my t-shirt. “What the. . .?” His fingers
ever-so-slightly pressed the spot where Grey had kidney punched me.
“Grey did this?”

I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I
pressed my lips together and nodded my response. Dave took the ice
bag which he had been holding against my neck and pressed it to the
bruise on my back. In a calm voice, absent any emotion, Dave asked,
“What else did he do?”

If I tried to speak, I knew I’d break
down before I could get a full sentence out. I pulled my hair back
with one hand and touched my temple with my other. It, too, felt
sore. Dave’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t move the bag of ice from
my back.

Dave confessed, “This is my fault. I’m
sorry, Candy. I wasn’t there to take care of you.” His expression
was earnest and his voice sorrowful.

“
This didn’t have anything
to do with you. He’s a psycho. I was working when he kidnapped me.
There were at least twenty people around. He didn’t care who saw
him.”

Dave’s gaze held mine. “I knew I
should have stayed. I came by when you were busy. I told a waitress
I’d be back after your shift.” He paused as his voice lowered,
“When I came back, she told me you saw a rat in the storage room
and left early. I thought I’d blown it and you didn’t want to see
me. I should have grabbed a table to begin with. None of this would
have happened if I’d stayed.”