Cold Cold Heart (25 page)

Overwhelmed and panicked, she got up too fast, banging the tabletop with a hip and sloshing Hardy's coffee out of the cup. She bolted out of the booth, bumping into a waitress, causing her to drop a plate loaded with food. The woman turned on her, surprised and angry, her face contorting like something in a funhouse mirror.

Dana pushed past the woman and ran out of the restaurant, onto
the porch, colliding head-on into a burly man who caught her by the upper arms with greasy hands strong enough to crush bone. She took in only impressions of him as she instantly fought to get free—a battered and bruised red face beneath a white flattop, a heavy Fu Manchu mustache bracketing a grimace of yellowed teeth and a fat lip, dark eyes like a shark.

“Hey!” he yelled as Dana kicked and struggled to tear herself out of his grasp. “I caught a feisty one!”

The men around him laughed. “Hang on, Mack!”

“Let go! Let me go!” Dana shouted, looking up at him.

His expression contorted with shock and disgust. “Jesus Christ!”

Dana kicked him in the shin as hard as she could.

“Ouch! Fucking little bitch!” he howled, hurling her away from him.

Dana stumbled backward, losing her footing and landing on her butt on the floor of the porch.

“Hey!” another male voice shouted. “What the hell?”

Then Tim was bending down over her, offering his hand to help her up.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” Dana said, flustered and embarrassed.

He moved her to the side like a piece of furniture and turned to the men. “What the hell is going on here?”

“She kicked me!” the big man blustered.

“Mr. Villante, do you think you're a big man shoving a girl around like that?” Tim asked. “You think it's okay to lay your hands on a woman? That's not okay in this county. Not in front of me, it isn't.”

He turned back toward Dana. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Dana mumbled, fussing with her hood. “I just want to go. I have to go.”

She hurried down off the porch and across the parking lot to her car, only to find the doors locked. Hands trembling, she searched the
pockets of her jeans and the front pouch of her hoodie. No keys. Nothing but a vibrating cell phone.

She pulled the phone out and looked at the screen. Her mother was calling. The logjam of emotions in her brain prevented her from remembering how to unlock the screen. The call went to voice mail and a text message popped up:
Where are you???? Answer me!!!!

Her frustration erupted like a volcano and she threw the phone at the car, punishing both at once. The phone ricocheted off the driver's window and landed faceup on the asphalt.

“You'd have more luck with these,” Dan Hardy said, holding up her key chain, the Hello Kitty figure looking ridiculous in his big, rough hand.

“You want to run away, little girl?” he asked. “You can't run away from what's in your own head.”

“Give me my keys!” Dana snapped, jumping to try to reach them.

Hardy raised his arm, holding the key chain well out of her reach. “That demon is in your head whether you put a face on him or not. You'll never be rid of him until you take him out and put him in the light of day.”

“Hardy!” Tim called, hustling toward them. He was out of uniform, in jeans and cowboy boots and a blue oxford button-down. Off duty but still wearing the air of authority in his expression and the set of his shoulders. “May I ask what the hell you think you're doing?”

Hardy looked at him with a stone face. “Miss Nolan and I were reliving old times,” he said. “Remember the good old days when your friend Casey went missing?”

Tim gave the older man a long, cold look. “Last I remember, you were retired. In fact, as I recall, you were specifically asked to leave the job. So what is this? You don't have anything else to fill your sorry, empty life but some demented idea of recapturing your past glory? Oh, wait. You never solved that case, did you?” he said, throwing Hardy's failure up in his face.

“You'd be smarter to mind who you're mouthing off to here, West Point,” Hardy growled.

Tim Carver's face flushed red. “I think you should give the lady her keys back.”

Hardy looked from Tim to Dana and back, his gaze inscrutable. He lowered his arm and Dana snatched her keys out of his hand.

“You think about what I said, little girl,” he said. “You can't be free of the past if you don't ever face it.”

He went around to the driver's side of his car, got in, and started the engine. Dana waited until he was driving away, then bent down to pick up her phone.

“Well, you are just the center of all unwanted attention these days, aren't you?” Tim said. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Dana said. “What happened with the man on the porch?”

“Mack Villante? Nothing. Unless you feel compelled to file a complaint against him.”

“John Villante's dad,” Dana said, recognition only now clicking in. “I ran into him and he wouldn't let go. I panicked, I guess.”

“It's okay. There's surely a long line of people who would like to kick him. Don't feel bad for being the one to do it. He is one mean, nasty piece of work. I watched him go after John last night—his own kid. Went at him swinging those fists like a pair of canned hams. But I'm sure that wasn't the first time that ever happened.”

“Casey was afraid of him,” Dana said. “I remember she and John hardly spent any time at John's house because his dad creeped her out. She said he was always looking at her like she was edible.”

“He's a crude dude,” Tim said. “I know he got a hard look from the detectives at the time Casey went missing, but he had an alibi. He was with some girlfriend over in Levine. The girlfriend corroborated his story. Hardy thought she was lying, that she was scared of Mack, but he couldn't prove it. And there was never any physical evidence to point in Mack's direction. The girlfriend died not long
after that in a house fire. A suspicious turn of events, but nothing ever came of that investigation.”

He leaned back against the car and crossed his arms. In jeans and a shirt he looked more like the boy she had known, but a beefier and more serious version. The blue of his eyes was as intense as the fall sky as he looked at her.

“Dana, what the hell were you doing here with Dan Hardy? After what I told you last night, here you are with him? Seriously? What were you thinking?”

“He wanted me to retrace Casey's and my steps from that last day,” Dana said. “He thought it might shake loose a memory.”

“Did it?”

“Not the way he meant. Not yet, anyway. Maybe if we had made it to the nursery . . . He says Casey and I had an argument there. I don't remember it that way. Or I don't want to remember it that way.”

She looked down at her phone as it began to vibrate again with another call from her mother. She declined the call and sent a text message instead:
I'm with Tim. All OK.

“I've got a couple hours before I go on duty,” he said. “I'll go with you if you'd like.”

“Thanks. I'll take you up on that,” Dana said. “After the morning I've had, a police escort sounds like a great idea.”

Mercer-Nolan Nursery and Garden Center
had been like a wonderland to Dana as a little girl, with all its terraces and pergolas and gazebos decked in twinkle lights. During spring and summer the place was as lush as the Garden of Eden must have been, with hanging pots overflowing with flowers and greenery, and topiaries made in the shapes of rabbits and unicorns and rearing horses. For the Christmas season it would become a winter wonderland, with every conceivable kind of Christmas tree decorated and on display, garland and wreaths everywhere, the smell of pine and spruce and hot, spiced cider perfuming the air.

With Halloween fast approaching, the nursery was bursting with fall colors—chrysanthemums everywhere, rows of young trees with turning leaves. Hundreds of pumpkins lay scattered on either side of the driveway, with happy scarecrow sentinels overseeing the selection of the perfect prospective jack-o'-lantern.

Out of long habit Dana took the side drive to employee parking behind the gift shop and greenhouses. Tim pulled his shiny silver pickup in beside her. He had always taken great pride in his vehicles, waxing and polishing every Sunday morning. This one looked like it had just rolled off the dealer's lot, buffed to such a sheen it was almost blinding when the sun hit it.
An extension of his perfect
image,
Dana thought as he climbed out of the truck and came toward her. It had always been important to him that people thought of him as perfect. She hadn't been much different, she supposed. “I spent many an hour here breaking my back for slave wages back in the day,” he said with a grin as he came around the front of the pickup.

“I'm sure it built your character,” Dana said dryly.

“I'm sure it did.”

The nursery had always been a source of jobs for the local high school kids. As Dana's boyfriend, Tim had had an automatic in.

“As I recall, you talked your way into a sales job fast enough,” Dana said as they walked up the path toward the buildings.

His grin only widened. “That gift of gab has to be good for something besides filling awkward silences.”

It had always seemed so easy for him to ingratiate himself with adults. Roger had treated Tim more like a son than he had ever treated Dana like a daughter. It had been in part Roger's string pulling and calling in favors that had gotten Tim his nomination to West Point.

“How did Roger take it when you left West Point?”

He shrugged. “I never heard from him. I didn't come back here for quite a long time after that. My folks split up and moved, and I was up in Fort Wayne. By the time I came back to Shelby Mills, he acted like he had never met me before in his life. I guess maybe that's his way of expressing his displeasure. I no longer exist for him.”

“I wish he'd pretend he didn't know me,” Dana grumbled. “Mom says I used to get along with him. I don't like him now, so I can't make that work in my head. I can't believe that I ever liked him.”

“He was never going to take the place of your dad. I just think you were more polite back then; that's all.”

Dana frowned at him as they walked along the edge of the shade-garden display. “Are you saying I'm rude now?”

He laughed. “Hey, I like the new, unvarnished Dana. You're refreshingly unfiltered.”

“It's strange,” Dana confessed on a sigh. She took a seat on a park bench that overlooked the lily pond. “To think that I used to be someone else.”

“We all used to be someone else, Dee,” Tim said, sitting beside her. “We all change. The causes are different; that's all. Some people change because they want to, some because they have to. Sometimes it's a choice and sometimes it's not. You didn't get to pick.

“In case you don't remember, you were never good with other people making decisions for you,” he said, trying to tease her away from the dark thoughts of what had happened to her. “That was when the temper came out. Hooo-weee!”

“Was I that bad?”

He laughed. “I think I probably still have some of your tooth marks on my pride.”

Dana didn't laugh with him. She thought of what Hardy had said to her that morning. That a person could lose their temper, and a push and a shove and a bump on the head later, they were guilty of murder.

“Hardy told me I was a suspect back then,” she said, still offended. Offended and just a little bit afraid.

“Well . . . yes,” Tim said. “Statistically, people are killed by people they know. You were one of the last people with her. And you were seen arguing.”

“She left here. I never saw her again.”

He held his hands up in surrender. “I'm not saying you did! But Hardy had to look at you differently. That was his job.
Was.
I want you to get that through your head. You are not to have anything to do with him, Dee. I mean it.”

“Let's walk,” she said, getting up again. “I want to get on with this.”

She wanted to walk around and remember that day and everything that was said between her and Casey, and see beyond all doubt that she didn't know a damn thing about what had happened to her friend.

A weekday in late fall meant there were fewer customers browsing the nursery than there would have been that summer day seven years ago. Dana led the way up to the terraces where the flats of summer annuals would have been in full bloom. Pansies and other cool-weather flowers had taken their place. It had been her job to drag the hoses around, watering the plants. Casey had followed her around, jabbering away about whatever their current obsessions had been—pop singers, Hollywood heartthrobs, school gossip, boys.

She stood there for a moment, trying to hear their conversation from seven years past. Below them activity buzzed around the large central gazebo. Workers were arranging bales of straw, moving potted plants, setting up picnic tables. People sat on directors' chairs in the gazebo itself, a videographer standing off to one side behind a camera on a tripod.

Roger had said something about doing an interview. And something about setting up for a party. Something to do with his campaign, she supposed, not that she was interested in the least. She only hoped he would get reelected so he would be going back to Indianapolis for days at a time, out of their house.

She looked over to the right, to an area where various trellises were displayed along a tall, slatted, wood fence. From her vantage point she could see beyond the fence to the utility building where the restrooms were tucked away. For a split second an image flashed in her memory of Casey coming out of the ladies' room and walking toward her, and a strange leftover sense of anger and anxiety seeped through her.

Dr. Burnette had explained the difference between emotional memory and contextual memory. Dana had done some of her own research on the subject. But knowing how and why and where in the brain different kinds of memories were stored was of no help in recovering those memories.

Now she remembered she had been angry with her friend, but for
whatever reason the memory of what they had argued about had either never been implanted or had been shut down after the fact, dismissed as either not important or too traumatic.

“Anything coming back?” Tim asked.

“She came back from the ladies' room and I was angry with her,” she said, trying to stare back in time, trying to hear their conversation. “We had words. Someone saw us arguing. I still can't remember what it was about.”

“Probably about Villante,” he said. “She probably told you she was taking him back again. That would have set you off. And why would you bother remembering that? Y'all argued about that at least once a month.”

“Didn't she tell you?” Dana asked, looking up at him. “She called you after she left here that day. Detective Hardy told me you said she called you to complain about me.”

“Yeah. Same as fifty other times,” he said. “Dana's so bossy. Dana's being a bitch. Blah, blah, blah.

“Let me clue you in—in case you don't already know this,” he said. “Girls' blah-blah-blahing to boys goes in one ear and out the other. She didn't say anything she hadn't probably said a hundred and twenty times before. And, no, I don't feel guilty about that because it wasn't in the least bit relevant to what happened to her after.”

“I wish I could feel that way,” Dana said.

“Can I put my hand on your arm?”

“What?”

He made a comical face of frustration. “I'm a toucher. You know that. I want to touch your arm before I make my point, and I don't want you punching me in the throat because I touched you. Can I touch your arm?”

Dana scowled. “Okay.”

He put his hand on her upper arm and looked into her eyes. “Sweetheart, has it occurred to you that maybe all this angst over
what happened to Casey is coming out of the guilt you feel because you survived what happened to you and she didn't?”

Instantly, Dana thought of the nightmare she'd had and the guilt she had felt afterward.

“Maybe.”

He moved his hand to her face, cupping the side where nerves had been damaged. It felt like he was touching her through a thick blanket. “It's not your fault, Dee. Let go of that.”

Easier said than done,
Dana thought.

“We don't know for a fact that she isn't alive,” she said. “She could still be out there somewhere. There was that girl in Northern California. She was gone for years and years. And those women in Cleveland were held captive for a decade or more.”

“Those are rare exceptions to the rule.”

“I know, but still . . .”

He checked his watch and grimaced. “I have to go. Will you be all right on your own?”

“I'm fine.”

“I'll call you later.”

He bent and planted a quick kiss on her lips—so quick she had no time to protest or react.

Not sure how she felt about it, she watched him hustle down the path, slowing at the big gazebo to wave and say something she couldn't hear.

Ducking into her hood to avoid the stare of a woman considering a flat of pansies, Dana started down the path herself. Slowly. It occurred to her that she was tired. Time to go home and have a nap. If she was lucky she would wake up in another lifetime.

And yet, as tired as she was, she couldn't quite turn off the mechanical churnings of her brain, still trying to pull together the pieces of the day she had last seen Casey.

They had had whatever words they'd had here on these terraces; then Casey had hurried down this very path, past the tomato plants
and kitchen herbs, past the big gazebo. She had gotten into her car and drove away to a fate no one knew. They had been best friends forever, and the last conversation they had had been a fight. They hadn't known they would never see each other again. They had thought they had all the time in the world to make up, as they had many times before. They'd had their whole lives in front of them. The flaw in that theory was that no one guaranteed how long a life would be.

Dana could see Roger clearly now as she got closer to the gazebo. His face was animated as he went on about something to the woman interviewing him. He was a handsome man, Dana had to admit, even if she didn't like him. The camera loved him, with his square jaw and angular features. The Clark Kent glasses looked so good on him, it would have been easy to imagine they were just a prop to suggest serious intelligence.

The woman interviewing him was clearly enthralled by whatever he was going on about—state sales tax or business incentives or his position on school vouchers or some similarly scintillating topic of state government. She looked to be in her early thirties, a pretty brunette with dark eyes and beautifully painted red lips that stood out against a complexion like fresh cream.

Casey might have grown up to look like her,
Dana thought, absently moving closer to the gazebo. In a trick of her mind she superimposed Casey's face over the interviewer's, eyes sparkling, a sweet smile.

“Dana, what are you doing here?”

She startled at the sound of Wesley Stevens's voice. He had come to stand beside her, looking very preppy with a V-neck sweater over his shirt and striped tie, tan corduroy pants and Top-Siders. His smile was pleasant enough, but it didn't reach his eyes.

“Enjoying a beautiful day,” she said.

“That's wonderful,” he said, “but we're shooting an interview here, so I'm going to ask you not to get so close. The mikes are very sensitive.”

He put a hand on her shoulder to steer her away, and Dana shrugged him off, shooting him a glare. “Please don't touch me.”

He stepped back with his hands up. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you. It's just that we have a bit of a time crunch here. And I don't want the interviewer to become distracted.”

“I get it,” Dana said. “Don't let the ugly stepdaughter attract attention.”

He looked uncomfortable. “That's not what I was going to say.”

It was already too late. The interviewer had spotted her and slid out of the director's chair to come to the gazebo railing.

“Dana,” she said, as if they were old acquaintances. “It's a pleasure to meet you. Sue Peralta.”

She extended her hand. Dana looked at it with suspicion, taking hold of it reluctantly. She knew the woman was looking at her as a possible interview exclusive. She knew because she would have been thinking the same thing in her position.

“It's such a relief to have you home,” the woman said. “Senator and Mrs. Mercer must be so happy.”

“Well, you're half right,” Dana muttered, her attention on Roger coming toward her.

“It's been a long road,” Roger said. “But of course we're so grateful to have Dana home.”

“I realize you're just settling in,” the woman said, “but I would love to interview you for the show—”

“No,” Dana said automatically.

Sue Peralta's smile faltered only briefly. “Well, not right now, of course, but later—”