by Tami Hoag
The couple of times John had brought Casey to the house, he had been embarrassed beyond belief by both the mess and his father. The old man had leered at Casey like a wolf looking at fresh meat. And he always managed to say something degrading or sexual or both. They had taken to climbing into John’s room through the window if they knew that Mack was in the house.
John’s bedroom had always been his sanctuary, always scrubbed clean and as neat as a pin. He had devised all kinds of hiding places for the few possessions he had that meant something to him. Nothing could be left out for Mack to get hold of and purposely ruin or somehow use against him. He lived like a prisoner of war in his own home.
Only he wasn’t living there anymore.
His hands still hurt from punching the old man in the face. He had a pretty good fresh cut on the big knuckle of his left hand from catching the edge of a tooth. He didn’t regret doing it. He regretted the consequences.
The foreman paid them their day’s wages and drove them all back to Silva’s on the flatbed. The garage was long closed by the time they got there. Mack’s truck was gone. He had already moved on to his evening bender.
John had parked his pickup at the back of the lot between a pair of long-idle Peterbilt tractor cabs, as hidden from easy view as possible. He doubted his father would expend the effort to go looking for it, but he for sure would have messed with it had it been easy for him.
The dog stood up in the box of the truck, tail wagging as John approached. John shook his head. He had left the tailgate down, half hoping the animal would be gone by the time he came back from work.
And half hoping it wouldn’t be, if he had to admit it.
He wasn’t used to having anyone be happy to see him at the end of the day. The dog jumped down from the truck and ran a few steps toward him, then suddenly remembered to be afraid and stopped, tail down but still wagging, ears lowered, lips pulled back in a sheepish smile as it danced in place.
“I ain’t gonna beat you,” John said.
The dog spun around in a circle and gave a little yip of delight.
“You’re a funny dog, Trouble,” John said. “Why you’d latch onto me, I don’t know. I got nothing for you or anybody else.”
Nothing except the day’s wages, which would buy them both a sackful of ninety-nine-cent burgers.
“Come on,” he said, pulling open the passenger’s door. “Let’s go eat.”
Whatever else the night was going to bring, at least he wouldn’t have to face it on an empty stomach. Or by himself. He had to admit there was some comfort in that.
The dog jumped into the pickup and settled itself in the passenger’s seat, panting happily. John went around to shut the tailgate, then got behind the wheel and coaxed the truck to life. He rolled slowly to the road, looking over at the parking lot in front of the Grindstone for his father’s Avalanche. No sign of it. But as he turned out onto the road, he could see the black truck tucked along the side of the bar across the way.
His father had to look like he’d gone a few rounds. John could still feel the impact of his knuckles on the old man’s face. He could hear his father now, telling his cronies how they should see the other guy. It was debatable whether or not he would tell them the “other guy” was his kid. Knowing Mack, he would probably take some kind of perverse pride in telling people he had a fistfight with his own offspring. He’d probably be hitting the Maker’s Mark pretty hard to fend off the full-on aches and pains of his beating and the sting to his pride.
If he had settled in at the bar, then this was John’s window of opportunity to go to the house and get his stuff out. He swung through the drive-through for the burgers and shared them with the dog as he drove home. It wouldn’t take him long. He ran through the inventory of his few possessions, ticking off each of his hiding places, making sure not to forget anything. He had a feeling once he left this time, he wouldn’t be coming back until the old man had breathed his last breath. Maybe not even then. There was no guarantee Mack Villante wouldn’t leave the property to the fire department to be burned to the ground rather than give it to John. He was that spiteful.
To be honest, John thought, it would probably be a relief to be free of it. It wasn’t as if he had a head full of happy childhood memories growing up in this house. For the most part he had raised himself once his mother had left. The only memories he had of being nurtured and loved were memories of her when he was small. And those memories were so old and faded they were more like half-remembered dreams. After she had gone, his life had consisted of figuring out ways to stay under his father’s radar. He hadn’t been a child so much as a tenant, given no more real consideration than if he’d been the stray dog now sitting on the far side of his truck.
His memories of his mother were of a fragile beauty and gentle soul trapped by some bad fairy-tale twist of fate with the ogre that was his father. John had been far too young to understand how or why she had come to marry Mack Villante in the first place, or why she had stayed with him as long as she had. He had no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty. But he supposed they had to have been happy once upon a time, before it had all gone wrong, and the drinking had unleashed the temper, and the violence had driven her away.
John had never blamed her for leaving. He had only wished she would have taken him with her. He had spent many lonely, scary nights imagining why she hadn’t. In some scenarios she had meant to take him, but something had prevented her. In other scenarios her plan had been to come back for him and snatch him away in the middle of the night, or to pick him up at school and take off for their new life in parts unknown. But in the back of his mind he always suspected she had left him because he was a burden and she didn’t want the reminder of the man who had made her life a misery.
He couldn’t blame her for leaving, he thought as he pulled into the driveway and looked at the little run-down ranch-style house with its weedy yard and ratty old shed out back. He was going to be glad to see the last of this place himself.
The sooner the better.
25
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 night
mare 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?”