by Tami Hoag
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.”
27
Dana met Tim at the Grindstone.
“My home away from home,” he said, grinning as he held the door for her.
Dana hesitated. “I kind of made a spectacle of myself here this morning.”
“That’s the beauty of a truck stop. Most everyone from breakfast is two states away by now.” He put his hand on the small of her back and herded her along to the dining room. “Next time I’ll let you pick the restaurant. I can get away with being here while I’m on duty.”
The restaurant was quieter at this time of day. Breakfast and lunch were the big meals. The dinner crowd took up only half the table space.
Tim guided her to a corner booth, where he had a vantage point of the entire restaurant. Dana slid in opposite him, readjusting her hoodie to close out the curious glances of patrons near them, who all seemed to know Tim.
“Any word on who did that to our April?” the waitress asked as she came to take their order. She cut Dana a hard look. Dana bent her head and stared at the tabletop.
“Not yet,” Tim said. “We’re working a couple of leads. But you ladies here should be careful going out in the parking lot at night. You never know what might be lurking out there. The world’s a dangerous place.”
“I carry my bear spray,” the waitress said. “Works on bears and truckers alike.”
“There you go,” Tim said, grinning up at her.
He ordered the chicken-fried steak. Dana asked for a cup of chicken soup. He frowned at that.
“You need to eat, Dee. There’s nothing to you.”
“I can’t eat and think at the same time,” she said. “I have a lot on my mind.”
“Too much. You know, your mama called me after you did. She’s worried about you.”
Dana put her head in her hands and groaned. “Oh God. That’s so embarrassing!”
“She’s just being a mom. And she’s probably right,” he conceded. “Casey’s been gone a long time, sweetheart. There’s no sense in you running yourself into the ground like you seem to be doing. I mean, where’s the fire, right?”
“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Dana admitted. “I’m having nightmares about her. I spent months in rehab with my brain stuck in neutral, not able to care about anything. Now it’s running nonstop and I can’t seem to turn it off. I don’t want to turn it off. I want to remember what I can. I want to know what happened. My mother wants me to sit and do crossword puzzles and watch television all day.”
“She almost lost you. She just wants to keep you safe.”
“I know she means well,” Dana said. “The Dana she got back isn’t the same girl she had before. I know that’s hard for her. It’s hard for me, too. But I’m not going to let go of Casey until I have some answers. I can’t now.”
“Have you given any more thought to the Doc Holiday possibility?”
“I’m working my way toward it. I’ve been told I should just confront the issue and get it over with, that I’m giving him more power by not dealing with it.”
“There’s some wisdom in that. Pull the Band-Aid off and get it over with. You say the word and I can show you a photo array.”
She pulled her phone out and opened the photo album. “You probably don’t have to. There was a man here this morning. I didn’t know him, but something about him upset me.”
She scrolled through the pictures to the bearded man and showed it to Tim. He looked at the photograph, then looked her in the eyes, his expression carefully blank.
“He looked like this, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Could be.”
“I still don’t remember—not in a way that could be helpful to anyone. I wish I did. I wish I could look at a picture of him and say I saw him right here in this restaurant the day Casey went missing. I wish I could say he spoke to us, that he flirted with Casey. That would be so much easier,” she said.
“Give yourself time, Dee.”
“Time for what? To make up a memory of something that probably didn’t happen?”
“Nobody wants that.”
“It would probably be a better story than the truth will turn out to be.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You said yourself—most murder victims are killed by someone they know,” she said. “You and I know everyone Casey knew. Do you want to think any of those people did something to her?”
“Well, I might not want to think it,” he said, glancing off to the side as the waitress approached with their meals, “but John was a pretty good suspect—from a detective’s point of view.”
“I gave you extra biscuits and gravy,” the waitress said cheerfully, setting his plate down in front of him.
He flashed the big smile. “You’re gonna make me fat, Charlene!”
“Well, I can think of ways to help you work it off,” she said sweetly.
She plunked Dana’s cup down, sloshing so
up over the sides without apology, and flung down a couple of cellophane packets of saltine crackers like she was throwing down a gauntlet.
“Charlene is a little bit in love with me,” Tim explained as the waitress walked away.
“Right down to her bleached-blond roots,” Dana muttered, staring at her soup, wondering what the odds were that Charlene had spit in it. She pushed the cup aside and opened a packet of crackers.
“I saw John today,” she said. “He was working at the nursery.”
He chewed a piece of his steak and swallowed, looking somber. “You be careful, Dee. That boy’s got a hair trigger since he’s back from the war. He beat the shit out of his old man last night before I could pull him off. Not that the old man didn’t have it coming. But I mean to say, the look in John’s eyes was like nothing I ever want to stand across from. He went to a dark place in his head. God only knows what lives in there.
“The detective in charge of this sexual assault case with the waitress is looking at him,” he said.
“At John?”
“He doesn’t have an alibi. Says he went out jogging that night all dressed in black like a goddamn ninja. He wouldn’t give us his clothes to look at. The guy’s full of rage and post-traumatic stress. He’s got a head injury—”
“Well, there you go,” Dana said sarcastically. “He might do anything.”
He realized his misstep too late. “You know what I meant. It’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? He suffered a traumatic head injury while someone was trying to kill him. If that makes him homicidal, then I must be homicidal, too. Or does that just make him crazy and unpredictable?”
“Stop it,” he said, annoyed with her. “He has a long history of violence. You don’t. And considering how hard they looked at him when Casey went missing . . . We have to take a look at him for the waitress attack.”
“He told me Casey was cheating on him,” Dana said.
She watched Tim’s reaction, looking for . . . what? Surprise? Shock? Wariness?
“Really? I don’t believe it.”
“He never told anyone back then because it would only make him look worse.”
“Well, that’s a fact,” he said. “He looked bad enough when we all thought Casey dumped him.”
“You don’t think it’s true?” Dana asked.
“She was your best friend. What do you think?”
“She never told me she was seeing anybody else. I was so used to her and John breaking up and getting back together. When she told me they broke up, I assumed . . . I was always pushing her to break up with him; it never would have occurred to me he would break up with her.”
“Tubman—the detective in charge of the case now—he’ll want to talk to John about this.”
“You didn’t answer me. Do you really think John was lying?”
He shrugged as he mopped up gravy with a biscuit. “I don’t know.”
“I think maybe you do,” Dana said quietly.
He sat back and pushed his plate away as if she had just ruined his appetite.
“That day—the day she went missing—we argued about you,” Dana said. “I found my old journal tonight. I read the entry from that day. Casey asked me if I would be all right if she went out with you.”
He looked across the room and sighed, unhappy with being caught out—if not lying, then skirting the truth. “You and I had already called it quits, Dee. You broke up with me, remember?”
“That’s right. My choice. We’d been broken up for a while. I guess it shouldn’t have bothered me that my best friend for my entire life wanted to go out with the first boy I ever loved. Maybe teenage boys operate that way with their friends, but girls don’t. Not if they want to stay friends, they don’t.”
“You were pissed,” he said.
“I thought you said that conversation you had with Casey went in one ear and out the other that day.”
“It was seven years ago, Dee. What’s the point of me telling you now? You and I had split up. Casey was there for me. And maybe I thought I wanted to hurt you a little bit.”
“Good job.”
“You took the first swing.”
“I was just trying to be practical.”
“Yeah, that’s a comfort,” he said sarcastically. “I had served my purpose.”
“You were awfully busy being you at the time,” Dana said. “You wouldn’t have even noticed I was gone if you hadn’t needed a pretty girl on your arm for all those events celebrating you.”
“I had a lot to be proud of,” he argued. “Including you. Losing you stung, Dee. I’m not gonna lie. A young man’s ego is a fragile thing.”
“And Casey wanted to soothe the hurt?”
“She was my friend, too,” he said defensively. “And a shoulder to cry on. Nothing came of it. She asked your permission, for God’s sake! And then she was gone. There wasn’t any point in talking about it. Why would I talk about it? Just to make it all hurt worse?”
“I told Detective Hardy that Casey and I didn’t argue that day,” Dana said, “because I was embarrassed.”
“It had no bearing on what happened.”
“My best friend wanted to date my ex-boyfriend and I was angry about it. Don’t you call that motive?”
He made a face. “If I didn’t know you.”
Dana looked down and picked at the wrapper on the second packet of saltines. What if she had been that angry? Angry enough to shove her friend, who might have fallen and hit her head . . . She had berated Roger for possibly having been in the house when Casey had come to get her things. What if she had been there? What if that was what Roger had meant when he’d said After all I’ve done for you . . .
“I keep having these nightmares,” she whispered, staring down at the saltines crumbling between her fingertips. “Casey keeps saying it was all my fault.”
She put her hands over her face and started to cry as silently as she could.
She heard Tim get up from his seat; then his hand was on her arm.
“Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s get out of here.”
Dana kept her head down as they left the restaurant and went out into the cool night air. He walked her to the far end of the long wooden porch with its row of rocking chairs. She looked past the side parking lot for the restaurant, past Silva’s Garage, and to the dark wooded lot beyond. Casey’s car had been found parked along the edge of that lot. Had she been taken from her car? Had she been lured into the woods? The same woods where the Grindstone waitress had been attacked just a few nights ago.
“Look at me,” he said, tipping her chin up.
She looked up at him through a wavy sheen of tears.
“I don’t believe you could have hurt Casey, Dee,” he said. “I mean, you had a temper, but . . . Hell, I know you. You would have wrote that in your journal, too.”
He meant for her to laugh. She couldn’t quite manage it.
“I’m gonna hug you for real now,” he said. “So don’t knee me in the groin or anything.”
He pulled her close as the second wave of tears came. She let him.
“Let it go, Dee,” he murmured. “Let it all go. It doesn’t matter now. The past is gone. Just let it go.”
“I wish I could,” she whispered. “I wish I could.”
28
John spun around at the sound of his father’s voice, shining the flashlight up to blind the old man just as he pulled the trigger. The sound of the explosion was deafening in the small shed. The shot caught him across the top of the right shoulder, gouging out flesh and chipping bone as John dove the other way. The impact felt like a strike from a white-hot poker. But there was no time to think about the pain. A massive wave of adrenaline carried him past it.
He crashed hard against the plywood shelving and used it to propel himself forward, launching hims
elf at the old man, driving his good shoulder into his father’s midsection and running him backward into the cupboards.
Stars burst behind his eyelids as something hard struck the side of his head again and again—an elbow or the butt of the gun.
Mack Villante was a big man. Broad and strong and heavily muscled, he was fueled by rage and alcohol and a hatred that had burned inside him every day of his life. He’d been fighting in bars and back alleys for years. Twisting his body to the side, he deftly turned John back up against the cupboards and brought the gun up, inches from John’s face.
John grabbed hold of his father’s wrist and forced the old man’s arm out to the side, and the gun went off again with a flash and a boom! He brought his weakened right arm up and hit his father in the mouth with his elbow, then swung a hard left hook, catching him just above the ear and staggering him sideways. But the old man caught himself and swung backhanded as hard as he could, catching John across the face with the body of the gun.
John turned with the motion, lessening the impact but still stumbling to his knees. He scrambled to get his feet under him, grabbing blindly at the shelves in front of him, catching hold of something hard and irregularly shaped—some part of an engine. He hurled it at the old man, buying himself a second or two as he turned back around and launched himself up and forward.
The old man grabbed onto him as they collided, and, feet tangling, they went down in a heap. They rolled on the floor throwing elbows and knees and fists, crashing into boxes and toppling rakes and weed eaters, John’s right arm losing strength with every second. As they rolled, the old man gained top position and dug an elbow into the wound, and what vision John had in the dimly lit shed went black.
With all the power he could muster, John twisted his hips out from under his father’s weight and reversed their positions. As he straightened up, pulling his left arm high, fist balled, the old man brought the gun up with both hands, screaming.