Cold Cold Heart (12 page)

He launched himself at the bag from five feet out, slamming his shoulder into it, absorbing the pain, welcoming the pain as it exploded through his chest and neck and down his back. The bag swung away, sending him past like an angry bull sidestepped by a matador.

John turned and came back swinging, bare knuckles connecting hard with the cracked leather and the patches made of duct tape. Left, right, left, right. One-two, one-two. Left hook, right hook, left hook, right hook.

He grabbed the bag in a clinch and drove his right knee into it as hard as he could again and again, then switched his stance and brought the left knee up once, twice, three times, four times.

With every punch, with every knee, his breath left him on a hard, guttural sound. He sucked in oxygen tainted with the smell of stale grease and gasoline. His pores opened and sweat beaded on the surface of his skin despite the chill of the fall air. As he worked the bag, the sweat ran down his back, across the seventeen tattooed names, and soaked the back of his pants.

He threw his hands until the muscles of his arms were bulging and heavy, the veins popping. He twisted into the hooks until the taut, ripped muscles that wrapped around his rib cage and stretched across his belly were burning and quivering with fatigue. He threw knees until it felt like his boots were made of lead.

When his hands hurt too much to connect another punch, and his knuckles were raw and bleeding, he switched to throwing elbows, imagining the strikes connecting to the faces of everyone who had ever looked down on him—Tony, Paula, Tim Carver, Dana Nolan; the list went on and on . . .

The emotions poured out of him like toxic steam, bitter and acrid. He could taste it like metal in his mouth. The feelings came up from the depths of him like bile. And when his body was spent, and his knees gave out, and he lay in an exhausted heap on the dirty floor, the last of the emotions drained out of him in his tears.

What if I don't like her?”
Dana asked for what was probably the fourth time in fifteen minutes.

“What if you do?” Lynda asked back. “What if she's the coolest person you've ever met?”

Dana didn't answer. Her mood was stuck on pessimism. It felt better to be angry than apprehensive.

She had managed to shower and brush her teeth but had refused to make much more of an effort than that. No makeup. No jewelry. She had left her hair wet and had dressed from a pile of clothing that had fallen to the floor during her fitful sleep—a pair of baggy jeans and an oversize black hooded sweatshirt.

Before Dana had been all about her looks, all about the wardrobe and what her clothing said about her. What her current look said about her was that she didn't give a damn. Her post-incident wardrobe consisted of T-shirts and hoodies, sweatpants, yoga pants, and jeans. After Dana was the Anti-Dana. Why should she try to impress people with her looks when her looks had been taken from her? Why seek approval when all she would get was pity? What did any of that superficial bullshit matter anyway?

She certainly didn't care to impress Dr. Roberta Burnette. She hated the idea of starting the process of therapy all over again. She
didn't want to have to tell her story again or be asked how she felt about it.

The stupidest question of all time: How did she feel about having her life destroyed? How did she feel about having been raped and tortured?

To distract herself, she opened her photos app and looked at the picture she had taken of John Villante the night before.

He scowled at her in a sideways glance, straight dark brows pulled low over narrowed dark eyes. He had an angular face pulled taut over high cheekbones and a square jaw. Even set in a hard line, his mouth was, for lack of a better word, beautiful, with a full lower lip. He could have been a Calvin Klein model, sullen and angry, selling designer underwear and sexuality on the pages of
GQ.

He had always had a chip on his shoulder but never had much to say. Dana had never really approved of him as a boyfriend for her best friend. Casey could have done so much better than an angry boy from the wrong side of town. She remembered him thinner, lean and hungry looking, with an unruly head of dark wavy hair that looked silly when she tried to attach it to the image of the man on her phone screen.

That was the difference. He had been a boy then. He was a man now. In her memory of before, John Villante was a teenage boy, a troubled loner who never quite fit in. Years later, he was a man, a soldier—or had been, at least. Whatever innocence he had possessed had been shorn away along with his hair. The anger and resentment he had carried as a boy had had seven years to harden into bitterness.

Seven years changed everyone. Dana wondered what Casey would have been like now. She had talked about becoming a social worker to help kids, or maybe to work with people with drug and alcohol abuse issues. She had always been a caretaker.

Outside of school, they had both volunteered at the local food bank and helped out with the kids' reading program at the public library. But where Dana had felt fulfilled in doing her civic duty, Casey had always made it more personal. It hadn't been enough to
stock the shelves at the food bank. She had to befriend the little kids of the families who came there. It hadn't been enough to read to children during story hour at the library. She had to mentor a little girl as well. It hadn't been enough to volunteer at the animal shelter. Casey had to feed half a dozen feral cats that lived in the woods at the edge of her neighborhood.

Casey had always taken in strays . . . like John Villante. They had started dating the fall of their senior year. Bubbly, sunny Casey and the agent of gloom.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

Dana looked up, surprised to see they were no longer in Shelby Mills. Lost in thought, she had missed the drive to the northern suburban reaches of Louisville. They had pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a long old two-story brick building that had once been a train station. The ground floor was filled with galleries and boutiques, places to eat and have coffee.

“I can do it,” Dana said automatically.

“I know you can do it,” Lynda said. “That's not what I asked you.”

Dana said nothing as she stared at the unfamiliar building. What if she couldn't find the directory? What if she couldn't find the elevator?

“Come on. We'll go find the elevator,” her mother said, getting out of the car. “I see opportunities for retail therapy. I'll check those out while you're with Dr. Burnette. You can text me when you're finished and I'll meet you. Does that sound like a plan?”

Relieved, Dana nodded. She took a photo of the building from their parking spot and made a note for future reference, then opened her parking app and set it to find the car later. Then she took a deep breath to brace herself for the next task at hand: opening herself up to the stranger who would want to drag all her ugly secrets out into the light.

*   *   *

“I
KNOW WHAT YOU'RE T
HINKING,”
Dr. Burnette began as she took a seat in a leaf-green upholstered cube of a chair near the bank of
windows. Barefoot, she curled her long legs beneath her with the grace of a deer. She was dressed in gray yoga pants and a fitted fuchsia T-shirt that showed off an athlete's body. Her bare arms were smooth and long, sculpted in lean muscle.

“You're thinking: What's this crazy-looking black woman gonna do for me? I've done told my story more times than I ever want to, and now I have to start all over and do it again, and that's gonna hurt, and I'm gonna hate it, and fuck this shit.

“Am I right?” Burnette asked.

Dana just stared at her, not sure what to think. This was not Dr. Dewar, Mother Earth, with her pseudo-hippy skirts with sitar music playing in the background. Roberta Burnette was thirtysomething with a trendy urban vibe about her. She wore her hair in short braids all over her head with a random assortment of colored beads woven in. Her ears were pierced with moonstone gauges that seemed to change color every time she moved her head.

“I know I'm right,” she said. “And I'll tell you why I know I'm right. Because I've been the one sitting right where you're sitting, thinking all the same things,” she said, her voice growing softer. She paused at that, giving Dana a moment to absorb what she had said, waiting for a reaction.

Dana didn't blink.

“I know this isn't easy,” Burnette continued. “It's like you already built a house out of Legos and somebody has taken it all apart and you have to start over, and the last thing you want to do is start from scratch because that means the first thing you have to do is walk around in your bare feet, stepping on all those damn Legos.

“I have a six-year-old nephew,” she confessed. “I know all about stepping on Legos.”

Still Dana said nothing. Legs tucked beneath her, she burrowed back as far as possible into the corner of the love seat, which was the bark-brown counterpart to the chair Burnette occupied.

The room had a Zen quality to it—a polished old plank floor,
sage-green walls, furnishings with clean, simple lines, and upholstery fabrics with organic colors and textures. One wall of simple built-in shelving displayed books and a collection of colorful, heavy glass sculptures with smooth, rounded shapes. While there were several lamps on tables around the room, only the lighting in the bookcases was turned on to spotlight the art pieces. Natural light filtered in through the tall windows that overlooked a cobblestone yard where people strolled or sat on park benches or at café tables, sipping coffee.

Dana stared out at them, envying their seemingly simple lives. From the corner of her eye she could see Burnette flip open a file folder to consult whatever notes were kept inside. She peered at Dana over the purple rims of her reading glasses.

“It doesn't say anything in here about you being mute. Is this something new? Nod for ‘yes.' Shake your head for ‘no.'”

Dana took her time responding, staring at the doctor with no expression for a moment before shaking her head slowly within the confines of her hood.

“Good, because talk therapy tends not to be the way to go with someone who doesn't talk,” Burnette pointed out with an arched brow, her full lips kicking upward at one corner.

Dana held her silence again.

Burnette drew in a long, dramatic breath. “Much as I love the sound of my own voice . . .”

“What happened to you?”

“Ah . . . ,” the doctor said softly to herself, pleased to have finally gotten a response. “Well, they tell us in shrink school not to share these personal things, but the people who wrote those textbooks have never been victims, and they don't know what it's like to sit down on a couch across from a stranger who wants to poke and prod inside their minds and tell them what they should and shouldn't feel. That's just bullshit, if you ask me. It made me angry when I was going through it, and I vowed I would never do that to anyone. So I
will tell you right up front that I've been a victim, and while I didn't have your exact experience, we have some common ground.”

“What kind of victim?” Dana asked again, her curiosity muscling past her determination to be uncooperative.

“I went to college on a track scholarship, had a goal to make the Olympic team. I was good enough, too,” Burnette said. “But late one night I was in the parking lot of a convenience store waiting for a friend to pick me up, and I got pulled into a car and taken for a ride by two guys who didn't care how fast I could run four hundred yards. The second they got hold of me, it didn't matter anymore.”

“They raped you?”

“They did. And used me for a punching bag. And stabbed me. And held a knife to my throat. And at one point, when I tried to get away, one of them tackled me, and I blew out my knee,” she said. “So when you tell me something and I say I understand how you feel, I really do. I get how hard this is, Dana. I know how much you lost.”

“They didn't carve your face up like a Halloween pumpkin.”

“No, they didn't, but I spent a year rehabbing a knee that never worked right again. And I spent a lot longer than that trying to come to terms with the anger, and the panic, and the nightmares, and the rest of it. We both lost big dreams, you and I.”

“And this is where you tell me I should still consider myself lucky, and that I can still have a great life,” Dana said, the familiar resentment sour on her tongue.

“You
can
still have a great life,” Burnette said, unfazed by her sarcasm. “You will. You didn't fight that hard to stay alive for nothing. You stuck it out for a reason.”

And if I had known what the aftermath would be like, would I have fought as hard?
Dana wondered.

If she had known about the endless anxiety and the physical pain, the struggle to sleep, and the exhausting ordeal of relearning life minute by minute, would she have fought as hard?

“Where there's life, there's hope,” Dr. Burnette said.

The words snapped Dana out of her thoughts.

“You know how this works,” Burnette said. “You've been doing it every day since this happened to you. You survive this minute, and then the next minute, and then the minute after that. Each minute has the potential to be better than the last.”

“Or just as bad,” Dana countered. “Or worse.”

“Or better,” the doctor insisted with the quiet, firm resolve of someone who had had this conversation many times before. “I know you're feeling overwhelmed. Just the step of moving from Weidman back home is a big deal. But I saw your homecoming on the news last night. That was a whole lot of crazy to deal with that you probably didn't expect.”

Dana replayed the scene in her head, the surprise, the frustration, the chaos, the flood of emotions . . .

“What happened to me happened months ago,” she said. “It's over. He's dead; I'm not. There's nothing left to say about it.”

“You're the only living survivor of a serial killer. That will make you news for the rest of your life.”

Dana frowned and looked away, arms crossed tight over her chest. She wanted to deny it, but she knew she couldn't. She would forever be the asterisk in the accounts of Doc Holiday's exploits as the one that got away. She didn't want the attention. The irony wasn't lost on her—the girl whose goal had been the spotlight didn't want the spotlight.

“They asked me about Casey,” she said. “I didn't know what they were talking about,” she confessed. “Casey was my best friend since grade school. She disappeared the summer after we graduated. I didn't remember that. How could I not remember that?”

“It was out of context,” the doctor said. “You've spent the last few months working like a dog just to get your brain to function in the moment. Don't expect it to turn on a dime and redirect its efforts to something from the past.”

“She was my best friend,” Dana said again. “We were like sisters.”

“Dana, you've just been through your own abduction and every horrible thing that went along with that crime. It doesn't surprise me at all that you may have blocked out the abduction of your friend,” Burnette said gently. “Those are two horrific events. And to your mind they are essentially the same recurring event viewed from two different perspectives. Your brain is trying to protect you from that. It doesn't make you a bad person that you didn't remember.”

But does it make me a bad person that I don't want to think about what might have happened to her?
Dana wondered.
Does it make me a bad person that I don't want to remember the man who did this to me, even if remembering could help solve Casey's mystery?

She kept those questions to herself even as the horrific images from her nightmare flashed through her head: Casey as the victim and the demon, taunting her, tormenting her . . .