The Last Dead Girl (16 page)

Interlude:
September 1996

J
ana Fletcher heard the calls of owls—a whole chorus of them in the dark.
Hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo.

She walked in starlight along the shoulder of the road. The air felt clean and cool. The road made a gentle arc through the woods, and up ahead she saw a single lighted window.

She looked back the way she'd come. She could barely make out the shape of the car she'd left behind.

Hooo, hooo, hooo.

She turned again to face the window, and the deer came out of nowhere.

Three of them—one larger than the others. They bounded up into the road in a clatter of hooves, the big one leading. Jana watched them cross the center line coming toward her, and the big one passed in front of her, an arm's length away. A dark eye taking her in as it went by, cantering down from the road and into the deep of the woods.

The second one followed without looking at her, leapt down and thrashed through the brush. A flash of white tail, and then nothing.

The third one stopped.

The clip of hooves turning a quarter circle. Then quiet. Even the night chorus seemed to fade back:
Hooo, hooo.
The deer's sober eyes fixed on Jana's. The animal gave off a wet, earthy smell. Its brown ears shifted; its nostrils breathed.

Jana focused on the deer's eyes, took a gentle step toward it. The creature ducked its head down and brought it up again. Jana lifted a hand to touch its shoulder. Felt it tense and then relax.

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

She felt the fur beneath her fingers, spread her fingers wide apart. The deer ducked its head again and turned away. Her hand trailed along its back as it moved. She watched it climb down from the road and trot off into the woods.

•   •   •

J
ana reached the window, but she couldn't see in through the curtains. She could hear muffled voices inside. She stood on a patch of grass in her bare feet. A few drops of rain began to fall.

She mounted two steps and knocked on the door. Felt a raindrop on her cheek. She knocked again, louder, with the side of her fist. Started counting, one two three, in time with the beating of her heart. When she got to twenty, she pounded on the door again. Pounded until her hand began to ache.

The door opened.

He filled the doorway, wearing jeans hastily put on, no shirt. She watched his face. Annoyance. Then shock. Then disbelief.

He sputtered out her name: “Jana.”

Stupid girl, she thought. You're not even ready. She reached behind her and pulled the gun from her back pocket and shot Eli Daw in the heart.

•   •   •

T
here was more noise than she expected. The gunshot, of course, a whip-crack sound that she felt through her hand, her arm, her whole body. Plus the television: the source of the muffled voices. Not so muffled now, with the door open.

Also the screaming.

Not from Eli Daw. He had fallen back obligingly and lay now on the floor with blood bubbling out of him. A big dumb animal with wide eyes, his mouth moving, making empty words. No screaming from him.

It came from farther back in the trailer. A woman's voice. “Oh my god! Eli! Who's there? What happened?”

On and on like that, with minor variations. Jana stepped over Eli Daw and went to find the voice, holding the gun out in front of her. She glanced at the television. An interrogation scene on a cop show, the hotheaded detective railing at the suspect. Jana moved through the trailer and came to a half-open door.

A bedroom. A naked woman.

Jana brought her arm up instinctively to cover her face—her mouth and nose at least. Like a hold-up man in a Western, wearing a bandanna to rob the stagecoach.

“Who are you?” the woman screamed. “What did you do?”

Her legs kicked against the mattress. Her arms strained against handcuffs, two sets of them, locking her to the cast-iron spindles of the headboard. There was a folding knife open on a bedside table, and a small cut trickling blood on the woman's left breast.

Jana went to the bed and took hold of a corner of a sheet with her gun hand. She drew it up to cover the woman's body.

That brought more screaming. “What are you doing?”

“Hush now,” Jana said. She gestured at the handcuffs with the gun. “Do you know where the key is?”

“Who the hell
are
you?”

Jana tucked the gun into her pocket and found the key on her own, in the drawer of the bedside table. She held it up and said, “I'll unlock you. I can take you away from here if you want. I have a car.”

She spoke softly and it seemed to help. The woman grew calmer.

“What happened to Eli?” the woman asked. “Is he dead?”

“I hope so,” Jana told her.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

Jana slipped the key into the nearest handcuff, heard it click open. One down, one to go.

“It's all right,” she said. “I can drop you off somewhere. All I ask is that you forget about me. Nothing happened here. You never saw me.”

“Nothing happened?” the woman said. “Nothing happened? You shot Eli.”

Jana nodded. “That's the part I'm asking you to forget.”

“But he's my husband.”

No screaming now, just a quiet lament. But to Jana it was more jarring than a scream.

“He chained you,” she said.

The woman lowered her eyes. “It's something he likes.”

“He cut you,” Jana said, pointing at the woman's left breast, where blood spotted the sheet.

“He didn't mean to. Sometimes he goes too far.”

Jana wrapped her fingers around the key. She felt the pulse of her own blood pumping through her hand. She still had her left arm blocking her face. She still had the gun in her pocket. For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to draw it out.

She dropped the handcuff key onto the bed. “My offer stands, if you want to leave.”

The woman's fingers found the key, but her eyes came up to meet Jana's and never left them.

“I should stay,” she said.

Jana turned and crossed to the doorway. She stood for a moment looking out—at Eli Daw's body. No movement there.

“Go,” the woman said. “I never saw you.”

I
drove out to Humaston Road on Monday afternoon, looking for the trailer that had once belonged to Wendy and Eli Daw. I found an empty patch of gravel and tall grass. Someone had used the spot to throw away an old electric stove; it lay on its side in the weeds. Not too far away I saw a rusted mailbox, fallen over on its wooden post. The name was still on the box. Most of it anyway:
D W
.

A mile down the road I found Luke Daw's trailer, the one where he had lived with Eli and their grandfather—until the grandfather died and Eli moved out. It had a screen door gaping open, attached by a single hinge. When I climbed the steps and went in, the air felt warm and dense. I'd brought a flashlight from the truck and I aimed it into the murky corners. The place had been picked over, stripped of furniture and fixtures.

At some point someone had built a fire in a steel washbasin on the kitchen floor. There were charred popsicle sticks in the basin. Probably the remnants of one of Luke Daw's models.

There were clothes strewn over the floor, and broken dishes. Cereal boxes, empty soup cans. A plastic pill bottle with no pills. According to the label, it had once held Ambien. The prescription was in Luke's name.

Pocketing the bottle, I made my way toward the back of the trailer. I came to a small bathroom, foul-smelling, with something scurrying inside. I pulled the door shut and moved on.

In one of the two bedrooms, I found another model: the shattered hulk of the Parthenon. Then, on a closet shelf, a small hollow cube glued together out of popsicle sticks, curiously intact.

The bedroom had a tiny window, the glass broken long ago. I heard a flutter of wings and a black bird came to perch in the window frame. A crow. We stared at each other for a while. I was the first to back down.

I left the trailer, taking the wooden cube as a souvenir. I put it in my truck and waded out into Luke Daw's overgrown backyard. Milkweed and butterflies and Queen Anne's lace. A rutted lane led through a stand of birch trees, and the trees gave way to a broad field—the pasture of the ruined dairy farm that the Daws' grandfather had once managed. On the north side of the lane was a pond as wide as a football field, the surface a scum of green algae. A thicket of cattails swayed in the wind along the far shore.

The lane ended west of the pond, and the ground sloped up to a long red barn. The barn doors stood open at either end, and a wide aisle ran down the center of the building, with cattle stalls on either side.

I walked along the aisle under a bright afternoon sky, because most of the barn's roof was gone. A framework of posts and beams remained, but the rest had fallen away. I could see the debris piled in some of the stalls: wood and tar paper and shingles.

The farmhouse was in worse shape than the barn. It had been a square building, one story, on a foundation made of field stones. One corner of the structure still stood—where the north side and the east came together. They formed a high point from which the rest of the building sloped away, a cascade of slate roof tiles and rotting timber.

I wondered if Cathy Pruett had ever been here. I recalled something her husband had said up in Dannemora—Gary Dean Pruett, who claimed the Daws had murdered his wife.
Maybe they took her somewhere first,
he said. The police had found her body in a field on the other side of town, but they never found the spot where she died. Could the Daws have brought her out here?

I walked around the perimeter of the house and I didn't see anything that looked like a killing ground. I picked my way through a collection of junk: old milk cans and coils of barbed wire, a rusted bicycle, broken bottles, a wheelbarrow, a plastic kiddie pool filled with rainwater and wet leaves.

Near the southwest corner of the house was a toolshed with a hasp on the door but no padlock. I drew the door open to look inside. Nothing there but a scattering of nails and wood screws on the floor.

When I came around again to the front of the farmhouse, I saw something I hadn't noticed before: an old wagon wheel half-buried in the ground. I only noticed it now because there was a crow perched on the rim of the wheel, a twin of the one I'd seen in the trailer. Maybe the same bird. It opened its wings and folded them again. Stared at me as I went by.

I walked back along the rutted lane with the eerie feeling that the crow was keeping watch on me. I thought if I turned around I might find it hopping along in my wake. I held things together until I reached the pond, then looked back. The crow wasn't following me, but the rim of the wagon wheel was empty.

Spooky.

I kept walking, and that's when I heard the sound of a car's engine and something else, maybe tires on gravel, coming from the direction of the trailer. I hurried along the lane, with the pond on my left. The birch trees obscured my view of the trailer. When I came through at last to the other side of the trees, there was no car. Just my truck and the trailer. I approached the truck expecting to find damage—a broken windshield, punctured tires. A warning. But everything looked fine. I checked the cab, thinking that Luke Daw's wooden cube would be gone. It was on the seat where I'd left it.

Crows and mysterious visitors, I thought. You're letting yourself get carried away.

Probably someone had pulled in here to turn around. Nothing more.

•   •   •

R
eckless.

K let up on the gas pedal, felt the car slow, watched the needle drop down to forty-five. No sense risking a ticket. He checked his rearview mirror for David Malone's pickup truck. Saw nothing but empty road.

A dumb move, driving by the trailer. There was no reason for it. Why had he done it? For the thrill? For the sense of comfort it gave him? He didn't know.

And why had he stopped? He should have sped by as soon as he saw the truck. But he had pulled over. He had even gone into the trailer.

Reckless.

K drove into Rome at the limit and lost himself in city traffic. He didn't like the thought of Malone poking around the trailer or the farm. It worried him. But something else worried him more. He had gone into the trailer without knowing if he would find Malone inside. With no plan. What would he have done if Malone had been in there? Would he have tried to kill Malone with his bare hands?

The idea appealed to him, and that was part of the problem. K worried that he was starting to lose control.

He turned onto a side street and parked. He needed to think. Jana Fletcher was dead—mark that down as a win. Her landlady's grandson, Simon Lanik, seemed to be the prime suspect. Not something K had planned, but he liked the way it had fallen into place. Another win.

The fire at Napoleon Washburn's house had been a disappointment. Washburn had survived. Still, he seemed to have skipped town. Call it a draw.

Which left Jolene. Her body had been discovered, and that was a loss. No way around it. K knew he should have hidden her better, weighted her with chains or stones. Then she would have sunk to the bottom of the canal and stayed there.

There was nothing he could do about it now. He needed to put her out of his mind. But that was part of the problem too. He kept thinking about her at odd moments. He had killed four women in his life, but Jolene was the only one he regretted. Part of him wished she was still alive, because she was an innocent girl who had died because she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And part of him wished she was still alive so he could kill her again.

Sentimental K.

He smiled to himself and shook his head. This was not the time to think about Jolene. He needed to focus on David Malone. He would take things slow and think them through. No more recklessness.

•   •   •

T
hat night I had a visitor.

I was eating a late dinner at the desk in Jana's apartment: Chinese takeout, shrimp lo mein. I had candles burning on the shelf above the fireplace, four tea lights lined up on a piece of two-by-four. It was my own poor counterfeit of Jana's candleholder—something I had put together over the weekend. I picked up the lumber from a home-improvement store, where a middle-aged man in a blue apron cut it to the length I wanted. I made the holes for the candles with a power drill and a one-and-a-half-inch bit—standing on the board to keep it steady. A drill press would have done a neater job, but I didn't have one.

The candles were supposed to smell like vanilla. It would have been hard to tell. The apartment smelled like boiled cabbage. Agnes Lanik had been cooking next door—a recipe from the old country, I assumed.

The knock on my door came around ten-thirty. It was Sophie.

She looked weary yet wide-awake, and I thought she had probably just come off a long shift at the hospital. She must have stopped at home, though, because the clothes she had on were nothing she would have worn at work: a blouse with a low neck and a skirt that ended well above her knees.

“Is this a bad time?” she said.

“No. Come in.”

“I don't want to intrude.”

“You're not intruding.”

She came in and dropped her handbag on the kitchen table. Moved into the candlelit living room and looked around, taking things in.

“I didn't really believe it,” she said.

“Believe what?”

“When you moved out, and you told me you were going to live in the dead girl's house. I thought you were just being cruel.”

“Sophie—”

She waved the idea away. “Sorry. I shouldn't have said that.” She stood looking at the wall adjacent to the fireplace, where I had pinned up a map of the city—with an
X
to mark the spot where Cathy Pruett's body was found and another to mark Luke Daw's trailer and the abandoned farm. I had other things pinned to the wall as well: newspaper stories I'd printed out at the library, down in the microfilm room. Stories about Cathy Pruett's death and her husband's trial. About the shooting of Eli Daw.

“What's all this?” Sophie asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

I told her a little about what I'd been doing, the people I'd been talking to. It was difficult to know if she was listening—her eyes were on the papers on the wall—but when I finished she cut through to the heart of things.

“So you think if you find out what happened to this woman, Cathy Pruett, that'll tell you who killed Jana.” It sounded a little unreal, hearing her say Jana's name.

“That's right,” I said.

Sophie turned her attention to the shelf above the fireplace. The wooden cube was there, the one I'd found in the trailer. She took it down.

“What's this?” she said.

“A clue.”

“A clue to what?”

“I don't know. I think Luke Daw made it.”

She put it back on the shelf and took down the empty pill bottle.

“Ambien,” she said. “Is this another clue?”

“It might be. It's a kind of sleeping pill, isn't it?”

She nodded. “A strong one. It can cause sleepwalking. Blackouts. Memory loss. It's nothing you want to mess around with.”

The bottle went back on the shelf. There was something else up there, a canvas resting against the wall. One of Angela Reese's paintings. She had given it to me on Saturday after our talk about Gary Pruett and the Daws.

It was like all her other paintings: eleven by fourteen with a black line drawn vertically down the center. The left side of the line was painted a vivid blue; the right was purple, verging on black. Angela had taken it down from the wall as I was leaving. “You should have it,” she had said. “I made it the day I found out Jana Fletcher died.”

“Who painted that?” Sophie asked me.

“A woman I talked to.”

“What does it mean?”

“It doesn't mean anything,” I said. “It's abstract art.”

“I think it's depressing.”

“I think it's supposed to be.”

“Do you like her?”

“Who?”

“The artist. The woman whose painting you bought.”

“She gave it to me.”

“Even better. Is she pretty?”

She turned to look at me expectantly, Sophie in her cat's-eye glasses, with her hair up in a clip.

“I don't know how to answer that question,” I said.

“She's either pretty or she's not.”

“She is.”

“See? How hard was that?” Sophie laid a palm against my cheek, turned my head a little. The smell of Agnes Lanik's cooking lingered in the apartment, but I could still make out the strawberry scent of Sophie's shampoo.

“You haven't asked me why I'm here,” she said.

I felt the warmth of her hand. I had a view of candlelight and shadow and her low-cut blouse.

“I'm getting the sense you're here to torture me,” I said.

She laughed. “That's close.” She touched my temple. “I came to take out your stitches.”

•   •   •

T
hey should have come out days ago,” Sophie said.

I was sitting at the kitchen table. Sophie was making preparations: bringing out forceps and scissors from her handbag, washing her hands, sterilizing her instruments with alcohol.

She stood over me, bathed my cut with Betadine solution.

“This probably won't hurt,” she said.

“‘Probably'?”

“Well, you never know.”

She lifted the knotted end of the thread with the forceps and snipped it with the scissors. Tugged the thread free from my skin, bit by bit. It didn't hurt.

She bathed the wound again and dried it. “The thing to remember,” she said, “is that your skin is still healing. It'll take weeks to get all the way back to the way it was. You want to be careful not to injure it again.”

She had three small adhesive bandages arranged on the table. She peeled the wrapping from one of them and placed it over the center of the cut.

“You still need to keep this clean and dry,” she said. “You don't want it to get infected.” She opened another bandage and put it in place. “People don't worry about infection as much as they should. I remember a kid who came into the emergency room one time, eight years old. He'd fallen out of a tree. He had an open fracture of the tibia—that's the bone in your shin. ‘Open' means the bone had broken through the skin.