The Last Dead Girl (24 page)

I stepped up onto the curb beside him and said, “Is there any way I could borrow your car?”

Interlude:
July 27, 1996

T
here were stairs on the other side of the door. This Jana knew from the night they brought her down. She heard footsteps now descending, a heavy tread. She sat up and faced the sound.

A key turned in the lock and the door opened. Lantern light filled the doorway, harsh and glaring. Jana raised a hand, palm outward, to block out the worst of it. She heard the thump of the door closing. A figure approached, set something down, and retreated again. Jana's eyes adjusted to the light. It was Eli holding the lantern, standing with his back against the door.

“Coffee,” he said. Just a word, detached from anything, until she realized he had put a mug on the floor, within her reach.

“It's instant,” Eli said. “With milk and sugar. It's not very hot.”

More words. Jana wasn't listening. She was staring at the body on the floor. Not so far away from her, not as far as it seemed in the dark. A small, slender woman, maybe forty, with golden-blond hair. She was laid across a corner of the room, her head closest to the door. A pale blue blouse and denim capris. A swath of red across the front of the blouse.

“The coffee was Luke's idea,” Eli said. “He thought it would help.”

“Help?”

“Didn't make a lot of sense to me either.”

“Where is he?”

Eli shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “He's thinking. That boy does a lot of thinking. He's the clever one, and I'm delivering coffee. He wanted me to give you the news. I told him you'd probably work it out on your own—that there's a dead woman in your room.”

He stumbled over the words:
a dead woman.
He didn't look at the body.

“Who is she?” Jana asked. “What's her name?”

“Her name's not important.”

“What happened to her?”

“You don't want to know,” Eli said. “Try the coffee.”

Jana picked up the mug. It smelled gorgeous, instant or not. She didn't taste it.

“The coffee's supposed to smooth things over,” Eli said. “That's genius, isn't it? That's Luke. He's the big thinker. I'm the dumb one.” He looked around the room—everywhere but at the body. Then he looked back at Jana. “You can drink it. It's not gonna kill you.”

No guile in his face, none that she could see, but his face wasn't built for guile; it was the face of an overgrown child. One thing she knew: she wouldn't drink the coffee. She raised the mug to her lips and tipped it up, pretending.

Eli went on talking. “I'd like to know what he's thinking, I'll tell you that. I'd like to know what we're supposed to do now. Just a complication, he says. Nothing we can't handle. That's the trouble with him. Thinks he can handle anything.”

There was more. Jana listened and pretended to drink from the mug. After a while Eli trailed off into silence. He set his eyes on her—grown-up eyes in his child's face. She brought the mug to her lips again, self-consciously.

Four strides brought him across the room. He eased himself down on one knee, rested the lantern on the floor. He held a hand out for the mug, and when she didn't offer it, he took it—but gently. He glanced down into it and chuckled at what he saw. He brought the mug to his mouth without hesitation, swallowed a big gulp, and handed it back to her.

“You can drink it,” he said. “It's not poison. I wouldn't do that to you.” He leaned closer and reached out to touch her. She stiffened, but there was nowhere to go; she had the wall at her back. He took hold of a lock of her hair, rubbing it between his fingers.

He spoke to her in a hushed voice. “I won't lie to you. We both know there's only one way this can end. But when the time comes, it won't be bad. I promise. I'll smother you in your sleep, or put a bullet in the back of your head.” Eli's fingers moved from her hair to her cheek, a slow caress, feather-soft. “It won't hurt. I'll make sure. It'll be me, not him. Better for you that way, trust me. Did he tell you about the time he had to shoot the dog?”

She turned her face away and didn't answer. His hand withdrew. He got back on his feet, picked up the lantern.

“I know he told you,” Eli said. “He likes to tell that story, how Grandpa made him do it. It makes people feel sorry for him. Poor Luke. He leaves out the worst part. He shot the dog all right. Killed him, eventually. But it took him three tries.”

Early August 1996

A
half-moon in the deep of an August night. A candle burning atop a wooden milk crate. The smell of tall grass.

Jana Fletcher was floating.

Legs together, arms spread wide. Cool water.

Luke Daw had asked her if she wanted a real bath. He had opened the padlock that held the chain around her ankle and had brought her up into the clean air, to a spot beside the fallen farmhouse. To a real bath in a shallow plastic pool, a kiddie pool, six feet wide.

Jana's cast-off clothes lay in the grass. She had stripped down to her bra and panties, no further. An absurd kind of modesty under the circumstances, but it seemed right.

She lifted her head from the water, looked at the moon and the stars and the barn looming in the distance. She could hear bullfrogs croaking down by the pond. And another sound, faint and far-off: a car passing on the road.

Like the wind running over the grass.

The road made her think of escape. If she could make it to the road, she could wave down a car. If there were no cars, she could look for a house. There had to be houses, and people.

“What are you thinking about?” Luke Daw asked.

She tipped her head back to let the water cool her brow. “I'm not thinking,” she said.

Luke was sitting beside the pool, on a second milk crate resting upside down on the ground. He had his revolver. Jana hadn't seen it since the night he and Eli took her, but he had it now, ready in his hand.

The road called to her. Sooner or later, Luke would make her get out of the pool. He would want to take her back to her prison. What if she didn't go? She could do something crazy. Throw water in his face and run, head for the road, in her underwear with no shoes. Luke could shoot her in the back. But what if he did? That would be another kind of escape.

Or he could chase her. He would catch her before she reached the road. He would take her underground and never let her out again.

Jana floated. She focused on the cool of the water against her cheeks. She could pull her face beneath the surface and breathe it in. One more way to escape. She wondered if she had the willpower to do it, or if instinct would take over and send her sputtering back up into the air.

Luke was watching her. “What are you thinking about now?” he asked.

In the grass beside her clothes there were two towels, a big one and a small one. She sat up and twisted round to grab the small one, then lay back again and rested her head against the side of the pool with the towel as a pillow.

She decided to tell him the truth. “I'm thinking about drowning.”

“I wouldn't let you drown.”

“No, I guess you wouldn't.”

•   •   •

T
he pool held about a foot of water. Jana wondered where it had come from. There didn't seem to be a hose or a spigot nearby, though she might have missed them in the dark. She could see two plastic jugs, a gallon each, lying in the grass. Luke might have used them to haul the water out here from the trailer, a little at a time.

It was a lot of water if you thought about it that way. In another sense, it wasn't much at all. Not enough to do what he wanted it to do. It was supposed to wash away a week spent living with a corpse. With flies buzzing in the dark and mice clawing at the door to get in. Jana thought it had been a week; she couldn't be sure. They'd been drugging her more than usual. She felt sluggish even now.

Tonight, when she struggled out of a thick sleep, she found the woman gone. She found the bright light of the lantern and Luke bearing coffee. Not instant this time, but real coffee in a takeout cup, still warm. And after the coffee—the bath.

Luke pulled his milk crate closer to the pool.

“Are you really worried about drowning?” he asked her.

“I wouldn't say worried.”

“You shouldn't think about it—about dying.”

“That's a funny thing for you to say.”

“Why?”

“You're holding a gun.”

“I don't see the connection.”

“I know.”

She wanted to ask him about the dead woman. She had tried before, the day after the woman appeared, when Luke came down with a sheet of plastic to roll the body in, with blankets to cover it up, as if that could make a difference. But Luke would tell Jana nothing—not the woman's name or where she'd come from or how she had died.

Still, Jana thought she knew what must have happened. An abduction gone wrong. They must have dragged the woman into the white van, at a rest stop or a gas station, the same way they had taken Jana. They must have brought her to the farm, and she must have fought back—just as Jana had. Only it had gone much further.

“Which one of you killed her?” Jana had asked Luke.

“It doesn't matter,” he'd said.

“I'd like to know.”

“It was Eli.”

A tossed-off answer. She didn't believe it. As far as she could tell, the woman had been stabbed—and Luke carried a folding knife. Jana remembered it; he had used it the night they took her, to cut the cord that bound her ankles.

She had other questions, ones she would rather not think about and didn't dare ask: Was Luke growing tired of her? Is that why he and Eli had taken the woman with the golden hair? And if the woman had lived, what then? Would they have kept Jana around, or would she have been expendable?

She tried to put the questions out of her mind, but she couldn't. Because the answers were easy to guess, if you were honest. And if you followed them to their logical conclusion, they could mean only one thing: that Jana owed a debt to the woman with the golden hair. The woman had fought a battle, and she had lost, but she had done something else without knowing it: she had spared Jana's life, at least for a while.

Even now, as Jana watched the half-moon riding low over the trees, the woman was still in her thoughts.

“What was her name?” she said aloud.

No lead-in, but Luke didn't need one. He understood.

“You're obsessed,” he said.

“Why can't you tell me?”

“I could tell you,” he said. “It wouldn't change anything.”

“It would change one thing. I'd stop asking.”

“Fine. Her name was Maggie.”

“Was it really?”

“You said you'd stop asking.”

“I'll stop when you tell me the truth.”

Luke waved the revolver carelessly through the air. “Maggie, Sheila, Holly,” he said. “Call her whatever you want. A name is just a word.”

“She was a real person. She deserves her own name.”

He slouched on the crate. The flame of the candle made a yellow mask of his face.

“It was Cathy,” he said. “Cathy Pruett.” He gestured with the gun. “You see? It doesn't change anything.”

But it did, for Jana.
Cathy Pruett.
It sounded right. It fit the woman with the golden hair.
Cathy Pruett saved my life.
Jana spoke the words in the privacy of her mind, but they made her throat tighten, made her eyes well with tears.

Luke was watching. The corners of his mouth turned down. “Now you're upset,” he said. “This is not what I wanted.” He tucked the gun away behind his back, picked up the big towel from the grass. “You should dry off. I'll take you back.”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

He draped the towel over his knee. “A few more minutes. Then we have to go.”

“Why?”

“We have to. You know how this works.”

The tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them with wet hands and sat up in the pool. “I know,” she said. “I can see it. One day I'll be the body in the corner. And there'll be another woman down there, terrified. Maybe she'll wonder what
my
name was.”

“That's not—”

“Yes it is. That's the future. You could at least be honest. Eli is. He told me he's going to kill me.”

Luke looked away, shaking his head. “He shouldn't have.”

“Why not? We all know that's how it goes. I die in the end.” Jana's wet hair clung to her face. She brushed it back angrily. “But I don't want to die. So we need to work out a different ending.”

It was a random idea, tossed out in a moment of frustration. Jana never expected Luke to take it seriously. In the real world, nothing would have come of it, but Luke Daw didn't live in the real world. In the place where he lived, he wasn't an aggressor, she wasn't his victim. They were collaborators.
We've never done this before,
he'd said to her once.
We're all feeling our way through this thing.

He sat in the candlelight and drew a popsicle stick from the pocket of his shirt. Started turning it over and over with his fingers.

He said, “What happens—in this different ending?”

It took her a long moment to process the question, and a shorter one to find an answer.

“You let me leave here,” she said.

“And?”

“And that's all. I just walk away.”

The popsicle stick turning, like a gear in an elaborate machine.

“You don't go to the police?”

“No. I never tell anyone what happened here.”

Still water around her. The chill of the air on her skin. She waited.

The stick turned slower, came to a stop.

Luke said, “You'd go to the police.”

Of course I would, Jana thought. First thing.

“I wouldn't,” she said.

“You say that now. But how can I trust you?”