The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  Lydia Fletcher had arranged for a service to be held for her daughter in a chapel called St. John’s off the main quad. It started a few minutes after ten. The priest had a strong, deep voice that brought to mind monks chanting in Latin. I sat in the last row and let the rhythm of his voice carry me along, and time passed slowly, the way it always had for me in church as a child. I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, or at the tall thin windows behind the altar, and once in a while I tried to focus on the words. They were dark: A thousand years in your sight, Lord, are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—they are like the new grass in the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.

  There must have been fifty or sixty people there, most of them older—friends of Jana’s mother, I thought. I spotted Roger Tolliver sitting by himself a few rows up, and we nodded to each other. I walked out before the service ended, while the rest of them were singing “Amazing Grace.”

  At the cemetery I hung back at the edge of the crowd. I wanted to talk to Lydia Fletcher and I dreaded it at the same time. I had picked her out in the chapel. It wasn’t difficult; her resemblance to Jana was strong. She stood by the grave in the company of a young couple—among the few people I had seen who were Jana’s age. The couple seemed to be husband and wife. The wife had a plump face and straight dark hair that reached her shoulders. She was pregnant—seven or eight months, if I had to guess.

  The husband’s hair was longer than the wife’s. He wore it tied in a ponytail. He was on the heavy side, but he looked as if he had once been even heavier. His black suit was a size too large—as if he had lost weight but hadn’t gotten around to buying a new wardrobe. He hovered around Lydia Fletcher the way a son might; sometimes they stood arm in arm. But I knew Jana didn’t have a brother.

  His name turned out to be Warren Finn. The priest introduced him to the gathered mourners as a friend of Jana’s who had known her since elementary school. Then the priest stepped back and Warren stood by Jana’s casket and read a passage from the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes. For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. He struggled to get through it, like someone who wasn’t used to speaking in public. He hit the important lines—a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance—but he skipped over some others, like the one about throwing away stones and gathering stones together. I didn’t mind. That part never made much sense to me.

  Afterward the three of them lingered longest at the graveside: Lydia Fletcher and Warren Finn and his wife. Roger Tolliver spoke to them briefly, then drifted away to his car. Other people did the same. I took a walk along a row of headstones, and when I reached the cemetery fence I followed it around, one corner to another, until I came back to the place where I started. By then Lydia Fletcher was leaving, with Warren Finn on one side of her and his wife on the other. Warren looked back at me once over his shoulder, as if he wanted me to know he’d been keeping track of me. That wasn’t the last I saw of him.

  After the three of them drove away I spent a few minutes alone at Jana’s grave, but it was hard to know what to say to her. I tried telling her I loved her, but it sounded empty. I’d never said it while she was alive. There hadn’t been enough time.

  Somewhere a lawn mower started up. A robin took off into the air. I became aware of distant voices: cemetery people, workmen who were waiting to fill in the grave. Now would be the time for some final gesture: a rose tossed onto the casket. I didn’t have a rose. Too late to get one now.

  I said a silent good-bye, then turned away and left the grave behind. It was a ten-minute walk to the place where I’d parked, and when I reached the truck it was warm from sitting in the sun. I started it up and drove around the edge of the lake. I came to the long, straight road that would take me away from Geneva and back to the Thruway. I watched fields pass by on either side. They moved slow, and I realized I was rolling along at thirty miles an hour. I pushed it to forty, to fifty, and it still didn’t feel fast enough. Got it to seventy and that seemed better. I thought I’d try eighty. Eighty miles an hour in your sight, Lord, is like a pleasant stroll along the beach.

  When the needle hit eighty-five I lifted my foot off the gas and glided along. Watched the needle fall. I waited for the truck to stop on its own, but it wouldn’t. The engine’s idle carried it along. I pulled over to the shoulder and made a wide U-turn and headed back.

  • • •

  Lydia Fletcher’s address was off County Road 6 on the western edge of Geneva. I’d looked it up before I left home. The houses on her street were all the same: one level, ranch-style, attached garage. I searched for a shady spot to park and found one far down at the end of the street.

  The Fletcher house had a front door painted green. It had flower boxes in the windows and bird feeders hanging from the trees in front. I stood on the sidewalk wondering what it had been like for Jana to grow up here, what I would say to her mother, whether I should say anything at all. Just when I had decided to walk to the door and knock, I heard a voice.

  “I don’t know if she wants visitors.”

  Warren Finn. He wore the suit he’d worn at the cemetery, minus the jacket and tie. He stood in the driveway of the house next door, the garage door open behind him.

  I went over and introduced myself. “David Malone. I knew Jana in Rome.”

  He had to think about shaking my hand. Decided in favor. Showed me how strong a grip he had.

  “Figured you were,” he said. “We’ve had word of you here.”

  I thought Roger Tolliver must have mentioned me, but I was wrong.

  “A detective paid us a visit—Moretti,” Warren said. “He asked if Jana ever talked about you. If she told us you hit her. I couldn’t help him. She never mentioned you to me.”

  “I never hit her.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what her mother thought, but not from anything Jana ever said. Lydia never had patience for abusive men. She figured Jana knew better than to stay with anyone who raised a hand against her.”

  He had retreated into his garage, as if he felt more comfortable there. There was one car inside, and the rest of the space was devoted to a woodworking shop. He had a table saw, a drill press, a collection of hand tools. He seemed to be in the middle of a project: a dresser or a cabinet—I couldn’t tell. There was a piece of wood clamped in a vise, something he’d been sanding. He ran his thumb over the smooth edge.

  “I’ll tell you something funny,” he said, tripping over the word “funny” as if he knew it wasn’t right. He hesitated, and now that I was close to him I noticed two things I hadn’t before: One was the way his eyes wandered, not quite wanting to look at me. The other was a vertical white line that ran through his upper lip to his nose: a scar from a long time ago.

  He started again. “I’ll tell you something. When we were kids, Jana and me, we used to wish for something exciting to happen in this town. A kidnapping or an alien invasion. A murder. Anything that would break up the boredom. I’m not sure what the appeal was supposed to be—maybe having a mystery to solve. I’d like to have that boredom back.”

  He loosened the vise, turned the board over, tightened it again. “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her,” he said, looking up at me suddenly, fixing his eyes on mine. “Moretti seemed to think it was someone she knew.”

  It was a quiet provocation. I didn’t take the bait. If he wanted to accuse me of murder, he would have to come out and say it.

  He stayed silent for a while and when he spoke again he seemed to have read my mind. “If I thought you killed her,” he said, “I wouldn’t let you out of here alive. So maybe it’s better that I don’t know.”

  I couldn’t think of any way to answer that. I watched him open a drawer in his workbench and take out a metal file. He didn’t stab me with it. He went to work
on the board in the vise, rounding off a corner.

  A moment later he looked up, as if he expected me to be gone. He waved the file toward Lydia Fletcher’s house. “You can try to talk to her if you want,” he said. “But don’t stay long. I know she’s tired.”

  16

  Warren’s a sweet boy,” said Lydia Fletcher.

  “He seems a little . . .” I searched for a word. “. . . intense.”

  I’d knocked on her door with an apology on my lips: I didn’t want to bother her; I could come back another time. But she had welcomed me in and insisted on brewing coffee. She had poured some for each of us, in fine china cups.

  “Well, he’s had a hard life,” she said, “because of . . .” She twirled her finger in a circle, pointing to her own mouth. I thought of Warren’s scar.

  “Harelip,” she said softly. “He was born with it and the doctors did what they could to fix it up. But the other children always teased him. Not Jana. She was devoted to him, even though she could have had . . . other friends.” She had started to say “better friends” but caught herself.

  We were sitting across from each other in a long, narrow living room. At the funeral Lydia Fletcher had worn a black sweater and a skirt; she had kept the sweater and traded the skirt for a pair of jeans. She had the same brown eyes as Jana and the same curly hair, though hers was streaked with gray. She must have been around fifty.

  I could tell she’d been crying, but she had composed herself and now she seemed at ease. Or at least as much at ease as you could be in that house. Because there was something off about it, something out of sync. The furniture was old. There was no doily draped over the back of my chair, but I thought a doily would have felt right at home. The walls were papered, and the ones that weren’t papered were covered in cheap wood paneling and hung with antique mirrors and paintings—oil paintings of cottages and lighthouses.

  There were some photographs of Jana on a side table—school portraits—but nothing else to suggest that a child had ever lived here. Even the cups we drank from were misplaced in time: they were fragile and dainty, decorated with intricate geometric patterns like the windows of a Gothic cathedral. They were the cups of a seventy-year-old lady.

  I tasted my coffee, added more sugar. Gestured at the room and said, “This is where Jana grew up?”

  Lydia Fletcher nodded. “I could show you her bedroom, but there’s nothing to see. She took everything with her when she went away. What she didn’t take, she threw out. But I have pictures.” She rose abruptly and disappeared down a hall, came back a minute later with a thick photo album.

  She opened it on the coffee table and patted the sofa cushion beside her, inviting me to come around. I brought my coffee with me.

  “That’s me with Jana’s father,” she said. The photograph showed a pretty girl in tie-dyed clothes with braided hair, and beside her a tall, slender black man with a big smile. Jana’s father wore a tweed jacket and glasses with round metal frames.

  He had taught at the college here in town, Lydia told me. He’d been a visiting lecturer from Sudan, and she had been one of his students. Back then, she had wanted to teach history.

  “All that went away when I got pregnant,” she said.

  Jana’s father left the country before Jana was born. His visa had always been temporary. He meant to come back, but he died a year later in a protest in the streets of Khartoum, a victim of the riot police.

  Lydia Fletcher had dropped out of college and moved back in with her mother, a stern-looking woman with beehive hair—the old lady whose house we were sitting in now.

  “That’s not a good picture of her,” Lydia said to me. “She really did smile sometimes. She saved me from a lot of misery, letting me stay here. And she took good care of Jana.”

  Jana looked well cared for. In the pictures she was always beaming. Here she was, a tomboy in high-top sneakers, perched in a tree. And on a bike with patches on the knees of her jeans. Here she was on Halloween, Princess Leia with a lightsaber, and a chubby Warren Finn beside her, dressed as Luke Skywalker.

  There were stories to go with the pictures, and Lydia Fletcher told them. Details poured out of her, about birthday parties and who attended and what presents they brought. Visits to the zoo in Rochester. A school field trip to Montreal.

  In high school Jana started acting in plays. I knew she’d been in As You Like It, but there were others too: Our Town, Guys and Dolls, The Importance of Being Earnest, Cyrano de Bergerac. Jana played Roxane, ethereal in a white gown, with flowers in her hair.

  After high school Jana attended college in Geneva. “She got accepted by other colleges,” Lydia Fletcher told me, “and she could’ve gone, but she stayed to help me. My mother was ill. Kidney disease. Someone had to take her to dialysis three times a week.”

  So Jana took care of her grandmother, but she managed to thrive in college too. She majored in psychology. She had always been a good student. And there were more plays. I saw the pictures: she was Miranda in The Tempest, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Raina in Arms and the Man.

  We came to the end of college—Jana posing on the front lawn in her cap and gown—and our coffee had long ago grown cold. Lydia took our cups away and came back with a bottle and two tumblers filled with ice.

  “Do you drink Scotch, David?” she asked.

  I told her no.

  “Would you care to start?”

  She needed the Scotch because things got rough when Jana finished college. She had applied to law schools, with her mother’s blessing—and to theater programs, without telling anyone.

  “I wanted her to study law at Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania,” Lydia said. “She had her heart set on the drama program at NYU. We couldn’t afford any of them, but with financial aid and loans, she could have gotten by. And if she studied law, she could have some hope of repaying the loans. I wanted her to be practical.”

  Jana bowed to her mother’s wishes and accepted admission to Cornell Law School. But she never went. Her grandmother took a turn for the worse.

  “Dementia,” Lydia Fletcher said over the rim of her glass, in the same soft voice she had used for “harelip.” “Looking back, I can tell you it had been coming on for a long time. But that summer after Jana graduated college, Mother went downhill fast. It got so you couldn’t leave her alone. You couldn’t predict what she’d do. She might wander into the street and start taking off her clothes.”

  So Jana gave up law school for her grandmother’s sake. The woman lasted almost another year, and toward the end she couldn’t do anything for herself. She had to be bathed and changed and fed.

  “She died at the end of May, two years ago,” said Lydia Fletcher. “It was a mercy, for her and for Jana too. I saw what it did to her, and she never complained. But with Mother gone I thought Jana could finally live her own life. She could go to Cornell—they had agreed to defer her admission for a year—and she’d be happy.”

  I watched Lydia top off her Scotch. “She didn’t go to Cornell,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “She’d had a year to think about it, about what she wanted. A year of helping my mother out of her bed in the morning and helping her back into it at night—and everything in between. She needed to get out of Geneva, but she didn’t want to go to law school. She wanted to act.”

  When Jana made up her mind, it happened fast. “I wanted her to take her time, to plan,” Lydia said. “She would need to apply to drama schools all over again, and it was too late to apply for the fall. But Jana was tired of waiting. She had a car, an old Buick LeSabre my mother had signed over to her. One day in June I came home to find her packing.

  “She told me she was going to New York City. She would find a job waiting tables and she would go on auditions. Maybe she would take classes. I told her she was being reckless. She didn’t know anyone there. She didn’t have a place to stay. Her l
ife there would be hard—she had no idea. ‘Harder than the last year?’ she said to me.”

  Lydia leaned back on the sofa with her glass. “I was afraid for her, and we argued, and she wouldn’t listen. She left that night, which was crazy. She could have at least waited till morning. But she was mad at me. She never called me from New York, not once, and I had no way to call her. She sent some postcards to let me know she was all right—I remember one from the Museum of Modern Art and another with a picture of the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to go and look for her, I wanted to call the police and make them find her. But of course they wouldn’t have done anything, and if they did, she would’ve hated me for it.

  “And in the end I was right: it was too hard. She came back three months later, just showed up here one day in September. The auditions never panned out and she couldn’t make enough money waitressing. She had to sell my mother’s car to pay the rent. She came home on a Greyhound bus.”

  Lydia held the glass in her lap. It was just a prop now; she wasn’t drinking from it. She said, “Jana wouldn’t stay here, in this house. I think she had the idea that I didn’t believe in her, and having to come back only made it worse. She stayed next door, with Warren. It worried me, because there was something going on between them—and that was new. They’d never been a couple before. Warren’s parents gave him that house when they retired. They live in Arizona now. Warren has a job at the college, working in the bookstore. I was afraid Jana would end up marrying him and they’d have babies and she’d be stuck in this town forever. But by the end of the following spring she had moved back in with me, and she was talking about law school again. At Bellamy University this time, because of a professor she’d heard about.”