The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  Tolliver sat with his elbows braced on his thighs. He picked at a patch of dry skin on the palm of his left hand.

  “You should stay away from Frank Moretti,” he said. “You’re not going to follow him again, are you?”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s too late in the day now.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously.”

  “Yes I am. That’s why I’m thinking about following him again. He warned me not to do it, Roger. Then he called you and told you to get me under control. I think he’s afraid I’ll learn something he doesn’t want me to know.”

  “Just leave him alone,” Tolliver said.

  “I don’t know if I can. I thought you’d be more sympathetic. I hoped you might lend me your car.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m driving a truck with my name on it. I need something less conspicuous.”

  Tolliver stood up suddenly, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. If you’re determined to play with fire, I can’t stop you. But I won’t help you. Someone has to act like a grown-up here. I should have done it a long time ago.”

  He went to the edge of the deck and looked out at the yard. Inside the chain-link fence, Roger the dog was on his feet now too.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Tolliver turned back to me. “I mean if I had done the right thing, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Jana should never have been working with me. She was only a first-year law student. But she was eager, so I made an exception. If I hadn’t, she never would’ve taken that call from Poe Washburn; she never would’ve heard of the Pruett case. But she did, and she got caught up in it. I should have made her drop it. Then she might still be alive.”

  “Is that what this is about?” I said. “You’re not responsible for what happened to her.”

  Tolliver came away from the edge of the deck and sat down again across from me. “I’m more responsible than you are,” he said. “But look what you’re doing. You’re trying to fix what happened, even though you know it can’t be fixed. And you’re going to keep pushing until you get yourself killed. I’d like to prevent that.”

  He bowed his head and ran his hands over his curly hair. When he spoke again, there was a plea in his voice. “Look, I know what you’re feeling. Jana was precious. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. You think there ought to be something you can do for her, even now. But it’s too late. She’s gone.”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He picked up his beer bottle but he didn’t drink. I thought he might be crying.

  “Do you need a minute, Roger?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to take a break, go wash your face?”

  “No, I’m fine.” His voice cracked. Definitely crying.

  “How much longer then?” I said.

  “What?”

  “I just want to know if we’re getting close.”

  “Close?”

  “To the thing you want to tell me.”

  He wiped his face on his sleeve, looked up at me, cleared his throat.

  “You don’t want to hear it,” he said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Roger. There’s nothing else I want to hear from you. But you need to clue me in. How big is it? You didn’t kill her.”

  The idea stung him. “You know I didn’t.”

  “All right. How bad could it be? You made a pass at her.”

  He sat back slowly in his chair. Held the bottle in his lap.

  “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know until just now, when you told me how precious she was. But I’ve suspected for a long time, ever since you tried to blame her bruise on the dog.”

  He glanced at the dog run. We both did. Roger the dog was pawing the dirt at the base of the chain-link fence.

  “He does play rough,” Tolliver said.

  “I know he does.”

  “And Jana played with him that day. Sunday, a week before she died.”

  It was ten days. I knew that as well as I knew anything at all. I let it pass.

  “She had him playing fetch in the house,” Tolliver said. “And he barreled into her once, knocked her down. But he didn’t give her that bruise. Didn’t hurt her. She just laughed and got up again. She had come here to discuss Gary Pruett and Napoleon Washburn, but we talked about other things too. About my kids. I’ve got a daughter and a son, seven and nine. They live with their mother in St. Louis. I only get to see them in the summer or on holidays. Jana wanted to hear all about them. I liked talking to her. I forgot who we were. Forgot she was my student.”

  He was looking down at his lap, telling his story to the bottle. “Time passed and Jana got up to leave,” he said. “But she lingered and we kept talking, standing in the living room, the dog lying quiet on the floor. And Jana—you know how beautiful she was. And I kissed her.

  “I had my hands on her, to pull her close to me, and it felt smooth, but it was probably clumsy as hell. It frightened her. I didn’t expect that. She didn’t just push me away; she ran. I think I had hold of her blouse; that’s how she lost her buttons. And suddenly the dog was up and barking, and Jana running for the door. I followed her. I wanted to apologize. And there’s a dead bolt on the door, and it was locked. But she didn’t realize. She was struggling with the knob and it wouldn’t open. It made her panic.

  “I came up behind her, trying to tell her how sorry I was, and that made it worse. She was pulling on the door and I reached to turn the dead bolt to let her out, and the door jerked open, and the edge of it hit her cheek.”

  Tolliver paused to take a breath. “She was better once she got outside, but she wouldn’t stay. I could’ve given her something. An ice pack. She hurried to her car and drove out of here fast. I thought of going after her, but it seemed wrong. Because it felt awful, to have her be so scared of me.”

  His head came up and his eyes fixed on mine. “I’ve gone over it again and again,” he said. “And I don’t know, maybe this is self-serving, but it seems like there was something else going on that night. Like it wasn’t me, or my clumsy pass. For those few moments she was someplace else. And not a good place—not a place I’d like to think about.”

  Interlude: July 27, 1996

  Jana Fletcher had cruel dreams.

  She dreamed of her life before the Daws. Dreamed of waking up in her mother’s house, safe in her own bed. Sometimes her grandmother was still alive, sometimes not. Sometimes she knew it was the day she would leave for New York. But every time, when she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight streaming through her bedroom window.

  There were other dreams too, but they followed the same pattern. On the twenty-seventh of July, Jana dreamed she was back in college, playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. There was a shy boy who auditioned to play Benedick, but he was hopeless; he didn’t get the part. He stayed on to build sets, to work on lighting and props, and on the night of the last performance he got up the courage to ask her out for a drink. In the dream she woke the next day in his bed, his palm resting on her hip. The curtains were drawn in his dorm room, but she could see the light of morning filtering through. She slipped out of bed, went to the window, swept the curtains open wide—

  And woke up in the black dark. Always a hazy time before she remembered where she was—before she remembered that the part that should have been a nightmare was real. She rolled onto her back, heard the familiar rattle of the chain. Her body ached. She felt the thin mattress underneath her. A blanket thrown over her, scratchy on her bare skin. She sat up and flung it away. Now a search for her clothes. Underwear down around one ankle, skirt pushed up around her waist. Blouse and bra within reach—she found them by touch.

  No memory of who had been with her. But someone, obviously. Eli, if she had to guess. She had a sense that Eli tended to take what he wanted and leave. Luke was more
likely to stay around and try to put her back together. Which may have been worse, if you really thought about it.

  A question for another time: which of them was the worse rapist. For now, Jana wanted a bath. A real bath in a tub with hot water. She wouldn’t get one, but she could think about it. The sound of the water running. The sensation of floating with just her face above the surface, the rest of her submerged. Gleaming white tiles. Candles burning on the edge of the tub. The window open to the summer air, a vase of flowers on the sill.

  She gave herself a minute to surrender to the image, then felt around until she touched a plastic bottle lying on its side. She uncapped it, poured water into her hand, bathed her face and neck. She recapped the bottle and put it aside. Got dressed. Made her way to the back wall of her prison and searched along the seam between the wall and the floor until she found her mother’s quarter.

  Her thumb traced the round edge and found the point she’d been making. It was a slow, mechanical task, rubbing the coin against a link of the chain. Trying to turn a quarter into a screwdriver. Jana set her back against the wall, gathered the chain, and went to work.

  No sound but the scrape of metal on metal, but she had her own voice in her head for company. Sometimes she ran lines from plays. Miranda in The Tempest: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it! Or Cyrano de Bergerac. She had played Roxane, but Cyrano had better lines: To sing, to laugh, to dream, to walk in my own way and be alone, free, with an eye to see things as they are . . . To travel any road under the sun, under the stars . . .

  Other times—like now—she got a piece of music stuck in her head. This time it was a song by Sheryl Crow: “All I Wanna Do.” Peppy and relentless. Jana tried to resist it at first, then surrendered.

  Eventually her hand grew tired from gripping the coin. She took a break and the scraping stopped. But it didn’t stop. She thought she heard a sound on the other side of the room.

  Scraping. Scratching.

  The Sheryl Crow song faded from her head. Jana put the coin down, stood up slowly. Listened.

  Now she heard nothing.

  No telling how long she stood there in the dark, her back against the wall, a chill along the nape of her neck. There couldn’t be anyone else in the room with her. Luke Daw always brought a light with him. He wouldn’t stand silent in the dark. She would be able to hear his breathing.

  Scratching. She heard it again.

  An animal, she thought. Maybe a mouse. Her prison was well built, the boards set close against each other, but there had to be gaps. There was air coming through. If there weren’t, she would have suffocated a long time ago. She had never felt a gap big enough for a mouse to crawl through, but she hadn’t explored every corner of the room. The chain prevented it. There were parts she couldn’t reach.

  Jana stepped away from the wall, stopped again, and listened. Scratching. Definitely. The sound a claw would make. Or a fingernail.

  “Luke?” she said.

  “Not funny,” she said. Her voice higher than she wanted. She could hear a tremor in it.

  “Eli?” she said.

  She took another step, her hands held out in front of her, groping at empty space. Another step and her arms sweeping through the air, and the fear growing that she would touch something solid.

  She came to the end of the chain.

  “Luke!” she screamed.

  The room swallowed up the sound. She froze with her arms outstretched.

  She was alone. She had to be.

  Scratching. Straight ahead.

  Jana crouched down and pried her fingers underneath the chain around her ankle. She tried to force it down over her heel. But there was no way. She knew. She sat down and wrapped both hands around the chain and strained to tug it free from its anchor. She moved back toward the wall and braced a foot on either side of the place where the chain went through, and pulled with all her strength, over and over, until she was sweating and couldn’t keep her grip on the metal.

  She fell back in the dark with her breath coming in gasps.

  Minutes crept by. She used them to get her breathing under control and to convince herself that the scratching had to be a mouse. She wasn’t afraid of a mouse. She found the water bottle, took a sip. Got up and walked toward the door until the chain stopped her. From there she knelt, then lay on her stomach. If she stretched out an arm, she could touch the bottom of the door with her fingertips.

  Scratching. She heard it clearly. She shifted the water bottle from one hand to the other, rapped it once against the door. Heard a mouse scuttling away on the other side.

  Jana let go of the bottle, surrendered to relief. Her breath sighed out of her and she laid her cheek against the floor. The bottle rolled away. She closed her eyes and let herself feel her lungs filling up, emptying out. The bottle stopped rolling. When she opened her eyes some time later, it wasn’t because the mouse came back and the scratching started again; it was because she realized there was something different about the air on this side of the room.

  It might have been a subtle difference in smell—although a subtle difference might have been hard to detect. The wood that made up her prison had its own smell, and there were layers underneath it: earthy, musty, primal. And other smells too—inevitable when your toilet is a plastic bucket, even if the bucket has a lid, even if it gets switched out every day or two and replaced with a clean one. So maybe it wasn’t a difference in smell that distinguished this side of the room from the other, but it was something. A feeling in the air. A heaviness. A presence.

  The mouse scratched at the door and Jana got to her hands and knees. She lifted her right hand from the floor and extended it as far as she could, exploring the space to the right of the door. She went as far as the chain would let her go, her fingertips straining, but she couldn’t reach into the corner of the room.

  She crawled back the other way, raised her left hand this time. Fingers spread, searching high in the air, and then lower. Urgently. She shifted farther left, the chain scraping the floor. She reached out blindly in the dark.

  And jerked her hand back, and scrambled away with a scream caught in her throat. She hit the far wall, lost her balance, fell sideways, and huddled there, rocking, her knees drawn up, her hands clutched between them. Her body rocked, rocked, and finally the scream tore out of her. Because she knew she had touched someone’s face.

  34

  I drove away from Roger Tolliver’s house just before sunset, thinking about his story and what it meant. He’d been trying to tell me more than one thing.

  He wanted me to know how Jana got the bruise on her cheek. It was the bruise that first brought us together, Tolliver and me; it was the reason I had broken into his house, the day after Jana died. He had lied to me about the bruise then, and now he had told the truth.

  He’d been trying to tell me something about himself too: that he felt guilty, he regretted the way he had treated Jana. Maybe he wanted me to forgive him, or maybe he wanted me to agree that he was a wretched man. I didn’t feel inclined to do either.

  The third thing he’d been trying to tell me had to do with Jana’s reaction, the way she panicked when he tried to kiss her. It seemed strange, but I didn’t know what it meant. I wondered if Tolliver had exaggerated it, if the incident had grown in his mind after Jana’s death, so that an awkward situation and a meaningless accident became something more significant.

  I didn’t realize that Jana’s reaction was the most important part of the story. It troubled me, but not as much as it should have. It was a hint, a clue. It was trying to tell me that I had no inkling yet of what had really happened to Jana Fletcher.

  • • •

  I drove east on Quaker Hill Road, past the spot where I’d first seen Jana on the Night of the Doe. I went on and came into Rome and found Jana’s street.
Though the sun had gone down, the sky was still light. It was all familiar, rolling down her street, seeing her car in the driveway. The blue Plymouth.

  It wasn’t mine, but I had the key in the apartment. I looked for it when I went inside, found it on the kitchen counter, on a ring of its own. I thought that tomorrow I might try to follow Moretti again. I wondered if I should use the Plymouth, but it didn’t seem right. Moretti might recognize it—that was one reason. But there was another. Following Moretti would be stupid. I could say I was doing it for Jana’s sake, but she had no choice in the matter, so it didn’t seem fair to draw her into it.

  I poured myself a glass of orange juice, took it with me to the bedroom. Jana’s possessions were all around me: her sheets on the bed, her clothes in the closet, her copy of The Count of Monte Cristo on the night table. None of these things were mine.

  I had her mother’s number in my wallet. I punched it into my cell phone and hit the call button. Three rings and a voice said, “Hello.” A man’s voice.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I might have the wrong number. I’m trying to reach Lydia Fletcher.”

  “No, you’ve got it right,” the voice said. “Who’s this?”

  “David Malone.”

  “Of course. I thought we might hear from you again.”

  He spoke with a casual arrogance—the tone of an insider talking to an outsider. I recognized him now: Jana’s friend, the one who had read from the Bible at her funeral. For everything there is a season . . .

  “Hello, Warren,” I said. “Can you let me talk to Lydia?”

  “I don’t think so. She had a bad day. She’s resting.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Quiet on the line. He was deciding if I deserved to know.

  “She’ll be all right,” he said at last. “The detective came to visit her. Moretti. He wanted to give her an update. You’ve heard about this guy who died, Sam Lanik?”

  “Simon Lanik.”

  “Right. Well, Moretti wanted Lydia to know that he thinks Lanik was the one who killed Jana. He said it may not be possible to prove it, but that’s what he believes.”