The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  “He told me the same thing.”

  “It sounded sketchy to me,” Warren Finn said. “Do you believe him?”

  I didn’t, but my own theory would sound just as sketchy.

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” I said.

  “Moretti said the case would stay open, but he hoped Lydia might take some comfort in knowing that Lanik was dead.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She went to bed as soon as Moretti left. I’ve been checking in on her. I think she’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to bother her, then,” I said. “The reason I called—I’ve been living in Jana’s old apartment. Her car is here, and her clothes and books and other things. I thought her mother would want them.”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “I could load everything in the car and bring it there, or someone could come and pick it up. There’s no rush. I don’t want her to worry about it.”

  Warren took his time responding. The arrogance had been fading from his voice, and when he spoke there was no trace of it left.

  “I don’t either,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. How about tomorrow night? Will you be home?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll get a friend to drive me out there. It might be a little late, nine or ten.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  We ended the call. I opened the bedroom window to let in some air. Drank some more orange juice. I knew I should start packing Jana’s things, but it was a job I didn’t want to face. I told myself I could do it tomorrow. I knew I should eat something too. Agnes Lanik had given me provisions: a bowl of goulash and a loaf of homemade bread. I put the goulash in a pan on the stove and let it simmer while I sliced the bread. The crust was thick as tree bark.

  I set a place at the table and fixed a plate and made myself eat, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to get out of the apartment, away from everything. I came close to leaving but then I pictured Poe Washburn finding the message I’d left for him. It was an invitation. I needed to be here in case he decided to come by.

  I finished up and washed the dishes and tried to imagine how my hypothetical meeting with Washburn would play out. It might not go well. Roger Tolliver had said I was asking for trouble. I thought I should be ready.

  Around nine-thirty I went next door and asked Agnes for a favor. When I came back, I had her Makarov pistol. Just in case.

  I settled in for the evening. Me and my gun and Jana’s copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. I stayed up reading till midnight and discovered I really liked Edmond Dantès.

  Washburn never showed.

  • • •

  The next morning I behaved like a responsible adult. I had two inspections scheduled: an old Victorian house on a hill overlooking a golf course, and a Craftsman-style bungalow on the east side of the city. The work kept me busy until one in the afternoon. Then I drove to Poe Washburn’s house and let myself in again. He wasn’t there, but the note I’d left on his pillow was gone.

  Back home, I gathered empty boxes and packed some of Jana’s things. It went okay at first. I started in the kitchen and moved on to her desk. I boxed up her files and papers, her books. I saved the bedroom for last. The closet was hardest: taking the clothes from the hangers and folding them and piling them on the bed. After a while I had to stop. Because it was too sad—and not an overpowering kind of sad, not the kind that breaks you down and leaves you sobbing on the floor. It was a small, detached, empty kind of sad.

  I left the clothes on the bed and went out. I locked the door of the apartment behind me and climbed into my truck. And drove.

  The first place I went was the hospital. I circled it three times before turning into the lot. Sophie’s car was there. I could have left a note on her windshield. It would have started with I’m sorry. I don’t know what it would have said after that.

  I went to the old apartment next and sat looking up at the balcony. There was a potted plant on the railing, something viney with dark green leaves. That’s new, I thought. That’s Sophie’s plant. It could be yours but you don’t live there anymore.

  I still had my keys. I could go up there and let myself in. Sophie would come home and find me lounging on the balcony, and she might be angry or she might be happy, I didn’t know. But I knew she’d be wearing her cat’s-eye glasses and I knew how her hair would smell and I knew what her voice would sound like when she called me Dave.

  I didn’t go up. I headed over to the university campus and the law school. It was Friday afternoon and the sun was out, at least for the moment. The students were walking around in shorts and tank tops, baring their pale arms and legs. Springtime in upstate New York.

  From there I kept moving. I drove past familiar places: the apartment where Angela Reese painted her canvases, the gray-brick IRS building where Wendy Daw worked. I wound up on Bloomfield Street, the neighborhood where Gary Dean Pruett had lived with his wife, Cathy.

  A quiet neighborhood, nothing flashy. The houses looked alike, but not too alike, not mass-produced. The people who owned them made a comfortable living. A lot of them were probably schoolteachers like the Pruetts. If they had children, they had one or two at the most.

  The people who lived here had fences or hedges to separate them from their neighbors. Some of them had small detached garages tucked out of sight, but others parked their cars on the street. The cars were like the houses, nothing flashy. They were midsize sedans in dull colors: blue and black and gray. They didn’t stand out.

  I drove by the Pruett house—tall and narrow, painted pale blue—then came back around again and parked across the street. I looked at the front lawn. The last time I was here—talking to Neil Pruett—the grass had been long and spotted with dandelions.

  It looked better now: Pruett had gotten around to mowing it. Of course he had. In a neighborhood like this, there were informal rules that everyone understood. You kept your lawn mowed and your hedges trimmed. You never turned your music up too loud. You cleaned up after your dog. You went easy on the decorations at Halloween and Christmastime.

  One of Neil Pruett’s neighbors came out onto her porch to get her mail. An older woman, gray-haired and slump-shouldered. She looked around and saw me parked on her street in my red pickup truck. She stared at me. I had the driver’s window down. I gave her a smile, a wave. I tried to look harmless. I succeeded. She went back inside.

  I thought about Cathy Pruett, living on this street in the final weeks and days of her life. On the outs with her husband, Gary. Gary had been cheating. Cathy had suspected it. She had talked about it with her best friend, her sister-in-law, Megan Pruett, and Megan had followed Gary to a hotel and caught him with an eighteen-year-old, Angela Reese. So Cathy’s suspicions were confirmed. She had tried to work it out with Gary, but in the last days of her life she believed that Gary had gone back to his old ways. She would have been preoccupied, distracted. What were those days like?

  If Gary Pruett was innocent, then someone else had killed his wife. Maybe Luke and Eli Daw. The Daws could have known Cathy Pruett because they were students at the high school where she taught, but when Cathy Pruett died they were in their early twenties; it had been years since they were in high school.

  Why did they choose Cathy Pruett?

  And once they chose her, what then? How did it work? Gary Pruett claimed that his wife had left the house one Saturday afternoon and never returned. She had taken her car. Where had she been headed? He didn’t know.

  Where did she cross paths with Luke and Eli Daw?

  Maybe right here, on this street.

  When you decide to abduct a schoolteacher, what’s the first step? Maybe you’ve got a place to take her—an abandoned farm out on Humaston Road. But that’s the end point. The starting point is your victim: you need to observe her,
learn what she does, where she goes. So you start right here, at her house.

  In the last days of her life, when Cathy Pruett was preoccupied with her failing marriage, her husband’s infidelity, were the Daws watching her?

  Did the Daws spend time here, parked on her street?

  Eli drove a white van.

  How did I know that? From a news story? No. I’d heard it from Wendy Daw.

  A van: the vehicle of choice for abducting schoolteachers.

  I tried to imagine the two of them, Luke and Eli, parked on this street in a white van. The van would have stood out among all these dull sedans. Luke and Eli would have attracted attention. They would have been noticed by gray-haired ladies collecting their mail, by people walking their dogs.

  When Cathy Pruett went missing, the police would have questioned the neighbors; they would have asked about unfamiliar vehicles parked on the street. Wouldn’t they? Frank Moretti led the investigation. Did he take it seriously or did he go through the motions? Did he keep an open mind or did he assume from the start that Gary Pruett was guilty?

  Was Frank Moretti a good cop or a bad cop? I kept coming back to that question.

  I needed to make a decision about whether to try following him again. If I was going to do it, I couldn’t use my truck; it would be an insult to his intelligence. I looked at all the dull sedans parked along the street. I needed one of those. Something plain, something invisible.

  It should be easy to get one. I could go to Enterprise or Avis, and they would be happy to rent me a dull sedan.

  I checked my watch. It was almost five o’clock. I’d lost track of the time. On Wednesday, Moretti had left the station house a few minutes after five. He might do the same today. By the time I drove to a car rental place and filled out the paperwork, it might be too late to catch him.

  As I debated whether to try it anyway, I saw a car approaching from down the street. A dark blue sedan, nice and plain. It pulled up in front of the Pruett house.

  Neil Pruett climbed out of it. He started toward the house, then glanced my way and did a double take. Confusion showed on his round face. I waved and got out of the truck. He waited for me on his side of the street.

  There were things I wanted to ask him about his sister-in-law. I wanted to know what she was like in the last days of her life and if she ever mentioned having the feeling that she was being watched. But that could wait.

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

  35

  Interlude:

  July 27, 1996

  There 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.”

  • • •

  The 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.