The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  They wouldn’t have kept her here, I thought. Not for three months. They would have needed someplace more secure.

  Warren drew his foot back and kicked over the basin, spilling popsicle sticks across the floor. The steel rang out, a bell in the rain.

  I handed him a flashlight and said, “Come on. I have an idea.”

  • • •

  The storm turned the lane into mud. We trudged through it, under the birch trees and along the edge of the pond. The beams of our flashlights swept the ground ahead of us. I tried hunching my shoulders, keeping my head down, but the rain found me anyway. Warren Finn strode along with his chin up, heedless, his ponytail plastered to the back of his neck.

  We left the lane and started climbing the slope. I lifted my head and saw a bright light over the skeletal roof of the barn. The full moon, veiled by a cloud. Warren would have gone that way, toward the barn. But I tugged his arm and led him toward the heap of timber that had once been the farmhouse.

  “Luke and Eli lived here with their grandfather,” I said. “In the summers, they worked for him on the farm.” Wendy Daw had told me that the first time I spoke to her. “And if they didn’t behave, he’d lock them in the root cellar.”

  My flashlight beam passed over the ruins of the house. Rotting wood. Stones from the foundation. Slate tiles from the roof. The root cellar would be buried underneath, but there might still be a way in—an access point from outside the house. A door leading underground.

  Where would it be? I remembered something I’d seen the last time I was here: a plastic kiddie pool. I walked to the west side of the house and found it, overflowing in the rain. Warren and I dragged the pool along the ground, water and wet leaves sloshing over the rim. But there was no door underneath.

  The second place we looked was the toolshed near the house’s southwest corner. A cheap metal structure with a rusted roof. We couldn’t get purchase enough to slide it, so we tipped it over on its side. There was nothing underneath but a patch of bare ground.

  I couldn’t think of a third place to look. Warren and I split up to explore the perimeter of the house. I turned a corner and heard a strange sound over the heavy beat of the rain. A rush of wings. I remembered the crow I’d seen here before. I waved my flashlight, searching. There was no bird. The flashlight beam fell on a hoop of wood: the wagon wheel half-buried in the ground. I stood over it and scanned the weeds and wet grass. The light glinted on something metallic.

  A ring of iron, the size of a bracelet.

  I bent down and lifted it up. Heavy. The grass and weeds came up with it, revealing an opening three feet wide and five feet long. A door into the underworld.

  • • •

  Stairs leading down, and another door at the bottom. A more conventional one, standing open. I passed through it into a room that resembled a wooden cube. Like the one on the mantel in Jana’s apartment. Not a perfect cube, but close enough: a dozen feet long and a dozen feet wide and maybe eight feet high.

  I knew it had to be the work of Luke Daw. He had traded popsicle sticks for lengths of two-by-four. And I knew Jana had been here, because there was one two-by-four missing, one gap in the wall at the back of the room.

  I knew what had become of Luke Daw. He was here. Pieces of him lay scattered on the floor. Skull and bones. He’d been gnawed on and picked apart, his clothes reduced to rags. He’d been eaten by mice and rats, bugs and worms. They’d had him for more than a year and a half. There was no flesh left. No scavengers either. They had moved on.

  I found his wallet, and his driver’s license gave me the confirmation I didn’t need. I dropped it on the floor and moved to the back of the room. I saw a chain and a padlock—a makeshift shackle. The chain ran through the gap in the wall. I crouched down and shined my light through and saw a vertical beam, three feet away, out of reach. The chain was bolted to the beam. Beyond the beam there was nothing but the dirt wall of the root cellar.

  I shifted the light to the piece of two-by-four above the gap. Two screws held it in place. Something made me reach into my pocket and dig out Jana’s quarter. Maybe intuition. I slipped the pointed edge of the coin into the head of one of the screws. A snug fit. I tried to turn it. Got nowhere. I put the flashlight down and tried it with two hands. I struggled with it, sweat running over my skin. I held my breath and strained against it and managed to move it a quarter turn.

  I sat with my back against the wall and clutched the quarter and breathed. My clothes clung to me. I heard the muffled sound of the rain up above. My flashlight’s beam lit the padlock and the chain. There was a key in the lock. It made me think of Jana setting herself free. I felt a chill and then a flush of heat running through me, because I knew I’d only had the smallest glimpse of what it must have taken for her to turn that key.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, Warren Finn coming down. He stood in the doorway taking things in. His flashlight sliced through the dark. He came into the room and the circle of light found Luke Daw’s license on the floor. The circle floated over a dirty mattress, a battered paperback. A grubby blanket. It found a plastic bucket. It moved here and there, seeking out Luke Daw’s bones. It climbed the walls and found dark ribbons that looped and curled. The ribbons looked like blood.

  The circle of light moved into a corner. Warren followed it. He nudged something with the toe of his shoe. I heard it roll over the floorboards. Luke Daw’s skull. Warren worked it clear of the corner and gave it a sharp kick that sent it crashing into the far wall.

  “I want to kill him.”

  I heard the words over the muted rain. But barely. Warren spoke them in a tight, low voice, carefully controlled. The kind of voice you use in lieu of screaming.

  “I know,” I said.

  Warren kicked the skull again and the damn thing bounced off another wall and wouldn’t break. He stomped it with his heel and I heard it crack. He stomped it again and it broke in three pieces, and he stomped each one of those. He broke the pieces into smaller pieces, and when they wouldn’t go any smaller he went looking for more bones to break.

  He wanted to kill Luke Daw. I wanted to do the same. Neither of us would get what we wanted, because Jana had already killed him. Which meant that I was wrong. Luke Daw wasn’t the one who spied on Jana from the woods. He wasn’t the one who broke through her door and put his hands around her throat and left her on the floor for me to find.

  Luke Daw didn’t light the fire at Poe Washburn’s house. He didn’t kill Jolene Halliwell or Simon Lanik.

  I had believed all those things, and none of them were true. What was left? I still believed that the Daws killed Cathy Pruett, and that it happened here at the farm. I believed that Jana knew about it, which was why she’d been convinced that Gary Pruett was innocent.

  I got up and leaned against the wall, felt the kidney-punch ache in the small of my back. I watched Warren Finn stalking the room in a quiet rage, grinding bits of Luke Daw’s bones under his heels.

  I was struck by the smallness of the space. Twelve by twelve. One thin, narrow mattress. One chain coming through the wall. It was a prison designed to hold one prisoner.

  Luke and Eli Daw had Jana here, but they went out and abducted Cathy Pruett. They watched her from their white van and they took her. That’s what I believed.

  But why would they do that? Maybe they intended to replace one prisoner with another. But why Cathy Pruett? They started with Jana, a girl in her early twenties, a stranger to them. Why would they choose to replace her with Cathy, a woman in her late thirties—someone familiar to them, because she had taught at their high school?

  What if I was wrong? I’d been assuming that the Daws abducted Cathy and brought her here—in part because that was what Jana seemed to have believed, based on what she’d said to Poe Washburn. But would Jana have been in a position to know, or had she made assumptions about how Cathy Pruett died?

  W
hat if there was a different explanation?

  What if Cathy Pruett came to the farm on her own, and saw something the Daws didn’t want her to see?

  What would have drawn Cathy here?

  Luke and Eli were drug dealers. Wendy Daw had told me they sold pot at the community college. They sold it to students—and professors too. So they probably wouldn’t have hesitated to sell it to high school teachers.

  But Cathy Pruett never experimented with drugs. I’d heard that from her sister-in-law, Megan. Cathy never even smoked a joint.

  What about Gary Pruett? He cheated on his wife with an eighteen-year-old. He had a looser set of morals. Lighting up would not have been beyond him.

  In the last days of her life, Cathy Pruett suspected that Gary had resumed his affair. Suppose she wanted to make sure. Suppose she followed him.

  Picture Gary driving out here to Humaston Road to buy pot from Luke Daw. Gary would knock on the door of the trailer. That’s where the deal would be made. Not here, not in this room underground.

  Unless Luke was selling more than pot.

  Picture Luke leading Gary up the lane on a day in late July. He’s got something to sell. Not a drug. Something better. The two of them come to the wagon wheel and Luke finds the iron ring. He opens the door in the earth.

  But Cathy has been following them. They see her. Luke can’t afford to let her know his secret. He kills her.

  A clever theory, but it didn’t ring true. Because if it were, then why did Gary Pruett keep silent about what really happened? Why did he let himself be put on trial for his wife’s murder and sent to prison in Dannemora? And who killed Jana? Not Luke or Eli Daw. Not Gary from his prison cell.

  I put aside my speculations and from my spot against the wall I watched Warren Finn drive his heel down on a long bone—a femur, if I had to guess. It wouldn’t break. He needed leverage. He picked it up and rested one end on the floor and the other against a wall. He kicked at the center point and the bone snapped. He took the two halves and propped them against the wall and went on with his vendetta against Luke Daw.

  Irrational. But that was what happened when people were angry. They did irrational things. I decided I’d give Warren a few more minutes and then I’d lead him out of here, through the rain, to the truck. I’d take him back to Jana’s apartment.

  That’s when I thought of Neil Pruett.

  There were four Pruetts: Neil and Megan, Gary and Cathy. Megan and Cathy had been best friends before they married the Pruett brothers. The two women looked out for each other. When Cathy first suspected her husband was cheating, she confided in her friend. Megan decided to follow him, to find out the truth. But the truth made Cathy’s marriage unravel.

  Megan Pruett had laid it all out for me: Gary was a liar. He would never change. She told Cathy she should divorce him.

  I told her if I were in her position I wouldn’t think twice. She got angry with me. I wasn’t in her position, she said. And maybe she wouldn’t be either if I hadn’t followed her husband around and caught him—which she had never asked me to do.

  Cathy Pruett was angry. She blamed Megan for her misfortune. It wasn’t fair: Megan was just the messenger. But anger makes people do irrational things.

  Megan had followed Cathy’s husband and uncovered his affair. What if Cathy decided to turn the tables?

  Picture it: a day in late July. Cathy follows Megan’s husband, Neil. She doesn’t know what to expect, but maybe Neil is like his brother: maybe he has a girlfriend on the side. She trails him out to Humaston Road. He goes to see Luke Daw. Luke leads him up the lane. To the wagon wheel. To the door. Cathy follows. Luke catches her and kills her.

  He keeps her body on the farm—maybe in this room—until he can figure out the best thing to do. Then he dumps it in a field across town.

  Gary Pruett goes to prison for the murder. His brother, Neil, lets it happen. Neil can’t tell the truth. He can’t admit he was at the farm that day, or reveal his reason for being there.

  Jana escapes. She knows about Cathy, but she thinks Cathy was a random victim of the Daws. She knows Gary Pruett is innocent, but she can’t say how she knows. Because she has her own secrets. She killed Luke Daw in self-defense. But it didn’t end there: she drove to Eli Daw’s trailer and shot him. A justified killing, as far as I was concerned. But the law might take a different view.

  Jana was a girl who spent years caring for her ailing grandmother. She needed to do the right thing. It was in her nature. So she found a way to help Gary Pruett: Roger Tolliver’s Innocence Project. She started talking to people about Gary’s case. Which brought her to Neil Pruett’s doorstep.

  Outside, a wave of thunder rolled over the farm. I felt it in the wall at my back. Warren Finn looked up, aiming his flashlight at the ceiling.

  “Are you finished?” I asked him.

  Warren turned his gaze down again and stepped on Luke Daw’s jawbone. I heard it snap in two.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  “I’m ready to go.”

  I watched him kick at Luke Daw’s teeth.

  “Are you going to share?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. I crossed to the doorway and stood at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Luke didn’t kill Jana,” Warren said. “But someone did. You’ve been quiet. Doing a lot of deep thinking. So I’m wondering if you’re going to share.”

  I brought my cell phone out of my pocket.

  “I have a thought,” I said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s nothing I know for sure.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “If I tell you, I need to know I can rely on you. You have to stay calm.”

  “I am calm.”

  I looked at him soberly. “The guy I’m thinking of, he might be innocent. We can’t just go and break his jaw, much as we might want to. What we really should do is call the police. Show them what we’ve found here. Let them deal with it.”

  He scuffed his shoe along the floor and one of Luke’s teeth skipped across the room. The sound died away, lost in a rumble of thunder.

  Warren said, “This is about Jana.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you don’t want to call the police.”

  “Doesn’t matter if I want to. I should.”

  “You haven’t called them yet.”

  I glanced at my phone. “There’s no signal down here.”

  “You think you’ll get a signal up there?” Warren said. “Forget the police. Tell me who he is. We’ll go talk to him together. I won’t hurt him.”

  He had his flashlight turned up toward his face. He wanted me to see that he was serious. His eyes were steady. They didn’t wander. They burned into me. They told me what he’d left unsaid. I won’t hurt him. Not until I’m sure he’s guilty.

  A mirror is a dangerous thing—and right then Warren Finn was a mirror. He was urging me to do what I already wanted to do. I wanted to confront Neil Pruett, even though I had no real proof against him. I wanted to forget about the police, because I didn’t know if I could count on Frank Moretti.

  I thought of the house on Bloomfield Street, the one painted pale blue. I thought I would find Neil Pruett there. If Warren wanted to come, he could come. We would talk to Pruett. We wouldn’t hurt him. Not until we were sure.

  I could hear the rain pelting the ruined farmhouse above us. Warren joined me by the doorway.

  “Who is he?” he said softly.

  I turned and started up the stairs.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  42

  At the house on Bloomfield Street, Neil Pruett drew back the string of his brother’s bow.

  He heard a sound that annoyed him: a knock on the door.

  Letting out a breath, he released th
e arrow. It sailed across the room and buried itself in the wall.

  Another knock, slightly more insistent.

  Neil ignored it. He paced across the room—sock feet on the smooth hardwood floor—and pulled the arrow from the wall. It left a neat round hole. One of many. Six of them ran in a vertical line. Four ran diagonally, up and to the right. Another four, down and to the right. Forming a letter K.

  A third knock.

  Neil took his time. There was a sofa in the room, and a love seat. They faced each other, a coffee table in between them. The table held five pillar candles—each one burning, each one a different height. Neil laid the bow and arrow on the sofa. He picked up a mirror in a mahogany frame. He had taken it down to clear a space on the wall. Now he put it back. It covered all the arrow holes.

  A fourth knock. Neil opened the door to the sound of thunder and rain. And saw Megan.

  “Were you asleep?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You took a long time.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Come inside.”

  He took her coat and hung it in the closet. She slicked her wet hair back from her forehead. Brown hair bobbed short.

  “The storm—” she began.

  She didn’t have to finish. He’d been married to her for nine years. Technically they were still married. He knew she didn’t like to be alone during a storm, especially at night.

  “I don’t have power at home,” she said.

  He gestured at the candles. “I don’t either.”

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “You should stay.”

  He told her to sit. Left her for a moment. Went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew and two glasses.

  She sat sideways on the love seat with a pillow at her back, her long legs stretched out over the cushions. He opened the bottle and poured. Gave her a glass: medicine for dealing with the storm. She bent her knees to make a space for him to sit.