The Last Dead Girl Page 12

“Roger Tolliver,” I said.

  “That’s him. I was relieved. Her life seemed to be on track. And now I wish she had stayed with Warren. I wish she had done anything but go to Bellamy.”

  Lydia turned toward a window and I followed her gaze. She had a view of Warren Finn’s house.

  “He’s with someone else now,” I said.

  She nodded. “Rose. They were dating when Jana came back from New York. Warren broke up with her when Jana moved in with him. And when Jana left him, he got back together with Rose. Now they’re married.” She looked away from me, but not before I spotted tears. “I keep thinking it could be Jana over there, with a baby on the way. Would that be so terrible? But she did what I wanted her to do. She went away to law school. And now I’ve lost her.”

  The tears rolled down her cheeks and she sat up and wiped them with the back of her hand. She held her glass out and I took it, and she found a box of tissues and used one to dry her eyes. I put the glass on the coffee table.

  She sat with her head bowed, holding the balled-up tissue. “Don’t think too poorly of me,” she said. “My daughter’s gone and here I am crying for myself.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I didn’t mean to do this,” she said. “It was nice of you to come here, and there’s something I’d like to ask you. You can tell me the truth.”

  “Ask me anything you want.”

  “It’s just that I never visited her there in Rome. I don’t know what her life was like.” She reached out to me, squeezed my hand. “There’s only one thing that’s important now. Maybe you can tell me. Do you think she was happy?”

  17

  I got home that night after dark. It would have been sooner, but Lydia Fletcher wanted to fix me something to eat and I didn’t want to refuse, and I thought it might be wise to give the Scotch some time to work its way through my system.

  She made bacon and eggs and pancakes. Breakfast for dinner, she said—something Jana had always loved as a child. The eggs scrambled, the pancakes loaded with blueberries. Lydia cooked more than we needed and I ate more than I should have, and when she packed the leftovers in Tupperware and offered them to me, I took them.

  I took a photo with me too—a portrait of Jana from her college yearbook. Lydia wanted me to have it and I was glad. As I slipped it into my wallet I realized it was the only picture I had of Jana. I’d never taken one; those were the days before everyone walked around with a camera in their cell phone.

  At home I found Sophie asleep in our bed. I joined her. When I woke sometime later, she was gone. Intern’s hours. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She had left me a note on the table: Missed you. Hope it went okay.

  I took my water onto the balcony. It was a cool, still night and the stars were out. I thought about Sophie’s message: two lines and so much to read between them. Missed you—because even though we’re living in the same place, we’re not connecting. We keep missing each other. Or it could mean: You were gone today and it made me sad. I missed you. Because I still care about you. Did you miss me?

  Hope it went okay—the funeral of that other woman you were sleeping with.

  Hope it went okay, but now it’s over and we have to move on. Don’t we?

  A good question. I drank some water and thought about the answer. It was time to decide: Keep obsessing over the woman you barely knew, the one who’s gone; or hold tight to the living, breathing woman who’s trying to stay with you, the one who misses you? What would a sensible man do?

  The answer was obvious: I was not a sensible man. I needed to obsess, at least for a little longer.

  I dug out my cell phone and called Roger Tolliver. It took four rings for him to answer.

  I said, “Was she happy?”

  Tolliver cleared his throat. “Was who—”

  “Jana’s mother asked me if she was happy,” I said. “What was I supposed to say?”

  “What time—It’s after midnight.”

  “I knew her for ten days,” I said. “She seemed happy. But how would I know?”

  “David—”

  “And what does it mean to be happy? It’s different things to different people. Some philosophers would say you’re only happy if you’re leading a good life, a life of virtue.”

  “Philosophers?”

  “Greek philosophers. Was Jana leading a good life? She was trying to do the right thing, trying to help Gary Dean Pruett, because she thought he was innocent. That’s virtuous, isn’t it?”

  Tolliver sighed. “David, are you drunk?”

  “No. This is what I’m like when I’m sober. I need to know more about Jana’s life. Otherwise—”

  “Hold on,” Tolliver said. “Did you talk to Jana’s mother like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like spouting nonsense about Greek philosophers when she asked you a simple question.”

  I got up and went to the balcony rail. “No,” I said. “I did what I was supposed to do. I told her Jana was happy.”

  “Good.”

  “But it’s not a simple question. That’s the point. I saw one small corner of Jana’s life. It’s not enough.”

  “Not enough for what?”

  “It’s not enough. I need more. Who did she talk to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About Gary Pruett. She talked to Poe Washburn. Were there others?”

  A quiet moment on the line. Then Tolliver said, “I’m sure she spoke to Pruett’s lawyer. And maybe his family. I think he has a brother—”

  “I want to talk to them,” I said. “Can you get me names?”

  “I suppose. But what do you hope to learn?”

  “I want to know why she died.”

  A longer quiet this time. I could hear Tolliver moving around, maybe sitting up in bed. “Is that what this is about?” he asked me. “You think you can find her killer?”

  “I want to know the truth about Gary Pruett,” I said. “If she died because of him, and if he’s guilty, then her death meant nothing. If he’s innocent, then somebody should do something about it.”

  Tolliver’s voice turned solemn. “You don’t really care about Pruett.”

  “I care about Jana.”

  “But there’s nothing you can do for her now.”

  I looked up at the stars. “I can find out if Pruett’s innocent,” I said. “Maybe get him a new trial. That’s what she wanted.”

  “And you think that’ll make a difference?” Tolliver said. “To her?”

  “It will to me.”

  • • •

  Gary Dean Pruett had been a high school algebra teacher before he went to prison for killing his wife.

  If I had lived in a different neighborhood, he might have been one of my teachers. But he taught at East Rome High School, and I went to Rome Free Academy in the center of the city. My algebra teacher was a distant cousin on my father’s side of the family, a strange little man with a buzz cut and horn-rimmed glasses, like a NASA scientist from the Apollo program. My father never liked him, but he never liked schoolteachers in general. He found them aloof. He noticed that they tended to socialize with one another and marry other teachers, and he concluded that they thought they were better than everyone else.

  I don’t know if Gary Pruett was aloof, but in one way he had conformed to my father’s stereotype: he had married a fellow teacher. Cathy Pruett had taught history and geography before she died.

  Gary had a brother, another teacher at the same high school. Neil Pruett. Chemistry and physics. I went looking for him the next day, around four-thirty in the afternoon. I didn’t find him. I found his wife.

  She was in her late thirties and very thin, with a long neck and a sharp chin and nose. She carried herself in a way my father would have called snooty: squared shoulders, r
igid posture. I was unsurprised to learn her occupation. She taught English at a middle school.

  Megan Pruett was leery of letting me into her house. She came out onto the porch to talk to me instead. When I mentioned Jana Fletcher she was sympathetic.

  “It’s tragic what happened to her,” she said. “She was so young. She came here, of course, to talk about Gary and whether he’d gotten a fair trial. She had some story about a false confession.”

  “You didn’t believe it?” I said.

  Megan Pruett shook her head. “Maybe I’m biased—Cathy was my best friend. But as far as I’m concerned, Gary is guilty as sin.”

  Megan had known Cathy Pruett since their college days. “SUNY Albany,” she said. “We were roommates freshman year. She was Cathy Dorn then, and I was Megan Linney. After we graduated, we found our first teaching jobs together, in Poughkeepsie. Then we moved here.”

  Cathy Dorn had met Gary Pruett at East Rome High. They had gotten engaged. She had introduced Megan to Gary’s brother, Neil.

  “So you were close,” I said, “all four of you.”

  Megan Pruett stood by the railing of the porch, looking out at the street. “About as close as you can get,” she said.

  “And what did you think of Gary and Cathy as a couple? Were there warning signs? Was he ever violent?”

  “No,” Megan said. “She would have told me. The trouble with Gary was much subtler. He was a liar. You know about his affair?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She was eager to fill me in.

  “After they were married a few years, Cathy started to feel like they were drifting apart. But if she tried to talk to him, Gary would say everything was fine. He tried to spin it into something positive. They were two different people, they should have their own interests. But that was really just a pretense for him to get out of the house. They taught at the same school, so he couldn’t take advantage of the usual excuses. He couldn’t say he had to work late. So he signed up for night classes: poetry and photography. Only she never saw much in the way of poems or pictures. Or he would claim to go to movies by himself. Sci-fi and horror, stuff she had no interest in seeing. Anything that would give him an excuse to be out at night.

  “Cathy wasn’t stupid. She thought there must be something going on. But when she asked him, he called her paranoid. She told me about it, because we talked about everything. And I decided to follow him.”

  Megan had been watching cars pass on the street. Now she turned to me. “You have to understand, we were like sisters,” she said. “We used to watch out for each other in college. If I got drunk at a party, she’d make sure I got home. If she thought her boyfriend was cheating, I’d make it my job to find out for sure. We had each other’s back.

  “When I followed Gary, it was crystal clear that he hadn’t been going to the movies, unless they were the kind of movies you could see in your room at a cheap motel. I waited there in the motel parking lot, after he went inside. I wanted to see who would meet him. I was afraid it might be someone we knew, someone Cathy worked with at the high school. But the woman who showed up didn’t look familiar.

  “I got a better look at her afterward, when they came out of the room together. And I realized she was young. I found out later that she was a girl named Angela Reese. She had just graduated from high school—this was in the summer. She was eighteen. She’s twenty now.

  “I dreaded telling Cathy, but I knew I had to. And when she confronted Gary he denied it. He said I must have mistaken him for someone else. But eventually he realized that lying wouldn’t work. Cathy trusted me more than she trusted him. So he admitted it. But he swore it had only happened a few times. And yes, the girl had been his student, but he had never touched her until after she graduated. He wasn’t some pervert.”

  Megan Pruett frowned, remembering. “I told Cathy she should divorce him, but she came from a religious family and she had always been the good daughter. She rarely drank anything stronger than wine, never smoked, never experimented with drugs, not even a joint—and as for her marriage, she took it very seriously. She wanted to fix it. Gary played along. He said he loved her and he was sorry. He put it all down to a midlife crisis. He’d gone a little crazy, but it was over now. He would prove to her that he could be a better man.”

  She looked out at the street again. “That went on for a few weeks, and he really did seem to change. He would take Cathy out. Buy her flowers. Leave her sweet little notes. Then one night after dinner he said he felt like going to a movie—would that be all right? Like he was asking her permission. She said she’d go with him. He told her he wanted to see some big action movie, not her kind of thing, she’d only be bored. That’s when she realized nothing had changed.

  “At that point I raised the idea of divorce again. I told Cathy if I were in her position I wouldn’t think twice. It would be the easiest decision I ever made. 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. She was lashing out. I couldn’t blame her. She was heartbroken.”

  Megan Pruett turned her back on the street, and for the first time her rigid posture wavered. She slouched against the wooden railing. “I think she would have divorced him eventually,” she said, “but she wanted to make one last effort: marriage counseling. Gary wasn’t interested. I know they argued about it. I don’t know exactly what happened next, but a few days after she brought up counseling, she disappeared. That was near the end of July. They found her body in mid-August.”

  “And you have no doubt Gary was the one who killed her?”

  Megan tipped her head to the side. “She asked me the same thing—your friend Jana Fletcher. The answer’s no. No doubts. Gary claimed that Cathy just left one afternoon without saying anything to him. But when she didn’t come back that night, or the next, he didn’t report her missing. He didn’t do anything until I called their house—because I hadn’t heard from her in days.

  “When the police talked to him, he said he assumed she had left him. He thought she must be staying with me and Neil. But if that’s what he believed, why didn’t he call us to make sure?”

  “If he killed her,” I said, “what was his motive? You don’t murder your wife just because you don’t want to go into counseling.”

  “You might if she threatened to divorce you,” said Megan Pruett. “Some men do. I wouldn’t have thought Gary was one of them, but I never suspected he’d cheat on Cathy with an eighteen-year-old either.”

  It seemed weak, as a motive. But when I started to say so, she interrupted me.

  “You have to remember Gary was a liar. He claimed his affair with Angela Reese started after she graduated. I didn’t necessarily believe him. I’m not sure Cathy did either. If it started earlier, he was on dangerous ground. Sleeping with a student can cost you your job, even if she’s over the age of consent. What if Cathy threatened to report him? I’m not saying she did, but she could have—in the heat of the moment, if they were arguing. And that might’ve been enough to make Gary snap.”

  It sounded plausible, I thought. But it was still guesswork.

  “Doesn’t it bother you,” I said, “not being sure about the motive?”

  She trailed a finger along the railing. “I suppose it would, if Gary hadn’t treated Cathy so badly. But honestly, what’s the alternative? Some stranger came along and killed her?”

  “But don’t you wish the case against Gary had been stronger?” I asked. “Doesn’t it bother you that it relied on a confession that might never have happened?”

  She answered after a thoughtful pause. “She asked me that too, your friend Jana. ‘What would Cathy think of all this?’ she said. And she really wanted to know. It was important to her. What if there was no confession? What if Gary turned out to be innocent? Cathy wouldn’t want him to suffer, would
she? And of course that’s true. She hated the way he had betrayed her, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to spend his life in prison for something he didn’t do.”

  Megan Pruett stood up tall and straight again. “But that’s all hypothetical. He killed her. I sat through the trial, every day of it. I was convinced—even without the confession.”

  18

  When I left Megan Pruett I drove about a mile to the house Cathy and Gary Pruett had shared. It was a two-story place painted pale blue, taller than it was wide. It had a strip of grass on either side and hedges to separate it from the other houses. More grass in front, unmowed, sprinkled with dandelions.

  I thought seeing the house might give me a sense of the couple who had lived here. It didn’t. But I had another reason for coming. Megan Pruett had told me her husband was staying here. They had separated after the trial.

  “It was just too hard,” she’d said, “staying together.”

  When I rang Neil Pruett’s doorbell, he answered right away. He’d been expecting me; his wife had called to let him know I was coming. He led me through to the back of the house and sat me down in the kitchen. The place looked a little rough—dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter.

  “I apologize for the mess,” he said.

  “It’s not too bad.”

  “Megan doesn’t think I’ll last, living on my own. She thinks I’ll wind up dressing in rags and eating off the floor.”

  Maybe he would, eventually. He wasn’t there yet. He was dressed well enough, in a white oxford shirt, khaki pants, and loafers—the wardrobe of a high school science teacher. He had taken off his tie: navy blue with yellow stripes. I could see it dangling over the back of a chair. He was around forty, with sandy-blond hair cut short and a round, plain face.

  “You talked to her,” he said. “What’s your impression?”

  I realized he meant his wife. “She has strong opinions,” I said. “About Gary.”

  He laughed. “Strong opinions. That’s true. That’s why she’s there and I’m here. When you think your brother’s innocent and your wife is sure he’s guilty, it tends to put a strain on the marriage.”