The Last Dead Girl Read online

  There’d been others. Like the guy behind the counter at the shop where she bought coffee. For him she made up a story about the child of a friend. A toddler. Toddlers play with blocks—clunky wooden ones. They have tantrums, they throw things. The tale told itself.

  You should have ducked, the guy said. Jana laughed. Next time she would.

  Then there was the manager at the restaurant where she waited tables: a motherly woman, though she wasn’t very many years older than Jana. She asked the question with a bit more concern than the others, and Jana answered her more carefully. She invented a softball league, very informal, one game a week. Jana played second base. Someone hit a grounder and it took a bad hop and she didn’t get her glove up in time. A softball’s not so soft, not really, not when it hits you in the cheek.

  A respectable lie, Jana thought. Her favorite part was the bad hop. She had played on the softball team in high school and the coach always warned her to watch out, to stay alert, because sometimes the ball took a bad hop.

  The restaurant manager listened with a grave expression. Doubtful.

  “Is that the way you want to leave it?” she asked when Jana finished.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  The manager looked sad. “I mean you can trust me, hon. You can say what really happened. You don’t have to tell me stories.”

  And Jana nearly wavered, because of the kindness in the woman’s voice. But in the end she said, “It’s not a story, it’s what happened.” She smiled. “I don’t have any stories.”

  The manager sighed and suggested that Jana take some time off, that she come back later in the week, after the swelling went down all the way. Then she could cover the mark with makeup, for the sake of the customers. Bruises are bad for business. It shouldn’t be hard to cover up; the manager could show Jana how; she knew some tricks.

  And now, in the moonlight, Jana remembered their conversation. She hadn’t gone back to the restaurant since, and she wasn’t sure if she would. But she didn’t regret the lies she’d told. Not the one about the bad hop, or the one about not having any stories.

  Because that was a lie too. She had stories.

  There was David, for instance. She had met him three nights ago. In the rain, as it happened. She had brought him home to her apartment, half a duplex on a dead-end street. And she had slept with him that first night, something she never did, but he was tall and she liked the shape of his jaw and he had a voice that was just a bit husky, as if he were getting over a cold.

  He had strong hands too, but he was smart enough to let her take control. He let her undress him the first time and laid back, his heels hanging off the foot of her bed. His body was lean; she explored it with her hands and her mouth. He got hard, fast, and stayed hard, but he didn’t rush her. Finally she kissed his chest and wrapped a hand around him, straddled him, took him inside her, just the tip. Still he waited, let her lead, and she sank herself onto him, all the way, and then she felt those strong hands on her hips, helping her move. And then the bedsprings and his voice saying her name, and she came so hard she moaned, which never happened either.

  David. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a year older—twenty-six—and he’d grown up here, in Rome, New York. He’d gone to college somewhere else and had a degree in engineering. She thought he came from money, but she wasn’t sure. There was something in the way he spoke, the way he carried himself, a confidence. When he took her out, he paid, no hesitation. On the other hand, his job was inspecting houses for people who wanted to buy them. Not what you’d call a high-powered occupation. He drove a pickup truck—and not a new one, but one that was well broken in. So, mixed signals. She had never seen where he lived.

  She didn’t know what he thought of her, living in her cheap apartment. Maybe that she came from money too, and was slumming, trying to prove that she could make it on her own.

  And he liked her body, her skin; that was part of it, she thought. His own skin was pale; he would get off on the novelty of sleeping with a black girl. Which was funny, because she never thought of herself as a black girl. She had a black father she had never met, and a white mother who had raised her in Geneva, New York, a little town on the shore of Seneca Lake.

  David. He was a good story. Jana didn’t know how long he would stay around, but he’d been back each night since they met. And if they kept at it, she would have to do something about the bedsprings, because her landlady lived in the other half of the duplex—a respectable elderly woman—and whenever Jana saw her now she got a disapproving look.

  She wasn’t going to worry about her landlady.

  Jana stepped off the bricks of the patio and into the grass. The lawn ran down in a gentle slope until it came to the edge of the woods in the distance. The wet ground yielded beneath her bare feet. The slightest breeze, cool on her body. She had nothing on but David’s shirt, and it was thin. She might as well be naked.

  A daring thought. Her fingers worked the buttons of the shirt, one by one. She parted it, drew it down off her shoulders, testing herself. Bold Jana. She felt goose bumps on her stomach, her breasts; felt her nipples stiffen in the air.

  David inside. So close. She could wake him and bring him out here and lay him down on the grass. She closed her eyes, let it play out in her mind.

  Something shifted and she opened her eyes. She drew the shirt up onto her shoulders and hugged it around her. She had a feeling of being watched, a physical sensation, real as the touch of the air on her skin. She thought of her landlady, who had her own brick patio nearby, on the other side of a woodpile and a forsythia bush, but when she went to check there was no one there. She looked off across the lawn, tried to see if there might be some figure in the woods. But all she could see was dark between the trees.

  You’re scaring yourself, she thought. It’s nothing. Too much moonlight and night. Getting a little too daring. Rein it in, Jana.

  Nothing.

  • • •

  I rolled onto my side and reached for Jana. Felt only the rumpled sheets. I got up and stood naked in the dim of the room. Looked around for my boxers and slipped them on. Couldn’t find my shirt.

  I drifted through the apartment, bare feet on old hardwood floors. I didn’t worry about tripping over things because the apartment was one of the sparest I had ever seen. No clutter, no clothes strewn around. In fact, Jana Fletcher owned fewer clothes than any other woman I knew: her wardrobe fit easily into a tiny closet and a chest of drawers. She owned precisely four pairs of shoes: sneakers, hiking boots, loafers, heels.

  Minimal furniture as well: the chest of drawers, her bed, a night table. A desk in the living room; no sofa, no television. No computer either. When she needed to do research or write a paper, she went to one of the computer labs at the university.

  Her desk faced a blank wall. Nearby, there was a small wood-burning fireplace with a shelf over it that served as a mantel. On the shelf sat a long piece of two-by-four in which someone had drilled four shallow holes, each one broad enough to hold a tea-light candle.

  The candles were burning now.

  The only other object on the mantel was a clay bowl that held a single coin: a quarter. The quarter was strange. Imperfect. Part of it had been worn away so that in the upper left quadrant—right around George Washington’s forehead—it came to a point.

  No other trinkets. No keepsakes, no vases. Jana had a few books for her classes and a small but eclectic collection of novels, from Alexandre Dumas to Stephen King. She had two houseplants. I could see them now as I stepped through the archway into the kitchen. A cactus and an African violet in twin pots arranged like centerpieces on the kitchen table. A faint glow fell on them from a light above the stove.

  The back door of the apartment stood open. I looked through the closed screen door and saw Jana standing outside on the lawn. She wore my shirt, which came down to her knees.
I stepped closer to the screen, but I didn’t go out, and as I watched she shrugged off the shirt, baring her shoulders and her back. Her dark hair hung down between her shoulder blades. Her body was a sculpture in the moonlight, a figure of blacks and grays. And even though I had known her for only three days, I thought I might be in love with her.

  • • •

  On the night we met, I’d been out driving on a dark road outside Rome.

  When people think of upstate New York, they think of farmland and rolling hills. They think of roads that wind like snakes and little towns that never change from one decade to the next. The speed limit goes down to thirty and there’s a gas station and a general store and a barn where someone’s selling antiques. There’s an old lady rocking on a porch and a roadside vegetable stand, and then the limit goes back up to fifty-five and there’s nothing to see for miles but fields and trees.

  Rome isn’t one of those little towns. It’s a city. It has good neighborhoods and bad ones. It has businesses that are growing, and others that are dying. It has a history that dates back to the American Revolution. It was the site of the groundbreaking for the Erie Canal in 1817 and the home of a major Air Force base all through the Cold War.

  Rome is gray and sprawling like a city, and at night it lights up like a city. On the night I met Jana, I wanted to get away from it. I left my apartment and drove north with no particular destination in mind. I got onto Route 46 and followed it out past the city’s edge. After a while I took some random turns and wound up heading west on Quaker Hill Road.

  Houses gave way to woods. Beyond the reach of the city lights, the night turned purer. The scenery began to look a little unreal, the way it does sometimes when you’re driving through the dark. A light rain began to fall. Not a dangerous rain: just enough to wet the road in front of me, leaving it a sparkling black in the light of my truck’s high beams. As if I were driving on obsidian.

  There were oak trees along the roadside and when the light washed over them the leaves glittered like gemstones. I remember that. I remember having the thought that I was traveling through a forest of emeralds.

  The deer came out of nowhere.

  It came bounding from the woods south of the road and it didn’t try to cross in front of me; it didn’t even come into my lane. I got one clear glimpse of it in the high-beam light and then I overtook it and it was right next to me, leaping along with me like a big friendly dog. It was there beside me shadowy in the dark, and I swear if I had rolled the window down I could have reached out and touched it.

  I was driving slow for the rain, but not that slow: maybe forty-five or fifty. I read somewhere once that a deer can run forty miles an hour, but as the seconds ticked by this one kept pace with me.

  I never thought of speeding up or slowing down.

  We came to a curve and something changed. Maybe the deer had begun to feel the strain or maybe it had decided to let me win. Either way, it slacked off. It was still gamboling along, but it was in my rearview mirror now, a shadow getting smaller until it was gone in the night.

  I let out a breath I’d been holding in. The rain fell in thin lines on the windshield and the wipers swept the lines away. A half mile on, I saw headlights approaching. I clicked the high beams down to low and a car rushed by in the eastbound lane. It was nothing to look at, a beat-up subcompact, but the driver was pushing it hard. I watched the taillights receding in the rearview.

  I wondered if the deer was still in the road. It probably wasn’t. If it was, the driver would probably see it in time. There was no reason to think something terrible was going to happen, and nothing I could do about it anyway. I didn’t need to touch the brakes. I didn’t need to start looking for a place to turn around.

  I found a little side road that led into some farmer’s field. I pulled onto it and backed out again, swinging around so I was heading east. The rain didn’t care; it kept on falling. The view was much the same in this direction; the leaves were the same sharp-edged emeralds.

  Just when I thought I’d gone far enough and wasn’t going to find anything, I rounded a bend and saw lights in the distance. The solid red of taillights, and the lazy blink of hazards.

  The subcompact was there on the roadside, unmoving. The deer was there too. And Jana Fletcher.

  3

  I pulled onto the shoulder and stepped out into the rain. In the glow of my headlights, Jana Fletcher walked back from her car to the deer. She was dressed in black. There was something dreamlike in the way she moved. I wondered if she was in shock.

  The deer—a white-tailed doe—looked smaller than it had before, probably because it was lying on the ground. It was on its side, with its head resting on the road as on a pillow. Its eyes were open and staring.

  Jana crouched beside it and touched the fur of its belly with her fingertips. She didn’t look up when I approached.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her dark hair fell in curls, damp with beads of rain. I was crouching now too, but she still didn’t look at me.

  “I didn’t see it coming,” she said.

  Her voice sounded soft. I got the sense she was talking to herself.

  “I didn’t see it, and then it was right there.”

  “You were driving fast,” I said.

  Finally she looked up. She had brown eyes. No sign of shock in them; they were clear, intense. “It ran straight at me. It jumped onto the hood of the car. Did you see?”

  “No.”

  “Like it was trying to run right over the car. At first I thought it did. I thought I’d come back here and it would be gone. Into the woods. Do you think it’s dead?”

  I thought it must be, but I didn’t want to say so. I listened to the falling rain and the murmur of my truck’s engine.

  She turned her attention back to the deer, running her fingers over the fur.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  She shifted her hand to the deer’s shoulder and the movement put her off-balance. She steadied herself, resting one knee on the ground. As I watched her, I saw things I hadn’t noticed before. She had a red bruise on her cheek. It didn’t look like something you’d get in a car accident. And her blouse was wide open at the collar. I could see there were two buttons missing.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She told me, and I told her mine.

  “Are you hurt?” I said.

  “No.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  She touched the red mark on her cheek as if she had just remembered it.

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “Maybe you should go to a hospital.”

  She braced her hands on her thighs and stood. “I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the deer. What if it’s not dead?”

  I got up too. We faced each other across the body of the doe.

  “It’s not moving.”

  “It doesn’t look injured,” she said. “There’s no blood.”

  “It got hit by a car,” I said gently. “I think it’s hurt in ways we can’t see. Internal injuries—”

  Jana Fletcher shook her head stubbornly and rain fell from her hair.

  “It didn’t get hit. I told you, it jumped onto the car.”

  “I’m sure it seemed that way. Your car rides low to the ground. You hit a deer, the momentum’s going to carry it up over the hood.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  She looked away from me and stepped around the body of the doe. Bending down, she laid a palm against the creature’s rib cage.

  I left her there and walked to the front of her car, a blue Plymouth Sundance. No damage to the grille, the headlights unbroken. But there were dents on the hood, and the windshield was shattered on the passenger side—the kind of damage that might well have been caused by a frightened animal trying to scramble over a moving car. I
could see bits of safety glass strewn like diamonds over the dash.

  When I returned to Jana I found her down on one knee again, stroking the doe’s back. Her blouse was wet through from the rain. She must have been feeling the chill of the night air. I got an old nylon jacket from the truck and brought it to her. She thanked me for it, slipped her arms through the sleeves.

  “Is there someone you can call?” I said.

  “My mother lives in Geneva.”

  “Maybe someone closer.”

  “Could you help me?”

  “Sure. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”

  “I meant with the deer,” she said. “Could you help me put it in my car?”

  I looked at the Plymouth. “You don’t want to drive that. Not with the windshield broken.”

  “In your truck then.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “I know an animal hospital. It’s open all night.”

  She must have read the skepticism in my eyes. She went to her car and came back with a plastic makeup case. Opened it and held the mirror near the nostrils of the doe. A fine mist appeared on the silver glass.

  “You see?” she said. “She’s breathing. We have to do something for her.”

  Jana tucked the case away and looked to me to see if I would come through for her. I smiled and shook my head, but I was already making plans. The first step would be to move the truck, get it facing in the other direction, back it up close. Then find something to use as a stretcher. I thought I had a tarp that would work. Move the deer onto the tarp, then lift it into the truck bed.

  Jana had her own ideas. She slipped her hands beneath the shoulder of the doe, shifted her feet for leverage, tested the weight.

  “Help me out here,” she said.

  “Hold on.”

  “She’s not that heavy. You’ll see.”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  She didn’t wait. She started to lift. I forgot my plans and hurried to help. Dropping to one knee, I worked my hands beneath the animal’s rib cage. Maybe we would have been able to carry the thing that way. Maybe. But just then the doe’s eyes blinked. The hind legs scrambled. I fell back in surprise and toppled into the grass by the roadside. Jana did better. She kept her balance.