The Last Dead Girl Page 21

  “Maybe you need to lower your expectations,” he said.

  “How low do you think they go?”

  • • •

  It was the fifteenth of July—at least that’s what Luke Daw told her when she asked. She had to accept his word; she hadn’t seen the sky since the day they locked her underground.

  The place where they kept her was a wooden box: twelve by twelve, with an eight-foot ceiling. Not quite a perfect cube. The walls were made of hundreds of pieces of two-by-four, each piece four feet long. The boards ran horizontally. They were screwed into studs behind the walls, or so she assumed. Two screws in each board. The floor and ceiling were made the same way.

  There was a single door in the middle of one wall. It looked like it had been salvaged from an old building, maybe from the farmhouse she had seen the night they brought her here. She couldn’t reach the door, because there was a chain around her ankle that limited her movement. The chain passed through the wall opposite the door, and the end of it must have been bolted to something on the other side.

  They gave her blankets and a thin mattress to sleep on. They left her hands free most of the time. Not out of mercy, she was sure. Out of practicality. They wanted her to be able to feed herself and use the bathroom. The bathroom was a plastic bucket with a lid.

  If it was the fifteenth, then Jana had been here for more than five weeks. She tried to decide if that felt right. She was reluctant to trust her own perception of time, because she spent so much of it alone in the dark. And because they were drugging her.

  It started early on. The first time Luke Daw raped her, she fought back; she managed to land an elbow in his face and split his lip. It didn’t matter. He still took what he wanted. But after that, they started putting something in her food. She felt groggy after she ate; she slept more than she thought she should; and even when she was awake, her mind didn’t feel clear.

  When she realized what they were doing, she went on a hunger strike. And when the grogginess continued, she decided they must be drugging the water they gave her. So she stopped drinking. They retaliated by taking away her clothes, her mattress, her blankets, the plastic bucket. They left her with nothing but the chain around her ankle.

  She still didn’t give in. Until Luke came down one day and held something up for her to see: her driver’s license. “Will you eat?” he said. “Or should I go to this address and kill whoever I find there?”

  • • •

  I had a dog once,” Luke Daw said.

  Jana had let her mind wander, but now she focused on him: Luke and his popsicle stick.

  “What kind?” she asked.

  “Just a stray we took in. A mutt. He knew how to fetch, though. I didn’t teach him. He already knew when he came to us. I miss him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Luke put the popsicle stick between his teeth. Took it out again. “He got old. Went blind. Got so he couldn’t walk. We had to shoot him.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I did it myself. My grandfather made me. I’d like to say he thought he was teaching me a lesson about personal responsibility. But mostly Grandpa was a prick.”

  Luke chewed on the popsicle stick for a while and added, “He used to lock me down here if I did something bad. Not actually in here,” he said, waving the stick at the room. “I built this myself, after he died.”

  He had told her that before, as if he wanted to impress her. She would have liked to tell him what she thought of his creation, but she kept it inside. She wanted him to keep talking to her.

  She discovered early on that he would bring her things if she asked. Soap and warm water to bathe with, towels, fresh clothes—her own clothes, from her grandmother’s LeSabre. He took away her dirty clothes too, and brought them back clean.

  She wondered what had happened to the car. He told her he had gotten rid of it. “No one’s going to find it,” he said.

  He told her other things as well, bits and pieces about himself. His mother had left when he was young; his grandfather had raised him. His idiot friend was named Eli and was actually his cousin. The band was real, but it had broken up; there was never any gig in Binghamton. The white van belonged to Eli; Luke drove a Mustang.

  “It’s got a sunroof,” he told her. “You’d like it.”

  “One of these days,” she said, “you should take me for a ride.”

  “I wish.”

  If you wanted the essence of Luke Daw, it was right there, in that deadpan-earnest I wish. Full of regret. As if they were both victims of circumstance.

  “What are you thinking?” Luke asked her.

  A dangerous question, one she never answered truthfully.

  “I’m thinking about coffee,” she said.

  “You’re always thinking about coffee. You’re obsessed.”

  “I wouldn’t be if you brought me some.”

  He laid the popsicle stick on his knee and picked up a plastic bottle of water from beside the lantern. He’d brought one for her too—had set it down in front of her as soon as he came in.

  She watched him take a long drink.

  “Spring water,” he said. “Much better for you than coffee.”

  He put the bottle down and took a card from his shirt pocket. “Before I forget,” he said. “It’s time to write home again, don’t you think?”

  He flipped the card through the air so it landed within her reach. A picture postcard with an image of the Statue of Liberty.

  “Vague and upbeat,” he said, tossing her a pen. “We don’t want Mom to worry.”

  Jana wrote out the address first, then the message: Everything’s great here. Don’t worry about me. I love you. Vague and upbeat. No tricks or hidden meanings. The first time Luke made her write a postcard, she had tried to write something out-of-character. Dear Mother, she wrote, because she was never that formal. But Luke caught on to her right away. “I don’t think so,” he said, tearing up the card. “Let’s go with ‘Dear Mom.’”

  So now, no tricks. She signed her name and tossed the pen back to him. Then the card. He read it and slipped it in his pocket.

  He gathered up his water bottle and the popsicle stick and got to his feet. “I should go,” he said. “I might come back to see you a little later, but maybe not. It’s been a rough day. Eli’s been nervous.”

  “Has he?”

  “He never thought this would go on so long. He thinks maybe we should end it.”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

  “The ending he has in mind—you wouldn’t like it.”

  “Oh.”

  Luke opened the door. “I told him it ends when it ends. We’ve never done this before. We’re all feeling our way through this thing.” He picked up the lantern. “He’s not happy. But that’s Eli. Skittish. Always needing to have his hand held. And I’m the one who has to hold it.”

  “That must be hard on you,” Jana said.

  No reaction in his face—his dark eyes didn’t blink—but something happened. He dropped everything he was carrying—lantern, bottle, stick—and dove toward her. Pushed her over so the back of her head struck the floor hard. His hand squeezed her throat. She tried to breathe, heard the lantern rolling across the wooden boards, watched its light play crazily over the ceiling.

  “Do you want to repeat what you just said?” he asked her. Mildly, softly.

  She didn’t try to speak, just shook her head no.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  Another head shake.

  “That’s good. You’re not smarter than me. I know what sarcasm is. All these little things you say, they’re not going over my head. You should remember that.”

  She nodded. He removed his hand from her throat and helped her sit up. She looked away from him, trying to catch her breath. Felt her heart beating wildly. When
she looked back, he was smiling.

  “Oh my god,” he said. “You should’ve seen your face. Were you really scared?”

  She didn’t trust her voice to answer.

  “You were,” he said, stroking her hair. “But you know I wouldn’t really hurt you. When did I ever hurt you?”

  He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there, the way you might kiss a child. She shut her eyes and kept perfectly still until he drew away.

  “We’re okay, aren’t we?” he said.

  She whispered her reply. “Yes.”

  • • •

  After he left, she sat in the dark unmoving, her back straight, trying to breathe slow and deep. She flashed back to the feeling of Luke Daw’s fingers on her throat, and that set her off—a trembling in her shoulders that grew into a shudder that passed through her whole body. She cried with her face buried in her hands. She lay down on her side, her knees drawing up to her chest, the chain on her ankle skittering over the floorboards.

  A long time later she retreated to the far wall, taking the water bottle he had given her. She twisted the cap to see if it would open hard or easy. If she had to break a seal, then he couldn’t have tampered with it.

  But she never had to break a seal; the bottles always opened easy. This one too. She drank a mouthful of water and it tasted fine, but there was never anything wrong with the taste. She replaced the cap and put the bottle aside, though she was still thirsty. She wanted to be awake if Luke returned.

  She sat in the dark with the wall at her back and thought about the postcard. She wondered if he would really send it. To make it convincing, he would have to mail it from New York City; otherwise the postmark would be wrong.

  She had never told him she was headed to New York, but he had her map with the route traced out. He wasn’t stupid—that was true. He was shrewd. He figured things out. He knew her plan wasn’t just to visit New York, because she had brought things along that a mere visitor wouldn’t bring: her birth certificate, her Social Security card. So he knew that she had left home.

  He knew about her mother too. His first threat had been a general one: to go to her address and kill whoever he found there. Since then, he had learned more: that Jana had been living with her mother, and that her mother would expect to hear from her. Hence the postcards.

  When Luke first mentioned her mother, Jana assumed he had done some research. It would’ve been easy: there was a listing for Lydia Fletcher in the Geneva phone book with an address that matched the one on Jana’s driver’s license. But she learned that Luke had a different source of information.

  “You told me about her,” he said.

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Sure you did, the other night.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “Different things. Like how she wanted you to go to law school.”

  “I never told you that.”

  “Well, you were a little out of it,” he said.

  “‘Out of it’?”

  “You know, sleepy.”

  “Are you saying I talk in my sleep?”

  “Not exactly. It happens when you’re awake, but not all the way awake. Eli thinks you’re having blackouts.”

  “Eli? Has it happened with him too?”

  “Once or twice. He doesn’t usually stick around for pillow talk. Not the way I do.”

  The idea of pillow talk with Luke Daw—or Eli—made Jana feel like she might throw up. She bowed her head, hoping the nausea would pass.

  Luke misinterpreted the gesture. “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s not your fault. It has to be from the pills.”

  It was the first time he had acknowledged that they were drugging her. He wouldn’t tell her any more—not about the pills or about what she might have said to him. The news that she was having blackouts devastated her, and yet it wasn’t really news. The one thing she had known all along was that she couldn’t remember everything that happened to her.

  There were bruises on her body that she couldn’t account for. There were times when she woke up alone in her prison, but knew that someone had been with her, someone had been inside her, and she didn’t know who—didn’t know which of them to blame, which to hate: Luke or Eli.

  It was one more level of violation: not knowing.

  • • •

  Jana ran her fingers along the seam where the floor met the wall. She panicked when she didn’t feel the thing she expected to feel, but a little farther on she found it: the quarter her mother had given her.

  They had taken everything from her pockets when they brought her here, except for this one thing. Somehow they missed it. That first night, when they left her alone, she held on to it like a talisman and thought about her mother.

  She never put it back in her pocket. She left it lying on the floor instead, out of the way, in the closest thing she had to a hiding place. Which turned out to be wise. Because not long after, Luke Daw took away the jeans she’d been wearing when they abducted her. He decided he liked her better in skirts. It made things easier for him.

  Now, in the dark, Jana closed her hand around the coin. The one thing she had that they didn’t know about.

  She stood up and paced the room, as far as the chain would let her go. Not very far. The chain was wrapped around her ankle and secured with a heavy padlock that passed through two of the links. It was tight—not tight enough to cut off her circulation, but tight enough that she couldn’t slip free. She had tried. She would have to find a way to break the lock, or the chain itself. Or she could go at it another way, from the other end.

  The chain passed through the wall, between two boards. It had to be anchored to something on the other side. So she needed to break through the wall. Simple.

  The place where the chain went through was low on the wall. Jana sat down in front of it and explored the surface with her fingertips. One board above the chain, one below. She focused on the one above. Found the two screws that secured it to the studs. Phillips-head screws. She needed a screwdriver. She had a quarter.

  She fitted the quarter edgewise into the head of the screw. It wasn’t a bad fit. It was a tantalizingly good fit, as a matter of fact. She tried turning it. Lefty loosey. She wasn’t surprised when the screw didn’t turn. She had tried it before.

  There were hundreds of boards in the room, hundreds of screws. Luke Daw would have used a power tool to drive them all, a cordless screwdriver with a Phillips-head bit. What chance did Jana have with a quarter?

  But she didn’t need to take out every screw. She only needed two of them. Then she could remove one board and find out what was behind it. Maybe the chain was attached to a steel plate, and the plate was screwed to a wooden post back there. That would be, what, another four screws? Six screws, grand total. Could she remove that many, with a quarter?

  One thing at a time. She fitted the quarter into the screwhead again, holding it with two thumbs and two fingers. When she turned it, the quarter slipped free. A good fit, but not good enough. The quarter had a rounded edge. A Phillips-head screwdriver came to a point.

  Jana gathered the chain in her lap, singled out one of the links with her left hand. She used her right hand to rub the quarter against the link. The quarter was never going to be a screwdriver, but maybe she could put a point on it. It might take days, weeks, but what else did she have to do with her time?

  Maybe it wouldn’t work; maybe Luke would find the quarter. Maybe Jana would never be able to work the chain free of its anchor. Even if she did, she would still be in a prison. She didn’t know how to get through the locked door. But she knew Luke Daw would keep coming through it. He would come to feed her and talk to her and use her. And if she could get the chain free, she would have surprise on her side, and a weapon.

  One day she might wrap the chain around Luke Daw’s neck.

  30

  Late
Tuesday afternoon. The newspeople had come to the realization that Agnes Lanik wasn’t likely to give them the tearful interview they wanted. They’d packed up and moved on. In their wake came a succession of elderly ladies, decked out in formal clothes and topped with hats or head scarves, who knocked on Agnes’s door to drop off casseroles and offer their condolences for the death of her grandson.

  I thought about sending Agnes flowers. Went as far as dialing a florist, but it seemed too impersonal. I got in the truck instead and drove to a garden center. Picked out a pot of begonias and another of impatiens. I brought them back and left them on her patio. I figured she could plant them in her garden if she wanted.

  In the evening I set up my computer on Jana’s desk. I had a business and I’d been neglecting it: canceling jobs, putting things off. I needed to get back to work. I started putting together a list of clients I needed to call, appointments I needed to reschedule.

  At eleven o’clock I turned on the television and watched the opening of the local news—a long segment on Simon Lanik that included footage from a police press conference. Frank Moretti was there, but he stayed in the background. The chief of police took center stage—white-haired, stout, pleasant. He looked like someone’s uncle.

  A reporter asked him about the connection between Lanik and Jana Fletcher. The police had been seeking Lanik for questioning. Would it be fair to say that he had been their main suspect in Jana’s murder? In light of his death, had the department changed its thinking? Was it possible that Jana’s killer was still at large?

  The police chief danced around the questions. The investigation of Jana’s murder was ongoing. He couldn’t comment on who was or wasn’t a suspect. The department was still pursuing every possible avenue to uncover the identity of her killer. As for the Lanik investigation, it was in its very early stages. The chief was unwilling to prejudge the outcome. It remained to be seen whether, or in what way, the two cases might be connected. It might turn out that Lanik’s death was unrelated to Jana’s. There had been a series of assaults and property crimes in Cypress Park over the years. Lanik’s murder might be part of that pattern.