The Last Dead Girl Page 26

  It was a lot of water if you thought about it that way. In another sense, it wasn’t much at all. Not enough to do what he wanted it to do. It was supposed to wash away a week spent living with a corpse. With flies buzzing in the dark and mice clawing at the door to get in. Jana thought it had been a week; she couldn’t be sure. They’d been drugging her more than usual. She felt sluggish even now.

  Tonight, when she struggled out of a thick sleep, she found the woman gone. She found the bright light of the lantern and Luke bearing coffee. Not instant this time, but real coffee in a takeout cup, still warm. And after the coffee—the bath.

  Luke pulled his milk crate closer to the pool.

  “Are you really worried about drowning?” he asked her.

  “I wouldn’t say worried.”

  “You shouldn’t think about it—about dying.”

  “That’s a funny thing for you to say.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re holding a gun.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “I know.”

  She wanted to ask him about the dead woman. She had tried before, the day after the woman appeared, when Luke came down with a sheet of plastic to roll the body in, with blankets to cover it up, as if that could make a difference. But Luke would tell Jana nothing—not the woman’s name or where she’d come from or how she had died.

  Still, Jana thought she knew what must have happened. An abduction gone wrong. They must have dragged the woman into the white van, at a rest stop or a gas station, the same way they had taken Jana. They must have brought her to the farm, and she must have fought back—just as Jana had. Only it had gone much further.

  “Which one of you killed her?” Jana had asked Luke.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he’d said.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “It was Eli.”

  A tossed-off answer. She didn’t believe it. As far as she could tell, the woman had been stabbed—and Luke carried a folding knife. Jana remembered it; he had used it the night they took her, to cut the cord that bound her ankles.

  She had other questions, ones she would rather not think about and didn’t dare ask: Was Luke growing tired of her? Is that why he and Eli had taken the woman with the golden hair? And if the woman had lived, what then? Would they have kept Jana around, or would she have been expendable?

  She tried to put the questions out of her mind, but she couldn’t. Because the answers were easy to guess, if you were honest. And if you followed them to their logical conclusion, they could mean only one thing: that Jana owed a debt to the woman with the golden hair. The woman had fought a battle, and she had lost, but she had done something else without knowing it: she had spared Jana’s life, at least for a while.

  Even now, as Jana watched the half-moon riding low over the trees, the woman was still in her thoughts.

  “What was her name?” she said aloud.

  No lead-in, but Luke didn’t need one. He understood.

  “You’re obsessed,” he said.

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “I could tell you,” he said. “It wouldn’t change anything.”

  “It would change one thing. I’d stop asking.”

  “Fine. Her name was Maggie.”

  “Was it really?”

  “You said you’d stop asking.”

  “I’ll stop when you tell me the truth.”

  Luke waved the revolver carelessly through the air. “Maggie, Sheila, Holly,” he said. “Call her whatever you want. A name is just a word.”

  “She was a real person. She deserves her own name.”

  He slouched on the crate. The flame of the candle made a yellow mask of his face.

  “It was Cathy,” he said. “Cathy Pruett.” He gestured with the gun. “You see? It doesn’t change anything.”

  But it did, for Jana. Cathy Pruett. It sounded right. It fit the woman with the golden hair. Cathy Pruett saved my life. Jana spoke the words in the privacy of her mind, but they made her throat tighten, made her eyes well with tears.

  Luke was watching. The corners of his mouth turned down. “Now you’re upset,” he said. “This is not what I wanted.” He tucked the gun away behind his back, picked up the big towel from the grass. “You should dry off. I’ll take you back.”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  He draped the towel over his knee. “A few more minutes. Then we have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to. You know how this works.”

  The tears rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them with wet hands and sat up in the pool. “I know,” she said. “I can see it. One day I’ll be the body in the corner. And there’ll be another woman down there, terrified. Maybe she’ll wonder what my name was.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Yes it is. That’s the future. You could at least be honest. Eli is. He told me he’s going to kill me.”

  Luke looked away, shaking his head. “He shouldn’t have.”

  “Why not? We all know that’s how it goes. I die in the end.” Jana’s wet hair clung to her face. She brushed it back angrily. “But I don’t want to die. So we need to work out a different ending.”

  It was a random idea, tossed out in a moment of frustration. Jana never expected Luke to take it seriously. In the real world, nothing would have come of it, but Luke Daw didn’t live in the real world. In the place where he lived, he wasn’t an aggressor, she wasn’t his victim. They were collaborators. We’ve never done this before, he’d said to her once. We’re all feeling our way through this thing.

  He sat in the candlelight and drew a popsicle stick from the pocket of his shirt. Started turning it over and over with his fingers.

  He said, “What happens—in this different ending?”

  It took her a long moment to process the question, and a shorter one to find an answer.

  “You let me leave here,” she said.

  “And?”

  “And that’s all. I just walk away.”

  The popsicle stick turning, like a gear in an elaborate machine.

  “You don’t go to the police?”

  “No. I never tell anyone what happened here.”

  Still water around her. The chill of the air on her skin. She waited.

  The stick turned slower, came to a stop.

  Luke said, “You’d go to the police.”

  Of course I would, Jana thought. First thing.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  “You say that now. But how can I trust you?”

  You can’t, she thought.

  “That’s the hard part,” she said. “You have to take a chance.”

  She watched a pair of lights flickering in his dark eyes—reflections of the candle flame. He touched the popsicle stick to his lower lip.

  “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t work. I couldn’t trust you.”

  He flipped the wooden stick into the grass and the light in his eyes faded. Jana’s hope left her. She had led him to the brink of something, but he had stepped back.

  “It’s not your fault,” Luke said. “It’s just the way things worked out. It might be different if we could go back and start over. Do you remember what it was like, the night we met?”

  She answered him reflexively. “I remember.”

  “We had something. A spark. We talked about meeting up in Binghamton. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when we followed you in the van, me and Eli, I told him, ‘Jana’s cool. You wait and see. She’ll stop. Dino’s Bar on Conklin Street. She’ll meet us there.’ Eli didn’t think so. But I believed. We followed you down I-81 and we came to the exits for Binghamton, and I was sure you’d get off—”

  “I almost did.”

  “I wish you had. Every
thing would’ve been different. We would’ve met up at Dino’s. And I know I told you we were playing there, the band, and that was a lie. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I would’ve said it was a mix-up. We would’ve laughed about it. And you and I would’ve hit it off. I know. We had a spark. But you didn’t stop. You kept driving. And now it’s too late.”

  There was longing in Luke’s voice. Jana almost missed it. She was thinking of last stands, of desperate measures. She wondered if she should run for the road, even though she would never make it. Or if she should try to attack Luke and wrestle his gun away. Mostly she was thinking about death and how it would find her, and whether she should wait for it or hurry it along.

  But part of her mind was listening to Luke—and that part realized he was telling her what he wanted. It was something he could never have, not in the real world. But Luke didn’t live in the real world.

  “Maybe it’s not too late,” she said. “To start over.”

  Luke looked wistful. He shook his head. “We can’t go back there.”

  “We don’t have to. I can stay here.”

  He wanted to believe they were in this thing together. She would let him believe it. She would use the time Cathy Pruett had bought her, and buy herself some more.

  “I can stay,” she said again. “But things have to change.”

  He put the towel aside and stood up. Alert. Wary. “What things?”

  Jana got to her feet as well. “First, no more Eli,” she said. “It has to be just you and me. You need to keep him away. Can you do that?”

  “I can handle Eli. What else?”

  “No more drugs,” she said. “I sleep when I want to sleep, and wake up when I want to wake up.”

  He hesitated. Then said, “All right. I guess we could try that.”

  “And I don’t want to be down there all the time in the dark. I want light. And I want to come out here, every day.”

  She saw at once that she had pushed too far. Luke set his hands on his hips. “I can’t have you out here in the day,” he said. “It’s too much of a risk.”

  “Every night then. I need to see the sky.”

  His dark eyes were on her. Searching. “How do I know you won’t try to run?”

  She could have lied, but he was shrewd. He would have seen through it.

  “You don’t,” she said. “But if I try to run, you can kill me.”

  He nodded and let his arms relax at his sides. He looked up at the stars and then at her body in the candlelight. He had one last thing to say.

  “If you get all that, what do I get in return?”

  Jana stood in the pool and smoothed her wet hair away from her forehead. She reached behind her back and unclipped her bra. Shrugged it off, cast it away.

  “I stay here,” she said. “Willingly. For as long as you want. And we can see if we still have a spark.”

  36

  Neil Pruett let me borrow his car.

  He took some convincing. We stood together on the lawn in front of his brother’s house and I explained to him that I thought Frank Moretti had a secret. If I could follow him and find out what it was, it might help me prove that he had framed Gary. It might bring us one step closer to getting Gary released from prison. The problem was that Moretti would recognize my truck. I needed something that would blend into traffic.

  Neil looked a little bewildered, but he let me have his keys. I left him the keys to the truck, thinking it would reassure him. He didn’t really know me. He might have been wondering, in the back of his mind, if he would ever see me or his car again.

  I made it to the police station in the old courthouse downtown at ten minutes after five. The fountain was running in the plaza at the bottom of the courthouse steps. I drove to the parking lot in back. Frank Moretti’s black Chevy was nowhere to be seen.

  I circled the block and thought about what to do. Moretti might have left just a few minutes ago. Then again, he might not have been here at all. He was a detective; he didn’t spend his life behind a desk or knock off at five every day. He could be out talking to a witness right now, or at a crime scene. He could be anywhere.

  I began to see the limits of my plan.

  I came to the parking lot again as a cop in a patrol car was pulling out. He gave me a steely look as he rolled by. I could find a place to wait or I could keep circling. Maybe Moretti would show up here. Maybe no one would notice that I was staking out the police station.

  I made one more trip around the block and then drove north, following the route Moretti had taken two days ago. The streets were full of commuters heading home. I left downtown behind and found Turin Road. I saw familiar markers: the Knights of Columbus Hall, the veterinary hospital, the canoe livery, the day care center where the young cop had pulled me over.

  I used the day care’s horseshoe drive to turn around. I went back half a mile and picked out a spot in the parking lot of the veterinary hospital where I could watch the road. It seemed like the best option I had. Moretti had come this way once, at about this time of day. Maybe he would come this way again.

  I turned on the radio and settled in to wait. The station that came on was NPR, a natural choice for a schoolteacher like Neil Pruett. Snooty radio, my father would have said. I listened to All Things Considered and heard about unrest in Indonesia. After that, there was a report about an economic summit in England, then a retrospective on Frank Sinatra, who had passed away earlier in the week. Then a piece on bears—hibernating bears in Alaska. They were waking up early because of a mild spring.

  Bears can sleep for almost half the year, the correspondent said, and yet their muscles don’t waste away the way ours would.

  It seemed impossible. Maybe there was a scientific explanation, but I don’t remember. I tuned out when I saw Frank Moretti drive by in his black Chevy.

  • • •

  I didn’t have to follow him far, maybe four miles. He stayed on Turin Road at first—a public park and a cemetery floating by on our left. I kept him in sight, but there was always at least one car between us.

  We came to Stokes Road and he turned west. Blue water stretched out on either side of us. A reservoir. Then houses and a church and a fire station. Then a low stone wall with evergreens growing behind it. Moretti slowed and turned onto a side road that passed through a gap in the wall. To the right of the gap stood a sign that read SUMMERBROOK MANOR.

  I didn’t follow him. I drove another half mile and then looped back. When I came again to the gap in the wall I thought I might find Moretti waiting for me, but he wasn’t there. I made the turn and followed the side road up a gentle slope past the evergreen trees. The trees gave way to a broad swath of lawn. There were buildings, but none of them looked like a manor. They were long and narrow, single-story, institutional. There were three of them, arranged like three sides of a square, with a courtyard in the middle.

  I parked at a distance from the buildings, as far away from Moretti’s car as I could. Which gave me a nice short walk to the courtyard with a breeze at my back and the air smelling of pine needles. On one side of the courtyard an old woman sat in a wheelchair with a blanket over her lap. On the other side a guy with a linebacker’s build and a shaved head leaned against a wall drinking a Coke. He wore jeans and a faded green smock that might have been the top of an orderly’s uniform.

  I gave him a friendly nod and asked, “Is this a nursing home?”

  He held the Coke can under his chin and looked me over. “That’s not what they call it,” he said. “They call it a continuing care facility.”

  “Is that anything like a nursing home?”

  “You’d have a hard time telling the difference.”

  He spoke in a soft voice, as if he didn’t want the old woman to overhear us.

  “I might want to look around,” I said. “We’re trying to find a place for my grandmother.”

&nb
sp; I waited for him to call me out on the lie, but he didn’t blink.

  “There’s a lady you can talk to. She handles intakes.”

  “I’d rather look at the grounds first on my own,” I said. “If that’s allowed.”

  He shrugged. “I won’t stop you,” he said. “But don’t wander too far.”

  I didn’t need to. I left the courtyard and made my way around the building on the west side of the square. There were picnic tables and a garden, and beyond the garden the lawn ran down to a winding stream—the brook of Summerbrook Manor. There was a paved path that led down there, wide enough to accommodate two wheelchairs, and at the bottom of the path lay a wooden platform that overlooked the stream. A place where you could sit and take in the view.

  Three people on the platform. One of them was Frank Moretti. Another was an African-American woman wearing the same pale green as the linebacker with the shaved head.

  The third was a woman in a wheelchair. Not an old woman, not what I would have expected. She had pale skin and dark brown hair. Because of the distance I couldn’t be sure of her age, but I would have guessed young. College-student young. About as young as Angela Reese.

  I watched them from the top of the path: Moretti chatting with the woman in green, then crouching beside the wheelchair to talk to the brown-haired girl. The girl had a stuffed bear, and Moretti picked it up from her lap, waggled it in the air, and made it talk—the way you would to entertain a child.

  After a while the woman in green left them and started up the path. She was on the heavy side and she took it slow. Moretti continued his business with the bear, and when that got old he rolled the girl’s wheelchair a little closer to the stream. He pointed out something in the water. He pointed to the clouds in the sky. To a hawk gliding overhead.

  When the woman in green reached the top of the path, she was breathing hard. She passed me without a word and went to sit at one of the picnic tables. I gave her a minute to herself, then walked over.