The Last Dead Girl Page 29

  “He still didn’t want to get involved. Jana wanted him to sign a statement, to testify again, this time on Pruett’s behalf. But Washburn couldn’t see the point. Gary Pruett didn’t confess, but so what? It didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty. Wasn’t the husband usually guilty? Somebody murdered Cathy Pruett. If it wasn’t Gary, then who?”

  The wind gusted outside. It pummeled the basement’s small, high windows.

  “Washburn posed that question to Jana,” I told Wendy Daw. “And he remembered her answer. I heard it from him tonight. ‘What if it was a stranger?’ she said to him. ‘It could have been anyone. What if Cathy Pruett ran into the wrong people? What if she got kidnapped by a couple of crazy farm-boys in a white van?’”

  Wendy closed her eyes and stood with her back against the television.

  “Washburn thought Jana was just offering him a wild example,” I said. “What if? But we know better, don’t we? ‘A couple of crazy farm-boys in a white van’—that’s Luke and Eli. They killed Cathy Pruett. And somehow Jana knew.”

  She knew in February—before she talked to Gary Pruett or anyone else about the case. That was the most important thing I’d learned from Poe Washburn.

  “That’s why Jana couldn’t let the Pruett case go,” I said to Wendy. “She knew Luke and Eli and what they’d done. I don’t know how she could have met them. That’s what you need to tell me.”

  Wendy’s eyes came open. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  I held up the photograph of Jana—the only weapon I had. “Stop lying to me. You recognized her the first time I showed you her picture. You knew her. You saw her—”

  Wendy shook her head. “I saw her one time. I don’t know how she knew Eli or Luke. I don’t know how they met. I only know one thing about her.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t think it’s what you want to hear.”

  “If it’s about Jana, I want to hear it. Tell me.”

  The screen of the television went blank and the lights flickered around us but stayed on. I watched Wendy Daw’s face. She looked away from me and looked back again. And then she told me the one thing she knew.

  • • •

  The rain held off for a long time. Well after nine o’clock, when I drove away from Wendy Daw’s apartment, the storm was still only wind. I watched it bend the trees as I drove along, but the windows of the truck were rolled up tight. The wind never touched me.

  The neighborhoods I passed through all had power—until I got to Jana’s street. There the lights were out. The Reed Terrace Apartments had gone dark as a void. When I walked to Jana’s door, my note was still there. Back soon. Come in. The door’s unlocked. I slipped inside as quickly as I could and shut the door behind me.

  There was light in the apartment: four candle flames burning atop the two-by-four on the mantel. Warren Finn was in the living room, sitting in Jana’s desk chair. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at something. Something not there, something far away.

  He held the Makarov pistol loosely in his right hand.

  He looked up and saw me standing in the archway of the kitchen. He had a habit of not looking people in the eye; I’d noticed it the first time I met him. His eyes found me and slid past me and found me again.

  “The power went out,” he said softly.

  “The wind must have knocked down a line,” I told him.

  “It’s getting pretty bad. Maybe I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.” The same thing I’d said to Poe Washburn.

  I picked up a kitchen chair and carried it into the living room. I put it down in front of the bedroom door, turned it around, and sat with my arms folded over the back.

  “Where’s your friend?” I asked Warren.

  He looked blank at first, then realized who I meant: the friend who had driven him here.

  “I told him he could take off. He’s got a wife and kid waiting. He wanted to get home before the worst of the weather hit.”

  “I hope he does.”

  “I’ve got a wife waiting too. It’s funny to say that. And a kid—I’ll have a kid before long.” Warren paused, trying out the idea, marveling at it. “But I’m still here.”

  I didn’t say anything. Warren was calm. Both of us were. It didn’t bother me too much that he was holding the gun. He didn’t look like he wanted to use it. He looked sad and a little lost. He wore a white dress shirt and a pair of black trousers, and they were too big for him—just as the suit he’d worn at Jana’s funeral had been too big.

  He had a fleshy face. Pink cheeks. He had a high forehead and the same long hair I remembered, tied back in a ponytail. And he had that scar: a white line running through his upper lip.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen this place,” he said, in a lost voice to go with his lost look. “I never visited Jana here. But she lived here. She sat at this desk.”

  I nodded.

  “And she died right here, didn’t she? In this room.”

  “You don’t want to think about that,” I said.

  “Show me where.”

  I pointed to the spot. It was midway between us. Nothing to see, just the hardwood floor. Bits of dried candle wax. Warren didn’t move from his chair.

  “I loved her,” he said.

  “I know.”

  The words fell flat. I didn’t have any right to say them. Warren frowned, but he didn’t overreact. He didn’t shoot me.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “I grew up next door to her. I saw her every day of my life. We walked to school together every morning. She was the most beautiful girl I knew, and I was a fat kid named Warren with a harelip. So don’t pretend you know how I loved her.”

  He had more to tell me, about how he loved her. I would have listened even if he hadn’t been holding the gun. I wanted to hear.

  “When I was a kid, I had a stutter,” he said. “It made the other kids laugh, but not Jana. I couldn’t talk to anyone, but I could talk to her. My parents spent a fortune on speech therapy, and it never did any good. But one summer Jana bought a secondhand guitar and taught herself a few chords. She had this ridiculous songbook—John Denver’s greatest hits—and we sat out on a blanket on the lawn and she made me sing every one of those songs with her. ‘You Fill Up My Senses.’ ‘Rocky Mountain High.’ ‘Sunshine on My Shoulders.’ Over and over, day after day. And somehow at the end of that summer I didn’t have a stutter anymore.”

  He paused for a moment, and the wind swelled up to fill the silence.

  “When we were fourteen she had her first boyfriend,” he said. “A football player. It didn’t amount to much. They went to a school dance, a few movies, a party at someone’s house. It was over in a month. He broke it off. It hit her hard, the way it does when you’re fourteen. It made her cry. I felt awful—and wonderful too. Because when she cried she let me put my arms around her.”

  He wanted to tell her how he felt, but he couldn’t, because if she didn’t feel the same way, it would ruin everything they had. “And what we had was a lot,” he said. “Jana had started acting in plays by then, and plays were a foreign world to me—as foreign as school dances and parties. I was too shy to ever stand on a stage. But when she had to learn a part, I was the one who helped her. We read all her scenes together.”

  When they were sixteen, Jana played Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac.

  “Do you know what it’s about?” Warren asked me.

  I said I did, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard.

  “It’s about an ugly man who’s in love with a beautiful woman. The only way he can tell her he loves her is if she can’t see him, if she thinks he’s someone else. When he’s standing under her balcony in the dark, then he can tell her. But he can never come out of that dark, because then she would see him. We read that balcony scene, Jana an
d me, when we were sixteen. I spoke those lines to her: ‘I love you beyond breath, beyond reason. Your name is like a golden bell hung in my heart; and when I think of you, I tremble, and the bell swings and rings.’”

  I watched his hand come up—the one with the gun in it. It touched his heart and then went down again.

  “But I was hiding in the dark,” he said. “I wasn’t brave enough to tell her the truth in my own voice. I never told her—not till later, after her grandmother died, when I found out she was leaving for New York City. And then I had to. It wasn’t bravery; it was desperation. I thought I might never see her again. So I told her I loved her and I wanted to go with her. But she . . . she didn’t . . .”

  His voice faded and he didn’t finish the thought. But this was a part of the story I knew. I’d heard it from Jana’s mother. Jana had gone to New York on her own, because she wanted to be an actress and she couldn’t wait any longer. She lasted in New York for three months—three months without a phone call to her mother, with nothing but a few postcards.

  “Did she ever call you from New York?” I asked Warren.

  He was staring at the hardwood floor. “No.”

  “You never got a letter or a card?”

  “No. I didn’t hear from her until she got back.”

  “Her mother told me Jana had a hard time in New York,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And when she came back, she stayed with you.”

  His chin came up. His eyes fixed on me. They didn’t wander.

  “All through the fall and winter,” he said. “All the way through the next spring.”

  “Tell me what she was like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything you remember. I need to know. When she left for New York, she drove her grandmother’s car, but when she came back—”

  “She came by bus. She had to sell the car. She called me from the bus station and I picked her up.”

  “How did she look?”

  “Exhausted. Like she’d been riding a bus for hours and hours.”

  “What did she have with her?”

  He pursed his lips, remembering.

  “She had a big duffel bag.”

  “Nothing else? No suitcases?”

  “No.”

  “But she must have taken suitcases when she left,” I said.

  Warren nodded. “She took a whole carload of stuff when she left.”

  “And came back with one bag. What happened to the rest?”

  I watched him knit his eyebrows together. Irritated. Because I was asking him about trivia.

  “She never told me,” he said. “She never wanted to talk about what happened in New York.”

  “You must’ve wondered.”

  “It was a bad experience for her. I think she fell in with some shady people. Maybe her roommates stole things from her. Maybe she met someone there and he turned out not to be what she expected. Maybe she had to get away from him, fast, and that’s why she left some things behind.”

  “Did she tell you that—that she’d met someone?”

  He seemed to hesitate, but just for a second. “No.”

  “She never mentioned anyone named Luke Daw? Or Eli Daw?”

  “No. Who are they?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “You mentioned roommates. Did she ever tell you their names, or the address of the place where she stayed?”

  “No. No address. I always imagined a place with roaches, and gang symbols painted in the hallways. And I know she waited tables, but I don’t think the restaurant was a good one. And she went on auditions, but they never led anywhere. She didn’t want to talk about any of it. I think she was ashamed.”

  The details were familiar: waiting tables and going on auditions. I’d heard them before, from Jana’s mother. Familiar and vague. I wondered what would happen if I asked Warren to name a single part that Jana had auditioned for. I had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to answer.

  I didn’t ask. I said, “When Jana came back, what did she do? How did she spend her time?”

  “She took it easy,” he said. “That’s what I wanted her to do. She spent time outdoors. She cooked. I never ate better than I did for those few months when she lived with me. And she took baths. Long, hot baths with a book, and music playing. Candles burning.”

  He turned to look at the two-by-four on the mantel. “She made that to hold the candles on the edge of the tub. Only that one’s different—”

  “I made that one,” I said. “It’s a copy. The police took the original. You’re saying she made it herself?”

  He nodded. “A couple days after she came home. It didn’t take much. I showed her how to use the drill press in my garage.”

  “Where’d the wood come from?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like it was salvaged. She might’ve brought it with her, in the duffel bag.”

  The flames glowed on the mantel, four of them in a row. Tea-light candles on a chunk of wood. But it meant something, the wood. Jana had crafted it herself. Everything’s a clue. I didn’t know what it meant. Not yet.

  Warren Finn was staring at the floor again, the Makarov pistol forgotten in his hand. I had more to ask him, and we were coming up on delicate territory. Jana’s mother had talked to me about what happened when Jana came back home, but she had only given me the bare outline. I knew that Warren had been seeing someone else at the time: Rose, the woman who was now his wife. I knew they had broken up when Jana reappeared. It wasn’t hard to understand. Warren had given up on Jana when she left Geneva. But everything changed when she came back and moved into his house.

  “I’d like to know the rest,” I said to him.

  He looked up, confused. “The rest?”

  “Jana took baths and she cooked for you and she lived with you for months. And you loved her. And you don’t want to tell me the rest. It’s private. I understand. But it might help me to know.”

  Confusion gave way to other reactions. Suspicion. A hint of anger. I watched his grip tighten on the gun.

  “How could it help you?” he said.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out who killed Jana. I think her death might have had something to do with her trip to New York City. It’s hard to explain. Look, you don’t have to answer my questions. But right now I’m making assumptions, and it would be better if I knew. So here’s what I think happened. I think when she got back she slept in a separate room at first. Maybe not for long. Then one night she wanted to sleep with you, in your bed, but she didn’t want you to touch her. And you went along with that. You would’ve gone along with anything, because you loved her. And I don’t know how long it took, but at some point she changed her mind. She wanted you to touch her, just to hold her. And finally she wanted you to do more than just hold her.”

  Warren endured my little speech with a quiet dignity, and when it ended I thought he would tell me to go to hell. But he let his grip loosen on the pistol and said quietly, “That’s all true.”

  “She stayed with you,” I said, “through the fall and the winter and the spring. And then she ended it. It must have been hard for you, at the ending. Hard for her too. She felt guilty. It wasn’t fair, the way she used you.”

  I could see from his reaction that I’d come close to the mark. He held himself still, reliving a memory of old pain.

  “Did she tell you that?” he asked.

  “No. Jana never said a word to me about her time in New York, or what happened after. She kept secrets. I’ve been a little slow to figure that out. She kept secrets, and she lied.”

  The idea offended him. “What did she lie about?”

  “I’ll get to that. But you need to tell me one more thing. You said she never talked about the people she met in New York. But you thought she had a boyfriend there.”

&nb
sp; “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it. ‘Maybe she met someone there and he turned out not to be what she expected.’ What made you say that?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  The wind ran wild outside, making the oak tree claw at the window. We listened to it for a while, and Warren ran his thumb along the barrel of the Makarov. Eventually he sighed and said, “The week after Jana came home, she asked me to drive her to Syracuse. She had an appointment. It was tricky for me to get time off work, so I suggested that she ask her mom. It’s hard to describe her reaction. She looked like she hated me or she wanted to cry, or both. All she said was, ‘She can’t know. It has to be you.’ So I drove her to Syracuse. To a clinic. And I waited for her, and I drove her home. And we never talked about the procedure—the one her mother couldn’t know about.”

  He turned the pistol over and ran his thumb along the other side. “She never told me her reasons, or who the father was. But I assumed it was someone she met in New York.”

  I got up and walked to the fireplace. The wooden cube was on the mantel, intact except for the one popsicle stick that had fallen away. I picked up the stray stick and bent it until it broke.

  Warren stood up too. “Do you know who he was—the father?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you think he’s important.”

  “I don’t know what’s important.”

  Warren narrowed his eyes. “Don’t do that. I’ve told you everything you wanted. You’ve given me nothing. You said Jana lied. Start with that.”

  I dropped the two halves of the stick onto the mantel.

  “All right,” I said. “But put the gun down. You don’t need it.”

  He looked down at his hand as if he’d forgotten what he was holding.

  “Never mind about the gun.”

  “Put it down,” I said. “I understand the appeal of the thing. You’re a guy with a wife, and a kid on the way. They should be your top priority. But you can’t stop thinking about a girl who died, a girl you loved. Some people would say that makes you a bad person. But you and I know that’s not true. So you don’t need the gun. You don’t deserve to be punished.”