The Last Dead Girl Read online

  The doe got her four legs underneath her and turned a tangled circle, her hooves clipping out a drunken rhythm on the wet black of the road. She skittered toward the broken yellow centerline and lifted her nose up into the rain, then bounded across with her white tail held high.

  I watched her disappear into the woods on the other side. Jana took a few steps into the road, as if she wanted to follow. She stood at the yellow line in the rain until I went to bring her back. When I touched her shoulder she spun around. Her eyes bright.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Did you see? Beautiful.”

  • • •

  I used my cell phone to call a tow truck for her car, waited with her until it came, offered to drive her home. She kept very still in the seat beside me, but I could tell she was wide-awake; I could feel a keyed-up energy coming from her. I drove under the limit, glancing at her from time to time, but she kept her focus on the road ahead.

  “What were you doing out tonight?” I asked.

  A gentle shake of her head. “Don’t ruin it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We just witnessed a miracle. We don’t want to muck it up with a lot of talk.”

  “A miracle?”

  “What else would you call a resurrected deer?”

  I thought “resurrected” might be too strong a word, but then again I’d been sure the animal was dead. So let her have that one.

  “I just wondered where you were coming from, where you were going.”

  She grinned without looking my way. “That’s a little better. Maybe we should both take this time to think about where we’re coming from and where we’re going.”

  I laughed, a quiet laugh that trailed off into silence. Jana rode at ease beside me with her handbag in her lap, along with a green file folder thick with papers—two items she had retrieved from her car. As we cruised along I looked over once more at her profile. Her features—long nose, high cheekbones—hinted at something foreign and exotic. Which made the red mark on her cheek more of an affront. I had asked her about it once and wanted to ask again, but maybe it was best to let it drop.

  Still, I had questions. “I’m curious about what’s in that folder,” I said.

  She graced me with a sidelong look. “Now you’re just being nosy.”

  Her house was tucked away on a cul-de-sac. We reached it near midnight. A sprawling oak tree grew by the driveway and sent out a long, low branch to brush the front window. I pulled in under the tree and she reached over to turn off the ignition.

  “You’re soaking,” she said. “Come in and I’ll put your clothes in the dryer.”

  She went inside without waiting for an answer. I followed. She draped my nylon jacket over a chair and left me in the kitchen. Came back with a big white towel. She held it up and said, “Come here,” and I leaned forward so she could work it over my wet hair. She did the same for her own hair, dropped the towel on the floor, and started unbuttoning my shirt.

  “I lied,” she said softly, looking up into my eyes. “I don’t have a dryer.”

  • • •

  That was three nights ago. Now through the screen door I watched her standing half naked in the moonlight, my shirt down around her waist. Suddenly she pulled it up and clutched it tight around her. She looked to her right, took a few steps in that direction, came back. She stood looking out toward the woods, her back to me still, and I opened the screen door and went out.

  4

  Jana heard the door and whirled around. A gasp of breath, hand over her heart, until she realized it was only David. He crossed the patio and came out into the grass, wearing nothing but his skin and his boxers. Worry lined his brow.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” she said. “Just a feeling I had. Like someone was watching me.”

  He took a few steps toward the woods. “Did you see someone?”

  “No. I was just being paranoid. I’m sure there’s no one there.”

  He came back to her and the lines on his brow went away. He took hold of the front of the shirt and pulled her close.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “I was watching you.”

  She had a quick flash of a thought: that it wasn’t David she’d felt watching her, that it wasn’t anyone she would want to meet. She pushed the thought aside and made herself smile.

  “Were you now?” she said.

  His hands made their way under the shirt and he bent to kiss her. She thought again of laying him down on the grass, but what she wanted was to go back inside.

  He must have had the same idea. She felt his hands trail along her sides and he ducked down and lifted her up, tossing her onto his shoulder. She kicked her legs and laughed, and he spun her around and carried her into the house.

  • • •

  Someone was watching.

  Call him K if you like. That’s how he thought of himself at times like this. There were things he wouldn’t normally do, like slinking through the woods at night and spying on young lovers. Not his style. But K was different; he had no such inhibitions. Truth be told, K liked that sort of thing.

  K had been watching the house for almost two hours. At one point he had crept right up to the bedroom window. Even in the darkness he could see the two of them sleeping in there, and he could tell they were naked under the sheets. He wished he had gotten there sooner, because he felt sure they’d been fucking. He would have liked to see them fuck.

  After a few minutes at the window, he crept back to the edge of the woods. He found a spot a dozen feet in, where he could sit on a fallen tree trunk and still have a view of the house. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and meditated. That was as close as he could come to a word for it. Meditation was when you sat without moving and tried not to think about anything. Which was a fair description, except that he did move, just a little. He had a wooden stick like you’d find in a popsicle, and he held it in his right hand and twirled it around with his fingers. Call it a nervous tick.

  And he was thinking. He couldn’t help it. He was thinking about the girl and about what he had to do to her.

  And then she came out. As if his thought had drawn her. She came out wearing only a shirt and stood looking at the moon.

  K got up from the tree trunk and walked closer to the edge of the woods and thought that this could only be better if she had come out wearing nothing at all. And then it happened, as if his thought had made it happen. The girl opened the shirt, let it fall back off her shoulders, and he could see everything he wanted to see. Her breasts, surprisingly full for a girl her size. The soft plane of her stomach. A little patch of hair, trimmed in the shape of a triangle.

  He could take her now, he thought. Sprint across the grass and be on her before she understood what was happening. The very idea gave him an erection hard as steel.

  A reckless idea, out of control, impulsive. K was not impulsive. The girl wrapped the shirt around her again, and K believed that this was somehow his doing too. He was being punished for his reckless thoughts.

  Then the boyfriend came out, bare-chested, wearing boxers. Tarzan in a loincloth. He could be trouble, K thought. It would be foolish to do anything while he was around.

  The boyfriend picked the girl up, surprised her. She let out a squeal of a laugh that carried across the lawn. K watched them retreat into the house. He stayed where he was.

  Give them some time, he thought. Then try the bedroom window again. He might see something good.

  But he had to be cautious. He couldn’t hope to finish the girl tonight. He’d have to wait. And plan. The important thing was not to get caught.

  If you did something and didn’t get caught, it was just the same as if it never happened.

  5

  The next morning I made a bad mistake.

  Jana was gone by the time I got up—off to one of her
classes. She’d left a key and a note asking me to lock the door when I left. I showered and dressed in the clothes I’d worn the night before. The shirt she’d worn. I helped myself to a glass of orange juice from her fridge. Took it out onto the patio in back.

  The morning sun had dried the grass, but there was more rain coming. As I walked onto the lawn, I heard the sound of a rake biting into the earth. Jana’s landlady was working next door, digging up last year’s flower bed, getting ready to plant something new.

  The woman was thin, stooped over, ancient. She wore a scarf to cover her hair and a ragged dress that might have come off the back of a medieval peasant. I’d seen her before but she never said a word to me, and she didn’t now, even when I wished her good morning. She shot me a dark glance from under her brow.

  I turned away from her and looked off at the woods. Thought about the night before—Jana’s feeling that she was being watched. She made light of it after, but there’d been a moment when she seemed genuinely afraid. I had a job scheduled for the afternoon, a home inspection, but for now I was free. I had time for a walk in the woods.

  I could have set out straight across the lawn. I’m not sure why I didn’t, except that I was feeling the weight of the landlady’s disapproval. I was a stranger here, unwelcome. For all I knew, she owned those woods. I had no business traipsing through them.

  I polished off the orange juice, took the glass inside, and went out again, this time through the front door, locking up behind me. My truck was parked beneath the oak. I skirted around it, walked east down Jana’s little street until I came to a bigger one called Clinton Drive. Three blocks south on Clinton there was a run-down playground: basketball hoops without nets, a baseball field without bases. A sign by the street read CYPRESS PARK.

  A few young kids were playing on a rusty swing set. Their mothers talked nearby. I cut across the ball field to the edge of the woods and walked along until I found the beginning of a trail. It wound aimlessly through a floor of wet leaves left over from the fall. Every now and then I saw a candy wrapper or a crushed can—the flotsam left behind by careless teenagers.

  The ground began to rise and the trail smoothed out, heading west and north. It came to a ravine with a sharp drop, twenty feet down. The only way across was a narrow footbridge that might have had a railing once but didn’t have one now. I crossed it slowly, listening to every pop and creak of the wooden planks.

  After the bridge I left the trail and came to the northern border of the woods. I found a spot that overlooked the lawn behind Jana’s apartment and saw a bent figure toiling with a rake—the landlady working in her garden. I kept within the cover of the trees so she wouldn’t see me. A dozen feet in from the wood’s edge I found a fallen trunk with the bark peeling off, a perfect place for someone to sit and watch Jana in the moonlight.

  I would have given a lot for a bare patch of mud, a clear set of footprints. But the ground here was covered with the same carpet of leaves, not quite dried by the sun. If there were prints, they were indistinct. Yet there was one plain sign that someone had been here: a broken popsicle stick lying on the ground by the tree trunk. No way to tell how long it had been there or who had left it. Maybe a watcher in the night, or maybe one of the same teenagers who had been careless with soda cans and candy wrappers.

  I walked back through the woods the way I’d come. Crossed the bridge. Followed the trail to Cypress Park. The kids had abandoned the swings and were taking turns on a slide. Their mothers supervised. I left the woods and marched through the ball field. None of them paid me any mind. On Clinton Drive a chipmunk scrambled along the top of a hedge, froze when it saw me, watched me go by. When I got back to Jana’s duplex I saw a guy in a long tan coat sitting on her landlady’s stoop, smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as I walked up the driveway, and when I approached Jana’s door he crushed out the cigarette and got up.

  “Hey, kámoš. You and me, we talk.”

  I paused with Jana’s key in the lock. “Do I know you?”

  “You don’t know me, I don’t know you. That’s what we talk about.”

  He wore a silk shirt under the coat and what looked for all the world like leather pants.

  “You’re not a tenant,” he said, wagging a finger at me. Like I’d done something naughty.

  “That’s true,” I said, “but I know the woman who lives here.”

  “You shouldn’t have a key.”

  “She let me borrow her spare.”

  “Maybe you think you live here now, huh?”

  “No. I’m visiting.”

  “You don’t live here. She pays rent for one. If there’s two, it’s more.”

  “I’m visiting.”

  “I can’t have it. She’s already behind.”

  He had acne scars and greased-back hair, and he spoke with an accent but it seemed to come and go. I thought it might be Eastern European. Czech or Polish.

  “You got a key,” he said. “Maybe you pay what she owes.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  He smiled and his teeth were definitely Eastern European. “I’m the landlord, kámoš.”

  I shook my head. “The landlord’s a nice old lady. Lives next door.”

  “That’s my grandma. She owns the house, I collect the rent.”

  He reached into the pocket of his coat and handed me a grubby business card: LANIK RENTALS. SIMON LANIK, LEASING AGENT.

  “That’s me,” he said. “You pay or no?”

  “Why should I believe you? Anyone can have a card printed.”

  “Oh, you can believe me, kámoš.” He looked over at the other stoop. The old woman was there now, standing with the door half open. “Hey, Nana,” he said to her. “This one’s real slick.”

  She put her head down and waved a withered hand in the air, as if she was disgusted with the both of us.

  Simon Lanik turned back to me. “You got a key. Good for you. You won’t be here long, and the girl won’t either. Unless somebody pays.”

  “How much does Jana owe you?” I asked.

  He hesitated just a little, as if he might be padding out the number.

  “Three fifty,” he said.

  “I don’t have that much.”

  “What you got, kámoš?”

  I brought my wallet out. “Four twenties,” I said. “Eighty bucks.”

  “That’s a start,” he said, reaching for the bills.

  I held them back. Nodded in the direction of the old woman. “I’ll give them to her,” I said, “and you’ll write me a receipt.”

  He laughed. “Whatever you want, Slick.”

  • • •

  I got my receipt and Simon Lanik went away. I went inside. I poured myself a bowl of cereal and thought about whether Lanik might have been responsible for Jana’s bruise. I decided he made a poor candidate. I could see him slapping a woman if she fell behind on the rent, but he had written the receipt with his left hand, scribbled it in pencil on the back of his business card. Jana’s bruise was on the left side of her face. I thought she must have been hit by someone right-handed.

  I took my cereal into the living room and sat at her desk. She had an address book with butterflies on the cover. Names and numbers committed to paper, because she didn’t own a cell phone. The person who hit her was probably a man, because men hit women. Probably someone she knew, so his name could be in the book. I paged through it. There were about thirty entries. None of the names jumped out at me, except one. Roger Tolliver. Jana had mentioned him. He was one of her law professors, a rising star on the faculty.

  I dragged a legal pad across the blotter, picked up a pen, and copied down his name and number. I didn’t know what I would do with it. Call him up and ask him if he hit her in the face? Ask him if he hid out in the woods last night, with a popsicle?

  I could figure it out later. For now, I copied more na
mes—every man’s name I could find in the book. Then I remembered the night I met Jana; I thought of it as the Night of the Doe. She had a file with her that night, a green folder thick with papers.

  I’m curious about what’s in there, I’d said.

  Now you’re just being nosy.

  I hadn’t seen the folder since. But the desk had a file drawer. I opened it and found it stuffed with folders. None of them labeled, but only one of them thick enough to be the one I was looking for. I started to take it out, and that’s when I made the bad mistake.

  I stopped.

  Because Jana Fletcher had trusted me to be alone in her apartment. She had given me a key. And she had made it plain enough that she didn’t want to tell me about what happened to her face, or about the contents of this folder.

  So I closed the drawer.

  I kept the names I’d copied. Tore the page from the pad, folded it, and put it in my pocket. But I didn’t do anything with it—not until after she died.

  • • •

  That was Thursday morning, the twenty-fourth of April. In the days that followed I learned some important things about Jana Fletcher.

  I learned that she’d been born on the night of the spring equinox, which made her an Aries, though she didn’t believe in astrology. I learned that she had broken her arm as a kid—a fall from a rope swing—and that she had once stepped on a rattlesnake, but had been saved by a pair of knee-high leather boots.

  I learned that she played tennis, but not well; that she had taken ballet classes; that she had played the part of Rosalind in her high school’s production of As You Like It.

  I learned that she sang with perfect pitch and that her favorite songwriters were Sheryl Crow and Dar Williams.

  I learned that she loved dogs—handsome, purebred dogs and mutts from the pound and little yappy excitable dogs with black button eyes and too much fur. She didn’t have one of her own, but she couldn’t see one on the street without trying to stop and pet it.