The Last Dead Girl Page 33

  He had drawn all the curtains in the room, but the wind still rattled the glass behind them. Each new gust made Megan turn her head. Neil put a palm on her ankle to comfort her.

  By the time he poured her a second glass, she seemed more at ease. She settled in. Rested her feet on his lap.

  “Have you been eating popsicles?” she asked.

  A bizarre question. He shook his head.

  “I thought maybe things were melting in your freezer,” she said. “So you figured you’d better eat them.”

  Bizarre. Until he looked down and saw a popsicle stick in his hand, spinning between his fingers like a baton. He hadn’t been aware of it.

  “It’s not from a popsicle,” he said. “I bought a box of them at a craft store.”

  “Why?”

  “I like the way they feel.” He spun the thing faster. “It’s a habit I picked up a couple years ago.”

  “I never saw you do it.”

  “I never did it while you were around.”

  Megan smiled. “What else have you been keeping from me?”

  “Nothing I want to tell you about.”

  “Neil with his secrets,” she said indulgently. “What happened to your hand?”

  He looked down at the red circle. The cigarette burn.

  “I had an accident,” he said. “I was frying bacon and the grease splattered.”

  “Neil the bachelor,” she said. “You were never much for cooking.” She reached to swipe a finger over the surface of the coffee table. It came away dusty. “Never much for housekeeping either. What would I find if I went into the kitchen? Probably crumbs all over the counter.”

  That had always been one of her stock complaints: crumbs on the counter. There were others: wet towels on the floor, laundry thrown in the wrong basket, unwashed windows, unraked leaves, mail left unsorted, dishwasher left unrun, thermostat set too high, thermostat set too low. It was a long list.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” he said.

  She sipped her wine. “All right. You’ve got a bow and arrow in your living room. Are you taking up archery?”

  “They used to belong to Gary,” he said. “I dug them out of the attic.”

  He watched her frown at the mention of Gary’s name. She had sharp features and the frown didn’t suit her. It made her look like a fairy-tale witch.

  “I don’t think I ever told you about the bow,” Neil said. “It has sentimental value. Gary shot me with it once.”

  He got the reaction he wanted: shock and curiosity. The story had been on his mind. He had told it to David Malone. Now he told it to Megan. A story about fifteen-year-old Gary and ten-year-old Neil.

  Gary wants a bow, but their parents won’t let him have one. He saves up and buys one anyway. He tries it out on a summer day when he and Neil are home alone. He shoots at trees in the backyard. But trees are boring. So he shoots at a dove.

  The arrow finds its target. Gary and Neil watch the bird die.

  If their mom and dad find out, Gary will be in trouble. So Neil threatens to tell them. He’s ten. That’s what little brothers do.

  Gary threatens him back. Like older brothers do. But he goes further than other brothers might. He fits an arrow to his bowstring and aims it at Neil.

  And his fingers slip.

  An accident.

  That was one version of the story. The one Neil had told David Malone. But it wasn’t the truth.

  Now, in the candlelight, he told Megan the truth.

  “Gary pulled the string back and let it loose. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. I saw the arrow coming toward me. I thought I was dead. But it passed over my shoulder. It grazed my neck as it went by.”

  Megan gasped.

  “I guess that’s what you’d call it—a graze,” Neil said. “What it really did was slice open the side of my neck. If it had gone an inch or so to the right, I think it would’ve hit my carotid artery.”

  “Oh my god,” said Megan. “What did you do?”

  “I backed away from him, terrified. I tripped over my own feet and landed on my back in the grass. My hand went to my neck and felt the blood. I looked at my palm and it was shiny red. I screamed.”

  Gary had laid down the bow. A peculiar detail, one that Neil remembered after all these years. Gary didn’t drop the bow or throw it aside. He knelt in the grass beside Neil and set the bow carefully on the ground.

  “He looked down at me,” Neil said to Megan. “I’d put my palm over the wound again. But he tugged my hand aside. He was curious. He wanted to see.”

  Neil remembered the look of fascination in Gary’s eyes. He remembered screaming again. And Gary raising a finger to his lips—the kind of gesture you would use if you were asking someone to keep a secret. When Neil screamed the third time, Gary put a hand over his mouth—in the same careful way that he had laid the bow on the ground. The pressure was light at first, just enough to quiet him. But Neil struggled, and something changed. Whatever emotion had been in Gary’s eyes faded out of them. And Gary’s hand pushed down harder.

  “It was a neighbor who saved me,” Neil told Megan. “An old spinster we never liked, because she always complained when we rode our bikes across her lawn. My screaming drew her out of her house. We heard her coming, yelling, ‘What have you boys done now?’ and Gary took his hand away from my mouth, and by the time she came around the hedge to our backyard he had me sitting up.”

  The neighbor had driven them both to the emergency room. Their parents showed up there an hour later. Gary told them a story—the same one he’d already told the neighbor and the ER doctors: He’d been shooting arrows at a tree and Neil had run by out of nowhere. It happened so fast he couldn’t help it, and he was sorry. He laid it on thick, how sorry he was. He cried real tears. Their father got mad, but he didn’t want to make a scene in the ER. Their mother cried along with Gary.

  Neil never contradicted Gary’s story. He was in shock, and the whole thing seemed unreal anyway, and in the back of his mind he was afraid—afraid of what Gary might do to him if he told the truth, and afraid that his parents might not believe him.

  That September when he returned to school he had a scar. Whenever someone asked about it, he lied: He’d been running through the woods and a low-hanging branch scraped his neck. Over the years the scar faded. People rarely noticed it anymore. If they did, he told them he’d had minor surgery—a couple of moles that had to be removed.

  That was what he had told Megan, the first time she noticed the scar. Now, as he finished telling her the true story, she sat up on the love seat beside him. She slipped her fingers inside the collar of his shirt and touched his neck.

  “Neil, that’s awful,” she said. “You could have died.”

  Neil stared at the candles on the coffee table. “I guess I was lucky.”

  “You can say it was luck. I think maybe someone was watching over you.”

  The suggestion shouldn’t have bothered him. He knew she was sincere. But he looked up from the candles and said, “Who was watching? God?”

  Megan moved her hand away from his neck. “Or angels,” she said.

  “That’s just another way of saying God. I don’t remember God being there that day. He sure wasn’t there for the dove. If he wanted to protect me, the arrow never should’ve touched me.”

  Neil took a drink of his wine, but it tasted bitter. He put the glass aside. “There’s no God,” he said. “And no justice as far as I can see. No one gets rewarded for being good or punished for being bad. That’s the one thing I’m sure of. My own brother almost killed me when I was ten. And what for? Because I said I would tattle on him. Let’s be serious. No one was watching over me. Nothing happened to Gary. He didn’t get punished—”

  “He’s in prison now.”

  Neil shook his head impatiently. “He’s in prison fo
r killing Cathy. Something he didn’t even do.”

  “I don’t know how you’re so sure,” Megan said. “I never understood it. And now—after what I’ve heard tonight—I understand it even less.”

  “I’m sure,” Neil said. “But let’s let it go. I don’t want to argue.”

  Megan touched his shoulder. “I don’t either,” she said. “But I’m worried about you. I don’t like you being on your own. Not if this is what you get up to—going through Gary’s things, dredging up bad memories. I think you should come home. We’ll both be better off. I miss you.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” he said.

  “We’ll make it work. We won’t talk about Gary. We’ll agree to disagree. Everything else is trivia.”

  Neil closed the fingers of his right hand around the popsicle stick. Squeezed it. Felt the pain of the cigarette burn.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “Trivia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to spend my time arguing about little things.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Arguing about whose turn it is to dust, or how long to let the grass grow. Or about crumbs on the counter.”

  Megan smiled. “We may need to negotiate about the crumbs.”

  Neil flexed his fingers and closed them again around the stick. The pain of the burn seared into him. He thought about what it would be like to go back to her. Part of him was tempted. The weak part, the part he didn’t like.

  “It won’t work,” he said.

  She watched him over the rim of her wineglass. “It will if you try,” she said. “If both of us try. Come home.”

  “It’s no good.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t explain it,” he said. “I could show you.”

  “Show me, then.”

  “You’ll think I’m weird.”

  Megan nudged him playfully. “Oh, Neil. I already think you’re weird.”

  He slipped the popsicle stick into his shirt pocket and stood.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  He took her wineglass and set it on the table, then helped her to her feet. He led her to the wall with the mirror. “Stand over here,” he said.

  He stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, guiding her. She watched him in the mirror, amused.

  He released her and stepped back.

  “Now take the mirror down,” he said.

  Puzzlement. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Put it on the floor.”

  She did. “What happened here?” she said. “Why is there a K on the wall?”

  “Don’t turn around,” he told her. “And don’t ask questions. Not yet.”

  Rain fell steadily against the windows. He picked up the bow from the sofa. Nocked the arrow to the string and pulled it back.

  “Now you can turn around.”

  She turned. Confusion. Anger. “Neil, what are you doing? That’s not funny.”

  He let the arrow fly. It whistled through the distance between them and pierced her heart.

  Megan Pruett crumpled to her knees. She fell forward. Caught herself on one arm. Neil laid down the bow and went to her. He eased her over onto her back.

  Blood on her blouse, but not as much as he expected. The arrow shivered with her heartbeat. She licked her lips. Whispered his name.

  “Don’t try to talk,” he said.

  He was sure she wouldn’t last, but she brought her right hand up and wrapped her fingers around the shaft of the arrow. She tried to draw it out. He put his hand over hers and held it in place.

  The corner of her mouth trembled. She whispered, “Why?”

  He could feel her chest struggling to rise, her lungs trying to fill themselves with air.

  “Megan,” he said. “There’s not just one reason.”

  She mustered all her strength and whispered again: “Why?”

  Her eyelids fluttered. He leaned close so she could hear him.

  “I’ve wasted too much time with you already,” he said. “I’m not going to listen to you whine about crumbs for the rest of my life.”

  43

  Interlude:

  Spring and Summer 1996

  When he got tangled up with Luke Daw, Neil Pruett was thirty-eight years old. He had a stable job, an affordable mortgage, a passable wife. He drank moderately, smoked marijuana on weekends, and kept a collection of Playboy magazines in an old file cabinet in his basement.

  His parents were dead: his father from a heart attack, his mother from leukemia. His brother, Gary, had delivered eulogies at both funerals, and the eulogies had reduced Neil to tears. Gary’s eloquence and kindness on both occasions convinced Neil of two things: that Gary had genuinely loved their parents and that he might genuinely love Neil as well.

  His memory of what Gary had done on that summer day in the backyard when they were kids kept him from being certain on the second point.

  Neil didn’t believe that any one thing had made him the way he was. But he knew that the incident with the bow and arrow had left him with the sense that people were unfathomable and the world was treacherous and unpredictable. It was a sense that stayed with him all his life. Which was probably why he ended up as something of an underachiever, teaching basic physics and chemistry to bored high-school students, even though he had once dreamed of working in a lab or an observatory, discovering new planets or new kinds of subatomic particles.

  As Neil grew older, he came to believe more and more that the universe was a hollow place, that there was no God, no morality. If the world had a secret, it was that you could do whatever you wanted, as long as you were smart enough to get away with it. Knowing the secret set you apart from other people. Gary knew it, or so Neil believed. Neil knew it himself, though he had never really acted on it. Not until he got involved with Luke Daw.

  On a Saturday afternoon in March 1996, Neil told Megan he was running out to buy some sealant to patch a crack in the concrete of their patio. He drove instead to an apartment building in south Rome and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The woman who met him at the door of apartment 3B was a part-time substitute teacher named Sheila Cotton.

  She invited him in and they sat together on a long red leather couch. He passed her some folded bills and she brought a shoe box out from under the couch and gave him a baggie that held an eighth of an ounce of pot.

  She said what she always said when he came around: “I could sell you more.”

  He answered the way he always answered: “If I had more, I’d smoke more.”

  He borrowed a rolling paper, as he always did, and rolled a joint on the lid of the shoe box. They lounged on the couch, their thighs touching, and passed the joint back and forth. Sometimes they would talk. Never about anything serious. This time she had music playing: Blues Traveler.

  Neil knew things about Sheila Cotton. He knew she’d been married and divorced twice even though she wasn’t yet thirty. He knew if he told a joke she would laugh—a throaty laugh like a barfly’s.

  He knew the feeling of her thigh, because they always sat like this, close together. It was the reason he bought so little at any one time, so he could justify coming back more often.

  She had thick thighs, not like Megan’s. Megan was slim and angular, but Sheila had a lush, rounded body, an hourglass figure. She tended to wear tight sweaters and tight jeans. Neil would be able to picture her, even after he left. He would hold an image of her in his mind, and when he got home later he would sneak down to the basement and find a Playboy with a centerfold who looked the way he imagined Sheila must look naked. And he would spend a feverish few minutes fantasizing about her.

  Sheila had just passed the joint back to Neil when they heard a rap on her door. A comic moment followed: Neil in a panic, guilty
at being caught, pinching out the joint and looking for a place to hide it; Sheila laughing as she got up, patting him on the knee, telling him to relax.

  Sheila turned down the stereo, went to the door, and let her visitor in. A young guy with messy black hair: Luke Daw. He wore a long coat and carried a padded envelope under his arm. He was chewing on a popsicle stick.

  Neil recognized him, and wished at once that he hadn’t. He’d never had Luke in class, but he knew him by reputation. One of those kids you stay away from. You wait for the day when they’ll drop out and you’ll never see them again.

  Neil could guess what was in the envelope. If he’d been asked to predict Luke Daw’s future, it would have been something like this: a small-time dealer selling to an even smaller-time dealer.

  Sheila took Luke into her bedroom and shut the door. They emerged a few minutes later, their business complete. The envelope was nowhere in sight. At the door, Luke turned his dark eyes on Neil and smiled. Brought two fingers up to his brow and flicked them away: a mock salute.

  After he had gone, Sheila returned to the couch. She used her lighter to get the joint burning again. When she tried to pass it to Neil he waved it away.

  “How well do you know that guy?” he asked her.

  “Luke? Well enough.”

  “And you’re comfortable with him?”

  “Comfortable?”

  “You trust him?”

  “As far as I need to.”

  “I’m not sure I would. Did he ask you about me?”

  She slouched beside him, looking up at the smoky air.

  “He asked if you were a friend or a customer,” she said.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you’re a friend. More than that he doesn’t need to know.”

  “You didn’t tell him my name?”

  “No.”

  “I think he recognized me.”

  “So what if he did?”

  “I don’t like having a student know about my . . . habits.”

  “He’s not a student anymore.”

  “He’s young, though. Suppose he talks to one of my students. I have to think about my reputation.”