The Last Dead Girl Read online

  I learned that her favorite color was indigo, mainly because she liked the word. I learned that her favorite restaurant was a place called The Falcon on Madison Street near the university, and that she liked to sit in a particular booth in the back—the one with a canoe hanging over it, suspended by wires from the ceiling.

  I learned that she lit candles whenever she came home, that she could cook without following a recipe, and that she noticed the smallest of details—like the fact that I had leafed through her address book and copied some of the names on a page from her legal pad.

  I found that out a few days later. Sunday night. Cool rain outside, but Jana and I were in her living room, with a fire burning in the fireplace. We had started out on our feet with our clothes on and by degrees wound up naked on the floor. At some point we’d had the good sense to put down blankets and pillows so we wouldn’t have to lie on the bare wood.

  “I know what you did,” she said.

  She was beside me with her head resting in the crook of my arm, the flat of her palm over my heart, her right leg wrapped around mine. I wondered what she meant, decided she must be talking about Simon Lanik, about the rent.

  I said, “It was no big deal. It was only eighty dollars.”

  “Not that,” she said, propping herself up on an elbow. “Though I know about that too. It was sweet, but you didn’t have to. I can handle the Laniks. And I’ll pay you back.”

  I didn’t care if she paid me back, but I didn’t say it. I said, “All right. What else did I do?”

  Jana rolled away from me and got to her feet. Took the legal pad from the desk and brought it down to me. She straddled my waist, held the pad so I could see it.

  I had torn away the sheet I’d written on, but the pen had left indentations on the page underneath. She had gone over that page with a blunt pencil, rubbing it lightly over the lines of text, so the indented letters showed up white on a field of gray.

  Clever. I had to smile. “Where’d you learn that?” I asked her. “The Hardy Boys?”

  “Nancy Drew,” she said.

  “I can explain.”

  “You don’t need to. You haven’t called any of them, have you? You haven’t tried to track them down?”

  “No. I was tempted. But I thought better of it.”

  Jana tossed the pad away. “I’m glad. About both things. Glad you were tempted and glad you didn’t give in to the temptation.” She rested her palms on my shoulders. “I just wanted to have that out in the open.”

  I reached up to touch the mark on her cheek. “If we’re getting things out in the open, we should talk about the other night.” The Night of the Doe. “There’s something—”

  But she was already shaking her head. “Forget about that. It’s a stupid thing that happened. It’s over.” She turned her head so I could see her profile. “Look,” she said. “It’s fading. In a few more days you won’t be able to see it.”

  “That’s not what I meant. There’s something else. Something I should tell you. You never asked why I was out driving that night—”

  She put her fingers on my lips to silence me.

  “Is it important?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Is it serious?”

  I nodded again.

  “I don’t want to talk about anything important or serious right now,” Jana said. “But I’ll make you a deal.” She shifted her body, moved her thighs down over my hips. “In a little while, if there’s still something you need to tell me, you can tell me.”

  She took her fingers away from my lips and I didn’t say anything, and she brought her hands up to the top of her head and arched her back and I still didn’t say anything. She lifted herself and lowered herself down again, and after a little while I forgot there was anything I needed to say.

  6

  Here’s the thing I meant to tell Jana that night: I was engaged to a woman named Sophie Emerson.

  We were set to be married in the fall, on a day in late September. There was going to be a carriage, and horses, and doves. The doves would be released at just the right moment, to symbolize whatever it is that you symbolize by releasing doves. The ceremony would take place in a garden on an estate, because Sophie’s mother knew someone from her sorority days who had married into an estate. And the mayor would preside, because Sophie’s father knew someone else who knew the mayor.

  Sophie kept a binder with all the details: a guest list for the rehearsal dinner, another for the ceremony itself, a third for the reception after; a set list for the band; menus from the caterers and brochures from the carriage company and the dove people. And on and on. When one binder filled up, she got another. She kept them on the coffee table in our apartment.

  “I can tell what you’re thinking,” she’d say to me. “You didn’t know what you were getting into. But why not? A little spectacle won’t hurt you, and my parents can afford it. It’s mostly for them.”

  “Really?” I’d say, teasing her. “We’re doing this for them?”

  “And for me,” she’d say, breaking into a smile. “I’m only getting married once, and by god I’m having horses.”

  • • •

  On the night I met Jana, the Night of the Doe, Sophie and I had known each other for six months; we’d been living together for three.

  We lived in an apartment not far from Rome Memorial Hospital, where Sophie spent most of her time. She was a surgical intern. The first time I saw her she was dressed in a set of blue scrubs; she wore cat’s-eye glasses and had her hair gathered up in a clip. A cross between a doctor and a sexy librarian.

  She was about to make an offer on a house and she had hired me to do the inspection. The place she had picked out was in a fine neighborhood and had a lot of surface charm, but there was mold in the basement and some substandard wiring and a furnace that wouldn’t last another winter.

  I walked her through and gave her my report.

  “That sounds bad,” she said.

  “The good news is, it can all be fixed,” I told her.

  “What’s the bottom line? Would I be crazy to buy this house?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “I think I’d be crazy,” she said. “What about these cabinets?”

  We had ended our tour in the kitchen.

  “What about them?” I said.

  “I think they’re hideous. Do you think they’re hideous?”

  “That’s not really my area.”

  “And the walls,” she said. “Too beige.”

  “A lot of people do that on purpose. Neutral colors. Makes the house easier to sell.”

  “Way too beige. I’d have to get someone in here to paint.”

  “Painting’s easy,” I said. “You could do it yourself.”

  Sophie laughed. “Like I’d have time to paint. I’d hardly have time to live here.” She turned a circle in the center of the kitchen, as if she were having one last look. “There’s no way I’m buying this house,” she said. “Do you want to get a drink?”

  • • •

  You know what I was worried about?” Sophie Emerson said. “The lawn.”

  She’d left it to me to pick the bar and we wound up in a dive on Dominick Street. A hangout for tradesmen, the kind of place my father would have gone to.

  “Houses have lawns,” said Sophie. “You have to mow them. And water them. And kill the weeds. You have to plant things and trim them and cut them down and put them in a paper sack and haul them to the curb.”

  She took a sip from her margarita. She had asked for a cosmopolitan, but the bartender vetoed that idea.

  “But it sounds like the lawn would be the least of my worries,” she said. “Mold and bad wiring and all the rest. I’m not ready to deal with that stuff.”

  I picked at the label on my beer. “Why do you want to buy a house in the fir
st place?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer me right away. She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes.

  “You’ll laugh,” she said.

  “No I won’t.”

  “Maybe you won’t. But you’ll think less of me. I wanted a house because of Brad Gavin.”

  Brad Gavin turned out to be someone she worked with, another intern at the hospital.

  “You’ve seen those shows,” she said. “On TV. About young doctors.”

  I nodded.

  “They’re always competing,” she said. “Who can get the best fellowship. Who can perform the trickiest procedures. Who can scrub in for the most surgeries. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, all that’s true. Only it doesn’t end there. Doctors are competitive about everything. Even little things. Who’s got the newest cell phone. Who can shoot a better game of pool. And no matter what it is, Brad Gavin is always the one to beat.”

  “And he bought a house.”

  “Exactly. And I thought: Why should he be the one with the house? I could get a house.” She put her glasses on and looked at me over the rim of her margarita. “You think less of me now, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You do, but it’s all right. I’ve got a flaw in my character. But I plan to reform.” She took the cat’s-eye glasses off again and held them by a stem. “Let me ask you something, David Malone. Does anyone call you Dave?”

  “Almost no one.”

  “I’m gonna call you Dave. But that’s not what I meant to ask you.” She pushed the margarita aside and leaned close to me across the table. “The glasses,” she said. “Do you like me better with them or without them, or does it not matter to you at all?”

  Something in her voice, either alcohol or mischief. I was hoping for mischief.

  I leaned close, took the glasses from her hand, opened up the stems. Put them on her. I reached to take the clip out of her hair, a dicey maneuver, hard to pull off gracefully. I managed it. Her hair tumbled down. She combed her fingers through it.

  “Then it does matter,” she said. “Good to know, Dave.”

  • • •

  Sophie didn’t buy a house. But three months later we got engaged. She gave up the apartment she’d been living in and I gave up mine, and we moved into a bigger one together.

  The cabinets in the kitchen were a few years out of date, but they were easy to replace. The walls in the bedroom were unacceptably beige, but I primed them and painted them sky blue. The bedroom windows faced south and had heavy, dusty curtains. We took them down and put up blinds that we could open to let in the light in the morning.

  Not that Sophie was there much in the mornings. She worked an intern’s hours, a schedule I could never predict. Sometimes she’d climb into our bed just as I was climbing out of it. Sometimes I’d come home in the evening and find her sleeping, a plate of half-eaten takeout on her night table, her clothes in a pile on the floor.

  On the twentieth of April, a Sunday, she came home at four in the afternoon and stumbled into bed. She asked me to wake her at eight-thirty so we could share a late dinner. I let her sleep till nine, then went in and sat on the bed—my side—and turned on a lamp. Then music on the clock radio. This was the way I’d learned to wake her: gradually, so she could get used to the idea.

  While I waited for the music to do its work, I tidied up my side of the room. Newspapers off the floor, dirty socks into the basket in our walk-in closet. I moved to her side, picked up a bra and panties from the night before, reached for the scrubs she’d been wearing when she came home.

  She had her eyes open by then. Still groggy. She said, “You can leave those, Dave. I’ll take care of them.”

  I was checking the pockets, because there was always something in them: a pen, a pad, a sample of some new medication the reps were trying to sell . . .

  Sophie was alert now, covers off, out of bed. “Dave, give me those.”

  . . . a tissue, an empty condom wrapper . . . That was new. Never found one of those before.

  She got the scrubs away from me, the wrapper too. She closed her fist around it as if she could make it disappear.

  “This was not supposed to happen.”

  She looked around for her glasses, found them, put them on. It took a few seconds, but it seemed like she needed the delay. I let her have it.

  “Dave,” she said, “it’s not what you think.”

  Which, when you get right down to it, is something people only say when it’s exactly what you think.

  I knew the next line, heard myself say it. “Who is he, Sophie?”

  “It was one time, I swear. It’ll never, ever happen again.”

  “Sophie—”

  “And I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that.” And I did. She was trembling. I could see it.

  I put my arms around her, but it was no good. I said, “Sophie, tell me who.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “You’ll think less of me.”

  Which was just enough of a clue to suggest the answer. I didn’t want to believe it.

  “Not Brad Gavin,” I said.

  The glasses came off and she held on to me tight. Her face against my neck, her tears on my skin. She didn’t say the name. We didn’t need to say it again. It had been said.

  I got loose from her after a while, and out of the apartment. Into my truck. And that was it; that was the catalyst: looking in Sophie’s pockets. It was enough to send me out into the night, to Quaker Hill Road, to my rendezvous with Jana Fletcher. The Night of the Doe.

  7

  K stayed away from that spot in the woods, the place where he had watched Jana Fletcher standing naked in the moonlight. Because something like that only happens once. You can’t recapture it. If you think you can, you’re kidding yourself.

  Besides, the spot in the woods had its limits. You couldn’t see the front of the duplex from there; you couldn’t see people coming and going. For that, you needed a better vantage point, and K found one: in the parking lot of a dumpy apartment complex across the street. When he parked in a corner of the lot, he had a perfect view of Jana Fletcher’s front door. And he could stay there as long as he wanted. The people who lived in the complex weren’t exactly neighborhood-watch types. They weren’t going to call the police if they saw a stranger sitting in a parked car.

  So he spent some time there. Not crazy, obsessive time. He wasn’t watching Jana Fletcher twenty-four hours a day. But he spent enough time to figure out that she generally left her apartment early in the morning and came back in the afternoon. Then she left again in the evening, between seven and eight, driving off in her little blue Plymouth. K assumed she was meeting her boyfriend for dinner, because when she came back the boyfriend would roll in right behind her in his pickup truck. And they would go in together and he would spend the night.

  Which meant that K couldn’t do it at night, the thing he needed to do. Not with the boyfriend there.

  The other thing K discovered was that the neighbor woman seemed to leave the duplex two evenings a week. She’d come out around six-thirty, dolled up in her finest, scarved and bejeweled like a gypsy. She’d hobble over to a big boat of a car and climb in and rattle off down the street. Where she went, K didn’t know. Not on a date, not an old crone like that. More likely a bingo game or some kind of church meeting.

  Whatever it was, she went every Monday and Wednesday. Or she seemed to. K couldn’t be sure; he hadn’t been watching very long. But she had gone out two Mondays in a row, and one Wednesday, and tonight would be the second Wednesday.

  K knew that tonight would be the test. He had woken up this morning with a sense of purpose, and with an image of Jana Fletcher in his mind, the way she looked in the moonlight. He would be there watching tonight—in the corner of the parking lot—and if the neighbor went out
at six-thirty he should have at least a half-hour window during which Jana would be alone in the duplex. K wouldn’t need a half hour. He would glide in and glide out. A few minutes and it would be done.

  As the morning wore on, he started feeling restless and eager. At noon he got into his car and drove to Jana Fletcher’s street. A warm day, sunny, the last day of April. He turned into the lot of the apartment complex, dodging potholes filled with yesterday’s rain. He found the corner of the lot and cut the engine. A line of spindly evergreens in front of him, and in the space between two of them he could see the duplex. Jana’s car gone, the boyfriend’s pickup parked in the drive.

  K wondered if the boyfriend was still asleep in the apartment. That must be the life, he thought: fucking all night, sleeping all day. But not all day. If he slept all day, he would still be there when Jana got back in the afternoon; he would be there at six-thirty when the old woman left. And that would ruin K’s plan. So the boyfriend had to go. K had to make sure of it.

  How? He couldn’t go over there, knock on the door, tell him to clear out. Nothing as crude as that. But K had other methods. He had the power of his thoughts. He knew the boyfriend’s name because it was on the side of his truck: DAVID MALONE. HOME INSPECTIONS. K focused on the duplex across the street, sending his thoughts out to find Malone, to wake him up, to bring him out. K sharpened his focus, aiming it at the front door, willing the door to open. If he concentrated intensely enough, if he wanted it, then his thoughts could make it happen.

  He must have been concentrating hard, because the tap at the window beside him startled him.

  K turned to see a woman leaning on his car, her left hand braced on the roof, her face inches from the window. Dyed-blond hair. Nice eyes, though there were shadows underneath them. Full lips colored red. She was asking him a question he couldn’t make out. He rolled the window down to hear it.