The Last Dead Girl (2 page)

One week earlier

J
ana Fletcher had the dream again, the one where she was trapped in a dark place underground. There were noises in the dream—small animals scurrying—and a damp smell. And there was a door she could never quite reach. A plain door with a knob made of black metal, vaguely old-fashioned. A door you wouldn't want to turn your back on, because you couldn't trust it, because it didn't belong underground. If you turned your back on it, it might open.

She woke in the night and sat up. Heard the sound of her own breathing and the bedsprings squeaking with her movement. David stirred beside her. She felt his hand on the small of her back.

“What's the matter?” Sleepy voice.

“Nothing,” she said.

Moonlight in her window. She waited for David to fall back asleep, then slipped out of bed and found his button-down shirt. She put it on and walked barefoot to the bathroom. The dream had faded from her mind. It used to make her heart race, make the air rasp through her lungs; sometimes she'd need an hour to come down from it. But now the details drifted away from her like wisps of fog.

She lit a candle on the bathroom sink, looked at her face in the mirror. Her skin was neither dark nor white—coffee with cream, her mother used to say. Good, clear skin. It made the bruise on her cheek stand out all the more. Jana appraised it in the candlelight: a rough crescent around her left eye. Deep purple, the color of plums.

A tough thing to explain, because it looked like the kind of bruise you'd get if someone punched you in the face.

She left the candle burning and walked to the kitchen, buttoning David's shirt as she went. She turned the lock of the back door, opened it, and slipped out, letting the screen door close behind her with a soft clap.

She stood on her little brick patio and turned her face up to the night sky—the moon high and half full behind thin clouds. Cool air, maybe sixty degrees. She liked the feel of it on her skin beneath the shirt. No rain for now, but there'd been plenty in the last few days. She knew there would be more.

The clouds drifted past the moon. One of them was shaped like a crescent. Like her bruise.

She'd spent three days with it, and she was finding ways to explain. Because people asked. They were tentative, apologetic—but they asked. A woman in her constitutional law class had asked her what happened, and Jana had blamed it on a fall. Jogging in the park, a shoelace comes untied, and the next thing you know you're sprawling face-first on the ground. Not very plausible, but the woman believed her. Because that was the other thing. People wanted to believe. They wanted a nice, reassuring explanation.

There'd been others. Like the guy behind the counter at the shop where she bought coffee. For him she made up a story about the child of a friend. A toddler. Toddlers play with blocks—clunky wooden ones. They have tantrums, they throw things. The tale told itself.

You should have ducked, the guy said. Jana laughed. Next time she would.

Then there was the manager at the restaurant where she waited tables: a motherly woman, though she wasn't very many years older than Jana. She asked the question with a bit more concern than the others, and Jana answered her more carefully. She invented a softball league, very informal, one game a week. Jana played second base. Someone hit a grounder and it took a bad hop and she didn't get her glove up in time. A softball's not so soft, not really, not when it hits you in the cheek.

A respectable lie, Jana thought. Her favorite part was the bad hop. She had played on the softball team in high school and the coach always warned her to watch out, to stay alert, because sometimes the ball took a bad hop.

The restaurant manager listened with a grave expression. Doubtful.

“Is that the way you want to leave it?” she asked when Jana finished.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

The manager looked sad. “I mean you can trust me, hon. You can say what really happened. You don't have to tell me stories.”

And Jana nearly wavered, because of the kindness in the woman's voice. But in the end she said, “It's not a story, it's what happened.” She smiled. “I don't have any stories.”

The manager sighed and suggested that Jana take some time off, that she come back later in the week, after the swelling went down all the way. Then she could cover the mark with makeup, for the sake of the customers. Bruises are bad for business. It shouldn't be hard to cover up; the manager could show Jana how; she knew some tricks.

And now, in the moonlight, Jana remembered their conversation. She hadn't gone back to the restaurant since, and she wasn't sure if she would. But she didn't regret the lies she'd told. Not the one about the bad hop, or the one about not having any stories.

Because that was a lie too. She had stories.

There was David, for instance. She had met him three nights ago. In the rain, as it happened. She had brought him home to her apartment, half a duplex on a dead-end street. And she had slept with him that first night, something she never did, but he was tall and she liked the shape of his jaw and he had a voice that was just a bit husky, as if he were getting over a cold.

He had strong hands too, but he was smart enough to let her take control. He let her undress him the first time and laid back, his heels hanging off the foot of her bed. His body was lean; she explored it with her hands and her mouth. He got hard, fast, and stayed hard, but he didn't rush her. Finally she kissed his chest and wrapped a hand around him, straddled him, took him inside her, just the tip. Still he waited, let her lead, and she sank herself onto him, all the way, and then she felt those strong hands on her hips, helping her move. And then the bedsprings and his voice saying her name, and she came so hard she moaned, which never happened either.

David. She didn't know much about him, except that he was a year older—twenty-six—and he'd grown up here, in Rome, New York. He'd gone to college somewhere else and had a degree in engineering. She thought he came from money, but she wasn't sure. There was something in the way he spoke, the way he carried himself, a confidence. When he took her out, he paid, no hesitation. On the other hand, his job was inspecting houses for people who wanted to buy them. Not what you'd call a high-powered occupation. He drove a pickup truck—and not a new one, but one that was well broken in. So, mixed signals. She had never seen where he lived.

She didn't know what he thought of her, living in her cheap apartment. Maybe that she came from money too, and was slumming, trying to prove that she could make it on her own.

And he liked her body, her skin; that was part of it, she thought. His own skin was pale; he would get off on the novelty of sleeping with a black girl. Which was funny, because she never thought of herself as a black girl. She had a black father she had never met, and a white mother who had raised her in Geneva, New York, a little town on the shore of Seneca Lake.

David. He was a good story. Jana didn't know how long he would stay around, but he'd been back each night since they met. And if they kept at it, she would have to do something about the bedsprings, because her landlady lived in the other half of the duplex—a respectable elderly woman—and whenever Jana saw her now she got a disapproving look.

She wasn't going to worry about her landlady.

Jana stepped off the bricks of the patio and into the grass. The lawn ran down in a gentle slope until it came to the edge of the woods in the distance. The wet ground yielded beneath her bare feet. The slightest breeze, cool on her body. She had nothing on but David's shirt, and it was thin. She might as well be naked.

A daring thought. Her fingers worked the buttons of the shirt, one by one. She parted it, drew it down off her shoulders, testing herself. Bold Jana. She felt goose bumps on her stomach, her breasts; felt her nipples stiffen in the air.

David inside. So close. She could wake him and bring him out here and lay him down on the grass. She closed her eyes, let it play out in her mind.

Something shifted and she opened her eyes. She drew the shirt up onto her shoulders and hugged it around her. She had a feeling of being watched, a physical sensation, real as the touch of the air on her skin. She thought of her landlady, who had her own brick patio nearby, on the other side of a woodpile and a forsythia bush, but when she went to check there was no one there. She looked off across the lawn, tried to see if there might be some figure in the woods. But all she could see was dark between the trees.

You're scaring yourself, she thought. It's nothing. Too much moonlight and night. Getting a little too daring. Rein it in, Jana.

Nothing.

•   •   •

I
rolled onto my side and reached for Jana. Felt only the rumpled sheets. I got up and stood naked in the dim of the room. Looked around for my boxers and slipped them on. Couldn't find my shirt.

I drifted through the apartment, bare feet on old hardwood floors. I didn't worry about tripping over things because the apartment was one of the sparest I had ever seen. No clutter, no clothes strewn around. In fact, Jana Fletcher owned fewer clothes than any other woman I knew: her wardrobe fit easily into a tiny closet and a chest of drawers. She owned precisely four pairs of shoes: sneakers, hiking boots, loafers, heels.

Minimal furniture as well: the chest of drawers, her bed, a night table. A desk in the living room; no sofa, no television. No computer either. When she needed to do research or write a paper, she went to one of the computer labs at the university.

Her desk faced a blank wall. Nearby, there was a small wood-burning fireplace with a shelf over it that served as a mantel. On the shelf sat a long piece of two-by-four in which someone had drilled four shallow holes, each one broad enough to hold a tea-light candle.

The candles were burning now.

The only other object on the mantel was a clay bowl that held a single coin: a quarter. The quarter was strange. Imperfect. Part of it had been worn away so that in the upper left quadrant—right around George Washington's forehead—it came to a point.

No other trinkets. No keepsakes, no vases. Jana had a few books for her classes and a small but eclectic collection of novels, from Alexandre Dumas to Stephen King. She had two houseplants. I could see them now as I stepped through the archway into the kitchen. A cactus and an African violet in twin pots arranged like centerpieces on the kitchen table. A faint glow fell on them from a light above the stove.

The back door of the apartment stood open. I looked through the closed screen door and saw Jana standing outside on the lawn. She wore my shirt, which came down to her knees. I stepped closer to the screen, but I didn't go out, and as I watched she shrugged off the shirt, baring her shoulders and her back. Her dark hair hung down between her shoulder blades. Her body was a sculpture in the moonlight, a figure of blacks and grays. And even though I had known her for only three days, I thought I might be in love with her.

•   •   •

O
n the night we met, I'd been out driving on a dark road outside Rome.

When people think of upstate New York, they think of farmland and rolling hills. They think of roads that wind like snakes and little towns that never change from one decade to the next. The speed limit goes down to thirty and there's a gas station and a general store and a barn where someone's selling antiques. There's an old lady rocking on a porch and a roadside vegetable stand, and then the limit goes back up to fifty-five and there's nothing to see for miles but fields and trees.

Rome isn't one of those little towns. It's a city. It has good neighborhoods and bad ones. It has businesses that are growing, and others that are dying. It has a history that dates back to the American Revolution. It was the site of the groundbreaking for the Erie Canal in 1817 and the home of a major Air Force base all through the Cold War.

Rome is gray and sprawling like a city, and at night it lights up like a city. On the night I met Jana, I wanted to get away from it. I left my apartment and drove north with no particular destination in mind. I got onto Route 46 and followed it out past the city's edge. After a while I took some random turns and wound up heading west on Quaker Hill Road.

Houses gave way to woods. Beyond the reach of the city lights, the night turned purer. The scenery began to look a little unreal, the way it does sometimes when you're driving through the dark. A light rain began to fall. Not a dangerous rain: just enough to wet the road in front of me, leaving it a sparkling black in the light of my truck's high beams. As if I were driving on obsidian.

There were oak trees along the roadside and when the light washed over them the leaves glittered like gemstones. I remember that. I remember having the thought that I was traveling through a forest of emeralds.

The deer came out of nowhere.

It came bounding from the woods south of the road and it didn't try to cross in front of me; it didn't even come into my lane. I got one clear glimpse of it in the high-beam light and then I overtook it and it was right next to me, leaping along with me like a big friendly dog. It was there beside me shadowy in the dark, and I swear if I had rolled the window down I could have reached out and touched it.

I was driving slow for the rain, but not that slow: maybe forty-five or fifty. I read somewhere once that a deer can run forty miles an hour, but as the seconds ticked by this one kept pace with me.

I never thought of speeding up or slowing down.

We came to a curve and something changed. Maybe the deer had begun to feel the strain or maybe it had decided to let me win. Either way, it slacked off. It was still gamboling along, but it was in my rearview mirror now, a shadow getting smaller until it was gone in the night.

I let out a breath I'd been holding in. The rain fell in thin lines on the windshield and the wipers swept the lines away. A half mile on, I saw headlights approaching. I clicked the high beams down to low and a car rushed by in the eastbound lane. It was nothing to look at, a beat-up subcompact, but the driver was pushing it hard. I watched the taillights receding in the rearview.