The Last Dead Girl (28 page)

“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.”

“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.”

Maybe I managed to hit upon some deep truth about his psychology, or maybe he got tired of listening to me. Either way, he opened the middle drawer of the desk and laid the gun inside. I was glad to see him do it. I had some things to tell him that would make him angry—maybe angry enough to shoot somebody. I didn't want it to be me.

I watched him close the drawer.

“Jana lied,” he said, prompting me.

I moved away from the mantel, trying to decide where to begin.

“There was a schoolteacher named Cathy Pruett,” I said. “Someone killed her. It happened here in Rome the summer before last—the same summer Jana left home to go to New York City.”

I went through the whole thing for him: the details of the case and Gary Pruett's conviction and Jana's desire to free him from prison. How she had contacted Napoleon Washburn to try to get him to recant his testimony. I repeated what she'd said to him:
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?
I talked about Luke and Eli Daw and why I believed that Jana's remark referred to them.

Warren's brow furrowed. “You mentioned them before—Luke and Eli.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You think they killed this woman, Cathy Pruett?”

“Yes.”

“And you think Jana knew them? You think she met them in New York?”

We were coming to the terrible part. It was something I didn't want to think about. I hated it. And I didn't want to tell him, but I thought he deserved to know.

“The thing is, Warren, I think she lied about New York. What is there, really, to prove that she ever got there? No phone calls, no address. Think about how little she told you about her time there. And the things she did tell you—did they sound real, or could they have been made up?”

I waited while he considered the question. He was standing near the mantel, with the candles in the background behind him. His eyes were pools of gray shadow.

“Why would she lie?” he asked.

“I think she just didn't want you to know,” I said. “I think she meant to go to New York, but she never made it. Because somewhere along the way, she met up with the Daws.”

I sketched it out for him: the story I'd been working out in my mind ever since I drove away from Wendy Daw's apartment. I had nothing to work with but bits and pieces of information: the words Jana had used to describe Luke and Eli—
crazy farm-boys in a white van
. The fact that she had left home in her grandmother's car but returned without it. Her reaction when Roger Tolliver made a pass at her—the fear that came over her when she couldn't get away from him, because his front door was locked.

Bits and pieces. They meant nothing on their own. But when you put them together with Jana's lost summer—when no one heard from her apart from a few postcards—they started to seem more ominous. I kept coming back to Luke and Eli. What if no one heard from Jana because they took her? What if they brought her to the farm on Humaston Road? A hideaway, abandoned and remote. What if they kept her there?

I went over all this with Warren. He took it in. He didn't want to believe it.

“You're guessing,” he said. “You don't know anything for certain.”

“You're right,” I told him. “But there's one last thing. Eli Daw died, just a few weeks after Cathy Pruett. Someone shot him. Everyone thought it was his cousin Luke, because the murder weapon belonged to Luke. But Luke didn't kill him. Tonight I talked to Eli's wife. She was there. She knows the truth. She told me Jana shot Eli Daw.”

That was Wendy Daw's revelation—the one thing she knew about Jana. She had described the scene for me: that night in their trailer when Eli died. Once I convinced her to talk, Wendy didn't spare any of the details, so I knew that she'd been cuffed to the headboard of their bed, courtesy of Eli. There'd been a knock on the trailer door and he had gone to answer it. Then she heard the gunshot. She screamed. And the next thing she saw was Jana in the doorway of the bedroom.

Now I described the scene for Warren. I could see the tension growing in him as he listened. I was glad he had put away the Makarov pistol.

“She could be lying,” he said. “If she knew who killed her husband, why didn't she tell anyone at the time?”

I had asked Wendy the same thing. Her response made sense to me. Her marriage to Eli had been nothing like what she signed on for. He had abused her. She had fantasized about killing him herself. She was horrified when Jana shot him, but once the horror passed, she realized that Jana had done her a favor.

“She's not lying,” I told Warren. “The pieces fit together. I believe Luke and Eli took Jana and kept her at the farm. I believe that's where she encountered Cathy Pruett—that's how she knew that Luke and Eli killed Cathy. And somehow Jana escaped from them. It must have happened on the night of September sixth. That's when she shot Eli. Luke disappeared the same night. The police found his car abandoned here in town, not far from the bus station. When Jana came home to you, she came on a bus. Do you remember what day that was?”

He did. I could see it in his eyes before he spoke. Jana meant everything to him. Of course he remembered.

“She came home on a Saturday,” he said. “September seventh.”

He went silent and we stood there together for a while. I watched him thinking. The wind gusted against the house and tore over the roof above us. The four flames burned behind him on the mantel.

“If that's what happened,” Warren said softly, “then I'm glad she shot him.”