The Last Dead Girl (11 page)

“Washburn?” I yelled. “Poe? Anybody there?”

No answer.

It would be really stupid to go up the stairs.

I dashed through the front room to the kitchen, ran water in the sink. Couldn't find a towel. Rifled through drawers until I had one. Soaked it in water. Held it over my nose and mouth and breathed, just to see how it would work.

When I turned back to the front room I heard coughing. Washburn must have crawled down the stairs headfirst. He struggled to his feet at the bottom, tall and lanky, eyes blinking, a mess of dark hair. His left hand held a pair of boots; his right hand hitched up his pants, tried unsuccessfully to buckle his belt.

Suddenly he noticed me. I tossed the towel away and said, “Poe?”

His face twisted and his eyes blinked, and he took two steps toward me and threw a kick that sent a white milk crate flying in my direction. There was an ashtray on the crate and it spun through the air and broke against the wall in a litter of spent cigarettes. I batted the crate away but Washburn came in behind it, leading with his right shoulder, sending me sprawling on the kitchen floor.

He landed on top of me and scrambled to his knees, straddling me. He still had a boot in his left hand. He drew it back and slammed it into the side of my head.

“What the fuck are you doin' in my house?”

I watched his face go in and out of focus. The world spun slowly.

“I'm trying to help you,” I said.

Washburn coughed and spat on the floor and shifted the boot to his right hand. His left hand gripped the collar of my shirt.

“Yeah, you're a big fuckin' help,” he said, pushing his fist into my neck. “You want to help? Here's how you can help. Are you payin' attention?”

I started to say yes and he hit me again with the boot.

“Now you're payin' attention,” he said. “Tell him I got it. I got the message. Tell him he doesn't have to worry about me.”

“Tell who?”

A whiff of booze as his face moved closer to mine.

“Tell him he didn't have to burn my fuckin' house down. I'm not gonna talk. I never wanted to talk in the first place. That's what you tell him. You got that?”

I nodded because it seemed the thing to do. His fist bore down on my neck and the world spun and part of the world was his hand with the boot in it. I saw a halo of light and for some reason the light smelled like smoke, and the boot swung down and crashed into my temple.

F
or the next little while I was awake and asleep. When I was awake I saw faces above me. The faces had lips and the lips moved, but nothing they said made any sense. Sometimes I saw hands and the hands held pinpoints of light. And somehow the pinpoints got to be as big as suns. And all the suns smelled like smoke.

Once I felt someone holding my hand. I saw a face above me, the face of a bald man with bristly eyebrows. His lips moved and what came out was like someone practicing birdcalls through a long cardboard tube. A light passed in front of my eyes—not a sun but a very bright star. It flicked out and the sky went dark.

When I finally woke up for real it was in the room with the white-tile walls. But without the chairs and the table, without Moretti. Without the tiles either.

I woke in a white room with someone holding my hand. The walls were curtains. The bald doctor was there with his bristly eyebrows. He held a light in his fist. He asked me my name.

My lips felt dry. I tried to wet them with my tongue, but my tongue was dry too. I didn't tell the doctor my name. Instead I let him in on a secret.

“Normally I wouldn't hold hands with you like this.”

His right hand clicked off the light. His left hand came into my field of vision and made a peace sign. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked.

“How many hands do you
have
?” I countered.

His eyebrows went up and he looked to his left. Someone moved there and another face came toward me. Hair brushed my cheek. It smelled sweet. Not at all like smoke.

“It's my hand you're holding, jackass,” Sophie Emerson said.

•   •   •

I
woke up again to find the bald doctor gone and Sophie reading in a chair by my bed.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

She closed her book. “Almost five.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes, in the morning. Don't get any ideas. You're not going anywhere.”

When I sat up I thought she would try to stop me. She helped instead. She fiddled with the controls on the bed, then held a cup of water so I could drink. Pretty soon I was holding it on my own.

“My name is Dave,” I said.

She smiled. “Yeah, you're brilliant. You're still not going anywhere. You've had a concussion.”

“Like drums?”

“That's percussion,” she said. “A concussion is a traumatic brain injury. A percussion is what you call a concussion when you've had a concussion. How do you feel?”

“Like someone used my head as a drum.”

She tapped her own temple. “You opened that cut up again. I told you to stop letting people shove you into walls.”

I reached up, felt a bandage. “He used a boot,” I said. “Did they catch him? Poe Washburn?”

Sophie shook her head. “You were the only one they found in the house.”

“He must have slipped away.”

She shrugged. “Maybe you could ask the police about him. One of them came to visit you while you were sleeping. A Detective Moretti.”

“Oh.”

“He's an interesting man,” she said. “When he couldn't talk to you, he asked to talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About where I was the other night.”

The other night. She meant the night Jana died.

“I was here at the hospital,” Sophie said. “We had a motorcyclist come in. Bad accident. Had to take out his spleen. There are about a dozen people who can vouch for me, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn't.”

“Detective Moretti seemed satisfied. He said he never really suspected me, but he had to rule me out.”

“I think that's true,” I said. “He has another suspect.”

“Not you, I hope.”

“Not me. A man named Simon Lanik. Jana's landlady's grandson.”

“That's good then,” Sophie said. “But you should watch out for Moretti. He's not happy about last night. The fire. I think he wants to charge you with arson.”

“He doesn't appreciate me.”

“Fortunately it's not his call. I gather the police have an arson specialist, and the specialist thinks the fire was an accident. Someone smoking in bed.”

It wasn't an accident, I thought. The timing was too convenient. Poe Washburn believed someone had set the fire to send him a message. I could imagine another possibility: someone had tried to kill him before I could talk to him. (A grandiose thought. I heard Moretti's voice in my head:
Yeah, you're just that important.
) But either way, it was no accident.

I kept these thoughts to myself. I asked Sophie, “When can I leave here?”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “If you insisted, they'd probably discharge you now. But I'm holding out for a CT scan.”

•   •   •

I
left the hospital five hours later, after a CT scan and a lot of paperwork and a wretched breakfast. I walked out into bright daylight, at ten o'clock in the morning.

Sophie drove me home. The scan showed no bleeding in my brain, so my concussion was just a concussion. The prescription was rest and Tylenol. I napped for a while, got up, wandered as far as the sofa, clicked on the television. Sophie appeared and covered me with a blanket. She made me soup. I asked if she would take me to get my truck. “That wouldn't be resting,” she said.

I read the paper when it came in the afternoon. The
Rome Sentinel
. It had a front-page story about the fire. Neighbors had seen Washburn leaving the house, slipping into his boots on the porch, driving away just as the fire trucks arrived. The police wanted to talk to him.

The story mentioned me by name and said that I'd been injured. Roger Tolliver saw it and called to see if I was all right and if I needed anything. I told him I'd let him know if I did.

There was no mention in the paper of any connection between Poe Washburn and Jana Fletcher. A separate story on Jana's murder said that the police were still following leads. It noted that they were looking for Simon Lanik. They wouldn't come out and say he was a suspect, but that was the clear implication.

Frank Moretti stopped by the apartment twice that afternoon. The first time, Sophie told him I was sleeping. The second time, she told him that if he wanted to talk to me he could work it out with my lawyer. She gave him Roger Tolliver's phone number and sent him away.

Tolliver spoke to him and agreed that we could meet the next day—not at the police station but at Tolliver's office at the law school.

•   •   •

T
he law school at Bellamy University occupies a fine old building with a broad front lawn shaded by willow trees. Tolliver had an office on the second floor: lots of bookcases and two casement windows and a sleek modern desk with a glass top.

When Moretti arrived, he had cooled down a little: he had dropped the idea of charging me with arson. But I wasn't in the clear.

“Obstructing a murder investigation—how does that sound?” he said to me. “I specifically told you not to talk to Poe Washburn.” Which wasn't quite true: he'd told me in general not to talk to anyone about Jana's murder.

I didn't say that. I didn't say anything. Roger Tolliver was already mounting my defense.

“In the first place, Detective,” he said, “merely talking to someone doesn't qualify as obstruction. In the second place, Mr. Malone's encounter with Mr. Washburn was less a conversation than a physical altercation—one that Mr. Malone did nothing to provoke. And their discussion, such as it was, did not touch upon the murder of Miss Fletcher.

“In the third place,” Tolliver said, “if I'm to believe the reports in the news, your investigation has been focusing on Simon Lanik. If Mr. Lanik killed Miss Fletcher, then it would seem Napoleon Washburn had nothing to do with her death. And therefore my client's dealings with Mr. Washburn could not reasonably be viewed as an obstruction of your investigation.”

There was a fourth place, which had to do with my status as a citizen of the United States of America and my God-given right under the First Amendment to talk to anyone I pleased, but by then Moretti had begun to give me one of his slow-burning looks.

He asked a few questions about what had happened in Washburn's house and then stood up to take his leave. Tolliver asked him if he had any information on where Washburn might have gone. “Nothing I can share,” Moretti said.

“But you do intend to arrest him for assaulting Mr. Malone.”

“It's right at the top of my list,” Moretti said.

•   •   •

A
fter our meeting, Tolliver drove me out to Poe Washburn's house. The firefighters had done their best, but the place was a wreck. The second floor had been gutted and most of the roof had fallen in. The whole thing would need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground.

Tolliver looked at it and said, “Maybe you should leave all this alone.”

I knew he wasn't talking about the house.

I thanked him for the ride. Promised to let him know if Moretti contacted me again. My truck was where I'd left it. I climbed in and watched Tolliver drive away.

I didn't go looking for Poe Washburn. I went home.

That night Sophie cooked a stir-fry: peppers and broccoli and tofu served over brown rice. After dinner I went into the bedroom to lie down. Her shift at the hospital started at ten, but before she left she came in to see me.

“Does your head hurt?” she asked, kneeling by the bed.

“It's not bad,” I told her.

“If it hurts, take something.”

“All right.”

“You're still supposed to be resting,” she said. “A few more days.”

She was telling me something, and asking me something too. I took her hand and she leaned in suddenly and kissed me hard on the lips.

Afterward she touched her forehead to mine and whispered, “Stop getting dragged out of burning buildings.”

That was Saturday. I rested that night and all day Sunday. But on Monday I couldn't rest. On Monday they buried Jana Fletcher.

T
he funeral was held in Geneva, New York, the town where Jana grew up. Roger Tolliver told me when and where; he offered to let me ride with him. I drove myself instead, ninety-five miles, most of it on the Thruway. It rained for part of the drive but cleared at the end, and as I drove south on the town's main street I could see blue sky over the water of Seneca Lake.

I was early, so I parked the truck and walked to the lake. There were students riding bicycles on a path along the shore. Geneva is home to two colleges that share a single campus—Hobart and William Smith. The campus takes up nearly two hundred acres and the parts of it I saw were pretty: lush and green, with old buildings faced in weathered stone. Jana's mother worked as a cook in one of the dining halls; her name was Lydia—and those were the only two things Jana ever told me about her mother.

Lydia Fletcher had arranged for a service to be held for her daughter in a chapel called St. John's off the main quad. It started a few minutes after ten. The priest had a strong, deep voice that brought to mind monks chanting in Latin. I sat in the last row and let the rhythm of his voice carry me along, and time passed slowly, the way it always had for me in church as a child. I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, or at the tall thin windows behind the altar, and once in a while I tried to focus on the words. They were dark:
A thousand years in your sight, Lord, are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—they are like the new grass in the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered
.

There must have been fifty or sixty people there, most of them older—friends of Jana's mother, I thought. I spotted Roger Tolliver sitting by himself a few rows up, and we nodded to each other. I walked out before the service ended, while the rest of them were singing “Amazing Grace.”

At the cemetery I hung back at the edge of the crowd. I wanted to talk to Lydia Fletcher and I dreaded it at the same time. I had picked her out in the chapel. It wasn't difficult; her resemblance to Jana was strong. She stood by the grave in the company of a young couple—among the few people I had seen who were Jana's age. The couple seemed to be husband and wife. The wife had a plump face and straight dark hair that reached her shoulders. She was pregnant—seven or eight months, if I had to guess.

The husband's hair was longer than the wife's. He wore it tied in a ponytail. He was on the heavy side, but he looked as if he had once been even heavier. His black suit was a size too large—as if he had lost weight but hadn't gotten around to buying a new wardrobe. He hovered around Lydia Fletcher the way a son might; sometimes they stood arm in arm. But I knew Jana didn't have a brother.

His name turned out to be Warren Finn. The priest introduced him to the gathered mourners as a friend of Jana's who had known her since elementary school. Then the priest stepped back and Warren stood by Jana's casket and read a passage from the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven
. He struggled to get through it, like someone who wasn't used to speaking in public. He hit the important lines—
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance
—but he skipped over some others, like the one about throwing away stones and gathering stones together. I didn't mind. That part never made much sense to me.

Afterward the three of them lingered longest at the graveside: Lydia Fletcher and Warren Finn and his wife. Roger Tolliver spoke to them briefly, then drifted away to his car. Other people did the same. I took a walk along a row of headstones, and when I reached the cemetery fence I followed it around, one corner to another, until I came back to the place where I started. By then Lydia Fletcher was leaving, with Warren Finn on one side of her and his wife on the other. Warren looked back at me once over his shoulder, as if he wanted me to know he'd been keeping track of me. That wasn't the last I saw of him.

After the three of them drove away I spent a few minutes alone at Jana's grave, but it was hard to know what to say to her. I tried telling her I loved her, but it sounded empty. I'd never said it while she was alive. There hadn't been enough time.

Somewhere a lawn mower started up. A robin took off into the air. I became aware of distant voices: cemetery people, workmen who were waiting to fill in the grave. Now would be the time for some final gesture: a rose tossed onto the casket. I didn't have a rose. Too late to get one now.

I said a silent good-bye, then turned away and left the grave behind. It was a ten-minute walk to the place where I'd parked, and when I reached the truck it was warm from sitting in the sun. I started it up and drove around the edge of the lake. I came to the long, straight road that would take me away from Geneva and back to the Thruway. I watched fields pass by on either side. They moved slow, and I realized I was rolling along at thirty miles an hour. I pushed it to forty, to fifty, and it still didn't feel fast enough. Got it to seventy and that seemed better. I thought I'd try eighty.
Eighty miles an hour in your sight, Lord, is like a pleasant stroll along the beach.

When the needle hit eighty-five I lifted my foot off the gas and glided along. Watched the needle fall. I waited for the truck to stop on its own, but it wouldn't. The engine's idle carried it along. I pulled over to the shoulder and made a wide U-turn and headed back.

•   •   •

L
ydia Fletcher's address was off County Road 6 on the western edge of Geneva. I'd looked it up before I left home. The houses on her street were all the same: one level, ranch-style, attached garage. I searched for a shady spot to park and found one far down at the end of the street.

The Fletcher house had a front door painted green. It had flower boxes in the windows and bird feeders hanging from the trees in front. I stood on the sidewalk wondering what it had been like for Jana to grow up here, what I would say to her mother, whether I should say anything at all. Just when I had decided to walk to the door and knock, I heard a voice.

“I don't know if she wants visitors.”

Warren Finn. He wore the suit he'd worn at the cemetery, minus the jacket and tie. He stood in the driveway of the house next door, the garage door open behind him.

I went over and introduced myself. “David Malone. I knew Jana in Rome.”

He had to think about shaking my hand. Decided in favor. Showed me how strong a grip he had.

“Figured you were,” he said. “We've had word of you here.”

I thought Roger Tolliver must have mentioned me, but I was wrong.

“A detective paid us a visit—Moretti,” Warren said. “He asked if Jana ever talked about you. If she told us you hit her. I couldn't help him. She never mentioned you to me.”

“I never hit her.”

He shrugged. “That's what her mother thought, but not from anything Jana ever said. Lydia never had patience for abusive men. She figured Jana knew better than to stay with anyone who raised a hand against her.”

He had retreated into his garage, as if he felt more comfortable there. There was one car inside, and the rest of the space was devoted to a woodworking shop. He had a table saw, a drill press, a collection of hand tools. He seemed to be in the middle of a project: a dresser or a cabinet—I couldn't tell. There was a piece of wood clamped in a vise, something he'd been sanding. He ran his thumb over the smooth edge.

“I'll tell you something funny,” he said, tripping over the word “funny” as if he knew it wasn't right. He hesitated, and now that I was close to him I noticed two things I hadn't before: One was the way his eyes wandered, not quite wanting to look at me. The other was a vertical white line that ran through his upper lip to his nose: a scar from a long time ago.

He started again. “I'll tell you something. When we were kids, Jana and me, we used to wish for something exciting to happen in this town. A kidnapping or an alien invasion. A murder. Anything that would break up the boredom. I'm not sure what the appeal was supposed to be—maybe having a mystery to solve. I'd like to have that boredom back.”

He loosened the vise, turned the board over, tightened it again. “I don't know why anyone would want to kill her,” he said, looking up at me suddenly, fixing his eyes on mine. “Moretti seemed to think it was someone she knew.”

It was a quiet provocation. I didn't take the bait. If he wanted to accuse me of murder, he would have to come out and say it.

He stayed silent for a while and when he spoke again he seemed to have read my mind. “If I thought you killed her,” he said, “I wouldn't let you out of here alive. So maybe it's better that I don't know.”

I couldn't think of any way to answer that. I watched him open a drawer in his workbench and take out a metal file. He didn't stab me with it. He went to work on the board in the vise, rounding off a corner.

A moment later he looked up, as if he expected me to be gone. He waved the file toward Lydia Fletcher's house. “You can try to talk to her if you want,” he said. “But don't stay long. I know she's tired.”