The Last Dead Girl (12 page)

W
arren's a sweet boy,” said Lydia Fletcher.

“He seems a little . . .” I searched for a word. “. . . intense.”

I'd knocked on her door with an apology on my lips: I didn't want to bother her; I could come back another time. But she had welcomed me in and insisted on brewing coffee. She had poured some for each of us, in fine china cups.

“Well, he's had a hard life,” she said, “because of . . .” She twirled her finger in a circle, pointing to her own mouth. I thought of Warren's scar.

“Harelip,” she said softly. “He was born with it and the doctors did what they could to fix it up. But the other children always teased him. Not Jana. She was devoted to him, even though she could have had . . . other friends.” She had started to say “better friends” but caught herself.

We were sitting across from each other in a long, narrow living room. At the funeral Lydia Fletcher had worn a black sweater and a skirt; she had kept the sweater and traded the skirt for a pair of jeans. She had the same brown eyes as Jana and the same curly hair, though hers was streaked with gray. She must have been around fifty.

I could tell she'd been crying, but she had composed herself and now she seemed at ease. Or at least as much at ease as you could be in that house. Because there was something off about it, something out of sync. The furniture was old. There was no doily draped over the back of my chair, but I thought a doily would have felt right at home. The walls were papered, and the ones that weren't papered were covered in cheap wood paneling and hung with antique mirrors and paintings—oil paintings of cottages and lighthouses.

There were some photographs of Jana on a side table—school portraits—but nothing else to suggest that a child had ever lived here. Even the cups we drank from were misplaced in time: they were fragile and dainty, decorated with intricate geometric patterns like the windows of a Gothic cathedral. They were the cups of a seventy-year-old lady.

I tasted my coffee, added more sugar. Gestured at the room and said, “This is where Jana grew up?”

Lydia Fletcher nodded. “I could show you her bedroom, but there's nothing to see. She took everything with her when she went away. What she didn't take, she threw out. But I have pictures.” She rose abruptly and disappeared down a hall, came back a minute later with a thick photo album.

She opened it on the coffee table and patted the sofa cushion beside her, inviting me to come around. I brought my coffee with me.

“That's me with Jana's father,” she said. The photograph showed a pretty girl in tie-dyed clothes with braided hair, and beside her a tall, slender black man with a big smile. Jana's father wore a tweed jacket and glasses with round metal frames.

He had taught at the college here in town, Lydia told me. He'd been a visiting lecturer from Sudan, and she had been one of his students. Back then, she had wanted to teach history.

“All that went away when I got pregnant,” she said.

Jana's father left the country before Jana was born. His visa had always been temporary. He meant to come back, but he died a year later in a protest in the streets of Khartoum, a victim of the riot police.

Lydia Fletcher had dropped out of college and moved back in with her mother, a stern-looking woman with beehive hair—the old lady whose house we were sitting in now.

“That's not a good picture of her,” Lydia said to me. “She really did smile sometimes. She saved me from a lot of misery, letting me stay here. And she took good care of Jana.”

Jana looked well cared for. In the pictures she was always beaming. Here she was, a tomboy in high-top sneakers, perched in a tree. And on a bike with patches on the knees of her jeans. Here she was on Halloween, Princess Leia with a lightsaber, and a chubby Warren Finn beside her, dressed as Luke Skywalker.

There were stories to go with the pictures, and Lydia Fletcher told them. Details poured out of her, about birthday parties and who attended and what presents they brought. Visits to the zoo in Rochester. A school field trip to Montreal.

In high school Jana started acting in plays. I knew she'd been in
As You Like It
, but there were others too:
Our Town
,
Guys and Dolls
,
The Importance of Being Earnest
,
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Jana played Roxane, ethereal in a white gown, with flowers in her hair.

After high school Jana attended college in Geneva. “She got accepted by other colleges,” Lydia Fletcher told me, “and she could've gone, but she stayed to help me. My mother was ill. Kidney disease. Someone had to take her to dialysis three times a week.”

So Jana took care of her grandmother, but she managed to thrive in college too. She majored in psychology. She had always been a good student. And there were more plays. I saw the pictures: she was Miranda in
The Tempest
, Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
, Raina in
Arms and the Man
.

We came to the end of college—Jana posing on the front lawn in her cap and gown—and our coffee had long ago grown cold. Lydia took our cups away and came back with a bottle and two tumblers filled with ice.

“Do you drink Scotch, David?” she asked.

I told her no.

“Would you care to start?”

She needed the Scotch because things got rough when Jana finished college. She had applied to law schools, with her mother's blessing—and to theater programs, without telling anyone.

“I wanted her to study law at Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania,” Lydia said. “She had her heart set on the drama program at NYU. We couldn't afford any of them, but with financial aid and loans, she could have gotten by. And if she studied law, she could have some hope of repaying the loans. I wanted her to be practical.”

Jana bowed to her mother's wishes and accepted admission to Cornell Law School. But she never went. Her grandmother took a turn for the worse.

“Dementia,” Lydia Fletcher said over the rim of her glass, in the same soft voice she had used for “harelip.” “Looking back, I can tell you it had been coming on for a long time. But that summer after Jana graduated college, Mother went downhill fast. It got so you couldn't leave her alone. You couldn't predict what she'd do. She might wander into the street and start taking off her clothes.”

So Jana gave up law school for her grandmother's sake. The woman lasted almost another year, and toward the end she couldn't do anything for herself. She had to be bathed and changed and fed.

“She died at the end of May, two years ago,” said Lydia Fletcher. “It was a mercy, for her and for Jana too. I saw what it did to her, and she never complained. But with Mother gone I thought Jana could finally live her own life. She could go to Cornell—they had agreed to defer her admission for a year—and she'd be happy.”

I watched Lydia top off her Scotch. “She didn't go to Cornell,” I said.

“No,” she said. “She'd had a year to think about it, about what she wanted. A year of helping my mother out of her bed in the morning and helping her back into it at night—and everything in between. She needed to get out of Geneva, but she didn't want to go to law school. She wanted to act.”

When Jana made up her mind, it happened fast. “I wanted her to take her time, to plan,” Lydia said. “She would need to apply to drama schools all over again, and it was too late to apply for the fall. But Jana was tired of waiting. She had a car, an old Buick LeSabre my mother had signed over to her. One day in June I came home to find her packing.

“She told me she was going to New York City. She would find a job waiting tables and she would go on auditions. Maybe she would take classes. I told her she was being reckless. She didn't know anyone there. She didn't have a place to stay. Her life there would be hard—she had no idea. ‘Harder than the last year?' she said to me.”

Lydia leaned back on the sofa with her glass. “I was afraid for her, and we argued, and she wouldn't listen. She left that night, which was crazy. She could have at least waited till morning. But she was mad at me. She never called me from New York, not once, and I had no way to call her. She sent some postcards to let me know she was all right—I remember one from the Museum of Modern Art and another with a picture of the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to go and look for her, I wanted to call the police and make them find her. But of course they wouldn't have done anything, and if they did, she would've hated me for it.

“And in the end I was right: it was too hard. She came back three months later, just showed up here one day in September. The auditions never panned out and she couldn't make enough money waitressing. She had to sell my mother's car to pay the rent. She came home on a Greyhound bus.”

Lydia held the glass in her lap. It was just a prop now; she wasn't drinking from it. She said, “Jana wouldn't stay here, in this house. I think she had the idea that I didn't believe in her, and having to come back only made it worse. She stayed next door, with Warren. It worried me, because there was something going on between them—and that was new. They'd never been a couple before. Warren's parents gave him that house when they retired. They live in Arizona now. Warren has a job at the college, working in the bookstore. I was afraid Jana would end up marrying him and they'd have babies and she'd be stuck in this town forever. But by the end of the following spring she had moved back in with me, and she was talking about law school again. At Bellamy University this time, because of a professor she'd heard about.”

“Roger Tolliver,” I said.

“That's him. I was relieved. Her life seemed to be on track. And now I wish she had stayed with Warren. I wish she had done anything but go to Bellamy.”

Lydia turned toward a window and I followed her gaze. She had a view of Warren Finn's house.

“He's with someone else now,” I said.

She nodded. “Rose. They were dating when Jana came back from New York. Warren broke up with her when Jana moved in with him. And when Jana left him, he got back together with Rose. Now they're married.” She looked away from me, but not before I spotted tears. “I keep thinking it could be Jana over there, with a baby on the way. Would that be so terrible? But she did what I wanted her to do. She went away to law school. And now I've lost her.”

The tears rolled down her cheeks and she sat up and wiped them with the back of her hand. She held her glass out and I took it, and she found a box of tissues and used one to dry her eyes. I put the glass on the coffee table.

She sat with her head bowed, holding the balled-up tissue. “Don't think too poorly of me,” she said. “My daughter's gone and here I am crying for myself.”

“I don't think—”

“I didn't mean to do this,” she said. “It was nice of you to come here, and there's something I'd like to ask you. You can tell me the truth.”

“Ask me anything you want.”

“It's just that I never visited her there in Rome. I don't know what her life was like.” She reached out to me, squeezed my hand. “There's only one thing that's important now. Maybe you can tell me. Do you think she was happy?”

I
got home that night after dark. It would have been sooner, but Lydia Fletcher wanted to fix me something to eat and I didn't want to refuse, and I thought it might be wise to give the Scotch some time to work its way through my system.

She made bacon and eggs and pancakes. Breakfast for dinner, she said—something Jana had always loved as a child. The eggs scrambled, the pancakes loaded with blueberries. Lydia cooked more than we needed and I ate more than I should have, and when she packed the leftovers in Tupperware and offered them to me, I took them.

I took a photo with me too—a portrait of Jana from her college yearbook. Lydia wanted me to have it and I was glad. As I slipped it into my wallet I realized it was the only picture I had of Jana. I'd never taken one; those were the days before everyone walked around with a camera in their cell phone.

At home I found Sophie asleep in our bed. I joined her. When I woke sometime later, she was gone. Intern's hours. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She had left me a note on the table:
Missed you. Hope it went okay.

I took my water onto the balcony. It was a cool, still night and the stars were out. I thought about Sophie's message: two lines and so much to read between them.
Missed you—because even though we're living in the same place, we're not connecting. We keep missing each other.
Or it could mean:
You were gone today and it made me sad. I missed you. Because I still care about you. Did you miss me?

Hope it went okay—the funeral of that other woman you were sleeping with
.

Hope it went okay, but now it's over and we have to move on. Don't we?

A good question. I drank some water and thought about the answer. It was time to decide: Keep obsessing over the woman you barely knew, the one who's gone; or hold tight to the living, breathing woman who's trying to stay with you, the one who misses you? What would a sensible man do?

The answer was obvious: I was not a sensible man. I needed to obsess, at least for a little longer.

I dug out my cell phone and called Roger Tolliver. It took four rings for him to answer.

I said, “Was she happy?”

Tolliver cleared his throat. “Was who—”

“Jana's mother asked me if she was happy,” I said. “What was I supposed to say?”

“What time—It's after midnight.”

“I knew her for ten days,” I said. “She seemed happy. But how would I know?”

“David—”

“And what does it mean to be happy? It's different things to different people. Some philosophers would say you're only happy if you're leading a good life, a life of virtue.”

“Philosophers?”

“Greek philosophers. Was Jana leading a good life? She was trying to do the right thing, trying to help Gary Dean Pruett, because she thought he was innocent. That's virtuous, isn't it?”

Tolliver sighed. “David, are you drunk?”

“No. This is what I'm like when I'm sober. I need to know more about Jana's life. Otherwise—”

“Hold on,” Tolliver said. “Did you talk to Jana's mother like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like spouting nonsense about Greek philosophers when she asked you a simple question.”

I got up and went to the balcony rail. “No,” I said. “I did what I was supposed to do. I told her Jana was happy.”

“Good.”

“But it's not a simple question. That's the point. I saw one small corner of Jana's life. It's not enough.”

“Not enough for what?”

“It's not enough. I need more. Who did she talk to?”

“What do you mean?”

“About Gary Pruett. She talked to Poe Washburn. Were there others?”

A quiet moment on the line. Then Tolliver said, “I'm sure she spoke to Pruett's lawyer. And maybe his family. I think he has a brother—”

“I want to talk to them,” I said. “Can you get me names?”

“I suppose. But what do you hope to learn?”

“I want to know why she died.”

A longer quiet this time. I could hear Tolliver moving around, maybe sitting up in bed. “Is that what this is about?” he asked me. “You think you can find her killer?”

“I want to know the truth about Gary Pruett,” I said. “If she died because of him, and if he's guilty, then her death meant nothing. If he's innocent, then somebody should do something about it.”

Tolliver's voice turned solemn. “You don't really care about Pruett.”

“I care about Jana.”

“But there's nothing you can do for her now.”

I looked up at the stars. “I can find out if Pruett's innocent,” I said. “Maybe get him a new trial. That's what she wanted.”

“And you think that'll make a difference?” Tolliver said. “To her?”

“It will to me.”

•   •   •

G
ary Dean Pruett had been a high school algebra teacher before he went to prison for killing his wife.

If I had lived in a different neighborhood, he might have been one of my teachers. But he taught at East Rome High School, and I went to Rome Free Academy in the center of the city. My algebra teacher was a distant cousin on my father's side of the family, a strange little man with a buzz cut and horn-rimmed glasses, like a NASA scientist from the Apollo program. My father never liked him, but he never liked schoolteachers in general. He found them aloof. He noticed that they tended to socialize with one another and marry other teachers, and he concluded that they thought they were better than everyone else.

I don't know if Gary Pruett was aloof, but in one way he had conformed to my father's stereotype: he had married a fellow teacher. Cathy Pruett had taught history and geography before she died.

Gary had a brother, another teacher at the same high school. Neil Pruett. Chemistry and physics. I went looking for him the next day, around four-thirty in the afternoon. I didn't find him. I found his wife.

She was in her late thirties and very thin, with a long neck and a sharp chin and nose. She carried herself in a way my father would have called snooty: squared shoulders, rigid posture. I was unsurprised to learn her occupation. She taught English at a middle school.

Megan Pruett was leery of letting me into her house. She came out onto the porch to talk to me instead. When I mentioned Jana Fletcher she was sympathetic.

“It's tragic what happened to her,” she said. “She was so young. She came here, of course, to talk about Gary and whether he'd gotten a fair trial. She had some story about a false confession.”

“You didn't believe it?” I said.

Megan Pruett shook her head. “Maybe I'm biased—Cathy was my best friend. But as far as I'm concerned, Gary is guilty as sin.”

Megan had known Cathy Pruett since their college days. “SUNY Albany,” she said. “We were roommates freshman year. She was Cathy Dorn then, and I was Megan Linney. After we graduated, we found our first teaching jobs together, in Poughkeepsie. Then we moved here.”

Cathy Dorn had met Gary Pruett at East Rome High. They had gotten engaged. She had introduced Megan to Gary's brother, Neil.

“So you were close,” I said, “all four of you.”

Megan Pruett stood by the railing of the porch, looking out at the street. “About as close as you can get,” she said.

“And what did you think of Gary and Cathy as a couple? Were there warning signs? Was he ever violent?”

“No,” Megan said. “She would have told me. The trouble with Gary was much subtler. He was a liar. You know about his affair?”

She didn't wait for an answer. She was eager to fill me in.

“After they were married a few years, Cathy started to feel like they were drifting apart. But if she tried to talk to him, Gary would say everything was fine. He tried to spin it into something positive. They were two different people, they should have their own interests. But that was really just a pretense for him to get out of the house. They taught at the same school, so he couldn't take advantage of the usual excuses. He couldn't say he had to work late. So he signed up for night classes: poetry and photography. Only she never saw much in the way of poems or pictures. Or he would claim to go to movies by himself. Sci-fi and horror, stuff she had no interest in seeing. Anything that would give him an excuse to be out at night.

“Cathy wasn't stupid. She thought there must be something going on. But when she asked him, he called her paranoid. She told me about it, because we talked about everything. And I decided to follow him.”

Megan had been watching cars pass on the street. Now she turned to me. “You have to understand, we were like sisters,” she said. “We used to watch out for each other in college. If I got drunk at a party, she'd make sure I got home. If she thought her boyfriend was cheating, I'd make it my job to find out for sure. We had each other's back.

“When I followed Gary, it was crystal clear that he hadn't been going to the movies, unless they were the kind of movies you could see in your room at a cheap motel. I waited there in the motel parking lot, after he went inside. I wanted to see who would meet him. I was afraid it might be someone we knew, someone Cathy worked with at the high school. But the woman who showed up didn't look familiar.

“I got a better look at her afterward, when they came out of the room together. And I realized she was young. I found out later that she was a girl named Angela Reese. She had just graduated from high school—this was in the summer. She was eighteen. She's twenty now.

“I dreaded telling Cathy, but I knew I had to. And when she confronted Gary he denied it. He said I must have mistaken him for someone else. But eventually he realized that lying wouldn't work. Cathy trusted me more than she trusted him. So he admitted it. But he swore it had only happened a few times. And yes, the girl had been his student, but he had never touched her until after she graduated. He wasn't some pervert.”

Megan Pruett frowned, remembering. “I told Cathy she should divorce him, but she came from a religious family and she had always been the good daughter. She rarely drank anything stronger than wine, never smoked, never experimented with drugs, not even a joint—and as for her marriage, she took it very seriously. She wanted to fix it. Gary played along. He said he loved her and he was sorry. He put it all down to a midlife crisis. He'd gone a little crazy, but it was over now. He would prove to her that he could be a better man.”

She looked out at the street again. “That went on for a few weeks, and he really did seem to change. He would take Cathy out. Buy her flowers. Leave her sweet little notes. Then one night after dinner he said he felt like going to a movie—would that be all right? Like he was asking her permission. She said she'd go with him. He told her he wanted to see some big action movie, not her kind of thing, she'd only be bored. That's when she realized nothing had changed.

“At that point I raised the idea of divorce again. I told Cathy if I were in her position I wouldn't think twice. It would be the easiest decision I ever made. She got angry with me. I wasn't in her position, she said. And maybe she wouldn't be either if I hadn't followed her husband around and caught him—which she had never asked me to do. She was lashing out. I couldn't blame her. She was heartbroken.”

Megan Pruett turned her back on the street, and for the first time her rigid posture wavered. She slouched against the wooden railing. “I think she would have divorced him eventually,” she said, “but she wanted to make one last effort: marriage counseling. Gary wasn't interested. I know they argued about it. I don't know exactly what happened next, but a few days after she brought up counseling, she disappeared. That was near the end of July. They found her body in mid-August.”

“And you have no doubt Gary was the one who killed her?”

Megan tipped her head to the side. “She asked me the same thing—your friend Jana Fletcher. The answer's no. No doubts. Gary claimed that Cathy just left one afternoon without saying anything to him. But when she didn't come back that night, or the next, he didn't report her missing. He didn't do anything until I called their house—because I hadn't heard from her in days.

“When the police talked to him, he said he assumed she had left him. He thought she must be staying with me and Neil. But if that's what he believed, why didn't he call us to make sure?”

“If he killed her,” I said, “what was his motive? You don't murder your wife just because you don't want to go into counseling.”

“You might if she threatened to divorce you,” said Megan Pruett. “Some men do. I wouldn't have thought Gary was one of them, but I never suspected he'd cheat on Cathy with an eighteen-year-old either.”

It seemed weak, as a motive. But when I started to say so, she interrupted me.

“You have to remember Gary was a liar. He claimed his affair with Angela Reese started after she graduated. I didn't necessarily believe him. I'm not sure Cathy did either. If it started earlier, he was on dangerous ground. Sleeping with a student can cost you your job, even if she's over the age of consent. What if Cathy threatened to report him? I'm not saying she did, but she could have—in the heat of the moment, if they were arguing. And that might've been enough to make Gary snap.”

It sounded plausible, I thought. But it was still guesswork.

“Doesn't it bother you,” I said, “not being sure about the motive?”

She trailed a finger along the railing. “I suppose it would, if Gary hadn't treated Cathy so badly. But honestly, what's the alternative? Some stranger came along and killed her?”

“But don't you wish the case against Gary had been stronger?” I asked. “Doesn't it bother you that it relied on a confession that might never have happened?”