The Last Dead Girl (27 page)

P
oe Washburn left twenty minutes later. I stood in the doorway and watched him cross the street to the parking lot of Reed Terrace, where he had left his truck.

We'd spent those twenty minutes talking. I'd asked him more questions, and the answers he gave me left me feeling even more like the world had turned unsteady. I shut the door and looked around and everything seemed to lean a little sideways. It needed to be set right.

I started with the clay bowl that Washburn had been using as an ashtray. I fished out Jana's quarter with its strange, sharp point. I dumped the cigarettes and ashes in the trash. Rinsed the bowl and the quarter and dried them. I'd grown used to having them around. I wondered if I could justify keeping them. I slipped the quarter in my pocket and returned the bowl to its place on the mantel.

I gathered the clip and the bullets from the kitchen floor and reloaded the Makarov pistol. I put that on the mantel too.

I swept up the glass from the broken window in the back door and used duct tape to secure a piece of cardboard over the opening. I began to feel better, to move easier. The bull that had gored me was still following me around; he nudged a horn into my back now and then. But he was a smaller, weaker bull. I wasn't so afraid of him.

I knew my next move. There was someone I needed to see.

I thought about Warren Finn, who was supposed to have a friend drop him off here tonight so he could pick up Jana's things and drive her car back to Geneva. I wrote a note for him and taped it to the front door on my way out:
Back soon. Come in. The door's unlocked.

•   •   •

I
'd never been to Wendy Daw's apartment; I had to look up the address. She lived in the basement of a house on Dominick Street, a few blocks from the IRS building where she worked. She had her own entrance, at the bottom of a set of concrete steps.

She answered the door in sweatpants and a flannel shirt. Her brittle hair was parted down the middle. The wind blew strands of it across her face.

I had Jana's picture out, the one I'd been carrying in my wallet. I held it up and said, “I think you knew her.”

Wendy Daw backed away from the picture and I took the opportunity to step inside. She had her television on, the sound muted, an old black-and-white movie on the screen. I saw a bowl of popcorn sitting on her sofa.

“I don't want you in here,” she said.

“I'm already in.”

“This isn't fair. I never wanted to talk to you about Eli. You told me if I did, I'd never see you again.”

I waved the picture. “You said you didn't recognize her. You lied to me.”

I hadn't been sure before, but now I knew I was on the right track. The picture made Wendy uncomfortable. Afraid.

“I want you to go,” she said. “I don't have anything to say about her.”

She held the door open for me, as if it might be that easy. I pushed it shut.

“Sit down,” I told her. “You don't have to say anything yet. Just listen. I'll tell you about Jana. She was a law student, working with one of her professors on an Innocence Project, trying to exonerate people who were wrongly imprisoned. She got caught up in a case—that's what her professor told me. Cathy Pruett's murder. You know about Cathy Pruett. Her husband went away for killing her. The crucial testimony against him at his trial came from a thief named Napoleon Washburn. Washburn claimed that Gary Pruett confessed to him in jail.”

Wendy had stayed on her feet. She backed away from me toward the television.

“Washburn's story was a lie,” I said, “and eventually he decided to set the record straight, so he got in touch with the Innocence Project. At least, that's what Jana told her professor. I found out today it wasn't true. Washburn didn't call Jana. She called him.”

I stepped closer to Wendy Daw.

“That's not the way it's supposed to work,” I said. “Jana's professor, Roger Tolliver, told me he gets requests for help from convicts and their families constantly. He has to turn most of them away. He never has to go looking for cases to get involved in. But that's what Jana did.

“She called Washburn in February. When he wouldn't talk to her on the phone she went to his house. She told him she knew he had lied about Gary Pruett's confession. Washburn stuck to his story and sent her away, but she wouldn't give up. She kept coming back. Finally she wore him down. He admitted that Pruett never confessed.

“He still didn't want to get involved. Jana wanted him to sign a statement, to testify again, this time on Pruett's behalf. But Washburn couldn't see the point. Gary Pruett didn't confess, but so what? It didn't mean he wasn't guilty. Wasn't the husband usually guilty? Somebody murdered Cathy Pruett. If it wasn't Gary, then who?”

The wind gusted outside. It pummeled the basement's small, high windows.

“Washburn posed that question to Jana,” I told Wendy Daw. “And he remembered her answer. I heard it from him tonight. ‘What if it was a stranger?' she said to him. ‘It could have been anyone. 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?'”

Wendy closed her eyes and stood with her back against the television.

“Washburn thought Jana was just offering him a wild example,” I said. “
What if?
But we know better, don't we? ‘A couple of crazy farm-boys in a white van'—that's Luke and Eli. They killed Cathy Pruett. And somehow Jana knew.”

She knew in February—before she talked to Gary Pruett or anyone else about the case. That was the most important thing I'd learned from Poe Washburn.

“That's why Jana couldn't let the Pruett case go,” I said to Wendy. “She knew Luke and Eli and what they'd done. I don't know how she could have met them. That's what you need to tell me.”

Wendy's eyes came open. “I can't,” she said. “I don't know.”

I held up the photograph of Jana—the only weapon I had. “Stop lying to me. You recognized her the first time I showed you her picture. You knew her. You saw her—”

Wendy shook her head. “I saw her one time. I don't know how she knew Eli or Luke. I don't know how they met. I only know one thing about her.”

“Tell me.”

“I don't think it's what you want to hear.”

“If it's about Jana, I want to hear it. Tell me.”

The screen of the television went blank and the lights flickered around us but stayed on. I watched Wendy Daw's face. She looked away from me and looked back again. And then she told me the one thing she knew.

•   •   •

T
he rain held off for a long time. Well after nine o'clock, when I drove away from Wendy Daw's apartment, the storm was still only wind. I watched it bend the trees as I drove along, but the windows of the truck were rolled up tight. The wind never touched me.

The neighborhoods I passed through all had power—until I got to Jana's street. There the lights were out. The Reed Terrace Apartments had gone dark as a void. When I walked to Jana's door, my note was still there.
Back soon. Come in. The door's unlocked.
I slipped inside as quickly as I could and shut the door behind me.

There was light in the apartment: four candle flames burning atop the two-by-four on the mantel. Warren Finn was in the living room, sitting in Jana's desk chair. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at something. Something not there, something far away.

He held the Makarov pistol loosely in his right hand.

He looked up and saw me standing in the archway of the kitchen. He had a habit of not looking people in the eye; I'd noticed it the first time I met him. His eyes found me and slid past me and found me again.

“The power went out,” he said softly.

“The wind must have knocked down a line,” I told him.

“It's getting pretty bad. Maybe I shouldn't have come tonight.”

“I'm glad you're here.” The same thing I'd said to Poe Washburn.

I picked up a kitchen chair and carried it into the living room. I put it down in front of the bedroom door, turned it around, and sat with my arms folded over the back.

“Where's your friend?” I asked Warren.

He looked blank at first, then realized who I meant: the friend who had driven him here.

“I told him he could take off. He's got a wife and kid waiting. He wanted to get home before the worst of the weather hit.”

“I hope he does.”

“I've got a wife waiting too. It's funny to say that. And a kid—I'll have a kid before long.” Warren paused, trying out the idea, marveling at it. “But I'm still here.”

I didn't say anything. Warren was calm. Both of us were. It didn't bother me too much that he was holding the gun. He didn't look like he wanted to use it. He looked sad and a little lost. He wore a white dress shirt and a pair of black trousers, and they were too big for him—just as the suit he'd worn at Jana's funeral had been too big.

He had a fleshy face. Pink cheeks. He had a high forehead and the same long hair I remembered, tied back in a ponytail. And he had that scar: a white line running through his upper lip.

“This is the first time I've seen this place,” he said, in a lost voice to go with his lost look. “I never visited Jana here. But she lived here. She sat at this desk.”

I nodded.

“And she died right here, didn't she? In this room.”

“You don't want to think about that,” I said.

“Show me where.”

I pointed to the spot. It was midway between us. Nothing to see, just the hardwood floor. Bits of dried candle wax. Warren didn't move from his chair.

“I loved her,” he said.

“I know.”

The words fell flat. I didn't have any right to say them. Warren frowned, but he didn't overreact. He didn't shoot me.

“You don't know,” he said. “I grew up next door to her. I saw her every day of my life. We walked to school together every morning. She was the most beautiful girl I knew, and I was a fat kid named Warren with a harelip. So don't pretend you know how I loved her.”

He had more to tell me, about how he loved her. I would have listened even if he hadn't been holding the gun. I wanted to hear.

“When I was a kid, I had a stutter,” he said. “It made the other kids laugh, but not Jana. I couldn't talk to anyone, but I could talk to her. My parents spent a fortune on speech therapy, and it never did any good. But one summer Jana bought a secondhand guitar and taught herself a few chords. She had this ridiculous songbook—John Denver's greatest hits—and we sat out on a blanket on the lawn and she made me sing every one of those songs with her. ‘You Fill Up My Senses.' ‘Rocky Mountain High.' ‘Sunshine on My Shoulders.' Over and over, day after day. And somehow at the end of that summer I didn't have a stutter anymore.”

He paused for a moment, and the wind swelled up to fill the silence.

“When we were fourteen she had her first boyfriend,” he said. “A football player. It didn't amount to much. They went to a school dance, a few movies, a party at someone's house. It was over in a month. He broke it off. It hit her hard, the way it does when you're fourteen. It made her cry. I felt awful—and wonderful too. Because when she cried she let me put my arms around her.”

He wanted to tell her how he felt, but he couldn't, because if she didn't feel the same way, it would ruin everything they had. “And what we had was a lot,” he said. “Jana had started acting in plays by then, and plays were a foreign world to me—as foreign as school dances and parties. I was too shy to ever stand on a stage. But when she had to learn a part, I was the one who helped her. We read all her scenes together.”

When they were sixteen, Jana played Roxane in
Cyrano de Bergerac
.

“Do you know what it's about?” Warren asked me.

I said I did, but he went on as if he hadn't heard.

“It's about an ugly man who's in love with a beautiful woman. The only way he can tell her he loves her is if she can't see him, if she thinks he's someone else. When he's standing under her balcony in the dark, then he can tell her. But he can never come out of that dark, because then she would see him. We read that balcony scene, Jana and me, when we were sixteen. I spoke those lines to her: ‘I love you beyond breath, beyond reason. Your name is like a golden bell hung in my heart; and when I think of you, I tremble, and the bell swings and rings.'”

I watched his hand come up—the one with the gun in it. It touched his heart and then went down again.

“But I was hiding in the dark,” he said. “I wasn't brave enough to tell her the truth in my own voice. I never told her—not till later, after her grandmother died, when I found out she was leaving for New York City. And then I had to. It wasn't bravery; it was desperation. I thought I might never see her again. So I told her I loved her and I wanted to go with her. But she . . . she didn't . . .”

His voice faded and he didn't finish the thought. But this was a part of the story I knew. I'd heard it from Jana's mother. Jana had gone to New York on her own, because she wanted to be an actress and she couldn't wait any longer. She lasted in New York for three months—three months without a phone call to her mother, with nothing but a few postcards.

“Did she ever call you from New York?” I asked Warren.

He was staring at the hardwood floor. “No.”

“You never got a letter or a card?”

“No. I didn't hear from her until she got back.”

“Her mother told me Jana had a hard time in New York,” I said.

“That's right.”

“And when she came back, she stayed with you.”

His chin came up. His eyes fixed on me. They didn't wander.

“All through the fall and winter,” he said. “All the way through the next spring.”