The Last Dead Girl (19 page)

Interlude:
Late August 1996

J
ana Fletcher and Luke Daw lay naked under the stars.

Jana tried to take in everything: the texture of the woolen blanket underneath them, the heat coming off Luke's body, the clean smell of the night air. Other smells too: the old timber of the barn, her own sweat, Luke's sweat. And something lingering, a memory of the smell of cows—inoffensive, because the cows had been gone for a very long time.

There were other animals here, though: birds in the high rafters. Jana could hear them up there, hopping along the wooden beams. The bare beams were all that was left of the barn's roof. A pair of birds took wing and Jana watched them fly away. Watched their silhouettes against the background of the stars.

“What kind of birds are those?” she asked Luke.

“Corvus brachyrhynchos,”
he said.

“In English.”

“Crows,” he said. “There are swallows up there too, but the swallows are way smaller.”

Jana focused on a star that looked brighter than the ones around it.

“They're bad omens,” she said.

“Swallows?”

“Crows, genius.”

“That's a myth,” Luke said. “I read somewhere that they're kind. They'll feed their parents, when their parents get old and weak.”

“They remember who their parents are?”

“Sure. They're smart. They're supposed to be able to remember human faces. They can recognize someone they've met before.”

Something passed over the empty framework of the roof—maybe one of the crows, maybe a different bird altogether. Jana lost track of the bright star, then found it again.

She pointed at it. “Is that anything?”

“Which one?” said Luke.

“The bright one.”

He tipped his head against her shoulder, looked up along the length of her arm. “It might be part of Sagittarius.”

“You think so?”

“Do you see a teapot?” he said. “Sagittarius is supposed to look like a teapot.”

“I thought it was supposed to be an archer.”

“It's a centaur with a bow, but the middle part is like a teapot.”

Jana tried to see a teapot, or a centaur, or a bow.

“I don't think that's Sagittarius,” she said.

She brought her arm down, and Luke's hand found hers. A breeze passed through the barn, cool on her skin.

Luke squeezed her hand. “See?” he said. “This is good.”

She closed her eyes. “It is.”

“We could be happy like this, couldn't we?”

“We could.”

He shifted beside her, getting comfortable. “You were wrong about me. You didn't like me at first.”

She remembered the night they met, at the rest stop on the Thruway.

“I liked you a lot at first,” she said. “I didn't like you at second.”

He laughed. A low, gentle sound. It trailed off and he breathed deep, let the breath out in a yawn. Jana opened her eyes and gazed at the stars. Not at one in particular, but at the whole field of them. She saw a red dot pass among them, blinking. A plane flying high.

Luke's breath fell into a steady rhythm. Jana listened to it, and the plane flew out of sight. She slipped her hand free of his, sat up slowly on the blanket, got to her feet.

She stepped around him and found her clothes piled on the ground, bra and underwear on top. She put them on, then put on her shirt and jeans. Luke's clothes made their own pile—topped off with something metal and black in the starlight. A thirty-eight revolver.

As she buttoned her jeans she realized that Luke was lying on his side, watching her.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She smiled at him in the dark. “Thought I might go for a walk.”

“What if I don't want you to go?”

“Then I'll stay here.”

He pushed himself up, sat cross-legged on the blanket. “Where would you go, if you went for a walk?”

“Timbuktu.”

“That's a long way.”

“Down to the pond then, for a start.”

He leaned back, bracing his weight on his arms. “You're very smooth.”

“Smooth?”

“Calm.”

“That's me,” she said. “Smooth and calm.”

“Are you pretending you don't see it?”

“See what?”

He nodded toward his clothes and the revolver. “The gun,” he said.

“I see the gun, Luke.”

“You're not going to pick it up?”

“Do you want me to pick it up?”

“I want you to do what a person would do.”

Jana bent down and picked up the gun. “Will you come with me to the pond?” she said.

“Forget about the pond,” said Luke. “The pond's not what you want.”

“What do I want?”

“I don't know. Do you want my car keys? They're in my pants.”

“Are you giving me your car keys?”

“You can take them,” he said. “You've got the gun.”

She aimed the gun at him. “Is that what I should do, take your keys?”

“That would be the sensible thing.”

“And then what? Shoot you?”

“I'd say shoot first, then take the keys.”

She pulled back the hammer of the revolver. “Is that what you think of me? Don't you know me at all?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” he said.

“Apparently, you don't.”

She turned the gun up suddenly and held it under her chin, the steel cold against her neck. She pulled the trigger and heard the click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

“Jana—”

She worked the hammer with her thumb again, and the trigger with her finger. Five more times, with Luke saying “Stop it!” all the while. When she had gone through every chamber, she dropped the gun on the ground between them.

He was on his feet now, pulling on his clothes.

“That was dumb,” he said, his voice heated. “You should never do that. You should always assume a gun is loaded.”

She turned her back on him. “Stop screwing around,” she told him. “If you don't trust me by now, you might as well shoot me in the head.”

He was quiet behind her, but she imagined him buttoning his shirt, picking up the revolver. She heard mechanical sounds that might have been the cylinder opening and then closing again. He might have put a round in the chamber. She waited for him to press the muzzle against the back of her skull.

He didn't. He came up behind her and put an arm around her waist, the other around her chest. “I'm sorry,” he said.

June 7, 1996

J
ana left the service plaza smiling, thinking about Luke the drummer with his orange T-shirt, and his idiot friend who played a mean bass. She motored east on the Thruway in her grandmother's LeSabre—stale smoke and perfume—and when she reached Syracuse she headed south on I-81.

She had the name of a bar in Binghamton scribbled in the margin of her road map: Dino's on Conklin Street. Luke and his band would be there tomorrow night. She had seventy-five miles between Syracuse and Binghamton to make up her mind. The band might be awful and Luke might be boring, and then she would have wasted a day. Or the band might be brilliant and Luke might be irresistible, and she might get tangled up with a drummer and never make it to New York City.

She reached Binghamton and kept on driving, with a small twinge of regret. There would be other musicians in New York.

She crossed the border into Pennsylvania, moved into the left lane to pass a line of semi trucks. The wind whipped through the window beside her. She had a Melissa Etheridge album cranked up loud in the LeSabre's cassette deck.

A short time after midnight she decided to take a break. She got off the interstate at a town called Harford and pulled into an Exxon station. The lone attendant was missing one of his front teeth and most of his hair. He was listening to a rock station on a boom box radio.

The ladies' room was hidden in a far corner, behind stacked cases of soda and racks of potato chips. Jana found it surprisingly clean, though there were no paper towels.

She came out drying her hands on her jeans. The attendant didn't see her; he had his nose in a hunting magazine. A Tom Petty song played on the radio: “You and I Will Meet Again.”

When she walked out the front door, she saw a white panel van parked next to the LeSabre. She went around the front of the van with her keys out and there was Luke Daw leaning against her car, wearing his easy smile.

“I know this seems weird,” he said, “but I can explain.”

And then there were two Janas: one who agreed that this seemed weird; he shouldn't be here; he should be back in Binghamton; maybe his gig got canceled. And another, half a step behind, who thought: He followed you. He's a crazy guy with a van.

Jana backed away. She should have screamed. The attendant would have heard her. He would have been a witness. She meant to scream, but she backed into something solid and a hand went over her mouth. Not Luke's hand—the idiot friend's. He had come up behind her.

Later on, she would remember the sensation of trying to twist away from him, trying to stab her keys into his thigh. She would remember the sound of the gas station radio—a fresh Tom Petty song, “Kings Highway.”

Music for an abduction.

She watched Luke slide open the side door of the van. The two of them forced her in. The door slammed shut. No more music, just the weight of Luke Daw on top of her and his voice saying, “Don't worry. This won't be as bad as you think.”

•   •   •

N
inety-two days—from June seventh to September sixth—that's how long she spent with the Daws. She passed the first few hours lying in the back of the van, her ankles bound together, hands cuffed behind her, a rag stuffed in her mouth and tied in place with a bandanna.

They drove north to Binghamton, retracing her route in reverse. Then they left I-81 and followed Route 12 for a hundred miles, all the way to the city of Rome. Not that Jana knew that at the time. She didn't know the destination or how long it took to get there. It seemed to take forever.

She was alone with Luke in the van. The idiot friend had gone off with her keys. She assumed he must be following them in her grandmother's car.

Luke drove in silence at first, then switched on the radio and flipped through the stations. Jana tried to get his attention, but the rag in her mouth turned everything she said into gibberish. She tried faking an attack—breathing hard and shaking as if she were having a seizure. Luke glanced back at her through the space between the seats, then returned his eyes to the road. “Knock it off,” he said.

She kept it up, but only for a little while. She was afraid she might start to hyperventilate for real. She lay with her cheek pressed against the carpeted floor of the van and focused on breathing calmly through her nose. Luke gave up on the radio and started to hum. He seemed full of nervous energy. He retrieved a drumstick from the dash and tapped out a complex rhythm on the seat beside him.

By the end of the trip he had tossed the stick aside and seemed to have retreated into himself. He didn't say anything when he pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. He came around and opened the side door and showed Jana a knife and a revolver. He used the knife to cut the cord that bound her ankles, then folded it and put it away. The handcuffs stayed in place. He dragged her out and stood her up against the side of the van.

She saw trees and a night sky and an overgrown lane running off into the dark. Luke had parked the van behind a trailer, but the road was there on the other side, not so far away. No sign of the idiot friend.

She lifted her chin defiantly. Said, “Take off the gag.” It came out muffled, but he got the gist. He tucked the gun away behind his back, turned her around, picked at the knot in the bandanna until it came free. He turned her again and pulled the rag from her mouth.

She spat out the taste of it. “I have asthma,” she said. “You put that in again, you could kill me.”

Luke shot her a skeptical look, opened the van's passenger door, and took out her handbag. He dumped the contents on the ground and nudged them with the toe of his shoe.

“I don't see an inhaler,” he said, laying a hand on her throat and pushing her back against the van. “You don't have asthma. If you lie to me, we're not going to get along.”

“You want the truth?” Jana said. “I don't like rags in my mouth.”

“All right, we'll leave it out. But if you scream, I'll have to shoot you.”

“That sounds fair,” she said, and drove her knee up into his groin.

It didn't put him on the ground as she had hoped, but it knocked him back. It gave her a chance to break free and rush along the rear wall of the trailer, around the corner, toward the road. She saw headlights and ran out to meet them, yelling “Help me!” at the top of her voice. The headlights slowed, the car swerved to avoid her. She recognized it too late: her grandmother's LeSabre, with the idiot friend at the wheel.

She turned to run and Luke Daw caught her and dragged her out of the road. He hauled her back to the van and the idiot friend brought the LeSabre around and joined them. Luke stuffed the rag in her mouth again, tied the bandanna in place. They bound her legs and picked her up. Carried her along the lane that led away from the trailer and the road and any help she might hope to find.

A half-moon shone low in the sky. They passed the edge of a pond to the sound of bullfrogs croaking. The ground sloped up. Jana twisted her head from side to side. She saw a barn looming in the distance. She saw a farmhouse that had fallen in on itself.

She thought they would take her to the barn, but she was wrong. They took her underground.

July 1996

Y
ou could bring me a puppy,” Jana said.

“What kind?” said Luke Daw.

“A golden retriever. I always wanted one.”

“That's a hunting dog.”

“I wouldn't have to take it hunting,” she said.

His dark eyes were studying her. Sometimes they seemed full of intelligence; sometimes they seemed empty. Right now she couldn't tell.

“A dog like that needs to be outdoors,” Luke said. “I don't know if I'd want to keep one down here. It seems cruel.”

“I wouldn't want you to do anything against your conscience.”

“Let me think about it,” he said. “What else?”

“Coffee,” she told him.

“No coffee.”

“Mocha with whipped cream.”

“You're lively enough without coffee.”

“Caramel macchiato.”

“I could bring you ice cream.”

“I'll take ice cream,” she said, “but I still want coffee.”

There were no chairs in her prison underground, so they were sitting on the floor—Jana in the middle of the room, Luke with his back against the door. He had brought a light with him: a battery-powered lantern that rested on the floor beside him.

Jana thought it must be nighttime, but she wasn't sure. She tended to lose track. Luke came down on his own schedule; she never knew when the door would open. Sometimes—like now—he came down just to talk, and they pretended they were civilized people, rather than a lunatic and his captive. They were a couple negotiating the terms of their living arrangement.

“I'd like Syrian food,” she said.

“That's Middle Eastern.”

“It's a kind of Middle Eastern.”

“Shish kebobs?” he said. “Like that?”

“Something like that.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“Or Ethiopian.”

“That's, what, African?”

“Northern African.”

“Aren't they always starving, the Ethiopians?”

“Not all of them,” Jana said. “Some of them come here and open restaurants.”

“What do they serve?”

“Chicken and lamb,” she said. “Lentils. And a spongy kind of bread called
injera
.”

“We don't have that around here. Sorry.”

“Too bad,” she said. “It's my favorite.” It wasn't really. She'd had it once, in Montreal. You couldn't get it in Geneva.

“What else?” Luke said.

“Italian.”

“I've given you Italian.”

“You've given me cold pizza.”

He sat there turning a popsicle stick over and over in the fingers of his right hand. Jana thought about what it would be like to break the stick in half and jam both halves into his eyes.

“Maybe you need to lower your expectations,” he said.

“How low do you think they go?”

•   •   •

I
t was the fifteenth of July—at least that's what Luke Daw told her when she asked. She had to accept his word; she hadn't seen the sky since the day they locked her underground.

The place where they kept her was a wooden box: twelve by twelve, with an eight-foot ceiling. Not quite a perfect cube. The walls were made of hundreds of pieces of two-by-four, each piece four feet long. The boards ran horizontally. They were screwed into studs behind the walls, or so she assumed. Two screws in each board. The floor and ceiling were made the same way.

There was a single door in the middle of one wall. It looked like it had been salvaged from an old building, maybe from the farmhouse she had seen the night they brought her here. She couldn't reach the door, because there was a chain around her ankle that limited her movement. The chain passed through the wall opposite the door, and the end of it must have been bolted to something on the other side.

They gave her blankets and a thin mattress to sleep on. They left her hands free most of the time. Not out of mercy, she was sure. Out of practicality. They wanted her to be able to feed herself and use the bathroom. The bathroom was a plastic bucket with a lid.

If it was the fifteenth, then Jana had been here for more than five weeks. She tried to decide if that felt right. She was reluctant to trust her own perception of time, because she spent so much of it alone in the dark. And because they were drugging her.

It started early on. The first time Luke Daw raped her, she fought back; she managed to land an elbow in his face and split his lip. It didn't matter. He still took what he wanted. But after that, they started putting something in her food. She felt groggy after she ate; she slept more than she thought she should; and even when she was awake, her mind didn't feel clear.

When she realized what they were doing, she went on a hunger strike. And when the grogginess continued, she decided they must be drugging the water they gave her. So she stopped drinking. They retaliated by taking away her clothes, her mattress, her blankets, the plastic bucket. They left her with nothing but the chain around her ankle.

She still didn't give in. Until Luke came down one day and held something up for her to see: her driver's license. “Will you eat?” he said. “Or should I go to this address and kill whoever I find there?”

•   •   •

I
had a dog once,” Luke Daw said.

Jana had let her mind wander, but now she focused on him: Luke and his popsicle stick.

“What kind?” she asked.

“Just a stray we took in. A mutt. He knew how to fetch, though. I didn't teach him. He already knew when he came to us. I miss him.”

“What happened to him?”

Luke put the popsicle stick between his teeth. Took it out again. “He got old. Went blind. Got so he couldn't walk. We had to shoot him.”

“That's terrible.”

“I did it myself. My grandfather made me. I'd like to say he thought he was teaching me a lesson about personal responsibility. But mostly Grandpa was a prick.”

Luke chewed on the popsicle stick for a while and added, “He used to lock me down here if I did something bad. Not actually in here,” he said, waving the stick at the room. “I built this myself, after he died.”

He had told her that before, as if he wanted to impress her. She would have liked to tell him what she thought of his creation, but she kept it inside. She wanted him to keep talking to her.

She discovered early on that he would bring her things if she asked. Soap and warm water to bathe with, towels, fresh clothes—her own clothes, from her grandmother's LeSabre. He took away her dirty clothes too, and brought them back clean.

She wondered what had happened to the car. He told her he had gotten rid of it. “No one's going to find it,” he said.

He told her other things as well, bits and pieces about himself. His mother had left when he was young; his grandfather had raised him. His idiot friend was named Eli and was actually his cousin. The band was real, but it had broken up; there was never any gig in Binghamton. The white van belonged to Eli; Luke drove a Mustang.

“It's got a sunroof,” he told her. “You'd like it.”

“One of these days,” she said, “you should take me for a ride.”

“I wish.”

If you wanted the essence of Luke Daw, it was right there, in that deadpan-earnest
I wish
. Full of regret. As if they were both victims of circumstance.

“What are you thinking?” Luke asked her.

A dangerous question, one she never answered truthfully.

“I'm thinking about coffee,” she said.

“You're always thinking about coffee. You're obsessed.”

“I wouldn't be if you brought me some.”

He laid the popsicle stick on his knee and picked up a plastic bottle of water from beside the lantern. He'd brought one for her too—had set it down in front of her as soon as he came in.

She watched him take a long drink.

“Spring water,” he said. “Much better for you than coffee.”

He put the bottle down and took a card from his shirt pocket. “Before I forget,” he said. “It's time to write home again, don't you think?”

He flipped the card through the air so it landed within her reach. A picture postcard with an image of the Statue of Liberty.

“Vague and upbeat,” he said, tossing her a pen. “We don't want Mom to worry.”

Jana wrote out the address first, then the message:
Everything's great here. Don't worry about me. I love you.
Vague and upbeat. No tricks or hidden meanings. The first time Luke made her write a postcard, she had tried to write something out-of-character.
Dear Mother,
she wrote, because she was never that formal. But Luke caught on to her right away. “I don't think so,” he said, tearing up the card. “Let's go with ‘Dear Mom.'”

So now, no tricks. She signed her name and tossed the pen back to him. Then the card. He read it and slipped it in his pocket.

He gathered up his water bottle and the popsicle stick and got to his feet. “I should go,” he said. “I might come back to see you a little later, but maybe not. It's been a rough day. Eli's been nervous.”

“Has he?”

“He never thought this would go on so long. He thinks maybe we should end it.”

“Maybe that's not a bad idea.”

“The ending he has in mind—you wouldn't like it.”

“Oh.”

Luke opened the door. “I told him it ends when it ends. We've never done this before. We're all feeling our way through this thing.” He picked up the lantern. “He's not happy. But that's Eli. Skittish. Always needing to have his hand held. And I'm the one who has to hold it.”

“That must be hard on you,” Jana said.

No reaction in his face—his dark eyes didn't blink—but something happened. He dropped everything he was carrying—lantern, bottle, stick—and dove toward her. Pushed her over so the back of her head struck the floor hard. His hand squeezed her throat. She tried to breathe, heard the lantern rolling across the wooden boards, watched its light play crazily over the ceiling.

“Do you want to repeat what you just said?” he asked her. Mildly, softly.

She didn't try to speak, just shook her head no.

“Do you think I'm stupid?”

Another head shake.

“That's good. You're not smarter than me. I know what sarcasm is. All these little things you say, they're not going over my head. You should remember that.”

She nodded. He removed his hand from her throat and helped her sit up. She looked away from him, trying to catch her breath. Felt her heart beating wildly. When she looked back, he was smiling.

“Oh my god,” he said. “You should've seen your face. Were you really scared?”

She didn't trust her voice to answer.

“You were,” he said, stroking her hair. “But you know I wouldn't really hurt you. When did I ever hurt you?”

He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there, the way you might kiss a child. She shut her eyes and kept perfectly still until he drew away.

“We're okay, aren't we?” he said.

She whispered her reply. “Yes.”

•   •   •

A
fter he left, she sat in the dark unmoving, her back straight, trying to breathe slow and deep. She flashed back to the feeling of Luke Daw's fingers on her throat, and that set her off—a trembling in her shoulders that grew into a shudder that passed through her whole body. She cried with her face buried in her hands. She lay down on her side, her knees drawing up to her chest, the chain on her ankle skittering over the floorboards.

A long time later she retreated to the far wall, taking the water bottle he had given her. She twisted the cap to see if it would open hard or easy. If she had to break a seal, then he couldn't have tampered with it.

But she never had to break a seal; the bottles always opened easy. This one too. She drank a mouthful of water and it tasted fine, but there was never anything wrong with the taste. She replaced the cap and put the bottle aside, though she was still thirsty. She wanted to be awake if Luke returned.

She sat in the dark with the wall at her back and thought about the postcard. She wondered if he would really send it. To make it convincing, he would have to mail it from New York City; otherwise the postmark would be wrong.

She had never told him she was headed to New York, but he had her map with the route traced out. He wasn't stupid—that was true. He was shrewd. He figured things out. He knew her plan wasn't just to visit New York, because she had brought things along that a mere visitor wouldn't bring: her birth certificate, her Social Security card. So he knew that she had left home.

He knew about her mother too. His first threat had been a general one: to go to her address and kill whoever he found there. Since then, he had learned more: that Jana had been living with her mother, and that her mother would expect to hear from her. Hence the postcards.

When Luke first mentioned her mother, Jana assumed he had done some research. It would've been easy: there was a listing for Lydia Fletcher in the Geneva phone book with an address that matched the one on Jana's driver's license. But she learned that Luke had a different source of information.

“You told me about her,” he said.

“No I didn't.”

“Sure you did, the other night.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Different things. Like how she wanted you to go to law school.”

“I never told you that.”

“Well, you were a little out of it,” he said.

“‘Out of it'?”

“You know, sleepy.”

“Are you saying I talk in my sleep?”

“Not exactly. It happens when you're awake, but not all the way awake. Eli thinks you're having blackouts.”

“Eli? Has it happened with him too?”

“Once or twice. He doesn't usually stick around for pillow talk. Not the way I do.”