The Last Dead Girl (15 page)

She led me to a painting on the wall between the windows. “It's all right there,” she told me. “All you need to know.” The canvas was painted in two shades of red. On the left side of the black line, the red was muted and muddy; on the right, it was rich and vibrant.

“This represents Gary?” I said.

“It represents my life with him, and my life after. After has been better.”

“How did things start between you, if you don't mind my asking?”

Angela lingered by one of the windows, sunlight falling on the fair skin of her face. Motes of white dust floated in the light.

“It's like you're twins,” she said.

A strange remark. It floated in the air with the dust.

“Who? Me and Gary?”

“God, no,” she said, laughing. “You and Jana. She stood right where you're standing and asked me the same thing, in the same delicate way. Like I might break if I had to talk about it—my miserable childhood and my father's abuse and how it drove me into a relationship with a man more than twice my age.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Oh god, relax. None of that happened. My father drank, but he never touched me. He died in a car wreck when I was twelve. Which, I know, probably had something to do with me getting involved with Gary. Looking for a father figure. I'm not an idiot. I've seen a therapist. But with me and Gary, it was nothing creepy. He didn't make me wear my hair in pigtails or put on a cheerleader uniform or anything. It started in the most ordinary way, one day after school when it was raining. He offered me a ride home.”

“So it started before you graduated?”

“Near the end of senior year. But if you want to get technical, the physical part didn't start until after graduation. Gary wanted to wait. Of course, he only had to wait a few weeks. If he'd had to wait longer, he might not have been so virtuous.”

“Did he ever talk to you about his wife?” I asked.

“He told me they weren't happy together,” Angela said. “But I sort of knew that already, or else what would he be doing with me?”

“He never talked about leaving her?”

“No, and it's not like he would have left her for me. We knew we weren't serious. We were just having fun.” She stepped away from the window toward the easel, which held a canvas. She'd drawn a black line down the middle, but the rest was white.

“I know it was wrong,” she said. “I think I knew it then. I think Gary knew. When Jana came here, she asked me if he was a good person. I told her he was. Good and bad both. We're all more than one thing. He never made me do anything I didn't want to do. He was kind to me. He told me I was beautiful, and talented. Maybe he only did that so he could get what he wanted from me. But I didn't think so at the time, and I still don't.”

She shifted the canvas a little on the easel. “And then there's the other Gary, the one who cheated on his wife. Lied to her. That's true too. I can't deny it.”

“Do you think he killed her?” I asked.

“I don't know. The funny thing is, I've never talked to him about it. He sent me a note once, through his lawyer. It said he wanted me to know he was innocent. But really, what else would he say? I never answered him. Early on, I worried about it. I thought I needed to know, one way or the other. But Gary Pruett's not my problem. I have my own life. I'm not responsible for him, whether he's innocent or guilty. Maybe that sounds harsh.”

“It sounds about right to me.”

She left the easel and sat at the foot of the bed. “What about you? Do you think he's innocent?”

I perched on the ledge of one of the windows. “That's a big question. He's still claiming he is. He thinks he knows who really did it, but I can't decide whether to believe him. He says it was a couple of cousins named Luke and Eli Daw.”

I watched her expression darken.

“Do you know them?” I asked.

“I know enough,” she said. “We overlapped for a year in high school. They were seniors when I was a freshman.”

“I understand they had a reputation. Something happened with a girl in a boiler room.”

Angela nodded. “I heard about that. And other things too. I remember being warned about them—about Luke especially.”

“Warned?”

“I was told to stay away from him. Luke liked to bring a girl to a football game on a Friday night and sneak away with her under the bleachers. And if you went with him—well, he considered that consent.”

“Sounds charming.”

Her eyes met mine. “I never went with him under the bleachers. Thank God. But I was in a class with him—an art class.”

“Really?”

“And strangely enough I found him charming. He was friendly. He would compliment your work if he liked it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Was he any good, as an artist?”

“He could draw, in pencil or charcoal,” she said. “I was never impressed with his painting—I don't think he had a sense of color. I remember he used to make models, though.”

“What kind of models?”

“Buildings, like the Parthenon or Monticello. He made them out of balsa wood. They were really detailed. He could have been an architect. He tried to do the Coliseum once.”

“Huh.”

She shook her head suddenly. “Not balsa wood. What am I thinking of? He made them out of popsicle sticks.”

Interlude:
June 1996

J
ana Fletcher drove east on the New York Thruway in her grandmother's Buick LeSabre. She had an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, a little tree that was supposed to make the car smell like a pine forest, but she could still make out the smell of her grandmother underneath: stale cigarettes and old-lady perfume.

So far she had gone less than twenty miles, but she felt better already, more alive. She'd left Geneva at nine in the evening with three suitcases and a few hundred dollars. She had a map she hadn't looked at yet and the address of a youth hostel in Brooklyn. She guessed the trip would take six hours, which would put her there around three in the morning. So maybe not the smartest planning ever, but still. She was on her way.

She cracked the window beside her to let in the night air. Drew a deep breath. She could still smell the cigarettes and perfume, but she didn't mind. There were worse things. She'd spent a year dealing with her grandmother's smells, helping her bathe herself, helping her to the bathroom. And in the last weeks of her grandmother's life, when the woman could no longer rise from her bed, when she couldn't feed herself, Jana had done everything for her, everything you can do for another person.

So she could take the smell of cigarettes and perfume.

•   •   •

J
ana pulled off the Thruway at the Port Byron service plaza, because the LeSabre's tank was low and she needed coffee. Inside, she wove through a motley crowd—young families, bikers in leather, retirees, a troop of Cub Scouts—and stood in line for McDonald's. The girl behind the counter looked half asleep. She passed Jana her coffee and mumbled the total. One twenty-four. Jana had a single ready. She pulled a quarter from her pocket, but just before she dropped it in the girl's palm she drew it back. She dug through her purse for another single instead.

The quarter had come from her mother. Jana had never told her what she meant to do until today, even though she'd been thinking about it ever since her grandmother's funeral. But today she'd been sure: she wouldn't go to Cornell Law School in the fall. She would go to New York, right now. No more waiting. She wanted to be an actress.

The news had sent Lydia Fletcher through the five stages of grief: Denial (
This is a whim. You'll get halfway there and come back
). Anger (
You're throwing your future away
). Bargaining (
Try Cornell for a year. If you don't like it, you can do something else
). Depression (
I give up. You never listen to me).
Acceptance (
Fine. If you're going, at least let me help you. I'll give you some money
).

The last one wasn't really acceptance—maybe grudging acceptance. Jana could have taken the money; it would have made her mother happy. But she was angry too, angry at having to play the good daughter for such a long time.

So she refused. But just before she left, her mother slipped a quarter into her hand.

“So you'll remember to call me,” Lydia Fletcher said.

A token gesture. You couldn't call anyone for a quarter, not long-distance. Yet it was a peace offering too, and Jana should have thanked her for it. Instead, she stuffed it in her jacket pocket and drove away.

Now she moved it to a back pocket of her jeans so she wouldn't spend it accidentally. She took her coffee to a table and got her road map from her purse. Chaos reigned around her: bearded bikers laughing, a toddler crying, a Cub Scout chasing a rubber ball he'd bought from a vending machine. Across the room, a guy in an orange T-shirt was using his table as a drum, tapping away at it with a pair of real drumsticks. Jana didn't know the tune, but it sounded familiar, like something a marching band would play at halftime. A second guy in a second T-shirt sat across from him, shaking his head in mock disapproval.

Jana spread the map over her table, drank her coffee, tried to figure out her route. If she followed the Thruway it would take her to New York City eventually, but she would have to go all the way to Albany first. It seemed like a waste. She thought she could get there more directly if she left the Thruway at Syracuse and got onto I-81. Follow that south to Scranton, Pennsylvania, switch over to 380, then 80, then 280—a whole lot of eighties—and that would take her to New York.

As she refolded the map she heard a voice say, “Where you headed?”

She looked up to see the drummer in the orange T-shirt. He'd brought his food tray to the trash, left his drumsticks behind. He was tall and lean, with tousled black hair and an easy smile.

“Syracuse,” she said. “Then south from there.”

“We are too,” said the guy in the orange T-shirt. “We've got a gig tomorrow night in Binghamton. Me and my idiot friend.”

He pointed across the room at his companion, who had picked up the drumsticks and was trying to tap something out on the table. It sounded like hail on a roof.

“You're in a band?” Jana said.

“Yup. We're meeting up with the others tomorrow. If you're in Binghamton, you should come.”

“Thanks, but I won't be.”

“After that, we're in Newark,” he said, with more of that easy smile. “Then a club in Boston next weekend. Stop me if you're going to be in any of these places.”

She smiled back at him. He was cute. And Binghamton was on her way. She started to think she could afford to spend a day there. Why not?

Across the room, the idiot friend left off drumming and tried to spin one of the sticks around his finger. The stick went flying.

The guy in the orange T-shirt sighed theatrically. “You can't go by that,” he said. “I swear he plays a hell of a bass.”

“What's the band called?” Jana asked.

T-shirt guy's eyes twinkled. “Take a guess.”

She waited a beat. “My Idiot Friend?”

He laughed. “Where were you when we were looking for names?”

She could definitely spend a day in Binghamton.

“What is it really?” she said.

“The Orangemen,” he told her, pointing at his shirt.

She wrinkled her nose.

“I know,” he said. “We're awful with band names. Don't let it stop you from coming.”

“We'll see,” she said.

“Cool. And now I'll leave you alone. 'Cause, you know, I don't want to be the weird guy at the rest stop. But something about you made me want to introduce myself.”

He held out a hand.

“I'm Luke,” he said.

E
li Daw died on the night of September 6, 1996. The
Rome Sentinel
covered the story on the front page, but the
Sentinel
's archives weren't online yet. I wound up spending part of my Sunday afternoon in the basement of the public library, looking through old issues on microfilm.

The initial report contained the bare facts. Eli was shot once in the heart at approximately eleven fifty-five p.m. It happened at his home, a trailer on Humaston Road. No weapon recovered at the scene. Subsequent stories reported that Luke Daw's car had been found the next day, abandoned in a drugstore parking lot near the bus station downtown. A handgun had been recovered from a storm drain nearby. Luke was being sought for questioning.

The
Sentinel
ran pictures of both cousins. Eli Daw looked like an amiable goof, with ruddy cheeks and wavy hair and ears that stuck out from his head. Luke Daw was something else. You could have cast him as the bad boy in a soap opera. He had an intense expression and piercing eyes.

Two things from the coverage jumped out at me. One of them I expected: the lead detective on the case was Frank Moretti. The other surprised me: Eli Daw had a wife.

I asked the woman at the circulation desk for a phone book and found a number for Wendy Daw. I entered it into my cell phone and walked out into the sunshine on the library's front lawn. I let my thumb hover over the green call button, tried to imagine what I would say.

I think your late husband was a murderer. And his cousin Luke might still be running around killing people. Do you have time to talk?

I decided to fib. I punched the button and when she answered I said, “Hi, my name is David Malone. I'm writing a book about unsolved murder cases, and I'd like to talk with you about your late husband.”

“Eli?” she said. “I don't think he's worth a book.”

“Well, he'll be one chapter out of many. Could we meet? I can come to you.”

“I can't. It's Sunday. I'm cooking dinner.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“I work tomorrow.”

“I could buy you lunch.”

“I don't think so. I'm sorry.”

I started to ask her to reconsider and realized she'd hung up on me.

I found her number under
RECENT CALLS
and punched the green button again. Waited as it rang. Four times, five, six. No answering machine. No voice mail. Seven, eight, nine. I punched the red button to end the call. Strolled on the library lawn. After a minute I tried again. Wendy Daw picked up on the fifth ring.

“You're persistent,” she said.

“It's important,” I told her.

“The thing is, I don't see any point in talking about Eli.”

“I understand it could be painful—”

“It's not painful. It's just something better left in the past. I don't think I'd want to be quoted in a book.”

“That's all right,” I said. “We can talk on background.”

“Background?”

“Just for research. I won't quote you.”

“I don't know. I'd rather not.”

“We can make it deep background,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means once we talk, you'll never hear from me again. If I pass you on the street, I'll pretend I don't know you.”

She laughed. Not much of a laugh, but enough.

“All right,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

•   •   •

I
met Wendy Daw at an outdoor café across from the IRS Regional Examination Center on Arsenal Street—a building of gray brick and few windows and undistinguished architecture. A suitable home for accountants who spent their days reviewing tax returns. Wendy worked there as a secretary.

“You wouldn't believe what goes on in there,” she told me. “The drudgery.”

“I think I can imagine,” I said.

“You really, really can't.”

She ordered a salad for lunch, said she was trying to lose weight. She had always carried an extra ten or fifteen pounds, she told me, and always right around her middle. She had fine, brittle hair that she wore parted in the center, and dots of acne on her cheeks. She was dressed very professionally, in a skirt and heels and a navy blue blazer. She was twenty-four years old, the same age Eli Daw would have been if he had lived.

I asked her how they met.

“We went to high school together,” she said, “but he never said a word to me there. I ran into him a couple years after graduation, at a party at Mohawk Valley Community College. I was working on an associate's degree. Business and information sciences. Not much use, but it'll get you a job answering phones for the IRS.”

“Was Eli a student there?”

“No. He played bass in a band, with Luke and a couple of others. Cover songs. He came over to talk to me between sets. Five months later he asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I had a good feeling about him. I thought he was going places.”

She delivered the last line evenly, with no hint of irony. When I didn't respond, she said, “You're too polite to be writing a book. Either that, or you haven't done much research yet.”

“I haven't,” I said.

“Well, take this down then,” she said, gesturing at the notebook I'd brought along for the sake of appearances. “Eli Daw dressed like a farmer and drove a beat-up white van. He wasn't going anywhere. The only reason he graduated from high school is that he kept showing up for four years and they wanted him to move on.”

“Why did you agree to marry him?”

“I took a look in a mirror and asked myself how many proposals I thought I had coming my way.”

“You shouldn't be so hard on yourself,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Now you tell me. We got married in the spring of '95. He got shot a year and a half later. In the meantime we lived in a trailer. I finished my degree and worked temp jobs. He had the band.”

“Did the band make any money?”

“The band played gigs that paid a hundred dollars a night, split four ways. The band didn't last.”

She went quiet for a moment, picking at her salad. I ate a bite of the sandwich I'd ordered. The sun came out from behind a cloud.

“I've heard that Eli and Luke might've had other ways of making money,” I said. “Maybe illegal ways.”

Wendy Daw smiled. She had a gap between her front teeth that might have been sexy, if only it had been a bit smaller.

“Is that your way of asking me if they sold drugs?” she said.

“Did they?”

“We're on deep background?”

“The deepest.”

“Then yes. Mostly pot, but other things too. Coke. Pills. Meth, if they could get it. Truth is, the band was mostly an excuse to sell pot to college kids. Professors too, from what Eli said.”

“Professors?”

“You think professors at a community college don't smoke pot? How else would they make it through the day?”

“Do you think that's what got Eli killed—dealing?” I asked.

She moved the salad around on her plate. “I don't know.”

“What happened that night?”

I waited for her answer. She stared off into the distance, recalling the details.

“I went to bed early,” she said. “Eli stayed up with a beer watching television. I woke when I heard the shot. Only, when you wake up to a gunshot, you don't realize it was a gunshot. I sat up in bed, knowing something was wrong, not knowing what. I could hear the TV in the other room. I called out to Eli and when he didn't answer I got up and went out there. Found him bleeding on the floor. The door of the trailer stood open. I heard a car driving off, fast.”

“But you didn't get a look at the car?” I asked.

“I was looking at Eli,” she said, “and trying to cover the hole in his chest.”

“Do you think Luke was the one who shot him?”

She shrugged. “That's what the police thought. If he was, I think he came there meaning to do it. I think he shot him as soon as he opened the door.”

“Did the two of them ever argue?”

“They grew up together, with just their grandfather to raise them. They argued all their lives. Had fights too—knock-down, bloody-knuckle fights, from what I heard. Not as much when they got older.”

“What happened to their parents?”

I watched her do the long-distance stare again, as if she were trying to decide how much to tell, and how to tell it.

“Their fathers were never in the picture,” she said. “They were one-night stands who didn't stick around. Their mothers were young—Holly and Maggie Daw—sixteen and eighteen. They got pregnant around the same time. Luke was born first, Eli two months later. Eli's mother—the sixteen-year-old—died in childbirth, so Luke's mother took care of both boys for a while. But when they were old enough for kindergarten, she took off. They'd get a card from her now and then—Christmas and birthdays—but she never came back. Their grandfather took charge of them from then on.”

“What was he like?” I asked.

“I never met him,” Wendy said. “Eli called him a farmer, but what he really did was manage someone else's farm—a dairy farm out on Humaston Road. Luke and Eli worked for him every summer, as soon as they were old enough. And if they screwed up, Grandpa would knock them around—take them out behind the toolshed or lock them in the root cellar or whatever people do out in the country.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He died a few years ago. Ran the farm into the ground first. The owner couldn't afford to pay the taxes. I think the state owns the land now. Grandpa Daw moved himself and his grandsons out of the farmhouse, which was falling down anyway, and into a trailer. He didn't own the patch of ground where he put the trailer, but no one cared enough about it to chase him off. He spent his last years drinking and collecting Social Security.”

“Is that the trailer where you and Eli lived?”

She looked across the table at me with a faint smile. “No. Luke kept that one. Eli got another one, about a mile down the road. I told him we had to have a place of our own, if he wanted me to marry him.” The smile turned bitter. “I didn't sell myself cheap.”

I felt bad then—for deceiving her, for tricking her into talking about things best left in the past. But I didn't stop.

“If I wanted to find Luke Daw,” I said, “how would I go about it?”

“What would you want him for?”

I stuck with my lie. “For the book.”

“He's on the run from the police,” she said. “You think he'd talk to you?”

“It's worth a try. Who would he go to for help? Would he try to get in touch with his mother?”

“I don't even know if she's still alive.”

“What about friends—maybe the other guys in the band?”

She shook her head. “One of them OD'd. The other moved out west. Luke wasn't all that close to either one.”

She finished her salad, glanced at the gray building across the street as if she might be thinking about heading back.

“Do you remember a teacher named Cathy Pruett?” I asked her. “She taught at your high school.”

“Sure. She died—she was murdered.”

“Did Luke or Eli ever talk about her?”

I watched Wendy Daw tip her head to the side, puzzled.

“No. Why would they?” she said.

“I just wondered. She was killed a few weeks before Eli.”

We sat in silence while the waitress came with the bill and went away again. I could see Wendy thinking, putting things together.

“Wait—do you think Luke killed her?”

Luke and Eli both, I thought. But I didn't say it. I didn't want to speak ill of her dead husband.

“I'm wondering if there might be a connection,” I told her. “Two unsolved murders in the same city around the same time . . .”

“But Cathy Pruett's murder was solved. Her husband did it.”

“He was convicted,” I said. “Some people think he's innocent. One of them was a woman I knew, Jana Fletcher. I think she might have believed that Luke killed Cathy Pruett. Did Jana ever try to contact you?”

“No. But her name's familiar. She was murdered too.”

“Yes.”

Wendy Daw stared at me with narrowed eyes. “You're not really writing a book, are you?”

I decided to resort to the truth.

“No. I'm trying to find out who killed Jana.” I pulled my wallet from my pocket and found the photograph of Jana that her mother had given me. “Jana spoke to a lot of people about the Pruett case,” I said, showing the photo to Wendy Daw. “Are you sure she never tried to talk to you?”

I didn't really expect her to recognize the photo, and after she looked at it she said, “I'm sure. I never saw her.”

She might have studied the photo a little too long. It seems that way to me now, though it could be a detail I'm inventing. At the time, she seemed natural enough.

Not long after, she thanked me for lunch and crossed the street, steady in her high heels. I watched her slip inside the gray brick building.

I never suspected she was lying.