The Last Dead Girl (3 page)

I wondered if the deer was still in the road. It probably wasn't. If it was, the driver would probably see it in time. There was no reason to think something terrible was going to happen, and nothing I could do about it anyway. I didn't need to touch the brakes. I didn't need to start looking for a place to turn around.

I found a little side road that led into some farmer's field. I pulled onto it and backed out again, swinging around so I was heading east. The rain didn't care; it kept on falling. The view was much the same in this direction; the leaves were the same sharp-edged emeralds.

Just when I thought I'd gone far enough and wasn't going to find anything, I rounded a bend and saw lights in the distance. The solid red of taillights, and the lazy blink of hazards.

The subcompact was there on the roadside, unmoving. The deer was there too. And Jana Fletcher.

I
pulled onto the shoulder and stepped out into the rain. In the glow of my headlights, Jana Fletcher walked back from her car to the deer. She was dressed in black. There was something dreamlike in the way she moved. I wondered if she was in shock.

The deer—a white-tailed doe—looked smaller than it had before, probably because it was lying on the ground. It was on its side, with its head resting on the road as on a pillow. Its eyes were open and staring.

Jana crouched beside it and touched the fur of its belly with her fingertips. She didn't look up when I approached.

“Are you all right?”

Her dark hair fell in curls, damp with beads of rain. I was crouching now too, but she still didn't look at me.

“I didn't see it coming,” she said.

Her voice sounded soft. I got the sense she was talking to herself.

“I didn't see it, and then it was right there.”

“You were driving fast,” I said.

Finally she looked up. She had brown eyes. No sign of shock in them; they were clear, intense. “It ran straight at me. It jumped onto the hood of the car. Did you see?”

“No.”

“Like it was trying to run right over the car. At first I thought it did. I thought I'd come back here and it would be gone. Into the woods. Do you think it's dead?”

I thought it must be, but I didn't want to say so. I listened to the falling rain and the murmur of my truck's engine.

She turned her attention back to the deer, running her fingers over the fur.

“It's beautiful,” she said.

She shifted her hand to the deer's shoulder and the movement put her off-balance. She steadied herself, resting one knee on the ground. As I watched her, I saw things I hadn't noticed before. She had a red bruise on her cheek. It didn't look like something you'd get in a car accident. And her blouse was wide open at the collar. I could see there were two buttons missing.

“What's your name?” I asked her.

She told me, and I told her mine.

“Are you hurt?” I said.

“No.”

“What happened to your face?”

She touched the red mark on her cheek as if she had just remembered it.

“It's no big deal.”

“Maybe you should go to a hospital.”

She braced her hands on her thighs and stood. “I'm not worried about me. I'm worried about the deer. What if it's not dead?”

I got up too. We faced each other across the body of the doe.

“It's not moving.”

“It doesn't look injured,” she said. “There's no blood.”

“It got hit by a car,” I said gently. “I think it's hurt in ways we can't see. Internal injuries—”

Jana Fletcher shook her head stubbornly and rain fell from her hair.

“It didn't get hit. I told you, it jumped onto the car.”

“I'm sure it seemed that way. Your car rides low to the ground. You hit a deer, the momentum's going to carry it up over the hood.”

“I know what I saw.”

She looked away from me and stepped around the body of the doe. Bending down, she laid a palm against the creature's rib cage.

I left her there and walked to the front of her car, a blue Plymouth Sundance. No damage to the grille, the headlights unbroken. But there were dents on the hood, and the windshield was shattered on the passenger side—the kind of damage that might well have been caused by a frightened animal trying to scramble over a moving car. I could see bits of safety glass strewn like diamonds over the dash.

When I returned to Jana I found her down on one knee again, stroking the doe's back. Her blouse was wet through from the rain. She must have been feeling the chill of the night air. I got an old nylon jacket from the truck and brought it to her. She thanked me for it, slipped her arms through the sleeves.

“Is there someone you can call?” I said.

“My mother lives in Geneva.”

“Maybe someone closer.”

“Could you help me?”

“Sure. I'll take you wherever you need to go.”

“I meant with the deer,” she said. “Could you help me put it in my car?”

I looked at the Plymouth. “You don't want to drive that. Not with the windshield broken.”

“In your truck then.”

“Where will we go?”

“I know an animal hospital. It's open all night.”

She must have read the skepticism in my eyes. She went to her car and came back with a plastic makeup case. Opened it and held the mirror near the nostrils of the doe. A fine mist appeared on the silver glass.

“You see?” she said. “She's breathing. We have to do something for her.”

Jana tucked the case away and looked to me to see if I would come through for her. I smiled and shook my head, but I was already making plans. The first step would be to move the truck, get it facing in the other direction, back it up close. Then find something to use as a stretcher. I thought I had a tarp that would work. Move the deer onto the tarp, then lift it into the truck bed.

Jana had her own ideas. She slipped her hands beneath the shoulder of the doe, shifted her feet for leverage, tested the weight.

“Help me out here,” she said.

“Hold on.”

“She's not that heavy. You'll see.”

“Just give me a minute.”

She didn't wait. She started to lift. I forgot my plans and hurried to help. Dropping to one knee, I worked my hands beneath the animal's rib cage. Maybe we would have been able to carry the thing that way. Maybe. But just then the doe's eyes blinked. The hind legs scrambled. I fell back in surprise and toppled into the grass by the roadside. Jana did better. She kept her balance.

The doe got her four legs underneath her and turned a tangled circle, her hooves clipping out a drunken rhythm on the wet black of the road. She skittered toward the broken yellow centerline and lifted her nose up into the rain, then bounded across with her white tail held high.

I watched her disappear into the woods on the other side. Jana took a few steps into the road, as if she wanted to follow. She stood at the yellow line in the rain until I went to bring her back. When I touched her shoulder she spun around. Her eyes bright.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Did you see? Beautiful.”

•   •   •

I
used my cell phone to call a tow truck for her car, waited with her until it came, offered to drive her home. She kept very still in the seat beside me, but I could tell she was wide-awake; I could feel a keyed-up energy coming from her. I drove under the limit, glancing at her from time to time, but she kept her focus on the road ahead.

“What were you doing out tonight?” I asked.

A gentle shake of her head. “Don't ruin it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We just witnessed a miracle. We don't want to muck it up with a lot of talk.”

“A miracle?”

“What else would you call a resurrected deer?”

I thought “resurrected” might be too strong a word, but then again I'd been sure the animal was dead. So let her have that one.

“I just wondered where you were coming from, where you were going.”

She grinned without looking my way. “That's a little better. Maybe we should both take this time to think about where we're coming from and where we're going.”

I laughed, a quiet laugh that trailed off into silence. Jana rode at ease beside me with her handbag in her lap, along with a green file folder thick with papers—two items she had retrieved from her car. As we cruised along I looked over once more at her profile. Her features—long nose, high cheekbones—hinted at something foreign and exotic. Which made the red mark on her cheek more of an affront. I had asked her about it once and wanted to ask again, but maybe it was best to let it drop.

Still, I had questions. “I'm curious about what's in that folder,” I said.

She graced me with a sidelong look. “Now you're just being nosy.”

Her house was tucked away on a cul-de-sac. We reached it near midnight. A sprawling oak tree grew by the driveway and sent out a long, low branch to brush the front window. I pulled in under the tree and she reached over to turn off the ignition.

“You're soaking,” she said. “Come in and I'll put your clothes in the dryer.”

She went inside without waiting for an answer. I followed. She draped my nylon jacket over a chair and left me in the kitchen. Came back with a big white towel. She held it up and said, “Come here,” and I leaned forward so she could work it over my wet hair. She did the same for her own hair, dropped the towel on the floor, and started unbuttoning my shirt.

“I lied,” she said softly, looking up into my eyes. “I don't have a dryer.”

•   •   •

T
hat was three nights ago. Now through the screen door I watched her standing half naked in the moonlight, my shirt down around her waist. Suddenly she pulled it up and clutched it tight around her. She looked to her right, took a few steps in that direction, came back. She stood looking out toward the woods, her back to me still, and I opened the screen door and went out.

J
ana heard the door and whirled around. A gasp of breath, hand over her heart, until she realized it was only David. He crossed the patio and came out into the grass, wearing nothing but his skin and his boxers. Worry lined his brow.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” she said. “Just a feeling I had. Like someone was watching me.”

He took a few steps toward the woods. “Did you see someone?”

“No. I was just being paranoid. I'm sure there's no one there.”

He came back to her and the lines on his brow went away. He took hold of the front of the shirt and pulled her close.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he said. “
I
was watching you.”

She had a quick flash of a thought: that it wasn't David she'd felt watching her, that it wasn't anyone she would want to meet. She pushed the thought aside and made herself smile.

“Were you now?” she said.

His hands made their way under the shirt and he bent to kiss her. She thought again of laying him down on the grass, but what she wanted was to go back inside.

He must have had the same idea. She felt his hands trail along her sides and he ducked down and lifted her up, tossing her onto his shoulder. She kicked her legs and laughed, and he spun her around and carried her into the house.

•   •   •

S
omeone was watching.

Call him K if you like. That's how he thought of himself at times like this. There were things he wouldn't normally do, like slinking through the woods at night and spying on young lovers. Not his style. But K was different; he had no such inhibitions. Truth be told, K liked that sort of thing.

K had been watching the house for almost two hours. At one point he had crept right up to the bedroom window. Even in the darkness he could see the two of them sleeping in there, and he could tell they were naked under the sheets. He wished he had gotten there sooner, because he felt sure they'd been fucking. He would have liked to see them fuck.

After a few minutes at the window, he crept back to the edge of the woods. He found a spot a dozen feet in, where he could sit on a fallen tree trunk and still have a view of the house. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and meditated. That was as close as he could come to a word for it. Meditation was when you sat without moving and tried not to think about anything. Which was a fair description, except that he did move, just a little. He had a wooden stick like you'd find in a popsicle, and he held it in his right hand and twirled it around with his fingers. Call it a nervous tick.

And he was thinking. He couldn't help it. He was thinking about the girl and about what he had to do to her.

And then she came out. As if his thought had drawn her. She came out wearing only a shirt and stood looking at the moon.

K got up from the tree trunk and walked closer to the edge of the woods and thought that this could only be better if she had come out wearing nothing at all. And then it happened, as if his thought had made it happen. The girl opened the shirt, let it fall back off her shoulders, and he could see everything he wanted to see. Her breasts, surprisingly full for a girl her size. The soft plane of her stomach. A little patch of hair, trimmed in the shape of a triangle.

He could take her now, he thought. Sprint across the grass and be on her before she understood what was happening. The very idea gave him an erection hard as steel.

A reckless idea, out of control, impulsive. K was not impulsive. The girl wrapped the shirt around her again, and K believed that this was somehow his doing too. He was being punished for his reckless thoughts.

Then the boyfriend came out, bare-chested, wearing boxers. Tarzan in a loincloth. He could be trouble, K thought. It would be foolish to do anything while he was around.

The boyfriend picked the girl up, surprised her. She let out a squeal of a laugh that carried across the lawn. K watched them retreat into the house. He stayed where he was.

Give them some time, he thought. Then try the bedroom window again. He might see something good.

But he had to be cautious. He couldn't hope to finish the girl tonight. He'd have to wait. And plan. The important thing was not to get caught.

If you did something and didn't get caught, it was just the same as if it never happened.