The Last Dead Girl Read Free Page A

and into the grass. The lawn ran down in a gentle slope until it came to the edge of the woods in the distance. The wet ground yielded beneath her bare feet. The slightest breeze, cool on her body. She had nothing on but David’s shirt, and it was thin. She might as well be naked.
    A daring thought. Her fingers worked the buttons of the shirt, one by one. She parted it, drew it down off her shoulders, testing herself. Bold Jana. She felt goose bumps on her stomach, her breasts; felt her nipples stiffen in the air.
    David inside. So close. She could wake him and bring him out here and lay him down on the grass. She closed her eyes, let it play out in her mind.
    Something shifted and she opened her eyes. She drew the shirt up onto her shoulders and hugged it around her. She had a feeling of being watched, a physical sensation, real as the touch of the air on her skin. She thought of her landlady, who had her own brick patio nearby, on the other side of a woodpile and a forsythia bush, but when she went to check there was no one there. She looked off across the lawn, tried to see if there might be some figure in the woods. But all she could see was dark between the trees.
    You’re scaring yourself, she thought. It’s nothing. Too much moonlight and night. Getting a little too daring. Rein it in, Jana.
    Nothing.
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    I rolled onto my side and reached for Jana. Felt only the rumpled sheets. I got up and stood naked in the dim of the room. Looked around for my boxers and slipped them on. Couldn’t find my shirt.
    I drifted through the apartment, bare feet on old hardwood floors. I didn’t worry about tripping over things because the apartment was one of the sparest I had ever seen. No clutter, no clothes strewn around. In fact, Jana Fletcher owned fewer clothes than any other woman I knew: her wardrobe fit easily into a tiny closet and a chest of drawers. She owned precisely four pairs of shoes: sneakers, hiking boots, loafers, heels.
    Minimal furniture as well: the chest of drawers, her bed, a night table. A desk in the living room; no sofa, no television. No computer either. When she needed to do research or write a paper, she went to one of the computer labs at the university.
    Her desk faced a blank wall. Nearby, there was a small wood-burning fireplace with a shelf over it that served as a mantel. On the shelf sat a long piece of two-by-four in which someone had drilled four shallow holes, each one broad enough to hold a tea-light candle.
    The candles were burning now.
    The only other object on the mantel was a clay bowl that held a single coin: a quarter. The quarter was strange. Imperfect. Part of it had been worn away so that in the upper left quadrant—right around George Washington’s forehead—it came to a point.
    No other trinkets. No keepsakes, no vases. Jana had a few books for her classes and a small but eclectic collection of novels, from Alexandre Dumas to Stephen King. She had two houseplants. I could see them now as I stepped through the archway into the kitchen. A cactus and an African violet in twin pots arranged like centerpieces on the kitchen table. A faint glow fell on them from a light above the stove.
    The back door of the apartment stood open. I looked through the closed screen door and saw Jana standing outside on the lawn. She wore my shirt, which came down to her knees. I stepped closer to the screen, but I didn’t go out, and as I watched she shrugged off the shirt, baring her shoulders and her back. Her dark hair hung down between her shoulder blades. Her body was a sculpture in the moonlight, a figure of blacks and grays. And even though I had known her for only three days, I thought I might be in love with her.
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    O n the night we met, I’d been out driving on a dark road outside Rome.
    When people think of upstate New York, they think of farmland and rolling hills. They think