The Last Dead Girl Read Free Page B

of roads that wind like snakes and little towns that never change from one decade to the next. The speed limit goes down to thirty and there’s a gas station and a general store and a barn where someone’s selling antiques. There’s an old lady rocking on a porch and a roadside vegetable stand, and then the limit goes back up to fifty-five and there’s nothing to see for miles but fields and trees.
    Rome isn’t one of those little towns. It’s a city. It has good neighborhoods and bad ones. It has businesses that are growing, and others that are dying. It has a history that dates back to the American Revolution. It was the site of the groundbreaking for the Erie Canal in 1817 and the home of a major Air Force base all through the Cold War.
    Rome is gray and sprawling like a city, and at night it lights up like a city. On the night I met Jana, I wanted to get away from it. I left my apartment and drove north with no particular destination in mind. I got onto Route 46 and followed it out past the city’s edge. After a while I took some random turns and wound up heading west on Quaker Hill Road.
    Houses gave way to woods. Beyond the reach of the city lights, the night turned purer. The scenery began to look a little unreal, the way it does sometimes when you’re driving through the dark. A light rain began to fall. Not a dangerous rain: just enough to wet the road in front of me, leaving it a sparkling black in the light of my truck’s high beams. As if I were driving on obsidian.
    There were oak trees along the roadside and when the light washed over them the leaves glittered like gemstones. I remember that. I remember having the thought that I was traveling through a forest of emeralds.
    The deer came out of nowhere.
    It came bounding from the woods south of the road and it didn’t try to cross in front of me; it didn’t even come into my lane. I got one clear glimpse of it in the high-beam light and then I overtook it and it was right next to me, leaping along with me like a big friendly dog. It was there beside me shadowy in the dark, and I swear if I had rolled the window down I could have reached out and touched it.
    I was driving slow for the rain, but not that slow: maybe forty-five or fifty. I read somewhere once that a deer can run forty miles an hour, but as the seconds ticked by this one kept pace with me.
    I never thought of speeding up or slowing down.
    We came to a curve and something changed. Maybe the deer had begun to feel the strain or maybe it had decided to let me win. Either way, it slacked off. It was still gamboling along, but it was in my rearview mirror now, a shadow getting smaller until it was gone in the night.
    I let out a breath I’d been holding in. The rain fell in thin lines on the windshield and the wipers swept the lines away. A half mile on, I saw headlights approaching. I clicked the high beams down to low and a car rushed by in the eastbound lane. It was nothing to look at, a beat-up subcompact, but the driver was pushing it hard. I watched the taillights receding in the rearview.
    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