The Last Dead Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

5
    T he next morning I made a bad mistake.
    Jana was gone by the time I got up—off to one of her classes. She’d left a key and a note asking me to lock the door when I left. I showered and dressed in the clothes I’d worn the night before. The shirt she’d worn. I helped myself to a glass of orange juice from her fridge. Took it out onto the patio in back.
    The morning sun had dried the grass, but there was more rain coming. As I walked onto the lawn, I heard the sound of a rake biting into the earth. Jana’s landlady was working next door, digging up last year’s flower bed, getting ready to plant something new.
    The woman was thin, stooped over, ancient. She wore a scarf to cover her hair and a ragged dress that might have come off the back of a medieval peasant. I’d seen her before but she never said a word to me, and she didn’t now, even when I wished her good morning. She shot me a dark glance from under her brow.
    I turned away from her and looked off at the woods. Thought about the night before—Jana’s feeling that she was being watched. She made light of it after, but there’d been a moment when she seemed genuinely afraid. I had a job scheduled for the afternoon, a home inspection, but for now I was free. I had time for a walk in the woods.
    I could have set out straight across the lawn. I’m not sure why I didn’t, except that I was feeling the weight of the landlady’s disapproval. I was a stranger here, unwelcome. For all I knew, she owned those woods. I had no business traipsing through them.
    I polished off the orange juice, took the glass inside, and went out again, this time through the front door, locking up behind me. My truck was parked beneath the oak. I skirted around it, walked east down Jana’s little street until I came to a bigger one called Clinton Drive. Three blocks