Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  It was a sickening thought. The Brenna Branchik rule: To punish a woman, you have to get in her head, get her feeling guilty enough so she’ll walk right through the unlocked door into a bloody crime scene. Maybe, in the end, even implicate herself in a murder.

  “Who did?” Kim asked.

  “What?” I snapped back to the conversation.

  “You said, ‘She left the door unlocked.’ Who?”

  “Fash. I meant F-Fash left the door unlocked,” I stammered. I had to get Kim out of harm’s way. “The police haven’t told you to stay in town, have they?”

  “Not yet.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Do you think you could get away for a few days?”

  “Maybe. My manager at the bar took me off the schedule this week. They’re good people over there.” Her voice started to tremble. “In all honesty, I’d love to get away. Not from the police. From my friends, Fash’s friends. Everyone knows I was the last to see him alive.” She hesitated, then went on. “There’s another rumor going around on the forums—that he killed himself because I wouldn’t go out with him, and I told other women to steer clear.” She laughed weakly. “I feel like the dudes in the scene all give me side-eye wherever I go. And the women won’t say anything, even if they know better. Don’t speak ill of the dead, I guess.” Now she was crying. “But just because this awful thing happened to him doesn’t erase what he did to me. To a lot of us.”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” I said. “I believe you. And it’s not your fault he’s gone.”

  She sniffed hard a few times, took a deep breath, and started talking in her normal voice again. “Anyway, I’m persona non grata around here. I’d love nothing better than to leave this shit behind, but I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  The solution came to me all at once. “What about Amarillo? If you could drive there, my mom would put you up in a heartbeat. And she wouldn’t bug you, except to make sure you got fed.” My mother always knew what not to ask. It was one of my favorite things about her. “I mean, it’s no resort town, but it’s quiet there.”

  “Thanks, Dana. It’s a nice idea.” She sighed. “But I doubt your mom wants some random person in her house.”

  “I’ll let her know you might be coming, and she can leave a key under the mat for you. That way you don’t even have to decide now. It can be a last-minute thing.” There was silence. “Just consider it.”

  “Okay. I’ll think about it. And thanks,” she said. “I’ve already said this, but it means a lot to me that you’d take my side in this after all that stuff before.”

  “Sure. We’ve got to have each other’s backs,” I said, then winced to hear the words come out of my mouth. “I just wish I were in town to help out.”

  “Where are you, anyway? It doesn’t sound like you’re in Amarillo. That’s where everyone thinks you are.”

  “I’m in L.A.” After a beat I remembered why. I’d almost forgotten it sounded like good news to a normal person. “I got some auditions out of that podcast I did.”

  “Oh, man, that’s great. Break a leg.” She sounded relieved to be on a new topic. “Where are you staying out there?”

  “In my old place,” I said. “With Jason.”

  There was a chilly pause, and when Kim spoke again, her voice sounded stiff. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone where you are. Even the police.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. I don’t want anyone to think—”

  She cut me off. “No problem. After all, we have to have each other’s backs, right?” She said it with a hint of irony, I thought, but then, Kim always sounded a little sarcastic. We said our goodbyes, and I texted her my mom’s address. Then I wrote an e-mail to my mom to let her know Kim might be dropping in sometime that week.

  It wasn’t much, but it was all I could do. I prayed Amanda hadn’t planted clues in Fash’s apartment to implicate Kim—though a small voice inside me that I couldn’t quite silence said, Better Kim than me.

  Alone in the house, I started looking around. With Jason gone, the fact that Amanda had lived here, if only for a short while, impressed itself on me fully for the first time. Amanda had been exorcised, the bugged phone swaddled in sound-muffling foam and banished to the studio, but this had once been her home. I tried to imagine her sitting on the sofa with Jason, pouring a glass of wine at the kitchen counter, curling up in his bed. As disturbing as it was, it was a place to start. Slowly, to preserve my vision of her, I got up and began walking through the house, keeping my footfalls soft so as not to frighten her ghost. I thought of Henry’s objects and the stories they told about themselves. Maybe, just maybe, Amanda had left something behind that told a story about her.

  I studied every room, but nothing I saw looked like Amanda; everything reflected either Jason’s benign neglect or my long-ago contributions. There were the rugs I’d picked out from Ikea to cover the tile floors that had been bare when I’d moved out here to join Jason. The curtains, too, were mine, cheap panels from Target, now faded in the middle and dirty at the hems. The pair of mismatched Goodwill armchairs, and the wall art, portraits on black velvet and badly painted landscapes. I walked down the hall, past a big-eyed cat in nursery pastels that always freaked Jason out, and forced myself to take a long look at his bedroom. There by the unmade bed was the nightstand I’d found for him at the Salvation Army to replace the cardboard box he’d been using when I moved in, its wood surface now scummed over with a year’s worth of sticky coffee-cup circles. The closet bristled with empty hangers and a few plaid shirts like crooked flags; most of his clothes were wadded up on the floor.

  If Amanda’s ghost was here, it was being very quiet.

  I opened the door to the studio. This had once been my bedroom, I thought with a pang, but you would never know it. I had been expunged as thoroughly as Amanda had. There was even some scarring on the outside of the door around eye level, as if someone had chipped away at the paint, perhaps preparing to strip the wood. I checked the perimeter of the room, moving mic stands, music stands, and a mixing board carefully away from the walls to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. I opened the closet and tried not to flinch at the sight of the shiny black pillow that held my bugged phone. A banker’s box in the closet turned out to hold more cables and a smaller mixing board. I continued to move around the house, opening all the cabinets and closet doors, looking for some trace of Amanda.

  Standing in the hallway, I spotted the attic door, a rectangle in the ceiling with a short piece of cord dangling from it. After hunting fruitlessly for a stepladder, I dragged an armchair from the living room into the hallway and stepped up onto the seat. My fingers barely reached the end of the braided cord, and it took several excruciating minutes of hopping up and down on the chair before I got a tight enough grip. The attic door let out a grating screech as it opened, and a shower of silt fell on my upturned face. I lost a few minutes coughing and crying the sharp granules out of my eyes before unfolding the ladder and climbing up, the ladder protesting my every step with a metallic groan. My head and shoulders in the dusty attic at last, I looked around.

  Ribbed ducts, a stack of two-by-fours, and pink fiberglass insulation under a thick coating of dust and cobwebs. That was all. Not a box in sight.

  I climbed down the ladder and folded it up again with some difficulty, shoving the door shut with a vindictive slam. Then I dragged the chair back to its place in the living room and flopped down on it, sweating with exertion and covered in attic filth from the waist up. Rubbing a streak of dust off my shirt, I thought about how different this place was from Amanda’s apartment in Austin—all clean lines and vibrant, unsullied colors, impersonal and ascetic and sparkling clean. There was no evidence that a person who liked those things had ever lived here. I began to despair.

  A shadow behind the living-room curtains, followed by a clatter, made me jump. It was only the mailman, I realized, my heart still pounding. Jason and I used to say we lived in a Bermuda Triangle for the US Postal Ser
vice because the mail always came to our street last, and when it came, half of it was misaddressed or misdelivered. For old times’ sake, I opened the door and flipped the lid on the mailbox. Not much had changed; with the single exception of a postcard chastising Jason for an overdue dental appointment, the small pile of envelopes consisted entirely of mail for former tenants. I flipped through them idly as I pushed the door closed with my foot: Julie Moore, Rebeccah Farrell, Keith Ho, Mr. J. Soriano . . .

  Former tenants.

  Before I moved in, Jason had always thrown mail to former tenants away, but I had insisted we stow it in a kitchen drawer instead, fully intending to forward it when I had time. That never happened, of course, and eventually we started calling the drawer “the sinkhole.” When I lived here, I’d emptied it into the trash can every couple of months, but I was pretty sure Jason had never cleaned it out on his own.

  I went to the kitchen, the mail still in my hands, and knelt to open the bottom drawer. It was stuffed so full of envelopes I could hardly wrench it open; I had to reach my hand to the back of the drawer to clear the logjam. When the drawer finally jerked open, a bank statement popped out, fluttered through the air, and landed on the tile floor by my knee. It was addressed to Ms. Dana Diaz.

  “Thanks a lot, Jason,” I muttered.

  I sat on the floor and started digging through the top layer of mail. When I saw the peak of a capital A poking out from behind a Free People catalog, my heart skipped a beat. It was only a special offer from Sephora, but it was addressed to Amanda Dorn. I’d found a trace of her at last.

  I started scooping out thick handfuls of red-stamped bills, credit card offers, catalogs, circulars for special elections and ballot initiatives, expired sandwich-shop coupons, wedding invitations, Christmas cards, and plain white envelopes with and without plastic windows, dumping them all on the floor in front of me. I forced myself to check the name on each piece of mail, no matter how trivial it seemed, before throwing it away. Every item addressed to Ms. Amanda Dorn gave me a little jolt of adrenaline, followed by a tiny crash of disappointment when it turned out to be junk mail. Still, I opened each and every one, just in case I was missing something more important than a special offer on a year’s subscription to Bon Appétit magazine.

  By the time I finished going through everything in the drawer, I had opened some fifteen pieces of Amanda’s mail, all of it useless. Not so much as an alumni magazine to give me a hint about her pre-Runnr past, much less the letter from home I had allowed myself to hope might be hiding in one of those plain white envelopes, entreating her to visit an ailing mother, forgive an abusive father. I sat, defeated, cross-legged on the kitchen floor under a pile of mail.

  A moth struck the windowpane near the kitchen-sink light, and I jumped. It was dark outside, the window a black square.

  It was late. I lifted myself up onto my knees, ignoring the prickles as circulation returned to my feet, and peered over the counter at the microwave clock. I had been doing this for two hours. Jason would be home soon. I sighed and opened the drawer again, this time yanking it so hard it jumped the tracks and came all the way out.

  There, at the bottom of the cabinet, was a pile of envelopes that had overflowed the drawer and slid back behind it. The one on top was for Amanda.

  I ripped it open. The letter inside was dated March 30:

  Dear AMANDA DORN,

  Thank you for being a valued customer of Saf-Stor, AMANDA! In order for Saf-Stor to continue to offer you the best storage experience possible, your discounted rental rate for UNIT NO. 302 will be adjusted effective MAY 1, 2017, to the current rate of $145. This letter is your 30-day notice . . .

  I lowered the form letter in disbelief. Amanda’s stuff wasn’t in Jason’s house, but it wasn’t in her new place in Austin either. I thought back again to the apartment where we’d spent so much time conspiring together. The clean, bright, sparkling-new furniture, the perfectly straight row of Blu-rays—Jaws, Die Hard, When Harry Met Sally, Clueless—movies to please the broadest swath of humanity possible. I remembered Amanda rummaging through nearly empty cabinets, looking for a corkscrew; pulling bottle after bottle down from the wine rack on top of the refrigerator, checking the labels, putting them back. Amanda didn’t have perfect taste in furniture and boring taste in movies and the ability to keep everything looking brand-new. She was renting an Airbnb. She had put her stuff in storage when she moved in with Jason, and it was still there. In—I scanned the letterhead—Glendale.

  I raced to Jason’s laptop to look up the hours, but the facility had already closed for the night. It would reopen in the morning at six thirty. Jason and I would be there.

  20

  Jason returned from work shamefaced over our fight and his angry exit. Amanda’s letter brightened his mood considerably.

  “Nicely done! There’s no telling what’s in that storage unit.” He tried to chuck me under the chin playfully, and I jerked my head away. “You were always the smart one, Dana.”

  “And you were the negligent, non-mail-forwarding one.” I held up an expired coupon for a mall nail salon. “Good thing I remembered the sinkhole.”

  “Ahhh, sorry. I promise I would have forwarded anything that looked important.” As I nodded skeptically, he said, “I’m assuming you want to get there first thing in the morning? So let’s get to sleep now, unless . . .” He trailed off.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sleep is good.”

  The subject of where I would sleep had become an awkward one. On the one hand, it felt silly to go all the way back to my motel every night, and I didn’t like the idea of sleeping alone in a place where I was at the mercy of the desk clerk to shield me from Amanda’s calls. At the same time, my relationship with Jason was still somewhat ambiguous, and sleeping in his bedroom didn’t feel right either. With the exception of one four a.m. kiss, our physical intimacy with each other had always been on the order of shoulder-punching. We had fallen asleep side by side countless times, sometimes leaning on each other, but never in bed. I could tell Jason was ready for more, but, in a role reversal that struck me as ironic, I wasn’t ready, not yet.

  I told myself it had to do with the dire situation we were in and the fact that I was still shielding Jason from it. Of course our amateur sleuthing seemed fun to him, even a turn-on. But the work of pretending that fun was all it was left no room in my emotional landscape for romance. I told myself that after we were through with Amanda, everything would feel right again. Regardless, his body language had become one of subtle overtures, and he hadn’t failed to notice that mine had become one of rejecting them. The mattress in the recording studio solved the problem temporarily, though it was hell on my back.

  To stall, I asked a question that had been on my mind since I’d found the letter. “Got any ideas for getting into Amanda’s storage unit?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Jason said. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Until then, don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”

  A chill went through me. His flippant attitude during our investigation reminded me of the way he’d been about Mattie’s truck. Maybe that was why I had trouble feeling romantic toward him. Anything that reminded me of Mattie gave me a swell of nausea that was hard to dispel.

  I suppressed the feeling as best I could and tried to join in the banter, moving down the hallway toward the studio. “Just a second ago, I was the smart one. Now I’m the pretty one?” I reached the door and turned around to find he’d been following close behind me.

  “You’re both,” he said, and he leaned in for a kiss, which I accepted mutely. After he drew back, he studied me for a moment.

  Without meaning to, I held my breath.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night, Jason,” I said. And closed the door behind me.

  “So that’s when we decided it was time to move in together.”

  Jason had been holding my hand during the conversation with the Saf-Stor
employee, whose name, according to his badge, was Delrick. Now Jason drew my hand all the way onto his lap and gave it a squeeze and said, “Right, honey?”

  I smiled apologetically at Delrick, who was clearly struggling to appear more interested in his first customers of the day than in the cup of coffee sitting half finished on his desk.

  Jason’s plan was to rent a unit on the same floor as Amanda’s, then cut her lock and replace it with a new one. He’d read about a rash of similar crimes in the L.A. area; not only was it easy to do, but if the staff discovered the break-in, they would think it was just petty theft and not investigate further. The hardware store opened even earlier than the storage facility, and we’d loaded up my purse with a lock, bolt cutters, and X-Acto knives for opening the boxes once we got in. But the plan had been too simple for Jason’s taste, and he had spiced it up by concocting an elaborate story about why we needed the storage, one involving absentee roommates and rising rent and, of course, our romance, which was always meant to be.

  I let him finish his spiel. Then, to nudge the clerk awake and feed him his next line, I added: “To be honest, the one-dollar move-in special is what convinced us.”

  Jason glared at me, but the clerk nodded.

  “It’s a great deal,” he said, moving into the rapid-fire patter of the salesperson who works on commission. “Let me just explain to you the terms and conditions—”

  The terms and conditions included the final month’s rent, but I was too impatient to complain. Twenty minutes and a hundred and twenty dollars later, the clerk rode the freight elevator up with us to the third floor and showed us to our unit. We walked together down a long, white corridor full of gray, numbered doors.