The Lesson of Her Death Read online

  The fall had not bought the sympathy she'd expected. She was frightened by her father's reaction.

  He repeated, "Answer me!"

  What was the safest answer? She shook her head.

  "You didn't see anyone?"

  She hesitated then swallowed. "I got sick at school."

  Corde studied her pale eyes for a moment. "Honey, we talked about this. You don't get sick. You just feel sick."

  A young reporter lifted a camera and shot a picture of them, Corde stroking a slash of blond hair out of her eyes. Corde glared at him.

  "It's like I have pitchforks in my tummy."

  "You have to go to school."

  "I don't want to! I hate school!" Her shrill voice filled the clearing. Corde glanced at the reporters, who watched the exchange with varying degrees of interest and sympathy.

  "Come on. Get in the car."

  "No!" she squealed. "I'm not going! You can't make me."

  Corde wanted to shout with frustration. "Young lady, get in that car. I'm not going to tell you again."

  "Please?" Her face filled with enormous disappointment.

  "Now."

  When Sarah saw her plan wasn't going to work she walked toward Corde's squad car. Corde watched, half expecting her to bolt into the forest. She paused and scanned the woods intently.

  "Sarah?"

  She didn't turn her head. She climbed into the car and slammed the door.

  "Kids," Corde muttered.

  "Find yourself something?" Slocum asked.

  Corde was tying a chain of custody card to the bag containing the newspaper clipping he had found. He signed his name and passed it to Slocum. The brief article was about last night's killing. The editor had been able to fit only five paragraphs of story into the newspaper before deadline. The clipping had been cut from the paper with eerie precision. The slices were perfectly even, as if made by a razor knife.

  Auden Co-ed Raped, Murdered was the headline.

  The picture accompanying the story had not been a photo of the crime scene but was a lift from a feature story the Register had run several months ago about a church picnic that Corde had attended with his family. The cut line read, "Detective William Corde, chief investigator in the case, shown here last March with his wife, Diane, and children, Jamie, 15, and Sarah, 9."

  "Damn, Bill."

  Slocum was referring to the words crudely written in red ink next to the photograph.

  They read: JENNIE HAD TO DIE. IT COULD HAPPEN TO THEM.

  They climbed the stairs slowly, one man feeling the luxurious carpet under his boots, the other not feeling a single thing at all.

  Outside the wind howled. A spring storm enveloped this lush suburb, though inside the elegant house the temperature was warm and the wind and rain seemed distant. Bill Corde, hat in hand, boots carefully wiped, watched the man pause in the dim hallway then reach quickly for a door knob. He hesitated once again then pushed the door inward and slapped the light switch on.

  "You don't have to be here," Corde said gently.

  Richard Gebben did not answer but walked into the middle of the pink carpeted room where his daughter had grown up.

  "She's going to be all right," Gebben said in a faint voice. Corde had no idea whether he meant his wife, who was in the downstairs bedroom drowsy from sedatives, or his daughter, lying at the moment on a sensuously rounded enamel coroner's table two hundred miles away.

  Going to be all right.

  Richard Gebben was a crew-cut businessman with a face troubled by acne when young. He was Midwestern and he was middle-aged and he was rich. For men like Gebben, life moves by justice not fate. Corde suspected the man's essential struggle right now was in trying to understand the reason for his daughter's death.

  "You drove all the way here yourself," Gebben said.

  "No, sir, took a commuter flight. Midwest Air."

  Gebben rubbed the face of his Rolex compulsively across his pocked cheek. He touched his eyes in an odd way and he seemed to be wondering why he was not crying.

  Corde nodded toward her dresser and asked, "May I?"

  "I remember when she left for school the last time she was home, Thanksgiving.... I'm sorry?"

  "Her dresser. I'd like to look through it."

  Gebben gestured absently. Corde walked to the bureau but did not yet open it. "Thanksgiving. She'd left the bedclothes all piled up. In a heap. After she'd gone to the airport, Jennie's mother came up here and made the bed and arranged it just like that...." Corde looked at the three pink-and-white gingham pillows on top of the comforter, a plush dog with black button eyes sticking his head out from under them. "My wife, she took a long time to arrange the dog."

  Gebben took several deep breaths to calm himself. "She ... The thing about Jennie was, she loved ..."

  What was he going to say? Loved life? Loved people? Loved flowers kittens poetry charities? Gebben fell silent, perhaps troubled that he could at this moment think only of the cheapest cliches. Death, Corde knew, makes us feel so foolish.

  He turned away from Gebben to Jennie's dresser. He was aware of a mix of scents. She had a dozen bottles of perfume on the mirrored dressing table. The L'Air du Temps was full, a bottle of generic cologne nearly empty. He lifted it, looked at the label and set it down. His hand would retain for days the sharp spicy smell, which he recalled from the pond last night.

  The bureau contained nothing but clothes. Above it a hundred postcards and snapshots were pinned to a corkboard. Jennie's arm twined around the waists of dozens of boys, faces different, poses similar. Her dark hair seemed to be darker in summer though that might be a trick of Kodak convenience photography. She often wore it pinned back. Her sport was volleyball and a dozen pictures revealed her playing the game with lusty determination on her face. Corde asked if he could have one of these, a close-up of Jennie, pretty face glossy with sweat. Gebben shrugged. How Corde hated this part of the job, walking straight into the heart of people's anguish.

  Corde touched several recent snapshots of the girl with friends. Gebben confirmed that all of them were away at other schools--all except Emily Rossiter, who was Jennie's current roommate at Auden. Corde saw: her high school ID card. Ticket stubs from a Cowboy Junkies concert, a Bon Jovi concert, a Billy Joel concert, a Paula Poundstone show. A greeting card with a silly cartoon rabbit on the front offered her congratulations on passing her driving test.

  Corde pulled the chair away from her desk and sat. He surveyed the worn desktop in front of him, nicked, scratched, marked with her doodlings. He saw a bottle of India ink. A framed picture of Jennie with a scruffy cocker spaniel. A snapshot of her coming out of church one recent spring, maybe at Easter, blue crocuses at her feet.

  She died on a bed of milky blue hyacinths.

  In a lopsided clay cup was a chewed yellow pencil, its eraser worn away. Corde lifted it, feeling beneath the thick pads of his fingers the rough indentations and the negative space of Jennie Gebben's mouth. He rubbed the wood, thinking that it had once been damp from her. He replaced the pencil.

  He went through her desk, which held high school assignments, squares of wrapping paper, old birthday cards.

  "No diaries or letters?"

  Gebben focused on the detective. "I don't know. That's where they'd be." He nodded toward the desk.

  Corde again looked carefully. No threatening letters, no notes from spurned boyfriends. No personal correspondence of any kind. He examined the closet, swinging aside the wealth of clothes and checking the shelves. He found nothing helpful and closed the double doors.

  Corde stood in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, looking around him.

  "Was she engaged? Have a steady boyfriend here?"

  Gebben was hesitating. "She had a lot of friends. Nobody'd hurt her. Everybody loved her."

  "Did she break up with anybody recently?"

  "No," Gebben said and shrugged in such a way that Corde understood the man had no idea what he was saying.

  "Anybody have a
crush on her?"

  "Nobody who knew Jennie would hurt her," Gebben said slowly. Then he added, "You know what I was thinking? Since I got the call I haven't told anybody. I've been working up courage. For all those people--her grandparents, her friends, my brother's family--Jennie's still alive. For all they know she's sitting in the library studying."

  "I'll leave you now, sir. If you can think of anything that might help us I'd appreciate a call. And if you find any letters or a diary please send them to me as soon as you can. They'd be very important." He handed Gebben one of his cheap business cards.

  Gebben studied the card. He looked up, sloe-eyed and earnest. "It's going to be all right."

  He said this with such intensity that it seemed as if his sole purpose at the moment was to comfort Bill Corde.

  Wynton Kresge sat in his office in the main administration building of Auden University. The room--high-ceilinged, paneled in oak--was carpeted in navy blue, pretty much the same color as that in his Cutlass Supreme though this pile was twice as thick. His desk was a large mahogany piece. Occasionally when he was on the phone listening to someone he had no desire to be listening to (which was pretty often), Kresge would imagine ways to get the desk out of the office without knocking a hole in the wall. On particularly slow days he actually considered trying to remove it. He would have been a good candidate for this project: Kresge was six foot four and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. His upper arms measured fifteen inches around, his thighs were twenty-four, and only a minor percentage of those dimensions was fat. (He had never lifted a barbell in his life but had retained much of the muscle he cultivated when he was a college linebacker for the Tigers not the Missouri Tigers the Dan Devine Tigers.)

  The top of the desk held one telephone with two lines, one brass lamp, one blotter, one leather desk calendar opened to this week, one framed photo of an attractive woman, seven framed photos of children, and one piece of paper.

  The paper, held down by Kresge's massive hand as if he were afraid it would blow away, contained the following words: Jennie Gebben. Tuesday ten P.M. Blackfoot Pond. McReynolds dorm. Lovers, students, teachers, robbery? rape? other motive? Susan Biagotti? Beneath this was an awkward diagram of the campus and the pond and the road around it. Kresge touched his earlobe with the butt of his Schaeffer sterling silver ballpoint pen, which he had polished just the night before, and considered what he'd written.

  Kresge drew additional lines on the paper, crossing off words, and adding others. He was drawing a dotted line from the campus to the pond when a knock on the closed door made him jump. By the time his secretary walked into the room without announcing herself further the piece of paper was wadded up and slam-dunked into Kresge's wastebasket.

  "She wants to see you," said the secretary, a pretty woman in her late thirties.

  "She does."

  The secretary paused then said, "You're holed up in here."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  She said, "I used to think that that phrase was 'hauled up.' Like they hauled somebody up in a tower so he could escape from the police or something."

  "The police?" Kresge asked.

  "But then I found out it was 'holed up.' Like, go into a hole."

  "I don't really know. Now?"

  "She said now."

  Kresge nodded. He unlocked his top drawer and from it took out a dark gray Taurus 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He looked to make certain there was a full clip in the grip of the gun then slipped it in a belt holster. He left the room with what the secretary sensed, though Kresge himself did not, was a look of intense, almost theatrical, determination on his face.

  This was how she would build the house: She would find some land--there, that beautiful field with the gold and white flowers in it, there through the window, surrounded by green-silver trees. She could see, from her cell, the tall grass waving in a breeze soft as a kitten's lazy tail. Then she would call her friends the animals and--

  "Sarah, are you with us?"

  Her head snapped away from the window and she found thirty-two children and one adult staring at her. Her breath escaped in a soft snap then stopped completely. Sarah looked at their eyes and felt her heart shudder then start to beat at a fast gallop.

  "I called on you. Come up here."

  Sarah sat still and felt the pure heat from her face flood into her arms and chest.

  Mrs. Beiderson smiled, her face as sweet as Sarah's grandmother's. Mrs. Beiderson smiled a lot. She never raised her voice at Sarah, never shouted at her, never took her hand and walked her to the principal's office like she did the boys that drew pictures on their desks or fought. Mrs. Beiderson always spoke to Sarah in a voice like a pussy willow.

  Sarah hated her more than anyone in the world.

  "Sarah, now come along. This is just practice. You're not being graded."

  The girl looked at her desk. Inside was the pill her mother had given her. But it wasn't time to take it yet.

  "Now, Sarah."

  Sarah stood, her hands at her sides, too heavy to lift. She walked to the front of the dungeon and turned to face the class. She felt Mrs. Beiderson's smile pelt the back of her neck like a whip of snakes. She glanced at the trees outside the window. Oh, the freedom of the trees! She could smell the bark, she could feel the fuzz on the bottom of an elf cap growing up through ivy, she could see the doorway to the secret tunnel in her house.

  Looking out over her classmates' faces, she saw Priscilla Witlock laughing, Dennis Morgan twisting up his fat lips into a mean grin, Brad Mibbock rolling his eyes. Laughter roaring so loud it struck her face and stung. She saw boys holding fists above their you-knows and moving them up and down, she saw girls with long red fingernails and dangling bracelets, girls her age but with round perfect breasts and sleek makeup and high heels, girls taunting her....

  And Mrs. Beiderson, who saw only the bored faces of her class and heard nothing but Sarah's whimpering, said, "Sarah, your word is 'clarify.'"

  The sound hit Sarah with the jolt of a schoolyard punch. Her daddy had helped her with this word. But she knew it had several up-down letters, which were very hard for her. She began to cry.

  "You've done it before," smiling Mrs. Beiderson said in her soft lying, cheating, snaky voice. "You're not trying, Sarah. We all have to try." Mrs. Beiderson touched the rose cameo at her throat. "'Clarify' is on the list. Didn't you study the list?"

  Sarah nodded.

  "If you studied the list then there's nothing to cry about."

  Now everyone would know she was crying, even the students in the back.

  "I can't."

  "You don't want us to think you're being difficult, do you? 'Clarify.'"

  Between sobs, Sarah said, "C."

  "Very good." The snake smiled.

  Her knees quivered. "I don't know. I don't." More tears.

  "What's the next letter?"

  "I don't know."

  "Try."

  "C-A ..."

  Mrs. Beiderson exhaled a sigh. "All right, Sarah. Sit--"

  "I could do it at home--"

  "--down. Anyone else?"

  And Priscilla Witlock didn't even rise from her seat but was staring right at Sarah, slinging out the letters, C, then L, then A, then R, spelling the word in the time it took Sarah to take a huge gulp of air to try to quench her fear.

  And then she felt it. First a trickle. Then a flood, as her panties grew wet and she put her hand down-there to stop herself but knowing it was too late, the flowing warm moisture running around her leg and Mrs. Beiderson saying, "Oh dear oh dear," and some of the class looking away, which was as bad as the rest of the class staring, as bad as knowing the story would be all over town and everybody would know even her grandfather up in heaven would know....

  Sarah threw her arms around herself and ran to the door, pushing it open with her shoulder. The glass burst into a spiderweb of cracks. She leapt down the stairs two at a time and ran blindly down the corridor to the front door of the school, leaving on the lino
leum the swirls and drips of her shame, like fragments of the letters that had beaten her once again.

  The woman said, "Whatever has to be done and I mean it."

  Dean Catherine Larraby was fifty-five and, if you squinted, looked like Margaret Thatcher. Gray hair, round face, stocky. Reassuring jowls. Eyes tired but severe. A coolness around the edges that Bill Corde thought was permanent and had not arisen with the killing. She had not applied her makeup well and the powder had accumulated in the creases around her mouth and on her forehead.

  He breathed deeply. He was still queasy from the bumpy flight back from St. Louis and more so from the frantic drive from the county airport to make this meeting.

  Through the windows of her breezy office Corde saw the manicured grass of the quadrangle, bordered with luminous green trees. Students walked along the sidewalks and paths; it seemed to Corde that they moved in slow motion. He remembered college as much more frantic. He was constantly hurrying, walking briskly into class, sweating, unprepared.

  A man appeared in the doorway, a tall, heavyset black man.

  "Ah," the dean said, "Detective Corde. Wynton Kresge, head of campus security." Corde shook his callused wad of hand and did a double take when Kresge's expensive suit coat swung open, revealing the no-nonsense automatic pistol.

  The dean looked at Kresge but when she spoke it was to the sixteen thousand parents of her eight thousand wards. "We've got to catch this man. We're going to catch him."

  Corde said, "I'd like to start interviewing Jennie's friends and professors as soon as possible."

  The dean's stubby fingers aligned a pen three times. "Of course," she said after a moment. "Is that necessary?"

  Corde took out a stack of blank three-by-five cards. "I'd like to ask some preliminary questions. I have an address for her. McReynolds Hall. That's correct?"

  "Right. She was GDI," Kresge answered; the dean frowned.

  Corde began to write. He printed his notes and used only capital letters, which with their many curved strokes gave a vaguely oriental appearance to his handwriting. "GDI? That's a sorority?"

  "No," Kresge explained, "GDI is what the dormies call themselves. People who aren't in frat or sorority houses. It means God Damn Independents." The dean kept staring at him and Kresge said, "Well, that's what they say."

  The dean said, "There are so many implications."