The Lesson of Her Death Read online

  Sarah was nobody's fool. She was going to do exactly what the wizard suggested. She also noted to her vast joy that although she would probably take this advice and go to Chicago, he had given her enough money to surely take her halfway around the world.

  The front door slammed and the feet were up the six stairs in three fast thuds before Diane could get to the front hall.

  She dried her hands as she continued to the stairs, pausing beside the coat rack and a wooden plaque of a goose wearing a blue bonnet and scarf. She straightened it absently and called, "Honey! Sarrie?"

  There was no answer.

  A moment later: "Honey, come on down here."

  A weak voice said, "I'm taking a bath, Mommy. I'll be down before supper."

  "Honey, Mrs. Beiderson called."

  Silence.

  "Sarah--"

  "I want to take my bath, Mommy. Can we talk about it, you know, later? Like, please?"

  "Come on out. She told me what happened at school."

  They continued this tug-of-war for a few minutes, Diane slowly edging up the stairs toward the girl's room. There was no lock on the door but Diane was reluctant to invade her children's territory. "Come on, honey. You can help me make dinner."

  "I don't want to!" Sarah answered shrilly.

  In these words Diane heard reason start to shatter. This was the time to back down. No hysteria, please. Not that. Sarah's attacks nailed her mother with tearful pity. And they also made her seethe; unable to distinguish between the moments Sarah was truly panicked and the times she was faking, Diane invariably backed down.

  Coward ...

  The phone began ringing.

  She glanced at it. "All right, Sarah, we'll talk later."

  As she walked into the kitchen Diane noticed that it was five P.M. She knew who the caller would be.

  She was married to him.

  Bill would ask about the kids and how Diane's day had gone and then he'd get suddenly sheepish and tell her he had to work late. Again. Every other day for the past month he skidded home just as supper was landing on the table and on more than a few occasions he had missed the evening meal altogether.

  And worse news: he now had a murder case.

  She remembered seeing the thick black type of the headline in the Register and reading the scant words about that poor dead student and feeling a wave of utter regret--for herself as well as for the poor parents of the murdered girl. She knew she was going to see even less of Bill until the man was caught.

  She picked up the beige phone.

  It was not her husband.

  She heard odd sounds in the background, like eerie electronic rock music, the sort she chided Jamie for listening to. She assumed it was one of his friends.

  "Corde residence," she said, wholly polite.

  "This's Mrs. Corde?" The voice was tenor-pitched but it seemed smoother than an adolescent's, more confident. She knew all of Jamie's friends and this didn't sound like any of them.

  "Yes, this is she. Who is this? Say, could you please turn that music down?"

  The volume of the music diminished. "You're Jamie's mother?"

  "You want to speak to Jamie?"

  "I'm calling from New Lebanon High? I'm the senior advisor of the freshman section of the yearbook and--this is really a hassle--but we lost a bunch of the bio sheets of some of the students, you know. We're way past the deadline and I'm calling people and filling in the forms over the phone."

  "Well, Jamie won't be home for another couple hours."

  "Could you just give me some information about him?"

  "Well, I don't know...." Diane said. She knew the risks mothers ran making decisions for their teenage boys.

  "Today's the last day we can get anything typeset."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Who's his homeroom teacher?"

  This seemed harmless enough. She said, "That'd be Mr. Jessup."

  "And is he on any teams?" the advisor asked.

  "Wrestling. He also does gymnastics but he doesn't compete. And he's going to do the triathlon next year."

  "Triathlon. So he's a bicyclist?"

  "You can't hardly keep him off it. He'd ride it to the dinner table if we let him."

  The boy laughed overloud at what he must have thought was a stupid joke. He then asked, "What kind of bike does he have?"

  "It's Italian. A fifteen-speed. I don't remember the name. Is it important?"

  "No, I guess not. What clubs is he in?"

  "Science Club and Latin Club. He was in Photo Club for a while but he quit that to spend more time working out. Say, will he have a chance to look this over?"

  "Not really, no. We're going to press tomorrow. But he wouldn't want just a blank space under his picture, would he?"

  "I guess not."

  "What's his favorite music video?"

  "I have no idea."

  "His favorite movie?"

  "I couldn't say."

  "How about his favorite groups?"

  "Groups?"

  "Music groups?"

  Diane was disturbed to find how little of this she knew. She said abruptly, "Can you wait a moment?" then set the phone down and fled into his room. She picked up several handfuls of tape cassettes and hurried back to the kitchen. She read the labels into the phone. "Tom Petty.... Uhm, Paul McCartney--well, I remember him of course."

  "Ha."

  "Then U2 and Metallica and Ice Cube and Run DMC, whatever that is. And he's got three tapes of this group Geiger. I guess they're from Germany."

  "Everyone knows Geiger."

  Well, excuse me....

  She continued, "I don't know if those are his favorites. He's got a lot of tapes."

  "Could you make up a quote for him?"

  No way. "I think that'll have to be blank."

  "I guess that's okay. You've been a big help, Mrs. Corde."

  "When is the yearbook coming out?"

  "Won't be long. Maybe I'll bring Jamie's by myself." The voice lowered a few tones. "I'd like to meet you."

  Diane laughed but silently; she understood fragile adolescent pride. "Well, that would be very nice."

  Hit on by a high schooler! Maybe you've got some of the old allure after all--even if it's just in your voice.

  When he got the note he'd been saying:

  "The phrase that some soldiers used was 'horizontal refreshment.' Medical records tell us that at the height of the war, nearly ten percent of Union troops suffered from some form of VD...."

  Associate Dean Randolph Rutherford Sayles took the slip of paper from the teaching assistant. He recognized Dean Larraby's elegant scrawl, as distinctive as her ubiquitously disquieting choice of words summoning him immediately to her office.

  Silence rose. He found he was looking past the paper, staring at the whorls and lines of the lectern, at an ink stain.

  "... In Washington, D.C., the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue contained dozens of houses of prostitution--a locale where I believe a number of lobbyists now maintain offices...."

  Sayles was in his trademarked posture: standing, both hands on the lectern, hunched forward. Sayles nurtured a classic professorial vogue, unkempt and preoccupied and tweedy, flaunting this style in the face of Brooks Brothers chic (passe on Wall Street but au courant in Cambridge, Hyde Park and Ann Arbor). He had sandy hair that he kept unruly and would grin like the absentminded scholar he had never been when it flopped into his face.

  "... And more astonishing, there are hundreds of documented cases of women disguising themselves as soldiers and circulating among the men to provide sexual favors for a profit. Perhaps this is where the phrase 'military service' arose...."

  These tidbits sounded frivolous but the students, who had waited in line since six A.M. on registration day to sign up for The Civil War to the Centennial, loved them. Sayles had worked hard at perfecting his lecturing skills. Nothing was more important to him than bestowing knowledge. He was tenured at thirty, two years after his doctoral thesis was
published and one year after his book, The Economics of Freedom, garnered a favorable Times review and started its record six-month run as number one on the National Association of Historians' recommended list.

  "As the war, which both Yanks and Rebs truly believed would last no more than six months, stretched on and on, the moral thread of the resoundingly Protestant and predominantly evangelical armies frayed...."

  More problematic was Sayles's second job as an associate dean, which he did not enjoy at all. But he was sophisticated enough to know that he could not survive forever without the yoke of administrative duties and he had struggled to master the perversity of collegiate infighting. Besides, his bailiwick was the Civil War and what better metaphor could there be for a college campus? He was like Grant, marshaling forces and riding herd over a bunch of brilliant feisty generals--that is, students--who drank too much, whored too much (or who railed loud against drinking and whoring), while he somehow managed to fight a war. And like Grant, Sayles had happened to rise to this position at the most difficult time in the history of his institution.

  "... But it wasn't until after the Dynamic Duo of Defeat--Gettysburg and Vicksburg--that the Southern troops embraced fundamentalist revivalism with a gusto ..."

  A warm spring breeze eased through the auditorium's huge windows, so high they could be locked and unlocked only with a twelve-foot-long pole. The class was half empty. Sayles considered the reason why attendance was poor and his eyes fell on a particular empty seat, surrounded by a blossom of other vacancies.

  Ah, yes, the memorial service.

  He had not had the strength to attend. The only place he could possibly be was here.

  The bell--not an electronic wail but an old-fashioned clapper on steel--rang and Sayles dismissed the class. He stood at the lectern while the class departed then he reread the dean's note. He too left the room and walked along a broad sidewalk, campus buildings on one side, the five-acre quadrangle on the other, to the university's administration building.

  On the second floor he entered a large anteroom. He walked past the room's only occupant, a secretary with whom he had long ago had an affair, a mousy woman with a bony face. He vaguely remembered breasts like fat pancakes.

  "Oh, did you hear? Professor? A student was--"

  Without answering he nodded and walked past her into the large inner office. He closed the door and sat in one of the oxblood leather chairs across from the dean's desk.

  "Randy," she said, "we have a real problem."

  He noticed her hand was resting on that morning's Register. The article about the murder was circled and above the headline was written: Dean Larraby. FYI. He looked at Bill Corde's picture then back to the dean. Sayles said, "She was in my class."

  Dean Larraby nodded without expecting any further response. She closed whatever massive work she had been reading--it appeared more legal than scholarly--and pushed it to the corner of her desk. Her fingers caressed the edges of the purple stone on her left hand.

  Sayles said, "Have you talked to the police?"

  "What?"

  "The police?"

  She responded querulously, "Yes, there was a detective here. This man, in fact." She nodded at the paper. "He wanted to know all about the Gebben girl."

  The Gebben girl.

  Sayles, whose brilliance like that of many professors was in large part memory, recollected perfectly how the dean had greeted him a few moments ago and asked, "What kind of problem? What else did the police say?"

  The Gebben girl. Student number 144691.

  "The police? That's not what I'm talking about," she said. "This is serious. I've finished meeting with the Price Waterhouse people. There are no funds to move into the loans accounts."

  "What do you mean?" Shock pummeled Sayles. The image of Jennie Gebben fell from his thoughts.

  "None."

  "But there was going to be an operating surplus this term," he whispered. "I thought we'd worked that out."

  "Well," she said testily, "there isn't."

  Oh, how he hated her. She'd told him, she'd promised him, there would be money. The shock yielded to a maelstrom of anger. He swallowed and looked out the window at the grassy quad whose sidewalks he had crossed perhaps ten thousand times.

  "The fact is the money isn't there."

  "What are we going to do?" His voice rose with panic. "Can we cover it up?"

  "Cover it up? We're long past that point." She smiled but cruelly and he thought her face looked like a malicious tortoise's. "Randy, without that money, the school is going to close."

  "What happened to it? We were supposed to have two and a half million."

  She tossed her head at a question he himself knew the answer to. Why does a college lose money? Auden University had been skimming the surface of insolvency for ten years. Competition from cheaper state and trade schools, decreasing college-age population, escalating salary demands and costs ...

  "This murder, it's going to focus a lot of attention on the school and its problems. That's the last thing we need. Not now. We can't afford people pulling their children out. And for God's sake we don't need profiles of the school in the press." She did not look at the Register but her fingers absently tapped the grim headline.

  Sayles said coldly, "Her death was most inopportune."

  The dean missed his irony. She asked, "Does anybody know about our arrangement?"

  Long dark hair. It often dipped down over one eye. Which? Her right eye. She would keen with passion. The Gebben girl. Student number 144691. She would cry at the scent of a forest filling with stiff fall leaves.

  "Does anybody know?" he mused. Nope, not anymore she doesn't. Sayles shook his head.

  The dean stood and walked to the window. Her back was to him. She had a solid figure, rubbery and strong; this was appealing--the severity and solemnity one wants in airline pilots and surgeons. A large, stern woman, hair going a little wiry, eyes puffy from wrestling with an injustice only partially of her own making.

  Jennie Gebben. Who would grip his cock with her prominent teeth and rasp up and down along his swollen skin.

  Who could not without prompting analyze European motives behind Civil War foreign relations but who had the far more enduring gift of pressing her knees into Sayles's midriff and with a stone-buffed heel square against his asshole force his pelvis against hers.

  Student number 144691.

  "Randy, we can expect an audit by mid-June. If you don't raise three million six hundred thousand dollars in cash by then--"

  "How am I supposed to get that much money?" He heard his voice rise to a strident whine, which he detested but could not avoid.

  "You?" she asked. Dean Larraby polished the purple stone against the fabric of her skirt then looked up at Sayles. "I think it's pretty clear, Randy. You, better than anybody, know what's at stake if you don't find that money."

  She got the idea from a made-for-TV movie.

  It had been a film about a thirteen-year-old girl, and her mother and stepfather hated her. Once, they locked her in the house while they went away to gamble and the girl ran away from home by jumping out a window then grabbing onto a freight train that went to New York City.

  Sarah shut off the water running in the bathtub, which though it was filled with steamy water and fragrant violet bubble bath did not--as she had told her mother--contain her. She had run upstairs and taken a fast shower then dressed quickly. Now, wearing a T-shirt, overalls, Nikes and a nylon windbreaker--her traveling clothes--she listened to her mother fixing dinner downstairs.

  In the film, when the girl ended up in New York she lived in the alley and had to eat bread somebody had thrown out and she smoked a cigarette and just before this big guy was going to take her up into his apartment and do something to her Sarah didn't know what, the girl's mom showed up and hugged her and brought her home and dumped the stepfather. And they showed an 800 number you could call if you knew any runaways.

  What a stupid movie--about as real and interes
ting as a cereal commercial. But it solved a big problem for Sarah because it showed her how to save all of the wizard's money and still get to Chicago.

  She was thinking of the railroad train.

  There were no railroads in New Lebanon. But there was a truck. It was a big one that looked sort of like a train and it passed the house every afternoon. The truck had a platform on the back that she thought she could hold on to, and it went past the house real slow. She could catch the truck easily and then climb onto the back and sit there. When he stopped for the night she could ask the driver where to find another truck going to Chicago.

  Sarah packed her Barbie backpack. She took Mr. Jupiter her shooting star bank, pairs of Levi's and sweatshirts and socks and underpants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, and a skirt and a blouse, her Walkman and a dozen books on tape. Of course Redford T. Redford the world's smartest bear would be traveling with her. And she took some things from her mother's dresser. Lipstick, mascara, fingernail polish and panty hose.

  It was now five-thirty. The truck usually went past the house about six. Sarah walked around her room. She suddenly realized she'd miss her father. She started to cry. She'd miss her brother some. She thought she'd miss her mother but she wasn't sure. Then she thought of the wizard telling her, "I'll look out for you," and she thought about school.

  Sarah stopped crying.

  She lifted the window, which opened onto the backyard of their house. She tossed the backpack out, hearing the coins in Mr. Jupiter ring loudly. She climbed out, hanging from the ledge, her cheek pressed hard against the yellow siding, then she let go and dropped the few feet to the soft ground.

  When he hung up the phone Brian Okun recognized a contradiction that would have made a tidy little philosophical riddle. As the black receiver started downward he thought, He's got no right to talk to me that way. As it settled in its cradle: He's got every right to talk to me that way.

  Okun was lanky as a cowboy and his face was obscured by the strands of black beard that weaseled unevenly out of his wan skin. Inky Brillo hair hung over his ears like a floppy beret. He sat in his tiny cubicle overlooking the quad, his tensed hand still clutching the telephone, and developed his thought: He has no right because as a human being I'm entitled to a mutual measure of respect and dignity. John Locke. He has every right because he's in charge and he can do what he fucking well pleases. Niccolo Machiavelli cum Brian Okun.