The Lesson of Her Death

by Jeffery Deaver

  "You can't go asking somebody that."

  "Ask."

  Miller turned fire red. "Can't we look it up somewhere?"

  "Ask," Corde barked.

  "Okay, okay."

  Corde read one of Miller's notes: Roommate and JG just before dinner on Tuesday night. They had discussion--"Serious" (Fight?) Couldn't tell what was said. JG unhappy as she left. Roommate: Emily Rossiter.

  Corde tapped it. "That's interesting. I want to talk to Emily. Get over there now and have her come in."

  Bill Corde was irritated at the fluorescent tube that flickered frantically above his head and he was exhausted from sifting for hours through the goofy and theatrical attitudes of young people on their own for the first time. He was thinking of closing up for the day and returning to the office when a young man appeared at the door. He was in his mid-twenties. A squat mass of black crinkly hair was tied in a ponytail. His face was very narrow and he had high ridges of cheekbones, under which was a dark beard. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt. "You Detective Corde?"

  "That's me. Come on in."

  "I got a message that you wanted to see me."

  "What's your name? Here, sit down."

  "Brian Okun. Is this about Jennie Gebben?"

  "That's right." Corde was flipping through his index cards. Slowly, card by card, reviewing his boxy hand-writing. It took a long time. He looked up. "Now, how exactly did you know her?"

  "She was in Professor Gilchrist's class. Psychology and Literature. He lectures. I teach the discussion section she was in."

  "You're on the faculty?"

  "I'm a graduate student. Ph.D. candidate."

  "And what did you do in your section?"

  "They're discussion groups, as I said."

  "What do you discuss?"

  Okun laughed, puzzled. "Do you really care?"

  "I'm curious."

  "The question last week was: 'How would John Crowe Ransom and the school of New Criticism approach the poetry written by someone diagnosed with bipolar depression?' Do you know what the New Criticism movement was all about, Officer?"

  "No, I don't." Corde answered. "Do you know if Jennie was going with anybody?"

  "'Going with.' What does that mean? That's a vague term."

  "Was she seeing anyone?"

  Okun asked in a voice crisp with irony, "'Seeing anyone'? Do you mean dating?"

  It seemed to Corde that the boy wasn't hostile. He looked genuinely perplexed--as if the detective were asking questions that could not be answered in plain English. "I'd like to know about anyone Jennie may have had more than a passing friendship with."

  Okun's eyes ricocheted off Corde's cards. "I suppose you know I took her out a few times."

  Corde, who did not know this, answered, "I was going to ask you about that--do you usually date students?"

  "This's a college town. Who else is there to ask out?" Okun's eyes met Corde's.

  "Isn't it unusual for a professor to ask out his students?"

  "I'm not a professor. I told you that. I'm a doctoral candidate. Therefore we were both students."

  Corde rubbed his finger across a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee. He shuddered at the squeaky sound. "I'd appreciate you answering my questions in a straightforward way. This is a pretty serious matter. How long were you seeing her?"

  "We broke up several months ago. We'd dated for three months off and on."

  "Why did you break up?"

  "It's not your concern."

  "It may be, son."

  "Look, Sheriff, we went out five or six times. I never spent the night with her. She was sweet but she wasn't my type."

  Corde began to ask a question.

  Okun said, "I don't feel like telling you what my type is."

  "What were the circumstances of you breaking up?"

  Okun twitched a shoulder. "You can't really call it breaking up. There was nothing between us, nothing serious. And neither of us saw any point in going on with it."

  "Do you know who Jennie began seeing after you?"

  "I know she went out. I don't know with whom."

  Corde fanned through his three-by-fives. "That's interesting. Several of her other friends also told me they aren't sure who she was dating recently."

  Okun's eyes narrowed and his tongue touched a stray wire of beard. "So, a mystery man."

  Corde asked, "What kind of student was she?"

  "Slightly above average but her heart wasn't in studying. She didn't feel passion for literature."

  He pronounced it lit'rature. Corde asked, "Was there anybody in class she was particularly close to? Other than you?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you see her personally in the last month?"

  Okun blinked. "Personally?" he asked the ceiling. "I suppose I'd have to see her personally, wouldn't you think? How else can one see anyone? Do you mean did I see her intimately? Or do you mean socially?"

  Corde thought of the time he managed to cuff and hogtie George Kallowoski after the man had spent ten minutes swinging a four-by-four, trying in his drunken haze to cave in Corde's skull. He thought a lot better of Kallowoski than he did of this boy. "Outside of class, I meant."

  "I hadn't seen her socially for a month. I assume you remember that I told you I didn't see her intimately at all."

  "Do you know if there was anybody who had a gripe with her? Anybody she'd fought with recently?"

  "No."

  "Did she get along well with her roommate?"

  "I guess. I don't know Emily that well."

  "But you knew Jennie well enough to know that Emily was her roommate."

  Okun smiled. "Ah, ratiocination! Does this mean you've trapped me?"

  Corde fanned his cards like a Las Vegas blackjack player. "Now, Emily ..." He looked up, frowning. "I thought you told me you never stayed overnight in Jennie's room?"

  Okun, observing the interrogation from a different plane, sighed. He descended to say, "Emily has a big mouth.... I was being euphemistic when I mentioned spending the night."

  "Euphemistic?"

  Okun said, "It means I was not being literal. I was being metaphoric."

  "I know what euphemistic means," said Corde, who did not.

  "I meant I didn't have sexual relations with her. We stayed up late discussing literature. That was all. Officer, it seems to me like this is some kind of personal vendetta."

  "I don't believe you're right about that."

  Okun looked out of the small window as if he were stargazing then said, "I don't know whether you went to college or not but I imagine you don't have a lot of respect for what I do."

  Corde didn't say anything.

  "I may look like a, what would you call it? Hippie? That's your era. I may look like a hippie. But it's people like me who teach half this illiterate world to communicate. I think that's a rather important thing to do. So I resent being treated like one of your local felons."

  Corde asked, "Will you submit a blood sample?"

  "Blood?"

  "For a genetic marker test. To compare with the semen found in Jennie Gebben's body?"

  Brian Okun said, "Fuck you." Then he stood up and walked out of the room.

  Do You Drive Your Man Crazy?

  Diane Corde sat in the paneled office and flipped through a Redbook.

  Question 1. What is the wildest thing you and your mate are capable of doing?

  A. Taking skydiving lessons together.

  B. Making love outdoors.

  C. Going skinny-dipping.

  D. Taking ballroom dancing classes.

  Diane didn't like the place. It reminded her too much of the office of the vet who spayed their puppies and dispensed worm drops. It was nothing but a cheap paneled waiting room and a sliding glass window, behind which was a gum-chewing receptionist, who seemed about to ask, "Time for Fluffy's distemper shot, is it?"

  Diane swallowed, dry-mouthed, and returned to the magazine.

  Question 7. How surprised would your mate
be if you called him up one afternoon and told him to meet you after work in a ritzy hotel room, where you would have champagne and caviar waiting for him?

  A. Not surprised at all.

  B. Somewhat surprised.

  C. Very surprised.

  D. Astonished.

  Corde and Diane had met at a Methodist church singles supper sixteen years before, held in the boathouse on Seever Lake. Corde had shown up with only bags of potato chips, getting mileage out of a bad joke ("Sure I know it's a pot luck supper--y'all're lucky I didn't bring a pot"). Corde then spotted Diane Claudia Willmot arranging pickles in a Tupperware bowl and asked her if she'd like to go for a walk. She said she would, only wait a minute she wanted to get her purse, which she did, and they wandered around in the park until, thank you Lord, a roaring cloudburst forced them into a little shack and while the other pot-luckers were eating beans and franks and making forty-days-and-forty-nights jokes, Corde and Diane kissed, wet and hot, and she decided she was going to marry him.

  She was four years older than Corde, which is a big difference between people at only one age--their mid-twenties, which is where the two of them happened to be. Crying, Diane asked him, "What are you going to do when I turn thirty? You'll still be young." And Bill Corde, who was in fact worried about the age difference (but because he thought she might leave him for an older man), told her something that turned out to be completely true: that he didn't think she'd go too ripe before he himself went gray.

  One problem he hadn't counted on, though. Diane was divorced, married two years to a salesman up in Fredericksberg. They'd split up before Corde met her and when she'd confessed the marriage, nervous about the response, he'd smeared on the nonchalance real thick. But later he got to thinking about Diane and Stuart together and he claimed it turned his stomach into a cloverleaf. Diane was tolerant at first but then Corde's insecurity began to wear on her. She didn't know how to placate him. It didn't even seem to make him feel better when she repeated over and over the partial truth that she and Stu hadn't had a good sex life. Although she didn't dwell on it she assumed that Corde had had his share of women and hoped it was true so that he had sowed all the wild grains he had in him. But it wasn't the sex that tormented Corde; it was something trickier--jealousy that the woman he wanted to marry had confessed secrets to another man, that she had cried in front of him, that she had comforted him. Corde could not be allayed, looking sheepish and sorrowful at this retroactive betrayal. "But it was before I even knew you," Diane snapped, and he got a look at her spirited side, as she'd intended. Corde brooded plenty and finally Diane called the bluff. "You gonna mope like that, go find yourself a virgin you think is worth all this heartache you're making for yourself."

  Their wedding, the following month, was appropriately punctuated by an inundation to match that of the day they'd met. They both took this as a good omen, which had proved to be pretty accurate. Sixteen years of marriage and when they called each other darling, they more often than not meant it. Diane said the secret to their success was that they had faulty memory circuits and tended to forget rather than forgive the transgressions. The closest either of them had come to an affair were unpure thoughts--along the lines of those about Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner when Corde and Diane made love the night they'd rented Bull Durham.

  They had weathered a near-bankruptcy, the deaths of Diane's father and Corde's mother, a stroke that made Corde's father forever a stranger and then the old man's death, and some bad problems when the family was living in St. Louis.

  Lately Corde was spending more and more time on cases, away from home. Yet oddly the brooding sense of threat she felt did not come from his long hours or moody obsession with his work. Rather, Diane Corde felt that for some reason it was the trouble with Sarah that was driving them apart. She did not understand this at all but she sensed the momentum of the rift and sensed too, in her darker moments, its inevitability.

  She looked at her watch, felt a burst of irritation at having been kept waiting then looked at the receptionist, who moved the gum around in her mouth until she found it a comfy home and continued addressing bills.

  Question 11. Does your husband ...

  The door to the inner office opened and a woman in her late thirties stepped out. She wore a beautiful pink suit, radiant, vibrating. Diane studied the dress before she even glanced at the woman's face. That is a tart's color. A formal smile on her lips, the woman said, "Hello, I'm Dr. Parker. Would you like to come in?"

  Ohmagod, she's a fake! Here she is just a Mary K rep who won the Buick and is on to better things. As she stood, Diane thought hard how to escape. Vet's office, pink suit and the woman's only references had been the yellow pages. But despite the misgivings Diane continued into the office. She sat in a comfortable armchair. Dr. Parker closed the door behind them. The room was small, painted yellow and--another glitch--contained no couch. All psychiatrists' offices had couches. That much Diane knew. This office was furnished with two armchairs across from a virtually empty desk, two answering machines, a lamp and a clean ashtray on a pedestal. A cube box of Kleenex.

  The doctor's thick gold bracelet clanked on the desktop as she uncapped a pen and took a notebook from the desk.

  On the other hand, the doctor passed the wall test. One side of the room was filled with somber, stout books like Psychodynamics in the Treatment of Near-Functioning Individuals and Principles of Psychopharmacology. On the facing wall were the diplomas. Dr. Parker had graduated from the University of Illinois, cum laude, from Northwestern Medical School and from the American College of Psychiatrists. Three schools! Diane, who had limboed out of McCullough Teachers' College with a B-minus average, looked at the squirrelly proclamations full of Latin or Greek phrases and seals and stamps then turned back to find the doctor gazing expectantly at her.

  "Well," Diane said, and folded her sweating hands in her lap. She felt the wave of tears slosh inside her. She opened her mouth to tell the doctor about Sarah and said instead, "Are you new in town?"

  "I opened my practice a year ago."

  "A year," Diane said. "New Lebanon a little quiet for you?"

  "I like small towns."

  "Small towns." Diane nodded. A long moment of silence. "Well, it is a small town. That's true."

  Dr. Parker said, "When you called you mentioned your daughter. Why don't you tell me about her."

  Diane's mind froze. "Well."

  The doctor's pen hovered, ready to scoot along the paper, dragging the eighteen-karat bracelet behind.

  Diane blurted, "Our Sarah's been having some problems in school."

  "How old is she?"

  "Nine."

  "And how many months?"

  "Uh, six."

  "That's fifth grade?"

  "Fourth. We held her back a year."

  "Tell me about her problem."

  "She's a smart girl. She really is. Some of the things that come out of her mouth ..." Examples vanished from Diane's mind. "But she has this attitude.... And she's lazy. She doesn't try. She won't do her homework. She fails her tests. I was reading this book? Your Hidden Child." She paused, waiting for Dr. Parker to approve the paperback. The doctor lifted her eyebrows quizzically, which gave Diane the impression she didn't think much of the book. "It said that children sometimes behave badly because they want attention."

  "You said she's smart. Do you know her IQ?"

  "I don't remember," Diane said, flinching. This was something she should have looked up. "I'm sorry. I--"

  "It doesn't matter. We can get it from the school."

  "But she acts hostile, she acts stupid, she has temper tantrums. And you know what happens? She gets attention. I think that's a lot of why she seems to be slow. We have another child--Sarah's the second--so we think that she feels jealous. Which is crazy because we spend lots of time with her. Much more than we do with Jamie. I don't let her get away with it. I don't put up with any nonsense from her. But she doesn't listen to me anymore. It's like she tunes me out.
So what I'd like you to do is talk to her. If you tell her--"

  "Has she ever seen a therapist or counselor about this?"

  "Just a counselor at her school. The New Lebanon Grade School. He recommended that book to me. Then I talked to our pediatrician about it. Dr. Sloving? He's an expert with children?"

  Dr. Parker apparently did not engage in the practice of confirming parents' opinions. She looked at Diane pleasantly and said nothing.

  "Anyway we went to Dr. Sloving and he prescribed Ritalin for her."

  "For attention deficit?"

  This gave Diane a burst of relief, thinking that at least dottering old Sloving had diagnosed the problem correctly.

  Dr. Parker continued, "Was she behaving in an unruly way, overly active? Any compulsive behavior--like washing her hands frequently?"

  "Oh, she's restless a lot. Jittery. Always running around. Nervous. She drives me to distraction."

  "Did Dr. Sloving give her any psychological testing?"

  "No. He took a blood sample." Diane was blushing and looked away from the doctor. "But he's known her all her life.... I mean, he seemed to think it was the best form of treatment."

  "Well," said stern Dr. Parker, "if attention deficit is the diagnosis what brings you to see me?"

  "I think the medicine's working." Diane hesitated. "But not too well. In fact sometimes I don't think it does any good, to be honest with you. It makes her very, I don't know, spacy at times. And it upsets her stomach and seems to make her more jittery. She says it gives her the tummy squabbles." She looked down at her hands and found to her astonishment that her knuckles were white as ivory. "The truth is she seems to be getting worse. Her grades are still terrible. Yesterday she tried to run away. She's never done that before. And her temper tantrums are more violent too. She talks back more than she ever did. She also talks to herself."

  "Let me ask you a few things...."

  An avalanche of questions followed. Diane tried to understand where the doctor was headed. But it was useless; just when Diane would think she understood what the doctor had in mind, she would throw a curve.

  "Does she watch much TV?"

  "Two hours in the evening, only when her homework's done. Actually she likes movies more. She thinks most sitcoms and commercials are stupid. She calls them yucky."

  A miniature smile made a reappearance. "I'm inclined to agree. Go on."