The Lesson of Her Death

by Jeffery Deaver

  Diane blurted, "Where does it come from? Dyslexia?"

  "I'm sorry, I should have discussed that with you." She closed the second file and turned full attention to Diane. "We don't know exactly. It used to be that a lot of doctors attributed it to physical problems--like memory confusion between the two hemispheres of the brain. That's been discredited now though vision and hearing problems can be major factors. My belief is that like many developmental problems dyslexia has both a nature and nurture component. It's largely genetic and the prenatal period is very critical. But how parents and teachers respond to the child is important too."

  "Prenatal?" Diane asked, then casually added, "So could it be that someone who had maybe smoked or drank or took drugs during pregnancy might cause dyslexia in their children?"

  "To some extent though usually there's a correspondent decrease in IQ...." Dr. Parker squinted and flipped through her notes. "Anyway I thought you said you largely abstained while you were pregnant."

  "Oh, that's right," Diane said. "I was just curious.... You know, when someone you love has a problem you want to know all about it." Diane stood up. She sensed Dr. Parker studying her. "Well, I'll make that appointment."

  "Wait a minute, please." Dr. Parker capped her pen. "You know, Mrs. Corde, one of the underlying themes of my approach to therapy is that we really are our parents." She was smiling, Diane believed, in a heartfelt way for the first time since they had begun working together. "I call parents the quote primary providers and not just in a positive sense. What they give us and what they do for us--and to us--include some unfortunate things. But it can include a lot of good things too."

  Diane looked back at her and tried to keep her face an unemotional mask. She managed pretty well, even when the doctor said, "I've seen a lot of parents in here and I've seen a lot of people in here because of their parents. Whatever's troubling you, Mrs. Corde, don't be too hard on yourself. My opinion is that Sarah is a very lucky girl."

  Technically this was trespassing. But boundaries in the country aren't what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody's land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.

  Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued for a ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout's skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.

  She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.

  To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.

  "You used to live in St. Louis, didn't you?" Jennie Gebben asks.

  Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.

  "Well, I did," he answers. "As a matter of fact." He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.

  "Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren't you in the news or something?"

  "All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conference or something. Drug bust."

  Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.

  "It seems it was something more than that," she says. "More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was ..."

  She stops speaking.

  Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow lower to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.

  Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond....

  Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.

  ... this session of the St. Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St. Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing....

  Corde thought he'd be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he'd say that he'd forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.

  A. Well, sir, the perpetrators ...

  Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?

  A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed.... The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise.

  Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.

  Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?

  A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143.

  Q. Inadvertently?

  A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134. I--

  Q. You mixed up the numbers?

  A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it backwards.

  Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door.

  A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs--

  Q. Whose backs?

  A. The policemen's backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded.

  Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?

  A. To date, one has. The rest have not.

  He'd been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who'd died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn't even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they'd had no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.

  Feed and grain, planing and sawing, teaching.... Long, long days. Then he'd seen the ad in the paper for a deputy and he'd applied.

  After Bill and Diane had moved back to New Lebanon he had five years with his father before the stroke. Five full years of opportunities to talk about what happened at the Fairway Mall. But what the two men spent those years on was pheasant loads and movies and carburetors and memories of their wife and mother.

  One day, a month before the blood clot swapped a clear,
complicated mind for one that was infinitely simple, Corde was crouched down, sharpening a mower blade in his father's garage. He heard the footsteps and he looked up to see the old man standing hunched and pale, licking the top of a Dannon yogurt container. His father said, "'Bout time we deal with St. Louis, wouldn't you say?" Corde stood, his knee popping and pushing him oh-so-slowly upward. He turned to face his father and cleared his throat. The elder Corde said solemnly, "Ten bucks says they'll cave to New York." Corde rolled grass flecks off his hands and dug into his pocket for a bill. "You're on," he said. His father wandered into the yard while Corde turned back to the iron blade in complete remorse.

  Q. If someone else had read the number of the door to the policemen in the alley, the mishap might not have happened. Or if you had taken your time and read the number slowly?

  A. (garbled)

  Q. Could you repeat that please.

  A. The mishap probably would not have happened, no.

  He'd never told anyone in New Lebanon. The facts were there, somewhere in his file in St. Louis. If Steve Ribbon or Hammerback Ellison or Jim Slocum or Addie Kraskow of the Register wanted to go to the trouble to look it up, they would find everything. But the New Lebanon Sheriff's Department simply glanced at his resume and believed the truthful statement that the reason for termination from his last job was that he'd quit. They believed too his explanation that he had grown tired of fighting city riverfront crime and had wanted to move back to his peaceful home town. After all, he had a six-year-old son and a baby on the way.

  Who'd think to look beyond that?

  Another snap, nearby. Corde turned. The animal materialized. A buck. He saw two does not far off. He loved watching them. They were elegant in motion but when they stopped--always as if they were late for something vitally important and had time to give you just a brief look--they were completely regal. Corde wished he was a poet. He wanted badly to put into words what he felt at this moment: The knowledge in the deer's eyes.

  The melting sun.

  The unseen movement of the woods at dusk.

  The total sorrow when you fall short of the mark that you know God's set for you.

  With a single crack of wet wood, the deer were gone. Bill Corde scooted off the rock and slowly made his way to his twentieth-century home, with his pickup truck and television, and his family.

  SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER--Two days after the slaying of a second Auden University co-ed by the man known as the "Moon Killer," John Treadle, Harrison County Supervisor, ordered Sheriff's Department deputies to step up nighttime patrols around New Lebanon.

  "But," he said, "I can't emphasize enough that girls shouldn't travel by themselves after dark until we catch this man."

  The body of the student, Emily Rossiter, a resident of St. Louis, was found floating in Blackfoot Pond on the night of the full moon. She had been struck on the head and left to drown. The body was reportedly mutilated.

  "We're devoting a hundred and ten percent of our time to solving these cult murders," Steven Ribbon, Sheriff of New Lebanon, said last night. He added that he had taken the unusual step of asking an outside consultant to assist in the investigation.

  "This man has a number of years of homicide investigation experience with a big city police department and he's already provided some real helpful insights into the workings of this killer's mind."

  Citing security, Sheriff Ribbon would give no details on this consultant's identity or exact role in the case.

  The Chamber of Commerce estimates that the series of murders has cost the town one million dollars in lost revenues.

  Her biggest fear is that somehow her father has scared off the Sunshine Man.

  It is now a couple of days in a row that her daddy has gotten up late, had breakfast with them and then been home before supper. But worse than that he had gone for long walks in the woods behind the house, the woods where the Sunshine Man lived. Sarah considers herself an expert on wizards and she knows that they resent people who don't believe in them. Her father's certainly a person like that.

  Although she's questioned Redford T. Redford at length about the wizard the bear has remained silent. She has left several presents and painstakingly written notes for the Sunshine Man in the magic circle. He has not picked them up or responded.

  She has thought about running away again. But because her mother has agreed with Dr. Parker to keep her out of school for a while, Sarah is willing to postpone her escape plans. She listens to her books on tape, she looks at her picture books, she watches television, she plays with her stuffed animals.

  At night Sarah sits and stares out the window. Once, when the waning moon is bright, she thinks she sees the form of a man walking through the woods. She flashes her bedside light and waves. Whoever it might be stops and looks at the house but does not respond. He seems to vanish. She stares after him until the trees begin to sway and the night sky opens up in great cartwheeling streaks of stars and planets and giants and animals, then she crawls under the blankets. She holds tight to her piece of magic quartz and, knowing the Sunshine Man may be out there, sends him a message in her thoughts.

  Sarah wishes her father would start working late again. And sure enough, after just two days, she gets this wish. He's up and gone before breakfast, and home long after she's gone to bed. One morning, when he hadn't seen her for two days, her father left a note at the breakfast table for her; it sounded all stiff. Sarah sadly thinks the Sunshine Man is much smarter than her father.

  She hopes the wizard will come back and make her smart. She believes he can do it. She also knows though that this will be a very hard wish to grant so she tells herself to be patient. She knows she'll have to wait just a little while longer.

  Philip closed his bedroom door and immediately they were warriors once again, tall and dignified and ever correct, struggling to understand this strange dimension.

  Jano looked around the room. "Your sister here?"

  "Nope."

  The boys who knew Philip's sister, and that was a lot of boys, did not call her "Rose" or "Rosy"; they called her "Halpern," which seemed to Philip to say everything there was to say about her.

  Jano whispered urgently, "Well?"

  "What?" Phathar shoved a dripping handful of popcorn from a half-gallon bag into his mouth.

  He whispered, "Did you do it?" Jano's eyes were red and it looked like there was a streak of dried snot under his nose. Phathar wondered if his friend had been crying (Phathar assumed he was the only freshman boy who still cried).

  Jano repeated, "The girl at the pond. Emily something. Did you?"

  He ate another mouthful. "Nope."

  Jano whispered, "I don't believe you."

  "I didn't do it, dude."

  "You wanted to fuck her so you killed her."

  "I did not." With a pudgy finger Phathar worked a hull out from between an incisor and his gum.

  "I am like totally freaked. What are we going to do?"

  "Have some popcorn."

  "You are like too much, man. She's dead too and you're like--"

  "So what? You saw the way the Honons mowed down the Valanies. They just like went in with the xasers and totally mowed them down. The women and the kids, everyone."

  "That's a movie."

  Phathar repeated patiently, "I didn't like kill her."

  "Did you find the knife?"

  "I might have if I hadn't been alone."

  "I couldn't make it. I told you. Maybe you didn't lose it."

  "I lost it."

  Jano said, "Man, we've got to get rid of everything."

  "I told you, I put a destructor on the files. It's great. Here look." Phathar walked to a locked metal file cabinet. He unlocked it and pulled a drawer open. Inside were stacks of charts and drawings and files. Resting on top of them was a coil from a space heater. "Look, this is a lock switch that I got from Popular Mechanics. It's great. If you open the cabinet without shutting off the switch ..." He reached inside the cabinet and pointed to two pi
eces of wood wound with wires pressing against each other, like a large clothespin. "... Somebody opens the drawer and it closes the circuit. The coil gets red hot in like seconds and torches everything."

  "Totally excellent," Jano said with admiration. "What if it burns the house down?"

  Phathar did not respond. Through the closed door, they heard Philip's father singing some old song, "Strangers in the Night."

  Jano looked in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. "What's that?" He picked up the brown purse, smeared with mud.

  Phathar froze. He was in a delicate position. This was his only friend in high school; he couldn't do what he wanted to--which was to scream to him to put it back. He said simply, "It's hers."

  Jano clicked it open. "The girl's? The second one! You did do it!"

  Phathar reached out and closed it. "Would you just chill? I saw her but--"

  "I don't see why you're denying it, man."

  "--I didn't kill her."

  "Why'd you keep it?"

  "I don't know." Phathar in fact had wondered that a number of times. "It smells nice."

  "You get over with her too?" Jano had stopped looking shocked and was curious.

  "Are you deaf? Like are you totally deaf?"

  "Come on, Phathar, I tell you everything. What was it like?"

  "You're a fucking hatter. I followed her for a while but then I took off. There was some dude wandering around."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know."

  "They found her in the pond. Yuck. If you did it with her your dick'll probably fall off, with that water. What's in the purse?"

  "I don't know. I didn't open it." Phathar stood up and took the purse away from his friend. He put it in the file cabinet and laid another heater coil on top of it. He closed the drawer.

  "I don't think that's a good place for it," Jano said.

  "How come?"

  "Even with the destructor it'd take a while for the leather to catch fire."

  Phathar decided this might be true. He retrieved the purse. He held it out to Jano. "You take it. Throw it someplace."

  "No way. I don't want to get caught with it. Why don't you burn it?"

  "I can't. My dad'd whack me again. Maybe I'll hide it under the porch and some night when he's playing cards I'll burn it."

  The terrible, glass-splintering crash came from the living room. The boys each stared at the dirt-smeared wall through which the sound had come. Philip dropped the purse into the empty popcorn bag and wadded it, along with some trash, into a green plastic garbage bag, which sat in the corner of his room. They stepped into the hall.