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The Lesson Of Her Death Excerpt
With every passing mile her heart fled a little more.
The girl, nine years old, sat slumped in the front seat, rubbing her finger along the worn beige armrest. The slipstream from
the open window laid a strip of blond hair across her face. She pulled it away and looked up toward the stern man of about forty who drove with his eyes fixed beyond the long nose of the car.
"Please," the girl said.
"No."
At the first click of the turn signal the girl jumped as if a gun had fired. The car
slowed and rocked into the driveway, aiming toward a low brick building. She realized that her last hope was gone; the man was not going to weaken at the last moment.
The car rolled slowly to a stop.
The man reached over and pushed her buckle release. The seat belt retracted.
"I don't want to. Please."
"Sarah."
"Just for today."
"No," the man said.
"Please!"
"Come on," he said.
"I'm not ready!"
"You'll be fine. Just do the best you can. Nobody expects more than that."
Her inventory of excuses was depleted. Sarah opened the car door but
remained sitting.
"Give me a kiss."
She leaned over and kissed her father quickly on her cheek then climbed out of the car, which happened to be a
late-model police cruiser. She stood completely still, breathing in the cool spring air heavily scented with the bus's exhaust, breathing it fast, nervously, growing dizzy. She took three steps toward
the building then paused, watching the police car pull out of the elementary school driveway.
Maybe her father would catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, change his mind and
return.
The car vanished over a hill.
Filled with stinging hopelessness, close to panic, Sarah turned and entered the building. Clutching her lunch box to
her chest she walked reluctantly through the corridors. Although she was as tall as any of the children swarming around her she felt younger than them all. Tinier. Weaker.
At the fourth-grade classroom she stopped.
Sarah looked inside. Her nostrils flared and she felt her skin prickle with a renewed rash of fear.
No one made fun of her. No one threatened her. No one even noticed her.
Go ahead, she told herself.
You'll be fine. Just do best you can. Nobody expects more than that.
But, yes, they do, Sarah thought. Everyone expects more than your best. Always, always,
always.
And she hesitated only for a moment before turning and walking resolutely out of the building, buffeted and jostled as she forced her way through the oncoming stream of
shouting, calling, laughing children.
* * *
Not thirty feet from where they had found the body last night, he saw the note.
The piece of paper, tied to a wild rose stem the shade of dried blood, fluttered in the moist wind,
sending out a Morse code in low morning sunlight.
Bill Corde pressed toward the paper through a tangle of juniper and maple saplings and stubborn runners of forsythia.
Had they missed it? How could they?
He barked his shin on a hidden stump and swore softly but continued on toward the scrap.
Corde was
six foot two and his short hair was Persian-cat gray, which because he was just about to turn forty made him maybe seven-eights premature. His skin was pale, the month being April and Corde having been
fishing only twice so far that season. He looked lean from a distance but his belt curled outward more than he would have liked; Corde's most strenuous sport these days was gentlemen's softball. This
morning as always his New Lebanon Sheriff's Department shirt was clean and stiff as a sheet of new balsa wood and his beige slacks had razor creases.
Corde was by rank a lieutenant and by specialty a detective.
He remembered this place not twelve hours before — last night, lit only by the deputies'
flashlights and the deceptive illumination of a half moon. He had sent his men to scour the ground. They were young and austere (the ones trained in the military) or young and arrogant (state police
academy grads) but they were all earnest.
Although they were virtuosos at DUI arrests and joy ridings and domestics, what the deputies knew about murder they had learned mostly
from pulp thrillers and TV, just like they knew about guns from stubbly autumn fields not from the state range up in Higgins. Still they had been ordered to search the crime scene and they had, doggedly
and with fervor.
But not one of them had found the piece of paper toward which Bill Corde now swam through thick brush.
Oh, you poor girl....
...who lies at the foot of a ten-foot-high earth dam.
...who lies in this chill wet dish of mud and low grass and blue flowers.
...whose dark hair is side-parted, whose face is long, and throat thick. Her round lips curl prominently. Each ear hold three wire-thin gold rings. Her toes are lanky and their nails dark with burgundy
polish.
...who lies on her back, arms folded over her breasts, as if the mortician had already done her up. The pink flower print blouse is buttoned high. Her skirt modestly
extends below the knee and is tucked beneath her thighs.
"We got her name. Here we go. It's Jennie Gebben. She's a student."
Last night Bill
Corde had crouched down beside her, his knee popping, and put his face next to hers. The pearlish half-moon was reflected in her dead but still unglazed hazel eyes. He had smelled grass, mud, methane,
transmission fluid, mint from her lips and perfume like pie spices rising from her cold skin.
He had stood and climbed to the top of the dam, which held back the murky waters of
Blackfoot Pond. He turned and looked down at her. The moonlight had been otherworldly, pale, special effects light. In it, Jennie Gebben had seemed to move. Not living, human movement but an odd
shrinking and curling as if she were melting into the earth. Corde had whispered a few words to her, or to whatever remained of her, and then turned away and gone to help the men search the ground.
Now, in the morning brilliance, he pushed his way through a final tangle of forsythia and stepped up to the rose bush. With his hand inside a Baggie, Corde untied the string that held
the paper to the russet thorns. He began to read.
Jim Slocum called to him, "The whole shebang?"
Corde did not answer; he was still reading. The
boys from the department had not been careless last night. They could not have found this scrap of paper then because it had not been here then. It was a clipping from this morning's Register.
Slocum asked again, "The whole, uhm, place?"
Corde looked up and said, "Whole thing. Yeah."
Slocum grunted and
continued unwinding yellow police-line tape around the circle of wet earth where the girl's body had been found. Slocum, after Corde, was the next senior New Lebanon town deputy. He was a muscular man
with a round head and long windswept ears. He'd picked up a razor-cut hair style in 1974, complete with sideburns, and had kept it ever since. Except for theme parks, hunting trips, and Christmas at the
in-laws, Slocum rarely left the county. Today he whistled a generic tune as he strung the tape.
A small group of reporters stood by the road. Corde would give nothing away but
these were rural news hounds and well behaved; they looked all filled up with reporters' zeal but they left the two detectives pretty much alone, content to shoot snaps of the two officers and study the
crime scene. Corde figured they were sponging up atmosphere for tomorrow's articles, which would brim with adjectives and menace.
Corde lowered the newspaper clipping, now wrapped
in the plastic bag, and looked around him. From the dam, off to his right, the ground rose to a vast forest split by Route 302, which led to the mall then to a dozen other county roads and to a half
dozen state highways and to two expressways and eventually to forty-nine other states and two foreign countries where an escaping killing might hide till the end of his days.
Pacing, Corde looked over the forest, his lips pressed tightly together. He and Slocum had arrived ten minutes before, at eight a.m. The Register started hitting stores and porches at seven. Whoever had left the clipping had done so in the past hour.
Listening to the hum of wind over a strand of taut barbed wire, he scanned the ground beneath the rose bush. It was indented by what seemed like two footprints though they were
too smeared to help in identification. He kicked over a log that appeared new fallen. A swarm of insects like tiny armadillos scurried away.
Corde found his hand was resting on
his service revolver, which he had not pulled from its holster for seventeen months. Striding to the top of the dam, he rested his hands on green metal pipes sunk into the dirt as a railing.
He squinted deep furrows into his forehead as he stared through the morning sunlight that crackled off the wind-roughed water of the pond. Encased in the piercing glare the woods
stretched away from him unpopulated and quiet, though for a moment it seemed that what he gazed at was not a forest at all but endless acres of sinewy arms, clenched fists and staring, hostile eyes.
* * *
She ran most of the way.
From the New Lebanon Grade School to Blackfoot Pond was three miles along 302 (which she was forbidden to walk along) but only a half hour through the
forest, and that was the route she took.
Sarah avoided the marshy areas, not because of any danger — she knew every path through every forest around New Lebanon — but because she
was afraid of getting mud on the shoes her father had polished the night before, shiny as bird's wings, and on her rose-print knee socks, a Christmas present from her grandmother.
She stayed to the path that wound through budding oak trees and juniper and pine and beds of fern. Far off a bird called. Ah-hoo-eeeee. Sarah stopped to look for it. She was warm and took her
jacket off then rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse and unbuttoned the collar. She ran on.
As she approached Blackfoot Pond she saw her father standing with Mr. Slocum at the
far end of the water, two or three hundred feet away through the thickest part of the forest. Their heads were down. It looked as if they were looking for a lost ball. Sarah started toward them but as
she stepped out from behind a huge oak tree she stopped. She had walked right into a shaft of sunlight so bright it nearly blinded her. The light was magical — golden yellow and filled with dust and
steam and dots of spring insects that glowed in the river of radiant light. But that was not what made her hesitate. In a thicket of plants beside the path she saw — she thought she saw — someone bending forward watching her father. With the light in her eyes she couldn't tell whether he was a man or woman, young or adult.
Maybe it was just a funny bunch of leaves and branches.
But maybe not.
She turned away, off the path, and started downhill toward
the water where she could follow the shoreline to the dam. It wasn't until Sarah had taken her first step that she realized she had placed her gleaming black shoe not on the firm dirt but on something
slippery. As her foot slid off the newspaper hidden in a patch of grass she gave a short scream and reached in panic for something to grip. But her tiny fingers found only strands of tall grass, which
popped easily from the ground and followed her like streamers and she slid toward the water.
* * *
Corde called to Slocum, "You hear anybody over that way?"
"Thought I might have." Slocum lifted off his Smokey the Bear hat and wiped his forehead. "Some
footsteps or rustling."
"Anything now?"
"Nope."
Corde waited four or five minutes then walked down to the
base of the dam and asked, "You through?"
"Yessiree," Slocum said. "We head back now?"
"I'll be taking a Midwest puddle
jumper over to St. Louis and talk to the girl's father. I'll be back by two or so. I want us all to meet about the case at four, four-thirty at the office. You stay here until the crime scene boys show
up."
"You want me just to wait, not do anything?"
"They're due here now. Shouldn't be long."
"But you know
the County. Could be an hour." Slocum's way of protesting was to feed you bits of information like this.
"We gotta keep it sealed, Jim."
"You want." Slocum didn't look pleased but Corde wasn't going to leave a crime scene unattended, especially with a gaggle of reporters on hand.
"I just don't want to get into a situation where I'm sitting here all day."
"I don't think it'll—"
A crackle of brush, footsteps coming toward them.
Corde and Slocum's eyes swiveled toward each other. The men turned back to the forest. Corde's hand again
dropped to his revolver. Slocum dropped the tape, which hit the ground and rolled, leaving a long thick yellow tail behind it. He too reached for his pistol.
The noise was louder.
They couldn't see the source but it was coming from the general direction of the rose bush that had held the clipping.
"Daddy!"
She ran
breathlessly toward him, her hair awash in the air around her, beads of sweat on her face. One of her knee socks had slipped almost to her ankle and there was a streak of mud along a leg and arm.
"Sarrie!"
Oh my sweet Lord. His own daughter. He'd had his hand on his service gun and it was daughter he'd come close to sighting on!
He was seared with untargeted anger. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm sorry, daddy. I felt all funny. I got to school and I thought I was going to
be sick." The words stumbled out. They sounded rehearsed. "Mommy told me you'd be here."
Jesus Lord....
Corde crouched down to her. He
smelled the shampoo she had received in her Easter basket. The scent was of violets. "You should never, never be where daddy's working. You understand that? Never! Unless I bring you."
Her face looked puffy with contrition. She glanced at her leg then held up her dirty forearm. "I fell."
Corde took out his sharp-ironed
handkerchief and brushed the dirt off her limbs. He saw there was no damage and looked back into her eyes. There was still anger in his voice when he demanded, "Did you see anyone there? Were you
talking to anybody in the forest?"
The fall hadn't bought the sympathy she'd expected. She was frightened by her father's reaction.
He repeated, "Answer me! Did you see anyone?"
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. The fear in them had a calming effect. "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 breaking 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. He himself raised his voice to say, "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 to Corde's squad car. Corde watched her, half expecting her to bolt into the woods. She paused and scanned the woods intently.
"Sarah?"
She didn't turn her head. She climbed into the car and slammed the door angrily.
"Kids," Corde muttered. He was looking at the Baggie.
"Find something?" Slocum asked.
Corde tied a chain-of-evidence card to the Baggie containing the newspaper clipping he had found and handed it to
Slocum. It was a brief article about last night's killing. They editor had been able to fit only five paragraphs of story into the newspaper before deadline. The clipping had been cut with eerie
precision into a L-shape. The slices were perfectly even; the tool used had been a razor knife or blade.
Auden Coed Raped, Murdered was the headline.
The last paragraph of the story read, "'There's nothing going to stop us from finding the perpetrator in this terrible tragedy,' Detective William Corde, chief investigator in the case, told
reporters."
"Damn, Bill."
Slocum was referring to a single word written crudely in red ink next to Corde's zealous quotation.
The word was: Nothing?
Copyright © 1993 Jeffery Deaver
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