The Lesson of Her Death Read Free

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 aphoto 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 .

T hey 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 sensuouslyrounded 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 clichés. 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 duTemps 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