The Lesson of Her Death (9 page)

Bill Corde knocked on the door. There was no answer.

“Ms. Rossiter? I’m from the Sheriff’s Department.”

Another knock.

Maybe she’d gone to St. Louis for the funeral.

He glanced behind him. The corridor was empty. He tried the knob and pushed the door open.

A smell wafted out and surrounded him. Jennie Gebben’s spicy perfume. Corde recognized it immediately. He lifted his hand and smelled the same scent—residue from the bottle on her dressing table at home.

Corde hesitated. This was not a crime scene and students in dormitories retained rights of privacy and due process. He needed a warrant in hand to even step into the room.

“Ms. Rossiter?” Corde called. When there was no answer he walked inside.

The room Jennie and Emily shared had a feeble symmetry. Bookcases and mirrors bolted to opposite walls. The beds parallel to each other but the desks turned at different angles—looking up from a textbook, one girl would look out the small window at the parking lot; the other would gaze at a bulletin board. On one bed rested a stuffed rabbit.

Corde examined Jennie’s side of the room. A cursory look revealed nothing helpful. Books, notebooks, school supplies, posters, souvenirs, photos of family members (Corde noticing that the young Jennie bore a striking resemblance to Sarah), makeup, hair curlers, clothes, scraps of paper, packages of junk desserts, shampoos, lotions. Shear pastel underwear hung on a white string to dry. A U2 poster, stacks of cassettes, a stereo set with a cracked plastic front. A large box of condoms (latex, he noted, not the lambskin found at the crime scene). Thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes. Jennie was a meticulous housekeeper. She kept her shoes in little green body bags.

Corde noticed a picture of two girls: Jennie and a brown-haired girl of delicate beauty. Emily? Was it the same girl in one of the pictures on Jennie’s wall at home? Corde could not remember. They had their arms around each other and were mugging for the camera. Their black and brown hair entwined between them and made a single shade.

A clattering of laughter from the floor above reminded
him that he was here without permission. He set the picture down and turned toward Jennie’s desk.

He crested the rise on 302 just in front of his house.

Corde had ticketed drivers a dozen times for sprinting along this strip at close to sixty. It was a straightaway, posted at twenty-five after a long stretch of fifty, so you couldn’t blame them for speeding, Corde supposed. But it was a straightaway in front of
his
house where
his
kids played. When he wasn’t in the mood to ticket he took to leaving the squad car parked nose out in the drive, which slowed the hot-rodders down considerably and put a slew of brake marks on the asphalt just over the crown on the rise like a grouping of bullet tracks in a trap.

Setting a good example, Corde braked hard then signaled and made the turn into his driveway. He parked the cruiser next to his Ford pickup, which was fourth-hand but clocked in at only sixty-seven thousand miles. He stepped out into the low sun and waved to Jamie, who was in the garage, lifting his bike up onto pegs in the exposed two-by-fours. In Jamie’s hands, the bike seemed to weigh only a pound or two.

The boy was fair-skinned and slight but he was strong as sinew. He worked out constantly, concentrating on many reps of lighter weight rather than going for bulk. He waved back to his father and headed toward the backyard, where he would pitch a tennis ball onto the crest of the roof and snag the fly with all sorts of fancy catches. The expression on his face was the same one that Corde had puzzled over for over a year until he finally recognized it as a look of Diane’s—contentment, Corde liked to think, though also caution and consideration. He was proud of his son—quiet and easygoing, a devoted member of the freshman wrestling team, a B-plus student without trying, good in Latin and biology and math, the secretary of the Science Club.

Corde believed his boy would grow up to be Gary Cooper.

Detouring through the Rototilled earth of the side yard, Corde turned on the sprinkler, which began to saturate the patch of mud that the seed package had promised four weeks ago would be luxurious green in six. Corde watched the wave sweep back and forth for a minute, then walked toward the split-level house, aluminum-sided bright yellow. Corde had an acre of land, all of it grass (or soon to be, Ortho assured him), punctuated with juniper bushes and saplings that in fifty years would be respectable oaks. The property bordered the panhandle of a working dairy farm to the north, beyond which was a forest. Surrounding houses, all modest split-levels or colonials, sat on similar plots along Route 302.

He heard a chug of a diesel engine. Up the road the driver of a White semi, hauling a Maersk Line container, started shifting down through his many gears as the truck rolled over the crest of the highway probably right on the posted speed. Corde watched the majestic truck for a moment then started toward the house.

A motion caught his eye and smiling still he glanced to the corner of his yard. Something nosing out of the bushes toward the road. A dog?

No!

“Sarah!”

His daughter stood up and looked at him in panic—a deer spotting a hunter. She turned and ran at top speed toward the truck, whose driver was oblivious to the girl.

“Sarah, stop!” Corde shouted in astonishment. “No!” He ran after her.

She was squealing with terror, running ahead of herself, tripping as her feet windmilled, her arms flailing in panic. She was aiming right for the truck’s massive rear wheels, which were as tall as she was.

“Oh, honey, stop! Please!” he gasped, and ran flat out, the Mace canister and a Speedloader falling from his Sam Browne belt, handcuffs thwacking his back.

“Leave me alone!” Sarah wailed, and plunged ahead toward the truck’s tires.

She dropped the backpack and made a frantic sprint for the truck. It seemed like she was going to leap right for the huge thundering disks of tires, firing pebbles into the air behind the trailer.

Sarah was three feet from the wheels when Corde tackled her. They landed, skidding, in a pile on the messy shoulder as the truck rumbled past them, the stack burping as the engine revved and the driver up-shifted, unaware of the struggle he left behind.

Sarah squealed and kicked. Panicked, Corde rolled to his knees and shook her by the shoulders. His hand rose, palm flat. She squealed in terror. He screamed, “What are you
doing
, what are you
doing?”
Corde, who had spanked Jamie only once and Sarah not at all in their collective twenty-four years on earth, lowered his hand. “Tell me!”

“Leave me alone!”

Diane was running toward them. “What happened? What happened?”

Corde stood. The panic was gone but it had left in its place the sting of betrayal. He stepped back. Diane dropped to her knees and held the child’s face in her hands. She took a breath to start the tirade then paused, seeing the despair in her little girl’s face. “Sarah, you were running away? Running away from home?”

Sarah wiped her tears and nose with her sleeves. She didn’t respond. Diane repeated the question. Sarah nodded.

“Why?” her father demanded.

“Because.”

“Sarah—” Corde began sternly.

The little girl seemed to wince. “It’s not my fault. The wizard
told
me to.”

“The wizard?”

“The Sunshine Man …”

This was one of the imaginary friends that Sarah played with. Corde remembered Sarah had created him
after the family attended the funeral of Corde’s father and the minister had lifted his arms to the sun, speaking about “souls rising into heaven.” It was Sarah’s first experience with death and Corde and Diane had been reluctant to dislodge the apparently friendly spirit she created. But in the past year, to the parents’ increasing irritation, the girl referred to him more and more frequently.

“He made Redford T. Redford fly out to the forest and he told me—”

Diane’s voice cut through the yard. “No more of this magic crap, do you hear me, young lady? What were you doing?”

“Leave me alone.” The tiny mouth tightened ominously.

Corde said, “It’s going to be okay, honey. Don’t worry.”

“I’m
not
going back to school.”

Diane whispered in a low, menacing voice, “Don’t you ever do that again, Sarrie, do you understand me? You could’ve been killed.”

“I don’t care!”

“Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that!” Mother’s and daughter’s strident tones were different only in pitch.

Corde touched his wife’s arm and shook his head. To Sarah he said, “It’s okay, honey. We’ll talk about it later.”

Sarah bent down and picked up her knapsack and walked toward the house. With boundless regret on her face, she looked back—not however at the ashen faces of her parents but toward the road down which the silver truck was hurrying away without her.

They stood in the kitchen awkwardly, like lovers who must suddenly discuss business. Unable to look at him, Diane told him about Sarah’s incident at school that day.

Corde said contritely, “She didn’t want to go today. I drove her back this morning and made her. I guess I shouldn’t have.”

“Of course you should have. You can’t let her get away with this stuff, Bill. She uses us.”

“What’re we going to do? She’s taking the pills?”

“Every day. But I don’t think they’re doing any good. They just seem to make her stomach upset.” She waved vaguely toward the front yard. “Can you imagine she did that? Oh, my.”

Corde thought:
Why now? With this case and everything, why now?
He looked out the window at Sarah’s bike, standing upright on training wheels, a low pastel green Schwinn, with rainbow streamers hanging pathetically from the rubber handle grips. He thought of Jamie and his high racing bike that he zipped along on fast and daring as a motocross competitor. Sarah still couldn’t ride her tiny bike without the trainers. It embarrassed Corde when the family pedaled to town together. Corde tried to avoid the inevitable comparison between his children. He wished whatever God had dished out for them had been more evenly divided. It was difficult but Corde made a special effort to limit the pride he expressed for Jamie, always aware of Sarah’s eyes on him, begging for approval even as she was stung by her own limits.

A more frightening concern: some man offering a confused little girl a ride home. Corde and Diane had talked to her about this and she’d responded with infuriating laughter, saying that a wizard or a magic dog would protect her or that she would just fly away and hide behind the moon. Corde would grow stern, Diane would threaten to spank her, the girl’s face became somber. But her parents could see that the belief in supernatural protectors had not been dislodged.

Oh, Sarrie
…

Although Bill Corde still went to church regularly he had stopped praying. He’d stopped exactly nine years
ago. He thought if it would do anything for Sarah he’d start up again.

He said, “It’s like she’s emotionally dis—”

Diane turned on him. “Don’t say that! She has a high IQ. Beiderson herself told me. She’s faking. She wants to get attention. And, brother, you give her plenty.…”

Corde lifted an eyebrow at this.

Diane conceded, “Okay, and so do I.”

Corde was testy. “Well, we’ve got to do something. We can’t let that happen again.” He waved toward the yard, like Diane reluctant to mention his daughter’s mortality.

“She’s got her end-of-term tests in two weeks.”

“We can’t take her out of school now,” Corde said. “We can’t hold her back another grade.” He looked out the window. Why did the sight of a bicycle standing upright bother him so?

It encouraged him that she could read some books by herself.

It encouraged him that she had made and kept a few friends.

It encouraged him that she was pretty.

It destroyed him that she wasn’t like Jamie.

“There’s something I ought to tell you,” Corde said, hesitating, not knowing how she’d respond.

He pointed to the
Register
, which rested with odd prominence on top of four cans of tomatoes in the middle of the table. It was open to the article about the murder.

“Somebody left a copy of that story at the crime scene. It was saying that maybe we shouldn’t be investigating this case too hard. Now it could be a prank and even if the killer left it I don’t take it all that serious. But I’m going to have a deputy here at the house.”

This however seemed to be just another small burden on his wife’s shoulders. Diane said matter-of-factly, “We shouldn’t let Sarah play by herself then.”

“Not outside of the yard, no. We’ll have to tell her
somehow. But we don’t want to scare her. She spooks so easy.”

Diane said, “You keep babying her. She’s never going to grow up if you keep treating her that way.”

“I just think we have to be careful is all.” Corde lifted his eyes to the post-and-rail fence two hundred feet away and saw a Hereford grazing in the field beyond. It reminded him of a picture Sarah had once tried to draw of a dalmatian. The drawing had been pathetic—an infant’s scrawl. “It comes close to breaking my heart,” he said. “It’s like she’s …”

“She
isn’t
retarded,” Diane hissed.

“I didn’t say that.”

“My daughter is not retarded.” She turned her attention to the refrigerator. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”