"The Lesson of Her Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deaver Jeffery)

2

They 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 sensuously rounded 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 du Temps 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 clothes. Above it a hundred postcards and snapshots were pinned to a corkboard. Jennie's arm twined around the waists of dozens of boys, faces different, poses similar. Her dark hair seemed to be darker in summer though that might be a trick of Kodak convenience photography. She often wore it pinned back. Her sport was volleyball and a dozen pictures revealed her playing the game with lusty determination on her face. Corde asked if he could have one of these, a close-up of Jennie, pretty face glossy with sweat. Gebben shrugged.

How Corde hated this part of the job, walking straight into the heart of people's anguish.

Corde touched several recent snapshots of the girl with friends. Gebben confirmed that all of them were away at other schools – all except Emily Rossiter, who was Jennie's current roommate at Auden. Corde saw: her high school ID card. Ticket stubs from a Cowboy Junkies concert, a Bon Jovi concert, a Billy Joel concert, a Paula Poundstone show. A greeting card with a silly cartoon rabbit on the front offered her congratulations on passing her driving test.

Corde pulled the chair away from her desk and sat. He surveyed the worn desktop in front of him, nicked, scratched, marked with her doodlings. He saw a bottle of India ink. A framed picture of Jennie with a scruffy cocker spaniel. A snapshot of her coming out of church one recent spring, maybe at Easter, blue crocuses at her feet.

She died on a bed of milky blue hyacinths.

In a lopsided clay cup was a chewed yellow pencil, its eraser worn away. Corde lifted it, feeling beneath the thick pads of his fingers the rough indentations and the negative space of Jennie Gebben's mouth. He rubbed the wood, thinking that it had once been damp from her. He replaced the pencil.

He went through her desk, which held high school assignments, squares of wrapping paper, old birthday cards.

"No diaries or letters?"

Gebben focused on the detective. "I don't know. That's where they'd be." He nodded toward the desk.

Corde again looked carefully. No threatening letters, no notes from spurned boyfriends. No personal correspondence of any kind. He examined the closet, swinging aside the wealth of clothes and checking the shelves. He found nothing helpful and closed the double doors.

Corde stood in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, looking around him.

"Was she engaged? Have a steady boyfriend here?"

Gebben was hesitating. "She had a lot of friends. Nobody'd hurt her. Everybody loved her."

"Did she break up with anybody recently?"

"No," Gebben said and shrugged in such a way that Corde understood the man had no idea what he was saying.

"Anybody have a crush on her?"

"Nobody who knew Jennie would hurt her," Gebben said slowly. Then he added, "You know what I was thinking? Since I got the call I haven't told anybody. I've been working up courage. For all those people – her grandparents, her friends, my brother's family – Jennie's still alive. For all they know she's sitting in the library studying."

"I'll leave you now, sir. If you can think of anything that might help us I'd appreciate a call. And if you find any letters or a diary please send them to me as soon as you can. They'd be very important." He handed Gebben one of his cheap business cards.

Gebben studied the card. He looked up, sloe-eyed and earnest. "It's going to be all right."

He said this with such intensity that it seemed as if his sole purpose at the moment was to comfort Bill Corde.

Wynton Kresge sat in his office in the main administration building of Auden University. The room – high-ceilinged, paneled in oak – was carpeted in navy blue, pretty much the same color as that in his Cutlass Supreme though this pile was twice as thick. His desk was a large mahogany piece. Occasionally when he was on the phone listening to someone he had no desire to be listening to (which was pretty often), Kresge would imagine ways to get the desk out of the office without knocking a hole in the wall. On particularly slow days he actually considered trying to remove it. He would have been a good candidate for this project: Kresge was six foot four and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. His upper arms measured fifteen inches around, his thighs were twenty-four, and only a minor percentage of those dimensions was fat. (He had never lifted a barbell in his life but had retained much of the muscle he cultivated when he was a college linebacker for the Tigers not the Missouri Tigers the Dan Devine Tigers.)

The top of the desk held one telephone with two lines, one brass lamp, one blotter, one leather desk calendar opened to this week, one framed photo of an attractive woman, seven framed photos of children, and one piece of paper.

The paper, held down by Kresge's massive hand as if he were afraid it would blow away, contained the following words: Jennie Gebben. Tuesday ten p.m. Blackfoot Pond. McReynolds dorm. Lovers, students, teachers, robbery? rape? other motive? Susan Biagotti? Beneath this was an awkward diagram of the campus and the pond and the road around it. Kresge touched his earlobe with the butt of his Schaeffer sterling silver ballpoint pen, which he had polished just the night before, and considered what he'd written.

Kresge drew additional lines on the paper, crossing off words, and adding others. He was drawing a dotted line from the campus to the pond when a knock on the closed door made him jump. By the time his secretary walked into the room without announcing herself further the piece of paper was wadded up and slam-dunked into Kresge's wastebasket.

"She wants to see you," said the secretary, a pretty woman in her late thirties.

"She does."

The secretary paused then said, "You're holed up in here."

"I beg your pardon?"

She said, "I used to think that that phrase was "hauled up." Like they hauled somebody up in a tower so he could escape from the police or something."

"The police?" Kresge asked.

"But then I found out it was "holed up." Like, go into a hole."

"I don't really know. Now?"

"She said now."

Kresge nodded. He unlocked his top drawer and from it took out a dark gray Taurus 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He looked to make certain there was a full clip in the grip of the gun then slipped it in a belt holster. He left the room with what the secretary sensed, though Kresge himself did not, was a look of intense, almost theatrical, determination on his face.

This was how she would build the house: She would find some land – there, that beautiful field with the gold and white flowers in it, there through the window, surrounded by green-silver trees. She could see, from her cell, the tall grass waving in a breeze soft as a kitten's lazy tail. Then she would call her friends the animals and -

"Sarah, are you with us?"

Her head snapped away from the window and she found thirty-two children and one adult staring at her. Her breath escaped in a soft snap then stopped completely. Sarah looked at their eyes and felt her heart shudder then start to beat at a fast gallop.

"I called on you. Come up here."

Sarah sat still and felt the pure heat from her face flood into her arms and chest.

Mrs. Beiderson smiled, her face as sweet as Sarah's grandmother's. Mrs. Beiderson smiled a lot. She never raised her voice at Sarah, never shouted at her, never took her hand and walked her to the principal's office like she did the boys that drew pictures on their desks or fought. Mrs. Beiderson always spoke to Sarah in a voice like a pussy willow.

Sarah hated her more than anyone in the world.

"Sarah, now come along. This is just practice. You're not being graded."

The girl looked at her desk. Inside was the pill her mother had given her. But it wasn't time to take it yet.

"Now, Sarah."

Sarah stood, her hands at her sides, too heavy to lift.

She walked to the front of the dungeon and turned to face the class. She felt Mrs. Beiderson's smile pelt the back of her neck like a whip of snakes. She glanced at the trees outside the window. Oh, the freedom of the trees! She could smell the bark, she could feel the fuzz on the bottom of an elf cap growing up through ivy, she could see the doorway to the secret tunnel in her house.

Looking out over her classmates' faces, she saw Priscilla Witlock laughing, Dennis Morgan twisting up his fat lips into a mean grin, Brad Mibbock rolling his eyes. Laughter roaring so loud it struck her face and stung. She saw boys holding fists above their you-knows and moving them up and down, she saw girls with long red fingernails and dangling bracelets, girls her age but with round perfect breasts and sleek makeup and high heels, girls taunting her…

And Mrs. Beiderson, who saw only the bored faces of her class and heard nothing but Sarah's whimpering, said, "Sarah, your word is 'clarify.'"

The sound hit Sarah with the jolt of a schoolyard punch. Her daddy had helped her with this word. But she knew it had several up-down letters, which were very hard for her. She began to cry.

"You've done it before," smiling Mrs. Beiderson said in her soft lying, cheating, snaky voice. "You're not trying, Sarah. We all have to try." Mrs. Beiderson touched the rose cameo at her throat. "'Clarify' is on the list. Didn't you study the list?"

Sarah nodded.

"If you studied the list then there's nothing to cry about."

Now everyone would know she was crying, even the students in the back.

"I can't."

"You don't want us to think you're being difficult, do you? 'Clarify.'"

Between sobs, Sarah said, "C."

"Very good." The snake smiled.

Her knees quivered. "I don't know. I don't." More tears.

"What's the next letter?"

"I don't know."

"Try."

"C-A…"

Mrs. Beiderson exhaled a sigh. "All right, Sarah. Sit -"

"I could do it at home -"

"- Down. Anyone else?"

And Priscilla Witlock didn't even rise from her seat but was staring right at Sarah, slinging out the letters, C, then L, then A, then R, spelling the word in the time it took Sarah to take a huge gulp of air to try to quench her fear.

And then she felt it. First a trickle. Then a flood, as her panties grew wet and she put her hand down-there to stop herself but knowing it was too late, the flowing warm moisture running around her leg and Mrs. Beiderson saying, "Oh dear oh dear," and some of the class looking away, which was as bad as the rest of the class staring, as bad as knowing the story would be all over town and everybody would know even her grandfather up in heaven would know…

Sarah threw her arms around herself and ran to the door, pushing it open with her shoulder. The glass burst into a spiderweb of cracks. She leapt down the stairs two at a time and ran blindly down the corridor to the front door of the school, leaving on the linoleum the swirls and drips of her shame, like fragments of the letters that had beaten her once again.

The woman said, "Whatever has to be done and I mean it."

Dean Catherine Larraby was fifty-five and, if you squinted, looked like Margaret Thatcher. Gray hair, round face, stocky. Reassuring jowls. Eyes tired but severe. A coolness around the edges that Bill Corde thought was permanent and had not arisen with the killing. She had not applied her makeup well and the powder had accumulated in the creases around her mouth and on her forehead.

He breathed deeply. He was still queasy from the bumpy flight back from St Louis and more so from the frantic drive from the county airport to make this meeting.

Through the windows of her breezy office Corde saw the manicured grass of the quadrangle, bordered with luminous green trees. Students walked along the sidewalks and paths; it seemed to Corde that they moved in slow motion. He remembered college as much more frantic. He was constantly hurrying, walking briskly into class, sweating, unprepared.

A man appeared in the doorway, a tall, heavyset black man.

"Ah," the dean said, "Detective Corde. Wynton Kresge, head of campus security." Corde shook his callused wad of hand and did a double take when Kresge's expensive suit coat swung open, revealing the no-nonsense automatic pistol.

The dean looked at Kresge but when she spoke it was to the sixteen thousand parents of her eight thousand wards. "We've got to catch this man. We're going to catch him."

Corde said, "I'd like to start interviewing Jennie's friends and professors as soon as possible."

The dean's stubby fingers aligned a pen three times. "Of course," she said after a moment. "Is that necessary?"

Corde took out a stack of blank three-by-five cards. "I'd like to ask some preliminary questions. I have an address for her. McReynolds Hall. That's correct?"

"Right. She was GDI," Kresge answered; the dean frowned.

Corde began to write. He printed his notes and used only capital letters, which with their many curved strokes gave a vaguely oriental appearance to his handwriting. "GDI? That's a sorority?"

"No," Kresge explained, "GDI is what the dormies call themselves. People who aren't in frat or sorority houses. It means God Damn Independents." The dean kept staring at him and Kresge said, "Well, that's what they say."

The dean said, "There are so many implications."

Corde said, "I beg your pardon."

"We may get sued," she said. "When I talked to her father last night he said he may sue the university. I told him it didn't happen on campus."

"It didn't," Kresge said. "Happen on campus, I mean."

Corde waited a respectful time for either of them to make some point then continued, "I'd like a list of all the residents and employees, handymen and so on, in that hall -"

"It's a very large dorm," the dean said. "That might cause, I don't know, panic."

"- and also her professors and students in all her classes." Corde noticed Dean Larraby wasn't writing any of this down. He heard rustling next to him. Kresge was jotting notes with a silver pen in a soft leather diary.

Corde asked, "I'd like to know if she was seeing a therapist or counselor. And I'd like a list of any employees of the school convicted of violent crimes."

As icily as a deposed prime minister, Dean Larraby said, "I'm sure we don't have any."

"You'd be surprised," Corde said.

"I'll find out," Kresge said.

"I'll guarantee you that we have no criminals on our staff."

"Probably not," Corde said agreeably. He turned to Kresge. "You're going to be my contact here?"

"Sure."

Corde shuffled his index cards. He said to Kresge, "If you could get this info to me ASAP?"

"No problem, Detective," Kresge said. "And I'd be happy to interview some of the students for you, or the professors. I know a lot of them personally and…"

Corde found he'd been ignoring Kresge. He looked up and smiled. "Sorry?"

When Kresge repeated his offer Corde said, "Not necessary, thanks."

"I'm just saying if you need a hand."

Corde turned to the dean. "I'd like a room of some kind."

Dean Larraby asked, "Room?"

"For the interviews. We'd prefer to do it on campus."

Kresge said, "The Student Union's got a lot of activity rooms."

Corde marked a note on one of his cards. "Book one for me, would you?"

There was a slight lapse before Kresge said, "Will do."

"Detective…" The dean's voice contained an element of desperation. Both men looked at her. She put her hands flat on the desk as if she were about to rise and lecture. Her fingers touched the wood with twin clicks and Corde noticed rings – a thick purple stone on her left hand, an even larger yellow one on her right. Presents to herself, Corde thought. "We have a contradictory problem here," she said. "You read the Register, you must know this school's in the midst of a fiscal crisis. Our enrollment is the lowest it's been in twenty-three years." She smiled humorlessly. "The baby boomers have come and gone."

Corde did read the Register. He had no idea what shape the finances of Auden University were in.

"It's of course in our interest to find the man who did this as fast as possible. But we don't want it to appear that we're panicked. I've already gotten a call from one of the school's benefactors. He's quite concerned about what happened." Corde looked at her blankly. "When benefactors get concerned, Detective, I get concerned."

Kresge said, "We've beefed up security patrols in the evening."

Corde said that was good.

The dean continued as if neither had spoken. "We're getting applications now for the fall term and they're running much lower than we'd expected." She caressed her cheek with her little finger and missed an uneven streak of prime minister makeup by a millimeter. "Isn't it most likely, Detective, that it was a drifter or somebody like that? Somebody not related to the school?"

Kresge said, "We can't assume anything, Dean."

The dean was ignoring Kresge too. She was his boss and could do a better job of it than Corde.

Corde said, "We just don't know anything at this point."

Kresge said, "One thing I wanted to mention. The Biagotti killing."

The dean clucked. "Wynton, Susan lived off-campus. She was killed in a robbery attempt. Isn't that what happened, Detective?"

"Susan Biagotti? It seemed to be a robbery, I recall."

The dean continued, "The school had nothing to do with it. So -"

"It was never solved, Dean," Kresge's baritone droned. "I was just speculating."

"- why bring it up?"

Corde said to both of them, "I don't think there's any connection. But I'll look into it."

"There was no connection," the dean said sourly.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm sure that's the case. Now the sooner I get back to work, the sooner we'll catch this fellow. You'll get that information, William?"

"Wynton."

"Sorry."

"Uhn, Detective, I wanted to ask you something. About motives for this type of crime. I -"

Corde said, "I'm sorry. I'm running pretty late. If you could just get me as much of that information as you can in the next hour or so I'd appreciate it. And the room. Don't forget the room."

Kresge's spacious unsmiling face nodded slowly. "You'll get it when you want it."

Diane Corde pressed the phone tight against her ear. She still held a grocery bag in one muscular arm.

"Oh, no…" She listened for a moment longer then lifted the phone away from her mouth. She called, "Sarah? Sarah are you home?"

Silence, broken only by the click and whir of the refrigerator.

"No. She hasn't come back yet. When she's upset sometimes she hides in the woods."

Diane cocked her head as she listened to Sarah's teacher explain how concerned they all were. Mrs. Beiderson also added delicately that the girl had been daydreaming all morning before the practice test. "I sympathize, Mrs. Corde, I really do. But she simply must try harder. She's bringing a lot of these problems on herself." Diane nodded at the phone. Finally she said the words that seemed to end so many of these conversations: "We'll talk to her about it. We'll talk to her."

They hung up.

Diane Corde wore blue jeans and a burgundy cotton blouse. With her high school graduation cross gold and glistening at her throat she looked like a pretty, born-again country-western singer. Her husband said she had thisaway hair because she wore it moussed up and brushed back. Wide-shouldered and thin-hipped, Diane had a figure that had pretty much withstood two children and forty-three years of gravity. On her forehead was a small scar like a crescent moon, which mimicked by half the end of the iron pipe she'd run hard into when she was four.

Diane set the groceries on the counter and returned to the back door to get her keys from the lock.

No keys.

She tried to recall – she had hurried inside from the car when she heard the phone ringing. She looked on hooks, on counters, at the bottom of her purse, in the freezer (it had happened more than once). On the off chance that she'd left them in the station wagon she walked outside and ducked her head through the open window. They hung from the ignition. She shook her head at her absentmindedness and plucked them out. She started back to the kitchen. She stopped cold, one foot on the doorstep.

How had she gotten inside without the keys?

The back door had been open.

The dead bolt was the only lock on the door and it could be secured only with a key. Diane clearly remembered locking it when she left for the A amp;P. Somebody had entered the house and left without bothering to relock the door.

Bill had been a cop for twelve years and had made his share of enemies; he'd instructed the children a thousand times always to lock the door when they left.

But Sarah of course could ignore a thousand stern warnings.

The girl had probably returned home to wash up after the incident at school then run outside to hide in her magic woods, forgetting to lock the door. I'll have another talk with her… But then Diane decided, no, the girl had been through enough. No scoldings today. She returned to the kitchen, dropped the keys into her purse, and began to think about supper.

She sits in the woods, hugging herself, knees up to her lowered chin, in the circle of magic stones. Sarah Corde is now breathing slowly. It has taken hours to calm down. By the time she got here, running the entire two miles from the school, her dress and underpants were dry but still she feels dirty – as if a sorcerer had thrown a potion on her.

She is no longer crying.

Sarah lies back in the grass that she pulled out of the nearby field and spread in the circle like a bed. She lifts the hem of her dress up to her waist as if the sunlight will clean the poison completely away and she closes her eyes. Sarah is sleepy. Her head grows heavy as a stone and she feels that she is floating in the moat of an old castle. Beiderbug Castle …

Sarah looks up at the clouds.

A huge dog with wings big as the county, a chariot pulled by a flying fish, and there, there – a towering thunderhead – is a god carrying a fierce club. He wears golden sandals, magic shoes that carry him high above this terrible place, the earth…

As she falls asleep she pictures the god turning into a wizard.

When she wakes, an hour or more has passed. The chariot is gone, the flying fish is gone, the god with his club is gone.

But Sarah finds that she has had a visitor.

She sits up, pulling her skirt down, then reaches forward cautiously and picks up Bedford T. Redford the world's smartest bear, who sits beside her, the shaggy face staring at her with humorous, glassy eyes. She left him that morning propped on her bed after she hugged him a tearful good-bye and left for school. How he got here she has no idea. In the ribbon around his collar is a piece of paper. Sarah unfolds it, panicking for a moment as she sees that it contains words she must now read. But then she relaxes and takes one word at a time. After fifteen minutes of agonizing work she manages to read the entire note.

She is shocked and terrified by its message. Suspicious of words, she decides she must have read it wrong. She tries again and finds that, no, she read it correctly.

Her first thought is that she could never do what the awkwardly printed letters suggest.

But as the girl looks around her at the dense woods, where she has hidden so often after fleeing from school, the woods in which she feels more at home than in her own living room, that fear slowly fades.

And eventually becomes joyous anticipation.

Sarah rises to her feet, thinking that one part of the note certainly is true. There really is nothing left for her to do.