The Lesson of Her Death (34 page)

Corde spent the evening talking to the parents of boys who’d bought Naryan Dimensional stilettos. He was easygoing and jokey and careful to put them at ease. No,
no, we don’t suspect Todd Sammie Billie Albert not hardly why he’s in Science Club with Jamie.…

“I’m just,” he would tell them, “getting information.”

They nodded gravely and answered all his questions and smiled at his jokes.

But they were scared.

Men and women alike, they were scared.

The second killing had proved the cult theory. The words that Corde had spoken to chubby Gail Lynn Holcomb had been proved utterly false. They
did
have something to be scared of. As far as the good citizens of New Lebanon were concerned, Satan himself had arrived, with two murders to his name and more on his mind.

Corde went from house to house and listened to parents, without exception, account for every minute of each boy’s whereabouts on the night of April 20—a feat possible, Corde knew as a father, only if every man and woman he talked to had turned psychic.

He saw through much of the smoke of course but still found no leads.

Long about midnight Corde noticed a dusty drawer somewhere in his mind. It seemed to contain Sheriff’s Department regulations and he believed, when he peered into it, that he saw something about officers who continue to engage in police work when suspended being guilty of impersonating sheriff’s deputies. He peered further and saw the word “misdemeanor” though his mind was often very dark and the word might actually have been “felony.”

Corde felt suddenly pummeled by fatigue. He returned home.

A county deputy, Tom’s replacement for the evening, sat in the driveway. Corde thanked him and sent him home and then went into the house. His children were asleep in their rooms. His wife too. Corde was grateful for that. He wasn’t looking forward to telling Diane that he’d been suspended.

The next morning he was up early. He kissed Diane, dodged a chance to give her the hard news and slipped out for a secret meeting with T.T. Ebbans. They rendezvoused outside the Sheriff’s Department on the hard-packed dirt the deputies sometimes used for impromptu basketball games. They both felt like spies or undercover narcs, padding around out of sight of the department’s grimy windows.

Corde told him about the knife and Ebbans slapped his head. “Doggone, I saw that movie.”

“So’d I, T.T., and I’ll bet every deputy in there did too. Hell,” he said in a whisper, “I’ll bet Ribbon’s even got the comic book. I talked to maybe thirty people last night. Here’s the list and my notes. Nothing real helpful.”

Ebbans took the sheet. “Watch yourself, Bill.”

Corde tapped his holster.

“I don’t mean that. You forget you’re suspended?”

“This thing’s too important to leave to Ribbon. You got what I asked you for?”

Ebbans handed Corde a plastic bag containing the green computerized accounting ledger that they’d found in the burnt oil drum. “Don’t lose it, Bill. I’m taking a chance as it is.”

“I think I’ve found me an expert who can help.”

“I also looked into the Gilchrist angle. Forget about it. He flew out to San. Francisco to read some paper on Saturday before Jennie was murdered and he was still out there when Emily was killed. I don’t think he’s back even yet.”

“You might want to talk to him though. He might know some of Jennie’s boyfriends. Or girlfriends.”

“Maybe I’ll ask him on the sly.” Ebbans added, “We’ve pulled up with a stitch on this mental-patient stuff. And the occult bookstore leads are going nowhere. This whole cult thing is looking thin as October ice. I think we oughta tell Hammerback and Ribbon.”

“Hold up a while,” Corde said gravely. “Next thing
you know you’ll be off the case too and Jim Slocum’ll be our new investigator in charge.”

“Hey now,” said Ebbans brightly, “that’d give us a chance to read Miranda to werewolves and vampires.”

“Mrs. Corde? Hello. My name is Ben Breck.”

Diane held the phone warily. From the man’s cheerful voice, she suspected a salesman. “Yes?”

“I’m from the Auden University lab school. You were speaking to the admissions department about a tutor?”

It turned out that he
was
a salesman of sorts but Diane listened anyway. Breck was selling something pretty interesting.

“I’m a visiting professor from the University of Chicago. I noticed your daughter’s application for admission to the Special Education Department.”

And how much are
you
going to cost, Doctor Visiting Professor from the Big City? A hundred an hour? Two?

“Our daughter’s seeing Resa Parker, a psychiatrist in town. She recommended we find a special ed tutor.”

“I know of Dr. Parker.” Breck then added, “I’ve done a lot of tutoring and I thought I might be able to help you.”

“Dr. Breck, I appreciate your call but—”

“Money.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You’re worried about the fees at Auden. And I don’t blame you one bit. They’re outrageous. I wouldn’t pay them myself.”

My, my, a doctor with a sense of humor. How refreshing
.

“It
is
one of my considerations,” Diane admitted.

“Well, I think you’ll find me fairly reasonable. I charge twenty dollars an hour.”

Breck named a figure that two weeks earlier would
have paled Diane; now she felt as if she’d pocketed found money. “That’s all?”

“I do ask to use the results of your daughter’s progress in my research. Anonymously, of course. I’m scheduled to publish my findings in the
American Journal of Psychology
. And I’m doing a book to help teachers recognize the problems of learning disabled children.”

“Well, I don’t know.…”

“I hope you’ll think about it, Mrs. Corde. From the application it looks like your Sarah has a lot of potential.”

Diane said, “You’ve worked with students like Sarah before?”

“Hundreds. In the majority of cases we’ve cut the gap between reading and chronological age by fifty percent. Sometimes more.”

“What are these techniques?”

“Feedback, monitoring, behavioral techniques. Nothing revolutionary. No drugs or medical treatment …”

“Sarah doesn’t do well with medicine. She’s had some bad reactions to Ritalin.”

“I don’t do any of that.”

“Well,” Diane said, “I’ll discuss it with my husband.”

“I hope to hear from you. I think Sarah and I can help each other a great deal.”

T.T. Ebbans walked into the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department, glancing at the sign, and asked, “Who put that up?”

Jim Slocum looked up from that day’s copy of the
Register
and said, “I did.”

“Could you please take it down?”

“Sure. Didn’t mean anything. Just thought it’d be kind of a reminder. For morale, you know.”

Ebbans sat down at his desk. On it were fifteen letters from people who claimed they knew who the killer was because they had dreamed about it (eight of them) or had psychic visions of his identity (four) or had been contacted in a seance by the victims (two). The remaining correspondence was from a man who explained that in a former life he had known Jack the Ripper, whose spirit had materialized in a condominium development outside of Higgins. There were also twenty-nine phone messages about the case. The first two calls Ebbans returned were to disconnected phones and the third was a man’s recorded voice describing how much he loved sucking cock. Ebbans hung up and gave the rest of the messages to Slocum and told him to check them out.

Corde’s news about the knife had both elated and depressed him. It had cheered him up because it was a solid lead and like any cop he’d take a single piece of hard evidence any day over a dozen psychics or a week’s worth of the most clever speculation. The news had also depressed Ebbans because it meant the line of the investigation he had inherited was looking pretty abysmal. Corde’s warning about Ebbans walking point, which he’d discounted at first, came back to him. Ribbon wasn’t pleased with the
Register
story that morning.
“Cult” Weapon in Auden Death Is Movie Toy
. The sheriff had said coolly, “Guess your boys should’ve checked that out to start.”

My
boys.

Ebbans returned to a stack of discharge reports from a mental hospital in Higgins. Ten minutes later the door swung open and a man in blue jeans and a work shirt stood uneasily in the doorway. Ebbans frowned, trying to place him. It took a minute.

The red hat man, without the hat.

“Detective?”

“Come on in.”

The man said, “What it is, I just thought you’d like to know. You asked me about those boys I seen the night that girl was killed. The boys by the pond? I was leaving the lake and just now one of them was back. He had his tackle but he wasn’t fishing, he was just walking around, looking at things. Would he be the Moon Killer?”

Ebbans stood up and said, “He out there now?”

“Was when I left.”

“Miller, come on, you and me’re taking a ride.”

So like what’s the reason?

Why is this guy your friend?

Jano didn’t have any answers. Philip was a freak. He was fat and had bad skin—not zits, which everybody had, even Steve Snelling, who could have any girl he wanted. It was more that Philip’s skin was dirty. Behind his ear it was always gray. And his clothes were hardly ever clean. He smelled bad. And forget about sports. No way could he even play softball let alone gymnastics. Jano remembered how his friend had strained to get up on the parallel bars and he had watched horrified as the wood rods sagged almost to breaking under the weight.

Why were they friends?

This afternoon Jano was walking around Blackfoot Pond, holding the gray chipped tackle box and the rod and reel. Tracing steps, trying not to think about that terrible night of April 20. He felt bad. Not depressed but fearful, almost panicked. He felt as if a screaming Honon warrior in an invisible Dimensional cloak was racing toward him from behind, preparing to leap, closer closer closer, to tear him apart. Jano’s heart galloped in his chest, heating his blood as it pumped and he felt terror spatter him like a spray of hot water. Like a spray of come.

He pictured the girl lying in the mud, her white fingers curled, her eyes mostly open, her bare feet with their long toes.…

No no no! She’s not an actress in a movie, thirty feet high on the screen in the mall. She is exactly what she is: pretty, heavy, smelling of mint, smelling of grass and spicy flowers. She is still. She does not breathe. She is dead.

Jano shuddered, feeling the Honon troops circling around him, and found he was staring at the crushed muddy blue flowers at his feet. He thought of Philip drowning the other girl, holding her down. And what was he, Jano, going to do now? Who could he talk to? Nobody … The panic crested and he sucked in air frantically.

Eventually he calmed.

Why
is he your friend?

Well, he and Phathar
did
talk about sci fi a lot. And movies. And girls. For a guy who never dated, Philip was an expert on sex. A walking dictionary of terms that every fifteen-year-old should know. He told Jano how gay guys shoved their fists up each other’s asses and how you could tell whether a girl was a virgin by the way she bent over to tie her shoes.

But Jano decided that their most common bond was how much they hated their fathers. Phathar was scared of his and that made plenty of sense because the old man was a total hatter. (One Halloween, Philip’s dad had come into the yard, sneaking up behind trick-or-treaters, carrying bloody cow’s intestines in his arms. He’d just stood staring at the totally freaked kids.) But Jano’s father was worse. He was like a Honon warrior hiding in a Dimensional cloak, passing through the house as if Jano didn’t exist. Sneaking past, looking at his son oddly, then vanishing.

…
The dimensional warp swelling out out out finally bursting into the now, the here, all that purple energy of the Naryan realm flooding onto the earth
.…

The movie had had a happy ending. Jano didn’t think this life would. He climbed to the top of the dam and then dropped onto his knees. He leaned forward looking at his gray reflection in the still water. He didn’t like water that was so still. It made him look like death. His thin face. He lowered his head to the water. He wondered what it was like to breathe water instead of air.

Look at that, Jano. You ever touched a girl there? You ever tasted a girl?

He stared at the water. He could smell its oily sourness.

You ever fucked a girl, Jano?

By lowering his head another two inches he could taste the water. He could lick it. The same way that Phathar gave him the opportunity to taste the girl’s cold mouth, her tongue, her cunt. He could swallow the water, he could swallow her, hide in her forever. A princess—

“Excuse me, young man.” The voice was like a chill downpour on his back. He leapt up. “I talk to you for a minute?” The deputy was tall and very thin.

Jano’s mouth was dry as summer pavement. He swung his tongue back and forth between his sticky teeth and didn’t say anything.