The Lesson of Her Death (38 page)

Corde said, “You don’t think Philip did it, do you?”

“Take a look at what we found.” Ebbans led him to the squad car. Inside was a foot-high stack of porn magazines and violent comic books, also sketchbooks and notebooks. Corde flipped through the crudely drawn pictures of spaceships and monsters, montages of photos cut out of the school yearbook: girls imprisoned in towers and dungeons, chained to walls while snake creatures circled around them. Much of the material had the Naryan insignia hand-printed on it.

Corde thought of the picture of Sarah, her skirt high over her thighs.

“He had this incendiary thing hooked up. We opened the drawer where he’d hid all this stuff and it started to set fire to the file cabinet. It blew a fuse before it did any damage. Lance went through the backyard. In
the barbecue he found some scraps of Jockey shorts the kid’d tried to burn.” Ebbans touched a small plastic bag. “They were stained and it could be semen. Oh, and we also found some pictures of a naked girl. Polaroids.”

Polaroids
.

“Jennie?”

“Can’t tell. It’s a girl’s breasts.”

“It’s not …” Corde dodged Ebbans’s eyes. “Not a younger girl, is it?”

Ebbans said, “Not a little girl, no.” He continued, “And I found a pair of muddy boots. I’m doing casts.”

From the porch Slocum offered, “It all fits the profile. The smut collection, the home situation, everything.”

Corde ignored this and said to Ebbans, “You didn’t question him by himself, did you? He’s got to have his parents present.”

“No. I didn’t question him at all. But I’ll tell you, his father’s not going to be much help to the kid. He’s the one sent us out to the barbecue. Told us he saw Philip burning something there the night after the first killing.”

Corde stared at the pile in the back seat of the car. In the center of Corde’s bulletin board was a sign that he’d sent off for from
National Law Enforcement Monthly
a couple of years ago. The brittle yellow slip of glossy paper read:
Physical evidence is the cornerstone of a case
. He was looking at physical evidence now. Physical evidence that could put two boys in prison for forty years. And one of them was his son.

Ribbon and Ellison arrived in one of the county’s fancy Furies. The slogan on the side said,
If you drink, do us all a favor. Don’t drive
. Ebbans told them what they’d found.

Inside Halpern was leaning over his son, who stared straight ahead. “What the hell was going through your mind?” The boy’s eyes were glazed. He didn’t speak. His face wasn’t particularly sad or frightened. He seemed to be possessed.

Philip played at the Corde house once or twice a
week. But was this the boy who’d taken the pictures of Sarah? Who had put the threatening newspaper article on the rosebush? And in Diane’s diaphragm case?

Was this the boy who murdered Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter?

He looked at Philip’s round, soft face, smudged with dirt or chocolate, a face that did not appear so much guilty as bewildered.

Corde said, “Jamie, come here.”

Slocum’s head turned. “Say, Bill … maybe it’s not such a good idea. Uh, talking to him in private, I mean.”

Corde squashed his temper and ignored the deputy. He motioned to his son. The boy stood and followed him onto the porch. Ribbon stepped forward.

Corde stopped him with a look. “Leave me alone with my boy.” The sheriff hesitated only a moment before stepping away.

Jamie leaned against the porch bannister and turned to his father, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Jamie, why are you being this way? I want to help you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

“I don’t
know
what happened.”

“Son, it’s murder we’re talking about. They’re looking for somebody to send to jail for this.”

“I know
you
are.”

“Me?”

“You want me to make up something about Phil?”

“I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell it to me right here and now.”

“Bill?” Ribbon came to the doorway. “You can be present at questioning but—”

“Oh, goddamnit,” Corde exploded. “Goddamnit! You don’t have probable cause to charge him. Call the DA. Ask him!”

Ribbon said delicately, “We do for conspiracy and
obstruction. You’ll just make things worse for everybody.”

“Jamie, why?” Corde’s eyes begged, his hand reached for his son’s arm but stopped short of contact. “What did I do? Why won’t you tell me?”

Eyes downcast, the boy let Ribbon lead him into the filthy house, while his father’s desperate questions fell like shot quail, silent and flimsy.

The tall grass waved in the wind and the sunlight flickered off the leaves of thin saplings. Sarah stepped into her circle of stones and sat down. She crossed her legs carefully. From her backpack she took the bear she was going to give to the Sunshine Man and set him next to her.

She looked at her Madonna watch. It said 2:40. She closed her eyes and remembered that this meant twenty minutes to three. She hated numbers. Sometimes you counted to a hundred before they started over, other times you counted to sixty.

Twenty minutes until the Sunshine Man arrived.

She remembered a drill at school—her second-grade teacher would move the hands on a clock and then point to different students and have them tell the time. This exercise socked her with icy terror. She remembered the teacher’s bony finger pointing at her.
And, Sarah, what time is it now?
She screamed that she didn’t know she couldn’t tell don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask.… She cried all the way home from school. That night her daddy bought her the digital watch she now wore.

A sudden breeze whipped her hair around her face and she lay down, using her backpack as a pillow. Sometimes she took afternoon naps here. Looking around her, wondering where the Sunshine Man would come from, Sarah noticed just above the horizon a sliver of new moon. She imagined that the sky was a huge ocean and that the moon was the fingernail on a giant’s hand as he
swam just below the surface of the smooth water. Then she wondered how come you can see the moon in the daytime.

She closed her
eyes and
she thought of the giant as he swam, lifting arms as big as mountains from the water, kicking his mile-long legs and speeding across the sky. Sarah was afraid of the water. When the family went to the park downtown she would still play in the baby pool, which made her ashamed but wasn’t as bad as the terror of bouncing on the adult pool floor with the water inches from her nose and thinking she might get swept into the deep part.

She wished she could swim. Strong strokes, like Jamie. Maybe this was something else she could ask the Sunshine Man to do for her. She looked at her watch. 2:48. She counted on her fingers. Two minutes … No!
Twelve
minutes. She closed her eyes and kneaded the grass bunched up at her hips and pretended she was swimming, skimming across the pool like a speedboat, back and forth, saving the lives of children struggling in the deep end and racing past her brother once then again and again.…

Five minutes later she heard the approaching footsteps.

Sarah Corde’s heart began pounding in joyous anticipation, and as she climbed out of her imaginary pool she opened her eyes.

Look at this place. Lord.

Bill Corde couldn’t get over the size of Wynton Kresge’s office.

“Plush.”

“Yeah, well.” Kresge seemed uncomfortable.

The room was probably a third as big as the entire New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department. Corde took pleasure walking over the thick green carpet and wondered why two busy oriental rugs had been laid over the pile.

“That’s the biggest desk I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, well.”

Corde sat down in one of the visitors’ chairs, which was itself bigger and more comfy than his own Sears armchair at home, and his a recliner at that. He tried to scoot it closer to the desk but it wouldn’t move and he had to stand again and lug the chair up to the desk.

Kresge explained, “Was the office of some dean or another. Academic affairs, something like that. He retired and they needed someplace to put me. I think they like having a black man on this corridor. See, when you come this way from the main stairwell you see me at my big desk. Looks good for the school. Think I’m a big shot. Little do they know. So they caught the kid.”

“They caught him. He was a friend of my son’s.”

“Well.” Kresge would be wondering whether he should ask the question about how close a friend but he let it pass.

“The evidence is pretty strong against him. He’s a spooky boy and his father’s worse.” Corde realized he still had his hat on—it banged into the high back of the chair—and he took it off, pitched it like a Frisbee onto the seat of the other chair. He opened his briefcase. “I need a favor.”

“Sure.” Kresge said eagerly.

Corde leaned forward and set a plastic bag in front of Kresge. Inside was the burnt scrap of computer paper.

“What’s this?”

“A bit of that paper we found behind—”

“No, I mean this.” The security chief pointed at the white card attached to the bag by a red string.

“That? A chain of custody card.”

“It’s got your name on it.”

“It’s not important, Wynton. The piece of—”

“This’s for trial, right?”

“Right. So the prosecutor can trace the physical evidence back to the crime scene.”

“Got it. So that if there’s a gap in the chain, the defense attorney can get the evidence thrown out?”

“Right.” Because Corde was here to ask a favor he indulged Kresge, who was examining the COC card closely. Finally Corde continued, “The piece of paper inside? I’d like to find out where it came from. I’ve got this idea—”

“You’re leaning on it.”

“—it’s from the school. What?”

“You’re leaning on it.”

“On what?”

Kresge motioned him away. Corde sat back in the chair and Kresge yanked a thick wad of computer printouts from beneath of stack of magazines. Corde had been using the pile as an armrest.

“It’s a university Accounting Department printout. They send them around every week to each department. Mine shows me security expenses, real and budgeted, allocation of overhead. You know, that sort of thing.”

“You know what department this was from?”

Kresge looked at it. “No idea.”

“Any chance you could find out?”

“Technically I don’t have access to the Accounting Department’s files.”

Corde asked coyly, “How ’bout untechnically?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” After a pause he asked, “But if they caught the boy what’s the point?”

Corde slowly touched away a fleck of lint from his boot heel and stalled long enough that an attractive woman blustered into the office with an armful of letters for Kresge to sign. The security chief rose and with clumsy formality introduced two people with nothing in common except their lack of desire to meet. Corde, however, was grateful for the curious decorum—it seemed to drive the question from Kresge’s mind and after the signing-fest, when their conversation resumed, he did not ask it again.

S
he could sense him nearby, almost as though he was hovering right over her body like a wave of hot sunlight.

She swung her head about, peering into the clearing, into the forest, the tall grass.

More footsteps, leaves rustling, twigs snapping.

(So: He doesn’t fly, he doesn’t materialize, he doesn’t float. He walks. That’s okay.)

Sarah looked for the glow of sun as he approached but she could see nothing except trees and branches, leaves, grass, shadows. The footsteps grew closer. Hesitant, uncertain. Then she saw him—a figure in the woods, coming slowly toward her, picking his way through the brush. He seemed less like a wizard than, well, a big man tromping noisily through the forest.
(That’s okay too.)

“I’m over here. Here!” She stood up, waving her arm.

He paused, located her and slowly changed direction, pushing aside branches.

She picked up the stuffed bear and ran toward him. She shouted, “I’m here!”

A sheet of bright green leaves lifted aside and the deputy stepped out, brushing dust and leaves off his uniform.

“Tom!” she cried, her heart sinking.

“Hey, missie, how’d you get here without getting all messed up?” He picked a leaf out of his hair then swatted his forehead. “Skeeter.” He examined his palm.

Crestfallen, Sarah stared up at him.

“You’re not supposed to be out here, you know. You could get me in a whole mess of trouble. You’re supposed to stay close to the house. Anyway, ’nough said. Your mom wants to see you now. You’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s, she says.”

“I can’t come right now.” She scanned the forest.
He’s leaving! I can tell. The deputy scared him off
.

“Well, I don’t know,” Tom said patiently. “Your mother told me to fetch you.”

“Not now, please? Just a half hour?” She was close to tears.

“That’s a cute little fellow you’ve got there. What’s his name?”

“Chutney.”

“How about if you and Chutney come home now and afterward you come back here with me and I’ll keep an eye on you? How’d that be?”