The Lesson of Her Death (60 page)

“There. There.” Breck reached up a bloody hand. At first Corde thought he was pointing out a direction. But
no. He saw in the front seat of the car two typed pages. Corde said, “Those sheets?”

Breck nodded. “Take them. Read … I’m getting very dizzy. My mouth is dry.…” He closed his eyes.

Corde picked up the sheets. He started to read. His attention flagged and he looked down. Diane took Breck’s face in both of her slick, red hands and shouted to him, “You’re going to be all right! You’re going to be fine! Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

She looked up at her husband. Corde put his hand on her shoulder. She picked it up and flung it off then lowered her head to Breck’s chest and began to cry.

It wasn’t until the ambulance left a minute later, kicking up dust and siren howling, that Corde walked abruptly back to his car and sat in the driver’s seat. Finally he began to read.

They stepped over a tangle of brush, between two beech trees that pretty much marked the start of Corde’s backyard and entered the forest at the exact spot he had seen, or imagined, the moonlit face staring at the house a month before. They walked on a carpet of spring-dried leaves and low raspy grass, yellow and deer-chewed.

Beside him, dressed in a beige uniform and tan windbreaker, Wynton Kresge was carrying a Remington pump shotgun. The gun had a stiff sling but he did not carry it slung. He held it two-handed like a soldier, index finger pointed forward outside of the trigger guard. The men walked quickly, Corde consulting two sheets of dark-stained typewriter paper as if they were instructions on a scavenger hunt.

The sky was milky. The sun, a white disk low in the sky, was trying to burn off the overcast, but the density of gray meant that it was going to lose. The forest, the cow pasture, the yellow-green carpet in front of him were an opaque watercolor. A coal black grackle flew
immediately toward him then turned abruptly away, startling both men.

At an old burnt-down barn that he had forbidden Jamie and Sarah from playing in, they turned right. Beams of the silo rose like charred bones. They walked on, over an old railroad bridge then followed the gravelly roadbed to the Des Plaines. They walked along the bank through more woods until they found the house. Corde folded the sheets of paper and put them in his pocket.

The house was another dilapidated colonial, two stories, narrow and sagging. This one was set in a grim, scruffy clearing, past which you could see storage tanks along the river. A tug towed a rusty barge upstream, its harsh, chugging engine irksome in the heavy air.

In the front yard was parked a green car. A Hertz sticker in the windshield. Corde read the plate.

“It’s the one Gilchrist rented.”

Corde crouched and Kresge knelt beside him, under cover of a fallen branch. Corde looked at the ground. He said, “You stay outside. No matter what you hear. If he comes out alone, stop him. He’s the only one who knows where Sarah is. I want him alive.”

Kresge said, “I’d feel better calling in some backup. That’s what the manual says in cases like this.”

Corde kept studying the house. Lord, it seemed ominous—towery and pale, mean. He said, “I’m going to get my daughter one way or another. I may need some time with Gilchrist by myself.”

Kresge looked long at Corde, considering these words. He turned back to the house. “How’d you know this was his place?”

Corde shushed him. Together they closed in on the colonial. Kresge crouched behind the Hertz car and rested the shotgun on the hood. He pointed at the front and back doors, nodding, meaning that he could cover them both. Corde nodded back and, crouching, ran to the front of the house. He paused beside the rotting gray porch. He caught his breath then eased slowly up to the
door. He smashed the door in with a vicious kick of his boot and stepped into the rancid-smelling house.

The room was milky, as if illuminated through smoke or mist. Light, already diffused by the clouds, ambled off the silver maple leaves outside and fell ashen in the room. The carpet, walls, plywood furniture, paintings seemed bleached by this weak radiance.

A terrible moment passed. Corde believed the house was empty and Gilchrist had escaped from them again. Then his eyes grew accustomed to the weak light and he saw at the end of the room a pale shape, a sphere that moved. It was mottled with indefinite features like the surface of the moon. Corde saw that it was a man’s head and that he was staring back at Corde.

The man slowly rose and stood behind a cluttered desk. About six-two, graying brown hair, trim, gangling arms and long thin hands. He wore a conservative light green tweed sports jacket and tan slacks. His face gave no clue that he was surprised by the intrusion. He examined Corde with brown eyes that were the only dark aspects of his person.

He looks like me
was the thought that passed involuntarily through Corde’s mind.

“Gilchrist,” he said evenly, “where is my daughter?”

L
eon Gilchrist walked through a thick beam of dusty light and stopped ten feet from Corde. He folded his arms. A mirthful half smile was on his face. “Well, I am surprised, Detective Corde.”

“I want to know where she is.” Corde’s voice trembled. “I want to know now.”

“Of course you do.”

“Sarah!” Corde shouted, looking at a stairway that led to the second floor.

“I was just thinking of you,” Gilchrist said mildly. “You’d be surprised how often you’re in my thoughts. About as often as I am in yours, I’d guess.”

Corde stepped forward, raising his revolver to Gilchrist’s chest. The professor glanced down at it then slipped his hands into his pockets and studied Corde as if the detective were a bug padding his last circle on the
cyanide disk in a kill jar. Then he asked, “How’s your son, Detective?”

An uncertain flicker was in Corde’s eyes as they scanned the face of Leon Gilchrist.

“Still enjoy bicycling, does he? Despite the dangers.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And he went for a swim, I heard. The music these young people listen to.…”

He’s trying to get my goat. Calm, stay calm
.

“Suicide by drowning. That was uniquely his. The song, I believe, mentions razors and ropes.… An alliteration suitable for adolescent lyrics.”

“What did you have to do with that?” Corde’s grip on the gun tightened and he was beset by a frightening sense that he was losing control of himself. In his ears he heard a humming of immense pressure. He swung the muzzle toward the professor’s face, which tightened microscopically but remained otherwise passive. The barrel stopped short of striking skin. “I could kill you—”

Gilchrist said slowly, “I don’t imagine you know the writing of Paul Verlaine. The French symbolist poet? No, of course not. I find his poems stunning but I also believe he suffered from the same problem as you do. Stoic on the outside, raging within. He tried to murder his close friend Rimbaud in a fit of passion. He ended up a worthless drunk. But if not for his psychoses the world wouldn’t have his astonishing work. The element of compensation is miraculous—compensation, which your little Sarah displays so well.”

Corde’s breathing was fierce. He felt himself hyperventilating. He grabbed Gilchrist’s collar and pressed the gun muzzle against his ear.

“Ah,” Gilchrist said in a silky voice, “remember her. Remember Sarah. Our conversation mustn’t become so obfuscated by passion that we forget that only I know where she is.
Obfuscated
. Can you deduce what that means, Detective? Can you?”

Corde shoved Gilchrist away and stepped back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. He felt that
he
was the cornered animal and that it was Gilchrist who was playing him.

“Detective, you continually misunderstand whom you’re dealing with. I’m not a thug barricaded in a convenience shop. Your concept of intelligence is that it gets you to the bottom row of a category in
Jeopardy!
I’m different in
kind
from people like Jennie Gebben and you and your son and your Sarah and your beautiful Diane.

“I’ve been studying you and your family since the morning after Jennie died. I saw your daughter at the pond after I’d left my first note to you. Her beautiful hair. The sun was so pretty on her tight, white blouse. Last year’s fashions? … Had to put off the spring shopping spree at Sears, did we? You know, I’ve been corresponding with Sarah ever since then. Why the shock, Detective? You would have figured it out eventually. See, that’s the very problem that concerned me. You’re not intelligent but you’re dogged—unlike the rest of your colleagues, who are neither intelligent nor persistent.

“Undoubtedly we could put you on the couch and wrench up some reason for this chronic tenacity. You fell asleep at the wheel once or twice when it mattered, didn’t you? When was it? Not too formative, I’d guess. Your teenage years? Maybe later. Whatever happened, you’ll be paying it off for a long time. I was sure you’d plod along until you stumbled across me.

“Sarah was the perfect distraction. At first I convinced her to run away. When that didn’t work I decided I’d infiltrate, throw you off the track. The town wanted a Moon Killer so I skinned a goat and gave them one. ‘Lunatic.’ And I did some painting around town with a bit of the leftover blood.
Mezza luna
.… Oh, I’ll bet my frescoes had your boss salivating. But not you, Detective. You kept plodding, ever the pedestrian, getting closer and closer. I needed a more direct attack. I tried threatening you off the case.”

He pointed to a Polaroid camera. “I’m quite some
photog, don’t you think? Oh, an aside: I detected that your wife’s contraceptive had not been much used of late. Are we in the middle of the sixteen-year itch? Have you noticed any change in her recently? Her pathetically polished fingernails? Her sudden interest in eye shadow? Did you know she and Breck have been for several walks in the forest?”

The professor smiled and lifted his hands like a TV preacher. “Did you know that while that buffoon of a deputy was supposed to be guarding the old homestead, I was browning through your bedroom? I opened your dresser and rearranged Diane’s panties. I smelled her pillow. I washed my hands with her cheap L’Air du Lis soap. Oh, I sat on Sarah’s bed. I caressed your son’s pajamas. It was all so fascinating to me! I lecture—excuse me, I used to lecture—about psychology every day. I’ve written articles for the most prestigious journals in the field, journals …” He cocked an eyebrow with amusement. “… that perhaps you’ve tried to read. But I don’t do clinical practice. Toying with your family has amused me greatly. Entwining them in this whole matter. I drew you away from the nest. I sent you to Lewisboro. I sold a handful of credit cards to this polyester thug in a bar in Fitzberg so you’d hightail it over there. Then I circled back. I followed that fool Breck—” Gilchrist sneered the name. “—and I killed him deader than Dreiser’s prose. I did all that, Detective, right under your nose and I escaped.”

“But,” Corde said, “here I am.”

The smile on the professor’s face did not diminish. “But
I
… have your daughter.”

“I want to know where she is!” Corde shouted in anguish.

“Stating the obvious,” Gilchrist snorted, “diminishes you, as a late colleague of mine used to say.”

Sarah, cry for me, baby! Shout, scream
.…

“You son of a bitch!” The menace in Corde’s voice rose to the distant smudged ceiling. It seemed to break the shafts of weak light that fell onto the bloodred carpet.
Corde pressed his revolver forward and the hammer actually started back. Gilchrist’s eyes registered an instant of monumental fear then became calm and conciliatory. He lifted a palm. “She’s all right. I swear it.”

“Where is she?”

Gilchrist’s eyes swept over him. The smile had faded. He was now composed and his face was a mask of concern. “I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”

“If you’ve hurt her—” Corde stepped forward, his hand kneading the gun.

“She’s fine,” Gilchrist said in a soothing voice. “Think, Detective. Why would I hurt her? I kidnapped her because I needed some insurance. I couldn’t stop you any other way.” He spread his hands out in front of him. “Look … You found out where I was. I had to protect myself.”

“I swear I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me what you’ve done with her.” He stifled a spiny urge to fire a bullet into Gilchrist’s leg or elbow.

The professor’s voice was suavely reassuring. “I haven’t done anything with her. She’s safe.” He nodded at his suitcase. “As long as I get out of here she’ll be fine. If you hurt me or arrest me you’ll never see her again. It’s as simple as that.”

Corde stepped forward and held the gun close to Gilchrist’s face. “Where is she?” he cried.

Gilchrist stepped back. “Those are my terms. There’s no negotiation. My freedom for your daughter. Take it or leave it.”

“You bastard, you damn bastard,” Corde growled.

“That’s perhaps true in one context or another but it’s irrelevant at this moment.”

The muzzle of the pistol lowered.

Corde’s breathing calmed. At least Sarah was alive. At least he had a chance of getting her back home safe. He had a poignant image of the girl sitting in bed, wearing her pajamas and talking to a stuffed bear. Tears saturated his eyes.