The Lesson of Her Death (61 page)

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Gilchrist offered. “Let’s
up the ante. In exchange for my head start I’ll tell you where your daughter is
and
I’ll give you an explanation. I’ll tell you exactly how I killed Jennie and why.”

Corde squinted slightly and somewhere in his mind the policeman stepped side by side with the father.

Gilchrist took the uneasy caution in Corde’s eyes as an affirmative answer. He sat down in an armchair, launching motes of dust into the sallow light.

“I loved Jennifer Gebben very much. The first time I’ve ever felt that way about a woman. Ridiculous, when you think about it. She was a simple girl. She wasn’t particularly pretty. She vacillated between intense and moody. But when she was with you, in bed, she was completely
with
you. Do you understand what I’m saying? She was the center of the universe. We’d play our games, we’d take our hickory sticks, we’d get out the straps. A lot of women just tolerate it for their man—the remote father problem, of course. But Jennie loved it. She lived for it.”

“Gilchrist—”

“Please. Let me finish. This spring she dropped me cold. She went back to that fucking roommate of hers. ‘Sorry, it’s over with.’ Well, that wasn’t good enough for me. No, sir. I wasn’t going to be discarded the way she tossed aside Sayles or Okun. ‘Sorry, it’s over with.’ Oh, no. I wouldn’t tolerate it, not even from a borderline personality. I called her up from San Francisco. She was too pusillanimous to break up—excuse me, Detective. She was too
cowardly
to do it in person. I was in a consuming rage for a full twenty-four hours. I calmed then I flew back.”

“You bought a ticket under a different name. So you intended to kill her.”

Gilchrist paused for a moment and seemed neither surprised nor alarmed that this was public knowledge. “There’s another part. Can you figure it out?”

Corde was nodding. “You killed Susan Biagotti and Jennie found out about it.”

The professor was, however, overtly disappointed
that Corde had made the deduction. Still he continued unemotionally. “Lying in bed with Jennie …” Gilchrist smiled at some memory. “Or lying in the bathtub with her or on the kitchen floor, I’d tell her things. You did that with her. She was disarming. Well, Susan and I had played some very serious games, I mentioned that one time to Jennie. Stupid of me but I did it.”

“Why did you kill Susan?”

“Accidental. We got carried away and I strangled her.”

Corde winced, uncomprehending. He whispered, “She was somebody you must’ve cared about. Yet you hurt her so badly you killed her? Why? Was the sex that good?”

“Not for her it wasn’t. Obviously.” He gave Corde a fast chill smile then added, “I used the hammer to cover up some of the marks and I made it look like a robbery.”

“But you didn’t tell Jennie you’d killed her.”

“Of course not.” Gilchrist grimaced at the foolishness of the question. “But she could link us together. When I called her from San Francisco on Sunday, when she told me she was breaking up with me, we argued. She said she was going back to Emily and if I didn’t leave her alone she’d tell the administration about the students I’d slept with. Well, our Virgin Dean has this
thing
—her professors can fuck students’ minds all they want but their bodies are off-limits. If Jennie blew the whistle Larraby would find out about Susan and me and I’d have problems. I flew back to New Lebanon and asked Jennie if I could see her. I told her I wanted us to end on a positive note. I said I had a book for her—in memory of our relationship. She agreed. We went for a walk. We ended up at the pond.”

“And you killed her.”

“And I killed her, yes.” Gilchrist seemed to be considering if there was anything else to say about Jennie Gebben and concluded there was not. He added, “And I
killed Sayles and Okun because …” He brought his hands together in a concluding way. “… they were my enemies.”

“That deputy in Lewisboro got himself shot too.”

“I’m very pleased about that—that it wasn’t you, I mean. I was actually feeling somewhat bad thinking that you would be the first one through the door.” He nodded his head slightly.

Corde said, “I’ll give you a one-hour start.”

“Is there anybody outside the house?”

“Just one deputy.”

“So this is an unofficial visit, is it?” Gilchrist glanced at Corde with a certain level of respect. “Well, all right. Drop your car keys there.”

“We walked. We didn’t drive.”

“Humor me.”

Corde tossed the keys into the middle of the floor. Gilchrist pocketed them.

“She’s all right?”

“Of course she’s all right. I’ve tied her hands and feet. That’s all. And gagged her.”

People suffocate under gags. An FBI bulletin had just reported on this. Corde had noted the fact in boxy script on a three-by-five index card.

Gilchrist picked up his suitcase. He said, “The basement.” He walked to the doorway and opened it. He stood at the top of the stairs and flicked a light switch on. Corde shouted, “Sarah! It’s Daddy.”

There was no response. Gilchrist said impatiently, “The gag. I told you.”

Corde took out his handcuffs and stepped toward Gilchrist. “Put one on your right wrist and the other on that radiator pipe there.”

“No. We have a deal.”

Corde said, “I give you my word you get an hour. But I get my daughter first. Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Gilchrist studied Corde’s eyes. “I think you might,
Detective. All right. Follow me. I’ll have to show you. It’s hard to find.”

“No. You stay here.”

The professor shrugged and said, “You’ll have to turn left at the foot of the stairs then go down a corridor then—”

Corde handed him the cuffs.

“—up a few stairs. You don’t have to worry; She’s fine, just fine.” Gilchrist was speaking like a pediatrician who’d nursed a child out of a fever.

Corde smelled the man’s scent, sour, old cloth, sweat. He realized suddenly how close they stood.

Gilchrist, reaching for the cuffs, calmly closed his long fingers around Corde’s wrist, the nails dug into flesh, and he threw himself backward down the stairs, dragging Corde with him.

The detective grabbed futilely for the handrail. The gun fired, the bullet sailing into a wall. Together they tumbled down the sharp-edged pine stairs. Snaps and thuds. Corde felt his left wrist pop. The gun flew from his hand. There was a huge reverberation as his head smacked hard into the rickety handrail and he heard another snap of joint that must have come from Gilchrist’s arm or leg.

They cartwheeled down and down the wood steps then crashed into the concrete floor and lay still, curled like lovers on a cold winter morning. In the small, dim basement around them were rusted tools, a sprinkling of coal, a half dozen cans of paint. And not another living soul.

Wynton Kresge rested across the trunk of the green Pontiac, in prone firing position. It was the pose of the dressed deer he tied onto his Olds hood when he drove home from hunting. The checkered grip from the Remington had imprinted its design into the pads of his fingers.
He smelled gun oil and gasoline and he thought Corde had been inside too damn long.

Then he heard the gunshot. A short crack from inside the house, the ground-floor windows flexing for an instant under the muzzle burst.

Front or back, front or back?

Pick one, damn it
.

Kresge stood up, hesitated, then ran over the barren lawn and through the open front door.

“Bill!” he shouted, and in response the poker caught him in the corner of the eye and laid open six inches of cheek. He fell backward hard. The shotgun went off, a chunk of clapboard exploded from the impact of the heavy shot. Hot blood streamed into his eye and mouth and he had a distorted image of Gilchrist limping forward to pick up the fallen shotgun. The professor’s right hand was swollen and dark and he too was bloodied about the face.

“Bill!” Kresge called, sputtering through blood.

Gilchrist lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at Kresge’s face. The deputy rolled over and tried to scramble away. He heard Gilchrist’s grunt as he pulled the trigger and realized that there was a spent round in the chamber. Kresge prayed that he didn’t know enough about guns to pump a new shell in.

He heard the double snap of the slide going back and forth and the tap of the old shell falling on the porch.

“No,” Kresge moaned, groping for his automatic. It had fallen from his holster and he could not find it. He crawled another few inches and pressed against the wrought-iron railing. He felt the heavy cold touch of the shotgun barrel on his back.

Then the explosion.

And another and another. Gilchrist reeling over, clutching his chest and stomach, where Corde’s bullets had exited. The shotgun fell on Kresge, who grabbed it in his blindness and pointed the muzzle toward the forest. Gilchrist dropped to his knees then fell forward.

Wynton Kresge was surrounded by numb silence, which was broken a moment later by a voice intruding on and finally destroying the deputy’s relief: the sound of Bill Corde crying, “Sarah, what have I done to you, what have I done?”

H
e walked unsteadily, the tufts of grass and wiry roots reaching out and snagging his feet. His voice was hoarse as he cried, “Sarah, Sarah?” Skittish birds flew up from their ground nests as he stumbled past. Sometimes he heard his own desperate echoes, which fed him momentary false hope.

He had sprained his wrist in the fall down the stairs but had refused any treatment and hurried outside to search for his daughter.

Or for what he was now beginning to believe with despair: his daughter’s body. She had been nowhere in the house or the garage.

Prodded by the horror of loss, his mind in chaos, Bill Corde was combing the five tricky acres around the house—tangled woods, pine needle dunes, a couple deep wells and plenty of dirt soft enough for a shallow grave. Wynton Kresge, stitched and in agony, strode through the same fields. As much as Corde, he dreaded finding a
small overturn of earth. Bringing such news about a child to her father was unthinkable to him; still he searched frantically. Other deputies joined in, even Lance Miller, wheezing against the grip of the elastic tape around his ribs. Jim Slocum and two off-duty New Lebanon deputies, entitled to be home with beer, wives and the tube, also combed the scruffy landscape.

Corde staggered through grass and whips of thin branches. He scrambled and shouldered his way through head-high brush. He fell over a cruelly hidden arc of barbed wire and bloodied his good palm to save his jaw. Every reclining blotch of pink seen through the weeds was a well of agony, every distant yip of a dog or owl’s hollow call. Once Corde cried hard as he leapt through tall grass to what turned out to be a beige IGA bag filled with empties.

“Sarah, Sarah?” he called in a whisper and continued across a stand of trees into another field, which was a dozen acres of fresh-plowed dirt.

By seven the sun is low, and narrow shadows of trees stretch out for yards and yards. Bill Corde sits on a hillock of chunky earth covered with dandelions and catnip and stalks of milkweed. His voice is gone, his strength too. He reaches out and affectionately strokes a yellow leaf in a wholly mad way. He thinks he should be searching the fields but he knows it is useless. He can do nothing, nothing but sit and mourn his daughter, and another loss too, for Sarah’s death will in an obscure, brutal way also poison the life he shares with Diane, and that with Jamie. The three of them will now be wedged forever apart.

While he searched, hope had been his only instrument and now it too is gone.

He sits for ten minutes in this paralysis then watches as a police cruiser rocks over the uneven ground toward him, Lance Miller cautiously piloting. It stops on an incline. The door opens. Diane gets out.

Then Sarah behind her.

Corde stands uneasily and steps forward. He hugs the girl hard, embracing then wholly encompassing her. “Honey, honey, honey!” he cries. His intensity begins to confuse her and he forces himself to grow nonchalant. Then a giddiness, which is not faked, sets in. He laughs hard and squeezes her hand.

Diane explains that Sarah came running up the road to their house twenty minutes before. She whispers to Corde, “She’s shaken up bad. She saw Gilchrist attack Ben and she ran and hid at the school. Then she came home on foot.” Corde cocks an anxious eyebrow and Diane reads the signal. She mouths, “She’s fine. He didn’t touch her.”

Diane then nods toward the ambulance parked at the entrance to Gilchrist’s driveway. “They gave her a pill that will keep her relaxed. Didn’t they, honey?”

“I feel sleepy, Mommy.”

Although there are a thousand questions he wants to ask, Corde knows not to pursue this conversation with his daughter now. He says, “Almost suppertime. How about we go home and fire up the barbecue?”

“Okay, Daddy. You hurt your hand.”

“It’s nothing.”

They start toward the Dodge in this holiday atmosphere but the weight of the events is suddenly too much for Sarah. She is staring at Gilchrist’s house as if gazing at a friend who has betrayed her. Although it is at some distance Corde slowly steps between her and the house on the slim chance that she might see blood. “He hurt Dr. Breck, Daddy. The Sunshine Man hurt Dr. Breck. I thought he was my friend.”