The Lesson of Her Death (62 page)

“It’s all right, honey. You’re going to be all right.”

“I feel sleepy. I lost my backpack.”

“We’ll get it later, honey.”

“I left it in Dr. Breck’s car. It has my tape recorder in it. Dr. Breck made me run when the Sunshine Man …” Her tiny voice fades.

Diane’s fingertips rise slowly to her lips but she is
determined not to reveal any more horror in front of the girl. She forces a smile onto her face.

Corde asks Diane, “How’s Breck?”

She hesitates. Corde knows she’s considering if she should admit the existence of this knowledge. “I called the hospital,” she whispers. “He’ll live. Hundreds of stitches.”

Sarah looks groggily away. “I don’t like it here, I’m afraid he’s going to come back to his house.”

“Who?” Diane asks.

“The Sunshine Man.”

Corde crouches down. “He’s gone away, honey. He’ll never come back. I’ve sent him away.”

Diane looks at the house. She says, “He lives
there
, your wizard?”

Sarah says, “I saw him behind the cow pasture a couple times. I wanted him to cast a spell to make me smart so one day I followed him here. But I was ascared to ask so I left.”

“And she wrote a story about it.”

Corde pulls the two stained pages from his breast pocket and reads the words he near to memorized earlier in the day. “
‘And the girl climbed onto the back of Cloud-Tipper the eagle and hugged his feather neck. They sailed away from the yellow house. They followed the Sunshine Man home. They flew into the yard then past the cow field and past the old well and the burned-down silo that looked like whale ribs and over the railroad bridge and along the path to the river. Finally, they came to a clearing in the woods. Cloud-Tipper landed gentle. And there was the Sunshine Man’s cottage.…’
”

“You came here by yourself, Sarah?” Diane’s eyelids lower at the insolence of tragedy averted by the smallest slip of fate.

“I just wanted him to make me smart, Mommy.”

Diane casually slips her arm around her daughter and they walk toward the squad car. Corde hobbles
along behind. Mother and daughter separate for a moment, the girl running ahead.

Corde catches up with his wife, who is now silent, the same wary expression on her face that she’d worn at Jamie’s bedside. Corde knows why but doesn’t want to consider it now. The pain in his arm is making up for lost time and he’s half faint by the time he slides into the backseat of the Dodge, next to Diane. Sarah has claimed the front. Diane brushes her daughter’s hair with her fingers.

When Corde sits closer to his wife she shies away from him. Her motion is subtle but is clear.

Miller starts the car and drives slowly over the rough ground, the Dodge sashaying like a canoe in a powerboat’s wake. Corde lowers his forehead to his thumb, as if administering Lent ashes, and lets his palm take the whole weight of his head. This is what he thinks:
I am just doing my job the only way I know how. What more is a man supposed to do?
Though Corde suspects that a man must do more and probably a lot more. He knows that when your daughter gets well your son gets sick and when the car is paid off the mortgage goes up and when you decide you love your wife she’s gone to another man.… There’s no end to the burdens life lays on you. Oh, there is so much to do and more after that. And more and more and more … But it seems to him that this isn’t so much the problem as is finding somebody or something that can show you exactly
what
has to be done. This is the lesson. This is what Bill Corde doubts he’ll ever get right.

“Everybody buckle up now,” Lance Miller announces and turns the cruiser onto the highway.

Corde got the new FI-113 written up but it was a chore. He was extra careful because he knew it was going to be the basis for Jim Slocum’s comments to the press and Hammerback Ellison’s as well and he wanted it to be as
clear as possible. He tried dictating into Sarah’s tape recorder but he kept getting tongue-tied and had to go back to ruled paper and a Bic medium-point.

The
Register
lost its exclusive. The killings had been laid at the feet of a college professor who’d taught at Harvard and had written book reviews for the
New York Times
. The Associated Press and some big-city newspaper reporters came to town, along with a herd of earnest young TV reporters (one from CNN, to the town’s delight) with their hair spray and crisp outfits and fancy electronics. One journalist referred to Gilchrist as the “New Lebanon Cult Killer” but Sheriff Jim Slocum said that “this didn’t appear to be so much a cult situation as a romance-oriented homicide and some follow-up homicides to cover it up.”

Corde had been granted dispensation from learning the radio codes and was now in charge of what Slocum was calling the Felony Desk, something he’d thought up after watching
America’s Most Wanted
one night. Things were slow though, the only felon at the moment being Dell Tucker, a New Lebanon farmer who’d turned an AR-15 full-automatic and had been heard testing it on gophers. Corde figured that was mostly a federal offense so why bother? Besides Corde had gopher problems himself.

Wynton Kresge had drawn a tough rotation from Hammerback Ellison. Being new he’d been assigned to a month of speed-trap duty out in the unincorporated portions of Harrison County. Corde told him they couldn’t all be glamour assignments.

“S’hardly fair,” Kresge had muttered. Sitting on Corde’s desk in the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department he was now looking over the felony investigation report. “Gilchrist flew back here the day before Jennie was killed.…” He was speaking to himself, picturing it. “He bought a new ticket under a different name.”

“We should’ve checked passengers, IDs and forms of payment. The information was there.”

Kresge said, “Seems like you can’t think of everything.”

Corde thought for a moment. “True, you can’t. But you have to.”

“Flew back all the way from San Francisco?” Kresge mused.

Corde continued, “And he just stayed in New Lebanon. He rented that house in the woods, the place we found him in. He rented it for a month, laying low. When he called people he just told them he was calling from San Francisco and they believed him.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“I didn’t
find
it out. I figured it out. From what he told me. The best source of information on a murder is the perpetrator. Remember that.”

“Well, I will.”

“I think he was going to stay there for a little while then reappear like he’d come back from the conference. But that first morning he must’ve seen Sarah in the woods. He decided to use her to get to me. Her and Jamie too.”

“How?”

“His threats against Sarah might’ve stopped me. Or if anything’d happened to the kids, I would’ve been in no shape to keep going. Remember, everybody else was looking for the Moon Killer. T.T. Ebbans and me—and you too—were looking for somebody like Gilchrist. He knew that. I was the one he had to stop. Hardly Ribbon.”

“Or Werewolf Slocum,” Kresge whispered. “When you were at the house, where you shot him, he said he had Sarah. Why’d he say that?”

Corde grimaced. “To do just what he did: get the advantage on me. I didn’t play it too smart. It never occurred to me that she’d gotten away. I walked in and asked first off where she was. That gave him something on me and he used it pretty damn well considering he was making it up as he went along. He was playing with me. He got me pretty riled then calmed me down telling
me that Sarah was safe and telling me why he killed Jenny. Put me off my guard.”

“Who’s this Breck fellow?” Kresge looked at the report.

Now there’s a question for you
.

“I just had me a talk with him. He was Sarah’s tutor. That’s all he was. Breck read part of Sarah’s book about this wizard watching our house. He asked her about it and found out she hadn’t made that part up. He figured it was the man leaving the threats and that meant he was the killer.”

“Why didn’t he tell us before?”

“He just read the damn thing five minutes before Gilchrist gutted him.”

And two days after
I
read the same story
.

“A wrong-time, wrong-place fellow, Breck was,” Kresge offered.

“You could say.”

Although there was a lot more to Breck than this, Corde now understood. But that had nothing to do with Gilchrist or the investigation, and it was going to take a lot of thinking and lot more talking before Corde figured out what to do about the Ben Breck situation—if there was anything he
could
do. And the person he had to talk to about it, well, she wasn’t much in the mood for conversation.

Who’s this Breck fellow?

“Gilchrist,” Kresge said almost reverently. “He was one step ahead of us the whole time.”

“He always was. And one step behind us too.”

“How’d you know he was in that house, Bill? I’ve lived in New Lebanon ten years and never even knew there were houses down there by the river.”

“It’s tough to explain how the process of deduction works, Wynton.”

“You mean it’s something you’re born with?”

“No. You can learn. The more you practice the better you are. Remember that.”

“Well, I will.”

Corde stepped out into the backyard of his house and set down his Pabst Blue Ribbon. He inspected the strip of muddy dirt by the dryer exhaust. He shooed off a couple of grackles and bent down low to the ground then went lower, on all fours; it seemed to him the green fuzz hadn’t grown a millimeter in the last weeks. He decided it was crazy to try to grow grass here in this sunless rocky gully between two houses populated by hard-running teenage boys who loved shortcuts; he ought to put in gravel and be done with it.

Nevertheless Corde arranged the sprinkler carefully and turned on the water.

He sat down in a plaid lawn chair, the aluminum legs screeching on the slab of concrete he’d laid two years ago and spent two years meaning to enclose. He looked at his watch. Tonight the family was going to visit Jamie in the hospital. They were going to smuggle in a VCR and Corde was going to hook it up to the TV in the hospital room. They were all going to watch a movie Diane had rented, some cop comedy. But that excursion was planned for after dinner. Now, he wanted to relax for a few minutes. He opened the beer and drank half of it then replaced the can on the concrete while he watched the intermittent rainbow the sprinkler made as it waved a fan of water high enough to catch the last of the sun. He glanced behind him and saw Diane behind the twin Thermopanes, occupied with dinner.

Corde felt a stack of three-by-five cards gig him in the thigh and he took them out of his pocket. Most of them would be filed away in the tall green cabinets he had testily commandeered for his own use down at the Sheriff’s Department. One card though, filled with his careful block lettering, he intended to pin up on his bulletin board. He thought he would put it in the space next to his favorite quote—about physical evidence being the cornerstone of a case. This card read:

He slipped the card into his pocket then picked up his beer, took several sips and cradled the sweating can on his stomach, listening to the sounds of dusk: cicadas, cricket creaks, an owl waking to his hunger, a dinnertime summons to the neighbor children. Diane banged on the window and shouted, “Ten minutes.”

Bill Corde said okay. He waited half that time then stood and stretched. He walked to the edge of the concrete deck and leaning outward began to wave the white cards high in the air, shouting “Whoa, whoa!” at a half dozen shiny grackles, which fled from his muddy patch of frail lawn and vanished into the moonless sky.