The Lesson of Her Death

  This was his favorite stretch of road--a sharp decline of smooth asphalt, which if you caught it at the right time of day was pretty much traffic free. Although he now rode a fifteen-speed Italian racing bike, the boy had often surged down this road on his old three-speed Schwinn, which was mounted with a speedometer. On a summer day with tires fat from the heat inflation he could hit fifty miles per hour before he had to brake for the stop light where Old Farm crossed Route 116.

  He started downhill.

  Jamie Corde loved to run and he was a ragingly fast runner, but he knew that nothing could beat the feeling of speed not of your own making--flying down a mountain of snow in Colorado or racing down a slope like this one, effortlessly, the gears ratcheting beneath your toe-clipped feet. As if the powers of nature were taking you someplace you couldn't find by yourself.

  The bike was steady under his strong arms as the dotted centerline became a single gray blur. He leaned forward to cut the drag and concentrated on nothing but steering around patches of pebbles. He did not think of his mother or his sister, he did not think of his father. With the exception of a few images of Greg LeMond in the Tour de France, Jamie Corde thought of speed and speed only.

  Halfway down the incline, to his enormous delight, he passed a car. True, it was an old Volkswagen diesel and it was being driven by someone who resembled Mrs. Keening, his antiquated Latin teacher. But it was nonetheless a car and he had outraced it, feeling with utter ecstasy the motion of the driver's head as she glanced at him with disapproving awe.

  A half mile ahead at the foot of the hill lay the intersection. He noticed with disappointment that he had timed his assault on the slope wrong. If he had waited three or four minutes at the top and started his descent just as the stoplight had turned red, he might have arrived when it was green and he would have swept smoothly through. But the light was now changing to yellow. Route 116 was heavily trafficked and was favored by this particular light, which kept drivers on Old Farm Road waiting impatiently for long minutes.

  He slowly squeezed the rear brake lever. Thonk. A sudden sensation. Something had struck his right calf. He believed he had hit a small animal--a field mouse or chipmunk--and it had been flung up against his leg by the hissing wheel. Almost simultaneously his hand on the brake lever began to cramp. He glanced at the handlebars and noticed that the lever was all the way to the metal.

  Jamie looked down at the rear wheel. What had struck his leg had not been an animal. It was the rubber pad of the rear brake shooting from its housing. The metal seemed slightly bent and he realized with horror that when he had lifted the bike onto the pegs in the garage last night, he must have hit the steel jacket that held the pad, loosening it. His father had warned him a dozen times to be careful when he placed the bike on the wall; he continually ignored the advice.

  He was two hundred yards from the intersection and still accelerating, approaching forty-five or fifty. The bike began to vibrate. He gripped the handlebars with trembling fists as he swept over stones and branches; he was going too fast to maneuver around them. Sweat of panic burst from his neck and under his arms. He felt the icy chill as the moisture evaporated in the slipstream. Jamie gently squeezed the front brake. No effect. He squeezed harder and the rear end of the bike rose suddenly, nearly sending him tumbling head-forward over the front wheel. He was now a hundred yards from the intersection. He kept as much pressure on the front brake as he dared but still the bike continued to speed up.

  A stand of tall oaks flashed into his vision and vanished. A roadside truck, some fence posts. The shoulder here was narrow. Paralleling his mad course was a barbed wire fence that would lacerate him if he were to set the bike down in the gravel beside the road.

  Jamie Corde, an A-minus science student, knows that terminal velocity in earth atmosphere is approximately one hundred and thirty miles an hour, he knows that human organs cannot withstand instant deceleration from any speed above fifty. He glances up at the cross-traffic along Route 116, trucks and cars whizzing past. Tears--from the wind, from his panic--streak from his squinting burning eyes and disappear into his hair. He sits up to increase wind resistance. He remembers a prayer from Sunday school. He drags his feet on the asphalt but shreds the running shoes' nylon toes quickly. He lifts his feet to the pedals and the bike hurtles forward once again.

  Seventy-five yards ...

  The hill had bottomed out but the bicycle tore along the road at close to sixty, the noise of the wheels and gears wholly obscured by the howl of the slipstream. Several bugs died against his face with sharp stings. The lightweight frame of the bike shuddered painfully with every stone.

  Jamie eased onto the centerline of Old Farm Road where there was less debris. A fragment of bottle or a smear of grease could kill him.

  Fifty yards from the intersection ...

  He believed he heard a horn behind him, maybe the Volkswagen driver trying to warn him.

  Forty yards ...

  The man in a car waiting at the light glanced in his rearview mirror and Jamie saw astonishment in the glossy rectangle that reflected the man's eyes.

  Thirty ...

  Two Japanese imports and a Buick dashed through the intersection on 116 going north. A tanker truck rumbled south.

  And Jamie Corde began to pedal.

  He couldn't stop in time. That was clear. Either he was going to dart between cars or he was going to get nailed. He lowered himself into his best aerodynamic huddle, clicked into his highest gear, released the front brake lever and pedaled as he never had before. He felt a warm sense of calm envelop him. The cars were on a different plane. The wind, the barbed wire, the road too. The bike itself. The fear vanished. He was above all of these things. The blue-haired woman piloting the Volkswagen, the driver whose eyes gaped in the mirror, the trees, the birds startled and fleeing from Jamie's own speed--nothing was of the least importance. He smiled and struggled to pedal fast enough to keep up with his trilling wheels, propelling himself faster and faster.

  Fifteen yards ...

  The car waiting for the green light was a Nissan and its license plate number was DRT 345.

  Ten ...

  An old skid mark in the shape of a sine curve crossed both lanes.

  Pedal pedal pedal pedal! ...

  A wooden crate that had contained Rock Island peaches lay shattered by the roadside, wads of blue tissue paper bleeding into the ground.

  ... faster than light....

  The southbound Taurus station wagon, doing about sixty-five, began its skid thirty feet from where the bike was entering the intersection. The gray vehicle's end drifted to the left as the frozen wheels howled. The driver steered into the skid expertly, which had the effect of moving the car into the oncoming lane and aiming the grille precisely at where the speeding bicycle would cross the highway.

  The front-seat passenger lowered her face below the dashboard.

  The baritone Detroit horn blared.

  The driver flung an arm over his eyes.

  Ping.

  Jamie Corde had an impression of fingers snapping beside his head as he passed in front of the station wagon. The bumper missed his rear tire by no more than six inches. Their combined speed was close to one hundred ten miles an hour.

  His ears filled with the horn and the endless scream of the locked wheels. Then he was past Route 116, dancing over what was otherwise a risky patch of pebbles and transmission fluid as confidently as if the road were a smooth, banked racetrack. He relaxed his numb legs and coasted. Horns shrieked behind him and he knew he was getting cussed out by at least one station wagon full of people.

  But what could he do except keep going, leaving them far far behind?

  Jamie Corde continued to pedal--furiously to keep his speed up. As he approached the school he stood high on the pedals. He gazed up into the sky and breathed in hot oily air, waving a fist above his head, laughing and howling like a desert-loco cowboy.

  Jim Slocum opened the candy bar and took a bite, pressing the ca
ndy up against the roof of his mouth. He dropped a dollar on the counter.

  "Be right with you, Officer," the young woman behind the counter said.

  "Take your time."

  Slocum leaned against the counter in the Sweets 'n Things shop at the Oakwood Mall. He took another bite of Milky Way, which was still his favorite candy bar. Always had been, always would be. The door to the candy store opened and Slocum watched a teenage boy enter. Fat. Wearing grimy clothes. Blond hair long and stiff with spray or grease. Slocum recognized him as Philip Halpern. The boy glanced at Slocum in unconcealed surprise. He walked to the wall of glass canisters of penny candy and began to fill a bag.

  Slocum was put off. He felt angry at the boy for his weight and his lack of willpower. He wanted to say, "You keep eating like that you're gonna stroke out by the time you're twenty, son." He kept these thoughts to himself though. Like all New Lebanon deputies Slocum had answered domestic violence calls at Creth Halpern's shabby bungalow. The father could be frightening--his eerily confused eyes as much as his temper. The ex-sailor would slouch on the couch picking at a flap of skin from his right-hook knuckle and smiling at the bloody streaks on the dented front of the Kelvinator.

  His wife, pungent with gin, holding ice to her pretty face, would look up with a drunk's sincerity and say, "We was fooling around is all." Philip, himself sometimes bruised, usually hid in the bedroom. There was a daughter too. Slocum bet she'd be knocked up and Remington-married by the time she was sixteen.

  Boy, you stay that fat, they won't let you join the Army and what're you gonna do then? Jim Slocum was convinced that all emotional troubles could be cured by varsity football or basic training.

  The clerk's customer left the store.

  "Miss," Slocum said to her, "I'm asking all the merchants here in the mall if they were open late on Tuesday night."

  "This have to do with the student girl who got killed?"

  "Yep, sure does."

  "Is this fellow, you know ..." Two furrows of concern appeared on the young woman's brow.

  "How's that?"

  She touched her heavily moussed brown hair. "What I heard was, Debbie Lipp told me, who's ever behind that killing? He's looking for brunets. I bought some Clairol yesterday. I mean, I had my colors done and going blond would throw it all off but ..."

  Slocum watched a tear center in her eye and roll over the edge of the eyelined lid.

  "I wouldn't go doing that, miss. He's not looking for brunets that we know about. Your hair looks real nice just the way it is." He smiled. "Sexy too."

  "I'm scared, Officer." Her brittle voice cracked. "I gotta drive home at night and Earl he's my husband's shift's not over till eleven. Sitting there in the trailer for three hours! By myself.... I can't watch TV, for the noises outside. I can't read. I just sit. I'm too addled to even knit and I'm going to miss my niece's birthday with the vest I promised her." She cried, grim and silent, for a moment.

  "We're doing everything in our power to get this son of a gun. Now I was asking about Tuesday?"

  "I can't help you, I'm afraid. We close at seven on Tuesday."

  Well, there you have it. Dead end. "Tell you what, give me a quarter pound of those jelly beans. What flavor'd they be?"

  "The watermelon ones?"

  "Yeah." Slocum paid. He took the change and smiled a flirt at her. "I get by here on occasion. I'll look in on you and see how you're doing."

  She swallowed and lifted away a tear with a corner of her sleeve. "I'd rather you was out catching him."

  "Well, we're doing that too," he said stonily and took the candy, walking to the door. He glanced at the Halpern boy. "You want a snack, eat apples," he snapped.

  Slocum ambled through the recession-battered wasteland of the mall until he came to the last store on his list. Floors for All. Inside a young man with trim hair sat at a desk, carefully writing in an order book. "Afternoon," Slocum said.

  "Howdy, Officer, what kind of carpet you interested in today? We got a special--"

  "This place here open late on Tuesday?"

  "Yessir. Lot of carpet stores close down weeknights but we're number one with carpet, number one with service. Nights're important. We get men come in after work to check out the carpet their little ladies've chose earlier in the day."

  "You working this last Tuesday?"

  "No sir, that'd be Mr. Trout. Amos Trout."

  "Will he be coming in today?"

  "Oh, he's in. He's not here right now because he got car problems. He took a late lunch. Should be back any time."

  "I'll stop back later."

  Slocum left the store and halfway to the exit nearly walked into Adeline Kraskow. "Well, well, well." Slocum circled her.

  "Hey, Jim," she said in her husky voice. She was young and might have been pretty if she'd forced her salt-and-pepper hair into staying put. The strands reminded him of BX cable. She also needed to move some of her boob weight down to her toothpick legs (a rearrangement Slocum never thought he'd recommend to any woman). Addie had dry skin and high cheekbones and she wore little makeup. This made Slocum think that she was desperate for a man.

  He asked, "What's happening?"

  "Doing a story on how this cult murder thing is affecting business."

  "Bad?"

  "Yep. People're scared. Staying home and not spending money. What are you doing here?"

  "I can't really talk about it."

  They stood for a minute, silent. Slocum had a fast series of thoughts: that he'd been promising to bring the wife to the mall, that he could do that on Sunday and that while she did her shopping he could talk to this guy Amos Trout at the carpet store. He asked, "I'm taking kind of a break. You interested in getting a drink?"

  Adeline Kraskow said, "Sure. I guess." And she stuffed her notebook into her huge purse and together they strolled through the mall.

  They had known each other for exactly one year, ever since she started covering the police beat for the Harrison County Register. The top-heavy Ms. Kraskow didn't know that Slocum regularly had acrobatic sexual intercourse with and had been fellated by her dozens of times--each instance of course in his Technicolor imagination while he was engaged in considerably more mundane sexual activity with his wife of eleven years, or with his right hand. He supposed that if in real life Addie had ever stubbed out one of her chain-smoked cigarettes and unzipped his fly he'd have gone limp as month-old rhubarb but still he liked to sit with his knee pressed accidentally on purpose up against her thigh while she asked her reporter's ever-serious questions. Now he maneuvered her into a dark corner booth of the mall's only full-fledged restaurant, T.K. Hoolihan's.

  "You're on duty?" she asked.

  "I'm undercover. I can drink."

  "You're wearing a uniform. How can you be undercover?"

  "Well, I'm wearing Jockey shorts. No, that's under-wear not undercover." He laughed to show it was a joke. Addie smiled with flirtatious contempt. They ordered neat scotches and he paid.

  "Thank'y." She lit a cigarette, inhaled and shot out a stream of smoke at the plastic Tiffany lampshade decorated with robins. "So, you got any leads yet?"

  "I told you--"

  "Is there a connection with the Susan Biagotti killing?"

  "Bill wouldn't want me talking on that."

  "I'm sure he wouldn't. But I can't ask only questions people want me to ask. The Biagotti killing never got solved. Here Steve Ribbon's revving up for reelection and he flubbed that case bad. Now there's a second girl dead."

  "Addie."

  She said, "You don't know how persistent I am. Tell me something. Anything. I promise your name won't appear anywhere in the story."

  Slocum sighed.

  Addie leaned forward, strategically, and whispered, "Cross my heart."

  The warmth she denied the parents she spent on the children.

  Diane Corde could at least say that for the woman.

  "Hello, Sarah," the woman said ebulliently. "I'm Dr. Parker. How are you today?"

>   In the silence that followed, the three of them standing in the veterinarian waiting room, Diane said, "Honey, you know how to answer."

  "I'm not going to take the spelling test," Sarah said in a dour, snappy voice. "And I'm not going back to school."

  "Well, now Sarah," the doctor said cheerfully, "we've got some other things to talk about. Let's not think about your spelling test today, all right?"

  "Sarah," Diane barked, "I won't have you behaving this way."

  Dr. Parker didn't intrude between mother and daughter; she simply kept the smile and extended her hand. Sarah shook it abruptly then stood back, looking, Diane thought sadly, like the little brat she'd become.

  "Come on inside," the doctor said. "I've got some things I'd like to show you." She motioned the girl into her office. Diane looked through the door and noticed a number of dark green boxes on her desk. The letters WISC-R were stamped into them.

  She then glanced at Dr. Parker to appraise today's fashion choice. A close-fitting red silk dress. With dark stockings. In New Lebanon! Didn't some famous gangster's moll wear a red dress when she turned him in?

  Diane stepped forward after Sarah. But Dr. Parker shook her head and nodded to the couch in the waiting room. "Just Sarah and me today."

  "Oh. Sure."

  Diane, feeling chastised, retreated to the couch and watched the receptionist open a pack of Trident and slip a piece into her mouth. The woman noticed Diane staring at her and held up the package.

  "I don't chew gum, thank you."

  As the doctor's door closed Diane caught a glimpse of her daughter's face staring fearfully down at the boxes. The door latch clicked. Diane sighed and aimlessly picked through a basket of wilted magazines. She lifted one to her lap with substantial effort and turned the pages.

  A few minutes later Diane closed the unread magazine and slumped on this rec room couch, awash with defeat.

  Defeated by her husband, in whose presence Sarah relaxed and laughed--her husband who could speak Sarah's flawed, tricky language while Diane could not.

  Defeated by Sarah herself with her wily tactics of tears and panic.

  By this harlot of a shrink, who was taking their scarce money so eagerly.

  And by her own guilt.

  Diane Corde gazes with unseeing eyes at a glossy magazine peppered with giddy photos of models while her legs shake with the terrible anguish of retribution. Diane Corde, fairly good Methodist, has been taught to believe in divine justice, taught to believe that revenge is fair and cleansing. But it is not. Because the person who is paying the exacted price for the sins is not the mother who committed them but the daughter.