The Lesson of Her Death

  Corde pulled off his muddy shoes and hugged Sarah. He washed his hands and face in the kitchen sink then poured a Diet Coke for her and a seltzer for himself. Only the Warner Brothers glasses were clean and he kept the Road Runner glass for himself. He handed Sarah Porky Pig.

  They got to work.

  She was particularly edgy tonight. The study session went badly from the start. She panicked often and began talking nonsense, joking and giddy. This put Corde in a bad mood because Diane had told him that Mrs. Beiderson was making special arrangements for Sarah's tests and he thought the silliness measured up to ingratitude.

  They were in the living room, on the couch, surrounded by a mass of papers. Sarah looked so small and overwhelmed by the mess that Corde picked up the papers and organized them into a single stack. They were Sarah's attempts at the practice spelling test. So far, twelve tries, her best score had been twenty-two out of fifty. Thirty-three was passing.

  Corde had that day written a check to Dr. Parker for $880, which was exactly twice what it cost him to insulate the entire attic.

  "Let's try again," he said.

  "Daddy, I don't want to take the test. Please! I don't feel good."

  "Honey, we've got to work on a few more words. We're only up to the M's."

  "I'm tired."

  Tired was the one thing his souped-up little daughter was not. At battle stations again, they sat with the spelling list between them.

  "Okay, the M words." He joked, "The M for 'mouthful' words."

  "I don't want to take the damn test," Sarah said sullenly.

  "Don't cuss."

  "It's a shitty test! I don't want--"

  "Young lady, don't you use that word again."

  "--to take it! I hate Dr. Parker."

  "Just the M words."

  "I'm tired," she whined.

  "Sarah. Spell 'marble.'"

  Eyes squinting, lip between teeth, back erect. She said, "M-A-R-B-L-E."

  "Very good, honey. Wonderful." Corde was impressed.

  "Marble" went on the plus side, joined by "make," "mark," "miss" and "milk." Sarah wasn't as lucky with "middle," "missile," "makeshift," "messenger," "melon" and "mixer." Dr. Parker hadn't suggested it but Corde took to drawing pictures of the objects next to the words. This seemed clever but didn't help.

  Sarah's mood was getting progressively worse. Her leg bounced. Her tiny fingers wound together frantically.

  "Now spell 'mother.'"

  Sarah started to cry.

  Corde was sweating. He'd been through this so many times and her defeats were always his. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and point her at Jamie and say, "You've got the same blood. There's no difference between you. Can't you understand that? Just work hard! Work hard! Why won't you do that?" He wanted to call up the psychiatrist and tell her to get her fashion-plate ass over here this minute. In a tired voice: "You're doing fine. A lot better than when we started tonight."

  "No, I'm not!" she said. She stood up.

  "Sit down, young lady. You've done the word before. Try it again. 'Mother.'"

  "M-O- ..."

  Corde heard her hyperventilating and thought momentarily of Diane's long labor when the girl was born. Breathe, breathe, breathe....

  "It's E-R. No, wait. M-O-T ... I got lost. Wait, wait ..."

  Corde set the piece of paper on the table with the other failed tests and picked up a blank sheet. He began to write, "M-O-T-H ..."

  "No!" she screamed.

  Corde blinked at the volume of the wail and the terror it contained. "Sarah!"

  "I don't know it! I don't know it!" She was howling. Corde--standing up, sending a chair flying--believed she was having a seizure.

  "Sarah!" he shouted again. His neck bristled in panic.

  Corde took her by the shoulders. "Sarah, stop it!"

  She screamed again and tipped into hysteria.

  He shook her hard, her hair flying around her head like golden smoke. The glass tumbled over, a flood of brown soda poured onto the carpeting. She broke away from him and raced up the stairs to her room. Sheetrock throughout the house shook as her door slammed.

  Corde, hands shaking, was mopping up the spilled soda with wads of napkins when the doorbell rang.

  "Oh, Lord, now what?"

  Steve Ribbon leaned on the doorpost, looking out over the lawn. "Talk to you for a minute, Bill?"

  Corde looked toward Sarah's bedroom then back to Ribbon. "Come on in."

  Ribbon didn't move. "Your family home?"

  "Just Sarah. Jamie and Diane are at a meet. Should be home anytime."

  The sheriff didn't speak for a minute. "Why don't you step outside here?"

  Corde shook his head. "I don't want to go too far. Sarah's not feeling well." He stepped onto the porch. Ribbon closed the door behind him. Corde flicked spilled soda off his fingers. The sheriff's squad car was parked in the driveway. Jim Slocum was driving. In the back was a blond man, heavy, craggy-faced, eyes fixed on the headrest in front of him.

  Ribbon's eyes scanned the moonlit ground, studying the perfectly trimmed grass. He said, "Bill, I've got to talk to you. They found Jennie's roommate. Emily Rossiter."

  Corde crossed his arms.

  They found ... Not we found. Corde understood the difference.

  It was his turn to stare at the neatly edged front lawn. From where he stood it was in some geometric shape whose name he couldn't recall--a rectangle pushed to one side.

  "Somebody hit her over the head then threw her in Blackfoot Pond right by the dam. She drowned. And there's some pretty unpleasant stuff he did to her." Ribbon paused. "There's a tentative match between shoeprints nearby her and those found by the dam the night Jennie Gebben was killed. I know your opinion, Bill, but it looks like there probably was a cult killer all along."

  PART TWO

  Physical Evidence

  The medical examiner was in a prickly mood. For the second time in two weeks, he stood in mud, at night, beside this dark pond. His usual demeanor--that of a cheerful TV doctor--was absent.

  Streaks on her face, hair muddy and plastered around her head the way a bald man hides scalp, still-beautiful Emily Rossiter lay on a blanket, faceup. A black hideous wound marred her temple. A large fishhook was embedded deep in her groin in the center of a slick patch of dark pubic hair. The hook was attached to a long piece of twenty-pound test line, which had pulled her skirt up between her legs.

  A crowd of locals and reporters stood on the fringe of the crime scene--a sloping grassy backyard that bordered Blackfoot Pond.

  The ME, a thin man of fifty, said to T.T. Ebbans, "Blow to the right temple with a rough, irregular object. Death by drowning."

  "Rape?"

  "Not this time."

  "What about the hook?" Ebbans asked. "After she was dead?"

  "Dollars to doughnuts."

  Jim Slocum said to Ebbans, "There, you've got your postmortem piercing. That's common in sacrificial murders."

  Ebbans pushed past the reporters, telling them that Sheriff Ribbon would be holding a press conference in ten minutes. He joined Bill Corde up by the road.

  "Detective Corde!" Addie Kraskow waved frantically, her laminated Register press pass bouncing on her chest. "You didn't think a serial killer was involved. You feel differently now?"

  Corde ignored her, and Ebbans repeated, "Ten minutes. Press conference."

  Addie didn't pursue the question anyway; she noticed a photo opportunity and sent her photographer to shoot the body being zippered up and carried toward the ambulance that stood in the driveway of a house, next to a child's pink-and-white tricycle. The cameramen were scrambling like panicked roaches to get the tricycle and the body bag in the same shot.

  The County Rescue Squad scuba divers arrived and suited up. One of them looked at the pond and muttered, "Whore's pussy."

  Corde sternly told the man to act professionally.

  On the periphery of the action Wynton Kresge leaned against an old,
beige Dodge Aspen crowned by a blue revolving light. On the door was the Auden University seal, printed with the school name and the words Veritas et Integritas. Ebbans nodded in his direction. Corde and Kresge ignored each other.

  "I step into a mantrap on this one, or what?" Corde asked Ebbans.

  "You play it like you see it, Bill. That's all you can ever do."

  "Crime Scene have a chance before everybody started padding around?"

  "It was virgin. We didn't find much other than the boot prints but it was a virgin."

  Corde glanced at the cluster of policemen beside the pond. One was the blond man he had seen in the back of Ribbon's car.

  Ebbans followed his eyes. "Charlie Mahoney."

  "What's he doing here?"

  "Representative of the family."

  "Uhn. What family?"

  "Works for Jennie's father."

  "And?"

  "Don't ask me."

  "Well, let's see what we've got." Corde started down to the water.

  "Wait up a minute, Bill."

  He stopped. Ebbans stepped beside him and when he spoke his voice was a whisper. Corde lowered his ear toward the man. "I just wanted you to know," Ebbans began then hesitated. "Well, it's bullshit is what it is...."

  Corde was astonished. He had never known Ebbans to cuss. "What, T.T.?"

  Their eyes were on an indentation in the grass--a wheel tread left by the gurney that had carried Emily's body to the ambulance.

  "Was there any connection between you and Jennie?"

  Corde looked up and kept his eye on the mesmerizing lights atop the ambulance. "Go on. What are you saying?"

  "There's some talk at County--just talk--that you burnt those letters because you were, you know ..."

  "I was what?"

  "'Seeing her' is what somebody said. And because of that maybe you wanted to deep-six the evidence. I don't believe--"

  "I didn't do that, T.T."

  "I know that. I'm just telling you what I heard. It's just a rumor but it's one of those rumors that won't go away."

  Corde had been in town government long enough to know there are two reasons rumors don't go away. Either because somebody doesn't want them to go away.

  Or because they're true.

  "Who's behind it?" Corde asked.

  "Don't know. Hammerback seems to be on your side. But with the election he's paying out his support real slow and if you turn out to be a liability he'll burn you in a second. Who else it could be I just don't know."

  At Corde's feet drops of dew caught the flashing lights and flickered like a hundred miniature Christmas bulbs. "'Predate your telling me, T.T."

  Ebbans walked to the ambulance and Corde headed down to the pond, whose turgid surface was filled with bubbles from the divers as they searched for clues to the death of this beautiful young woman--whose story and whose secrets were now lost forever and would never be transcribed on one of Bill Corde's neatly ordered index cards.

  He stood for a long time, with his feet apart in a patch of firm mud, looking over the water, and found himself thinking not at all of fingerprints or weapons or footprints or fiber traces but meditating on the lives of the two girls murdered in this dismal place and wondering what the lesson of those deaths would ultimately be.

  "She's calm now." Diane Corde was speaking to Dr. Parker in her office. "I've never seen her have an attack like that. Bill said he asked her to spell a word and she just freaked out."

  Mother. That was what Sarah was supposed to spell. Diane didn't tell the prim doctor this. Neither did she say how much she resented Corde's callousness in telling her which word so panicked Sarah.

  Dr. Parker said, "I wish you'd called me. I could have given her a tranquilizer. She had a panic attack. They're very dangerous in children."

  Although the doctor's words were spoken softly Diane felt the lash of criticism again. She said in a spiny tone, "I was out and my husband had just got some bad news. We couldn't deal with it all at once."

  "That's what I'm here for."

  "I'm sorry," Diane said. Then she was angry with herself. Why should I feel guilty? "I've kept her out of--"

  "I know," Dr. Parker said. "I called the school after you called me."

  "You did?" Diane asked.

  "Of course I did. Sarah's my patient. This incident is my responsibility." The blunt admission surprised Diane but she sensed the doctor wasn't apologizing; she was simply observing. "I misjudged her strength. She puts on a good facade of resilience. I thought she'd be better able to deal with the stress. I was wrong. I don't want her back in school this term. We have to stabilize her emotionally."

  The doctor's suit today was dark green and high-necked. Diane had noticed it favorably when she walked into the office and was even thinking of complimenting her. She changed her mind.

  Dr. Parker opened a thick file. Inside were a half dozen booklets, on some of which Sarah's stubby handwriting was evident. "Now I've finished my diagnosis and I'd like to talk to you about it. First, I was right to take her off Ritalin."

  I'm sure you're always right.

  "She doesn't display any general hyperkinetic activity and she's very even-tempered when not confronted with stress. What I observed about her restlessness and her inattentiveness was that they're symptomatic of her primary disability."

  "You said that might be the case," Diane said.

  "Yes, I did."

  But of course.

  "I've given her the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Gray Oral Reading Test, Bender Gestalt, Wide Range Achievement Test and the Informal Test of Written Language Expression. The results show your daughter suffers from severe reading retardation--"

  "I don't care what you say," Diane blurted, "Sarah is not retarded."

  "That doesn't mean that she's retarded, Mrs. Corde. Primary reading retardation. It's also called developmental dyslexia."

  "Dyslexia? That's where you turn letters around."

  "That's part of it. Dyslexics have trouble with word attack--that's how we approach a word we've never seen before--and with putting together words or sentences. They have trouble with handwriting and show an intolerance for drill. Sarah also suffers from dysorthographia, or spelling deficit."

  Come on, Diplomas, cut out the big words and do what I'm paying you to do.

  "She has some of dyslexia's mathematical counterpart--developmental dyscalculia. But her problem is primarily reading and spelling. Her combined verbal and performance IQ is in the superior range. In fact she's functioning in the top five percent of the population. Her score, by the way, is higher than that of the average medical student."

  "Sarah?" Diane whispered.

  "It's also six points higher than your son's. I checked with the school."

  Diane frowned. This could not be. The doctor's credentials were suddenly suspect again.

  "She's reading about three years behind her chronological age and it usually happens that the gap will widen. Without special education, by the time she's fifteen, Sarah's writing age would be maybe eleven and her spelling age nine or ten."

  "What can we do?"

  "Tutoring and special education. Immediately. Dyslexia is troubling with any student but it's an extremely serious problem for someone with Sarah's intelligence and creativity--"

  "Creativity?" Diane could not suppress the laugh. Why, the doctor had mixed up her daughter's file with another patient's. "She's not the least creative. She's never painted anything. She can't carry a tune. She can't even strum a guitar. Obviously she can't write ..."

  "Mrs. Corde, Sarah is one of the most creative patients I've ever had. She can probably do all of those things you just mentioned. She's been too inhibited to try because the mechanics overwhelm her. She's been conditioned to fail. Her self-esteem is very low."

  "But we always encourage her."

  "Mrs. Corde, parents often encourage their disabled children to do what other students can do easily. Sarah is not like other children. Encouragement like t
hat is just another way of helping her fail."

  "Well," Diane said stiffly. "You sure don't hesitate to call it the way you see it, Doctor."

  Dr. Parker smiled a smile that meant nothing at all to Diane, who was for once relieved that the psychiatrist had set a frigid atmosphere for these sessions. She had no problem saying bluntly, "That's very well and good, Doctor, but how the hell are you going to help my little girl?"

  "I want you to find a tutor. They're expensive but you need one and you need a good one. I recommend that you check with the Auden lab school."

  "Why can't we help her? Bill and me?"

  "Sarah needs a specialist."

  "But--"

  "It's important that she see someone who knows what they're doing."

  Diane thought it was remarkable that you could both admire and detest someone at the same time.

  "Second, I'd like to work with her myself. Until we build up her confidence in herself she's never going to improve. Her self-esteem has been very badly damaged."

  "What can you do that we haven't? All right, maybe the way we tried to teach her was wrong. But you keep forgetting that we've always supported her. We always tell her how good she is. How talented."

  "But she doesn't believe you. And how can she? You push her to work harder and it does no good. You tell her she's doing well but she isn't, she's failing her classes. You tell her she's smart but by all the outward manifestations she isn't. Mrs. Corde, you've acted for the best motives but your efforts have been counterproductive. We need to encourage Sarah to do the things she's genuinely good at."

  "But haven't you heard what I've told you? She isn't good at anything. She doesn't even like to help me cook or sew. All she does is play games by herself, go to movies and watch TV."

  "Ah. Precisely." Dr. Parker smiled like a chess player calling checkmate.

  Diane blinked. What'd I say?

  "I'd like to see Sarah as soon as possible. If you could make the appointment with Ruth." The cryptic eyes, so talented at dismissals, glanced at another file.

  "Okay, sure." Diane stood.

  Then she hesitated.

  She sat down again. "Say, Doctor ..."

  "Yes?"