Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

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?"

He 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 hopes.

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 shuddered 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 yard 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, set 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."

"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. "Hell 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?"