Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

Jennie gave a bored glance at Okun and responded brashly that she'd never heard of her near namesake.

He asked her out three days later, a record in self-restraint.

At a university like Auden, located in a two-cinema, four-screen town, inappropriate liaisons cannot proceed as they would in an anonymous city. Okun and Jennie spent their time walking in the woods or driving out to the quarry. Or spending nights in her room or his apartment.

He brooded to the point of fetish. Why this fierce attraction? Jennie wasn't gifted artistically. She wasn't brilliant, she was a B-minus student with a solid Midwestern artistic sensibility (this meant that she had to be told what was valid and what was not). He was stung by these limitations of hers. When he inventoried what he loved about her he came up with shrinkage: the way she covered her mouth with her delicate hand at scenes of violence in movies, the way she let slip little murmurs from her throat as she looked at a chill spring wash of stars above them, the way she could drop her shoulder and dislodge a satin bra strap without using her fingers.

Of course some aspects of Jennie Gebben he loved intensely: her suggestions when they were making love that he might like to try "something different." Did he enjoy pain? Would he please bury his finger in her, no no not in my cunt, please, yeah, there all the way… Did he like the feel of silk, of women's nylons? And she would bind a black seamed stocking tight around his balls and stroke his glans until he came, forceful and hurting, on the thick junction of her chin and throat.

Several times she dressed him in one of her nightgowns and on those occasions he emptied himself inside her within seconds of fierce penetration.

These were the bearings of their relationship and as impassioned as Okun felt, he knew they could not be trusted. Not when your lover was Jennie Gebben. The murmurs and whimpers had taken on too great a significance for him. Out of control he crashed.

It occurred when one night he had blurted a marriage proposal to her. And she, less intelligent, a common person, had suddenly encircled him in her arms in a terrifying maternal way. She shook her head and said, "No, honey. That's not what you want."

Honey. She called him honey! It broke his heart.

He raged. Jennie was what he wanted. His tongue made a foray into the crevice of his lips and he tasted her. That was proof, that was the metaphor: he hungered for her. He cried in front of her while she looked on maturely, head cocked with affection. He blurted a shameful stream: he was willing to do whatever she wanted, get a job in the private sector, work for a commercial magazine, edit… He had purged himself with all the hokey melodrama of mid-list literature.

Brian Okun, radiant scholar of the esoteric grafting of psychology and literature, recognized this obsessive effluence for what it was. So he was not surprised when, in an instant, love became hate. She had seen him vulnerable, she had comforted him – this, the only woman who had ever rejected him – and he detested her.

Even now, months after this incident, a day after her murder, Okun felt an uncontrollable surge of anger at her, for her simpering patronizing Mutterheit. He was back on the Nobel path, yes. But she had shaken something very basic in his nature. He had lost control, and his passions had skidded violently like a car on glazed snow. He hated her for that.

Ah Jennie, what have you done to me?

Brian Okun pushed his hands together and waited for the trembling to stop. It did not. He breathed deeply and hoped for his heart to calm. It did not. He thought that if only Jennie Gebben had accepted his proposal, his life would be so unequivocally different.

The smell of the halls suggested something temporary: Pasty, cheap paint. Sawdust. Air fresheners and incense covering stale linens. Like a barracks for refugees in transit. The color of the walls was green and the linoleum flecked stone gray.

Bill Corde knocked on the door. There was no answer.

"Ms. Rossiter? I'm from the Sheriffs Department."

Another knock.

Maybe she'd gone to St Louis for the funeral.

He glanced behind him. The corridor was empty. He tried the knob and pushed the open door.

A smell wafted out and surrounded him. Jennie Gebben's spicy perfume. Corde recognized it immediately. He lifted his hand and smelled the same scent – residue from the bottle on her dressing table at home.

Corde hesitated. This was not a crime scene and students in dormitories retained rights of privacy and due process. He needed a warrant in hand to even step into the room.

"Ms. Rossiter?" Corde called. When there was no answer he walked inside.

The room Jennie and Emily shared had a feeble symmetry. Bookcases and mirrors bolted to opposite walls. The beds parallel to each other but the desks turned at different angles – looking up from a textbook, one girl would look out the small window at the parking lot; the other would gaze at a bulletin board. On one bed rested a stuffed rabbit.

Corde examined Jennie's side of the room. A cursory look revealed nothing helpful. Books, notebooks, school supplies, posters, souvenirs, photos of family members (Corde noticing that the young Jennie bore a striking resemblance to Sarah), makeup, hair curlers, clothes, scraps of paper, packages of junk desserts, shampoos, lotions. Sheer pastel underwear hung on a white string to dry. A U2 poster, stacks of cassettes, a stereo set with a cracked plastic front. A large box of condoms (latex, he noted, not the lambskin found at the crime scene). Thousands of dollars' worth of clothes. Jennie was a meticulous housekeeper. She kept her shoes in little green body bags.

Corde noticed a picture of two girls: Jennie and a brown-haired girl of delicate beauty. Emily? Was it the same girl in one of the pictures on Jennie's wall at home? Corde could not remember. They had their arms around each other and were mugging for the camera. Their black and brown hair entwined between them and made a single shade.

A clattering of laughter from the floor above reminded him that he was here without permission. He set the picture down and turned toward Jennie's desk.

He crested the rise on 302 just in front of his house.

Corde had ticketed drivers a dozen times for sprinting along this strip at close to sixty. It was a straightaway, posted at twenty-five after a long stretch of fifty, so you couldn't blame them for speeding, Corde supposed. But it was a straightaway in front of his house where his kids played. When he wasn't in the mood to ticket he took to leaving the squad car parked nose out in the drive, which slowed the hot-rodders down considerably and put a slew of brake marks on the asphalt just over the crown on the rise like a grouping of bullet tracks in a trap.

Setting a good example, Corde braked hard then signaled and made the turn into his driveway. He parked the cruiser next to his Ford pickup, which was fourthhand but clocked in at only sixty-seven thousand miles. He stepped out into the low sun and waved to Jamie, who was in the garage, lifting his bike up onto pegs in the exposed two-by-fours. In Jamie's hands, the bike seemed to weigh only a pound or two.

The boy was fair-skinned and slight but he was strong as sinew. He worked out constantly, concentrating on many reps of lighter weight rather than going for bulk. He waved back to his father and headed toward the backyard, where he would pitch a tennis ball onto the crest of the roof and snag the fly with all sorts of fancy catches. The expression on his face was the same one that Corde had puzzled over for over a year until he finally recognized it as a look of Diane's – contentment, Corde liked to think, though also caution and consideration. He was proud of his son – quiet and easygoing, a devoted member of the freshman wrestling team, a B-plus student without trying, good in Latin and biology and math, the secretary of the Science Club.