Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

Her reluctance to discuss her lovers fueled the rumors that she slept with professors. Last year she supposedly went out with one professor for much of the spring term. They kept it intensely secret though it was believed that he was in the Education School and that they had contemplated marriage.

A number of girls call Jennie's sexual behavior disgraceful but when they do, the disdain is transparent and there is envy beneath.

Many students say that they considered her a searcher, unsettled, unhappy. Several give similar versions of the same incident: Late one night Jennie was in the stairwell of the dorm by herself. She was crying and the echoes of her voice on the concrete walls made a terrible, mournful moan. "I'm so lonely …" one student believes she was saying. Another, on the floor below, heard, "If only I had him…"

She was not religious and had never attended a church in New Lebanon. She had some tapes by New Age musicians and several crystal necklaces but little interest in spiritualism or the occult. Students have given conflicting reports about her relationship with her parents. Jennie was cool toward her mother. Her connection with her father, on the other hand, was turbulent. On the phone she sometimes told him in oddly passionate terms that she missed and loved him. Other times she slammed the phone down and announced about him, "What a prick."

Bill Corde drops his quarter on the table and scoops up his index cards, considering all these facts, and he tries to picture the killer. But he sees woefully little. Far, far less than the profile in the Register (which infuriated him partly because he doubted he himself could ever create such a vivid image of a criminal). Corde's own profiling technique, that of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, is charted on the yellowed sheet of paper pinned on the corkboard behind his desk. It is a lengthy process of inputting voluminous facts, arranging them into models, assessing the crime and finally creating then fine-tuning the criminal profile. (He knows that the NCAVC procedure includes an optimistic sixth and final step: apprehension of the killer – a stage that seems despairingly unattainable at this moment, eight long days after Jennie Gebben's demure body was found in a bed of muddied hyacinths beside that gloomy, still pond.)

Corde knows many details about Jennie Gebben. He knows that Brian Okun has lied to him and that Professor Sayles might have. He knows that two boys were near the dam shortly before her death and one of them may have had a knife. The trail is cooling and there is so much more to learn. More interviews, more facts to unearth… Though he secretly wonders: Is he merely stalling, hoping for a picture of the killer to flutter down from heaven, a picture as clear as the portrait of Jennie taped inside his briefcase?

Bill Corde riffles the index cards.

He believes much and he knows little. A mass of information is in his hands but the truth is somewhere between the facts themselves, in the gaps of his knowledge, like the shadows between the flipping cardboard. For now, Corde sees only darkness as dense as the water in Blackfoot Pond. He sees no deeper than the reflection of double moons in the facets of a dead girl s necklace.

Corde hopes for startling illumination and yet he fears it will be a long, long time coming.

Her trouble came with the first asymmetrical block.

Resa Parker flipped through the green booklet, its cover printed with the large black letters VMI, Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, and noted the exact point where Sarah Corde's abilities failed her: trying to copy a line drawing of an uneven rectangle.

Setting this aside the psychiatrist reviewed the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Revised, examining the snaky plot of the verbal and performance tests in the WISC-R profile blocks. The Revised Gray Oral Reading Test, which was strictly timed, showed Sarah – a fourth grader – reading at a first-grade level. Without the stress of a clock she was slightly better.

The scores were worse than the doctor had expected.

Sarah now sat in front of her, struggling through the last of the diagnostic tests – the Informal Test of Written Language Expression. Dr. Parker saw the anxious behavior, the darting eyes, the quivering knees, the frosting of sweat. The psychiatrist, who had at one time been in daily analysis for six years, continually confronted her own anger and insecurity and the coldness with which they were manifest; she struggled to instill serenity in the child. "Take your time, Sarah." Big smile. "There's no rush."

She noted the process of internalizing. Sarah didn't sound out unknown or difficult words. She stared at them without lip movement until she applied whatever phonetic skills she could muster and then wrote the words slowly in crude letters. Sarah leaned forward, an intense frown on her brow as she tried to conjure up the words. In her eyes the agony of repeatedly slamming into her limitations was clear.

Children of policemen have a higher incidence of learning disabilities than those of other parents and Dr. Parker noticed in herself a kernel of resentment toward Bill Corde. It was a rancor that she would never reveal but that he would have to go a long way in rebutting. Diane Corde refined much of what she said through a very complex series of filters and Dr. Parker wondered just how much the man actually helped his daughter, in contrast to how much Diane believed, or wished, he did.

The doctor also knew something else – how little the girl would ultimately improve and the immense effort and expense even that limited progress would require. "I'm afraid your time's up," Dr. Parker said, and took the notebook from the girl, who was sweating and nearly breathless. She examined the girl's sad attempt to write a story about a simple illustration in the test booklet – a boy with a baseball. Sarah had started: His naem was Freddie. And he watnted to play bsebale, baseball, only … The handwriting was abysmal. The story continued for a half page; an average child could easily fill three of four pages in that time. "All right, Sarah, very good. That's the last of our tests."

Sarah looked mournfully as the written language test was slipped into the file. "Did I pass?"

"You don't pass these tests. They're just to tell me about you so I can help you do better in school."

"I don't want to go back to school."

"I understand, Sarah, but it's not a good idea for you to stay back another year. You don't want all your classmates to advance a grade while you're left behind, do you?"

"Yes," Sarah answered without hesitation, "I'd like that."

Dr. Parker laughed. "Well, how about if I call Mrs. Beiderson and have her agree that you can take your tests out loud? Would that be all right?"

"So I wouldn't have to write out the answers?"

"Right."

"Would she do that?"

"I'm sure she would." The call had already been made.

"What about the spelling test? I'm ascared of spelling." The voice grew meek. Manipulatively meek, the doctor noted. Sarah had tried this technique before, with success.

"I'd like you to take it. Would you do it for me?"

"I'll be up in front of everybody. They'll laugh at me."

"No, you can do it by yourself. You and Mrs. Beiderson. That's all."

The child's instinctive sense of negotiation caught on that this was the best she could do. She looked at Dr. Parker and nodded uneasily. "I guess."

"Good. Now -"

"Can I finish the story at home?"

"The story?"

"Freddie and the baseball." She nodded at the booklet.

"I'm sorry, Sarah, that's all we had time for."

The girl's face twisted with enormous disappointment. "But I didn't get to write down the neat part!"