Jeffery Deaver: The Lesson of Her Death

Wynton Kresge sat in his office in the main administration building of Auden University. The room – high-ceilinged, paneled in oak – was carpeted in navy blue, pretty much the same color as that in his Cutlass Supreme though this pile was twice as thick. His desk was a large mahogany piece. Occasionally when he was on the phone listening to someone he had no desire to be listening to (which was pretty often), Kresge would imagine ways to get the desk out of the office without knocking a hole in the wall. On particularly slow days he actually considered trying to remove it. He would have been a good candidate for this project: Kresge was six foot four and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. His upper arms measured fifteen inches around, his thighs were twenty-four, and only a minor percentage of those dimensions was fat. (He had never lifted a barbell in his life but had retained much of the muscle he cultivated when he was a college linebacker for the Tigers not the Missouri Tigers the Dan Devine Tigers.)

The top of the desk held one telephone with two lines, one brass lamp, one blotter, one leather desk calendar opened to this week, one framed photo of an attractive woman, seven framed photos of children, and one piece of paper.

The paper, held down by Kresge's massive hand as if he were afraid it would blow away, contained the following words: Jennie Gebben. Tuesday ten p.m. Blackfoot Pond. McReynolds dorm. Lovers, students, teachers, robbery? rape? other motive? Susan Biagotti? Beneath this was an awkward diagram of the campus and the pond and the road around it. Kresge touched his earlobe with the butt of his Schaeffer sterling silver ballpoint pen, which he had polished just the night before, and considered what he'd written.

Kresge drew additional lines on the paper, crossing off words, and adding others. He was drawing a dotted line from the campus to the pond when a knock on the closed door made him jump. By the time his secretary walked into the room without announcing herself further the piece of paper was wadded up and slam-dunked into Kresge's wastebasket.

"She wants to see you," said the secretary, a pretty woman in her late thirties.

"She does."

The secretary paused then said, "You're holed up in here."

"I beg your pardon?"

She said, "I used to think that that phrase was "hauled up." Like they hauled somebody up in a tower so he could escape from the police or something."

"The police?" Kresge asked.

"But then I found out it was "holed up." Like, go into a hole."

"I don't really know. Now?"

"She said now."

Kresge nodded. He unlocked his top drawer and from it took out a dark gray Taurus 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He looked to make certain there was a full clip in the grip of the gun then slipped it in a belt holster. He left the room with what the secretary sensed, though Kresge himself did not, was a look of intense, almost theatrical, determination on his face.

This was how she would build the house: She would find some land – there, that beautiful field with the gold and white flowers in it, there through the window, surrounded by green-silver trees. She could see, from her cell, the tall grass waving in a breeze soft as a kitten's lazy tail. Then she would call her friends the animals and -

"Sarah, are you with us?"

Her head snapped away from the window and she found thirty-two children and one adult staring at her. Her breath escaped in a soft snap then stopped completely. Sarah looked at their eyes and felt her heart shudder then start to beat at a fast gallop.

"I called on you. Come up here."

Sarah sat still and felt the pure heat from her face flood into her arms and chest.

Mrs. Beiderson smiled, her face as sweet as Sarah's grandmother's. Mrs. Beiderson smiled a lot. She never raised her voice at Sarah, never shouted at her, never took her hand and walked her to the principal's office like she did the boys that drew pictures on their desks or fought. Mrs. Beiderson always spoke to Sarah in a voice like a pussy willow.

Sarah hated her more than anyone in the world.

"Sarah, now come along. This is just practice. You're not being graded."

The girl looked at her desk. Inside was the pill her mother had given her. But it wasn't time to take it yet.

"Now, Sarah."

Sarah stood, her hands at her sides, too heavy to lift.

She walked to the front of the dungeon and turned to face the class. She felt Mrs. Beiderson's smile pelt the back of her neck like a whip of snakes. She glanced at the trees outside the window. Oh, the freedom of the trees! She could smell the bark, she could feel the fuzz on the bottom of an elf cap growing up through ivy, she could see the doorway to the secret tunnel in her house.

Looking out over her classmates' faces, she saw Priscilla Witlock laughing, Dennis Morgan twisting up his fat lips into a mean grin, Brad Mibbock rolling his eyes. Laughter roaring so loud it struck her face and stung. She saw boys holding fists above their you-knows and moving them up and down, she saw girls with long red fingernails and dangling bracelets, girls her age but with round perfect breasts and sleek makeup and high heels, girls taunting her…

And Mrs. Beiderson, who saw only the bored faces of her class and heard nothing but Sarah's whimpering, said, "Sarah, your word is 'clarify.'"

The sound hit Sarah with the jolt of a schoolyard punch. Her daddy had helped her with this word. But she knew it had several up-down letters, which were very hard for her. She began to cry.

"You've done it before," smiling Mrs. Beiderson said in her soft lying, cheating, snaky voice. "You're not trying, Sarah. We all have to try." Mrs. Beiderson touched the rose cameo at her throat. "'Clarify' is on the list. Didn't you study the list?"

Sarah nodded.

"If you studied the list then there's nothing to cry about."

Now everyone would know she was crying, even the students in the back.

"I can't."

"You don't want us to think you're being difficult, do you? 'Clarify.'"

Between sobs, Sarah said, "C."

"Very good." The snake smiled.

Her knees quivered. "I don't know. I don't." More tears.

"What's the next letter?"

"I don't know."

"Try."

"C-A…"

Mrs. Beiderson exhaled a sigh. "All right, Sarah. Sit -"

"I could do it at home -"

"- Down. Anyone else?"

And Priscilla Witlock didn't even rise from her seat but was staring right at Sarah, slinging out the letters, C, then L, then A, then R, spelling the word in the time it took Sarah to take a huge gulp of air to try to quench her fear.

And then she felt it. First a trickle. Then a flood, as her panties grew wet and she put her hand down-there to stop herself but knowing it was too late, the flowing warm moisture running around her leg and Mrs. Beiderson saying, "Oh dear oh dear," and some of the class looking away, which was as bad as the rest of the class staring, as bad as knowing the story would be all over town and everybody would know even her grandfather up in heaven would know…

Sarah threw her arms around herself and ran to the door, pushing it open with her shoulder. The glass burst into a spiderweb of cracks. She leapt down the stairs two at a time and ran blindly down the corridor to the front door of the school, leaving on the linoleum the swirls and drips of her shame, like fragments of the letters that had beaten her once again.

The woman said, "Whatever has to be done and I mean it."

Dean Catherine Larraby was fifty-five and, if you squinted, looked like Margaret Thatcher. Gray hair, round face, stocky. Reassuring jowls. Eyes tired but severe. A coolness around the edges that Bill Corde thought was permanent and had not arisen with the killing. She had not applied her makeup well and the powder had accumulated in the creases around her mouth and on her forehead.