Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

She made a call and stiffened slightly when someone answered. "It's Emily… I have to see you. No, now." She listened for a moment to vehement protests then answered defiantly. "It's about Jennie." The voice on the other end of the line went silent.

"So I go like you are too much why don't you just sit on it and then Donna's like he is too totally much it's like you know like his eyes have this total hard-on and I go…"

Philip Halpern thought: Shut. Up.

In the room he and his sister shared there was one telephone. His sister, fourteen, used it most of the time.

The cool breeze of an April evening flowed through the window, rippling the green sheet that separated Philip's side from his sister's. Taped on the poorly painted walls were dozens of creased posters, the sort that come stapled in the centerfold of teen magazines. The wind momentarily lifted aside the Kmart sheet, studded with tiny red flowers, and for a brief moment Luke Perry and Madonna faced off against the Road Warrior and Schwarzenegger's Terminator.

In Philip's half of the stale-scented space: stacks of comic books, science fiction novels, drawing tablets, plastic figures of comic book heroes and villains. Hundreds of magazines, Fangoria, CineGore, Heavy Metal, many missing their covers; unable to afford them, Philip regularly swiped the unsold, stripped copies from trash bins behind New Lebanon News. On his dresser and desk rested elaborate plastic models of space ships perfectly assembled but coated with grime. In the corner, a hatrack project for shop class, partially completed, hid a massive dustball.

Dominating the room was a huge hand-printed sign. In oddly elaborate script it read: Entry Forbidden, the message surrounded by dozens of letters from the runic alphabet and tiny sketches of gargoyles and dragons.

Philip lay in his sagging bed on a mattress now dry but marred with a hundred old urine stains. He had told his parents that he had to study for a test and went into the bedroom. His father had seemed pleasantly surprised at this news then turned on Wheel of Fortune. Philip did not however study. He read Heinlein, he read Asimov, he read Philip K. Dick (he believed at times he was possessed by Dick's spirit), he lay on the bed, staring at flowers and mentally designing a laser, until his sister came into the room and made the phone call to her girlfriend.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Their father opened the bedroom door abruptly and said, "Off the phone. Lights out. Now." His hand swept the light switch down. The door closed.

"… naw, my old man… gotta go. Yeah, tomorrow."

Philip turned the laser onto the afterimage of his father to see if it would work. It did, spectacularly. Philip invented very efficient weapons.

His voice hissed as he fired it again.

Rosy said, "Asshole."

"Say that to him."

"I'm talking to you," she said. He heard the zipper of her jeans. He wondered what she was going to wear to bed.

Philip said, "You're a 'ho."

She said, "You wish."

"Bitch."

"Fag."

The springs of her mattress squeaked as she flopped into bed. Philip lay unmoving for ten minutes – until he heard her steady breathing. Fully dressed, he sat up, feeling the cool air from the open window wash over him. He climbed through the window and as he fell to the spongy ground he slipped into the Lost Dimension; it was Phathar the warrior who staggered briefly then righted himself and strode confidently out of the moonlight-flooded backyard.

Professor Randolph Sayles wondered why there were no crickets or cicadas here. He listened. It was late April. Was it too early for them? He didn't know entomology. He'd struggled through life sciences, biology being the one course that had deprived him of a four-point grade average in undergraduate school. Twenty-six years later he still resented this.

He stood in the Veterans Memorial Park for ten minutes before she appeared. He thought Emily Rossiter was one of the most beautiful young women he'd ever seen. She had curly brown hair, surrounding a round face of Italian or Greek features, very pale. On her beauty alone he could have lived forever with her, sufficiently happy, sufficiently in love.

Yet as she approached him now – under a trestle of budding maples, the defiantly glaring moonlight silver against the riffling underside of the young leaves – what he saw shocked him. She was like a homeless woman, disheveled, her face puffy, her hair in tangles and unclean, her mouth slack, clothes dirty. Her eyes unfocused, her weak smile mad.

Yet despite her crazed demeanor, despite his anger toward her, despite his fear of her, Randy Sayles wanted nothing so much as to make love to her. Here, immediately, on the grass, on the dirt, hot flesh on flesh in a sea of cool spring air… He wanted to force her down and press on her, harder harder… He wanted to sample her vulnerability. He wanted her salty, unwashed flesh between his teeth…

He had once tried to seduce her, an incident that ended unconsummated and dangerously close to rape. She had finally repelled him with a slap, drawing blood. He had apologized and never approached her again. Curiously this scalding memory exponentially increased his hunger for her now.

He stood slouching, hands pocketed, as she stopped two feet away from him. They stood under a streetlight that seemed duller and more eerie than the light from the full moon. "Emily."

"You know what happened to her, don't you?" The words seemed to stumble from her mouth.

"What is it you want?"

"To Jennie. You know what happened to her?"

She began to walk, suddenly, as if she just remembered an appointment. Sayles followed, slightly behind. They moved this way, together, for five minutes then turned north along a path that led to a circle of brick surrounded by concrete benches and behind them a tall boxwood hedge. They would have three of four minutes' warning in case somebody walked toward them.

When speaking with female students Sayles automatically considered escape routes.

"Where are you staying," he asked, "in the room?"

"Ah, kiddo," Emily whispered to no one.

"You should think about going home. Take incompletes. Ill arrange it if you like."

"Kiddo."

"What were you trying to say on the phone? You didn't sound very coherent."

"I didn't know it would be this hard. It's so hard without her."

"What do you want?"

The moonlight shone on her cheeks in two streaks leading from her eyes to her mouth. Sayles stood with his hands still in his pockets, Emily with her arms crossed over breasts he had never seen. She asked, "You saw her the night she died, didn't you?" She spoke from some brink whose nature he couldn't fathom; was it resolution or resignation?

Sayles said, "No."

"I don't believe you."

They were in the small park off the quad, a place where lovers over the years had unzipped and unbuttoned all manners of fashions as they lay struggling on fragrant Midwest grass. Tonight the park was, or appeared to be, deserted. Emily said, "You know what happened to her, don't you?"

After a moment Sayles asked, "Why are you asking me?"

"Ah, kiddo," Emily muttered. "Ah kiddo kiddo kiddo…"

Sayles asked in a furious whisper, "What are you saying? What do you know?" He was engulfed with emotion and couldn't will his strong hands to stop as they grabbed her shoulders.

She seemed to waken suddenly and stood back, shaking her head, crying. "You're hurting me…"

"Hey, anybody there?" a gruff voice called. Footsteps behind them. Someone walking in the woods nearby, separated from view by the boxwood hedge. Emily broke away. Sayles started toward her. She waved her hand wildly, as if brushing away a riled bee.