Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

"But we always encourage her."

"Mrs. Corde, parents often encourage their disabled children to do what other students can do easily. Sarah is not like other children. Encouragement like that is just another way of helping her fail."

"Well," Diane said stiffly. "You sure don't hesitate to call it the way you see it, Doctor."

Dr. Parker smiled a smile that meant nothing at all to Diane, who was for once relieved that the psychiatrist had set a frigid atmosphere for these sessions. She had no problem saying bluntly, "That's very well and good, Doctor, but how the hell are you going to help my little girl?"

"I want you to find a tutor. They're expensive but you need one and you need a good one. I recommend that you check with the Auden lab school."

"Why can't we help her? Bill and me?"

"Sarah needs a specialist."

" But - "

"It's important that she see someone who knows what they're doing."

Diane thought it was remarkable that you could both admire and detest someone at the same time.

"Second, I'd like to work with her myself. Until we build up her confidence in herself she's never going to improve. Her self-esteem has been very badly damaged."

"What can you do that we haven't? All right, maybe the way we tried to teach her was wrong. But you keep forgetting that we've always supported her. We always tell her how good she is. How talented."

"But she doesn't believe you. And how can she? You push her to work harder and it does no good. You tell her she's doing well but she isn't, she's failing her classes. You tell her she's smart but by all the outward manifestations she isn't. Mrs. Corde, you've acted for the best motives but your efforts have been counterproductive. We need to encourage Sarah to do the things she's genuinely good at."

"But haven't you heard what I've told you? She isn't good at anything. She doesn't even like to help me cook or sew. All she does is play games by herself, go to movies and watch TV."

"Ah. Precisely." Dr. Parker smiled like a chess player calling checkmate.

Diane blinked. What'd I say?

"I'd like to see Sarah as soon as possible. If you could make the appointment with Ruth." The cryptic eyes, so talented at dismissals, glanced at another file.

"Okay, sure." Diane stood.

Then she hesitated.

She sat down again. "Say, Doctor…"

"Yes?"

Diane blurted, "Where does it come from? Dyslexia?"

"I'm sorry, I should have discussed that with you." She closed the second file and turned full attention to Diane. "We don't know exactly. It used to be that a lot of doctors attributed it to physical problems – like memory confusion between the two hemispheres of the brain. That's been discredited now though vision and hearing problems can be major factors. My belief is that like many developmental problems dyslexia has both a nature and nurture component. It's largely genetic and the prenatal period is very critical. But how parents and teachers respond to the child is important too."

"Prenatal?" Diane asked, then casually added, "So could it be that someone who had maybe smoked or drank or took drugs during pregnancy might cause dyslexia in their children?"

"To some extent though usually there's a correspondent decrease in IQ…" Dr. Parker squinted and flipped through her notes. "Anyway I thought you said you largely abstained while you were pregnant."

"Oh, that's right," Diane said. "I was just curious… You know, when someone you love has a problem you want to know all about it." Diane stood up. She sensed Dr. Parker studying her. "Well, I'll make that appointment."

"Wait a minute, please." Dr. Parker capped her pen. "You know, Mrs. Corde, one of the underlying themes of my approach to therapy is that we really are our parents." She was smiling, Diane believed, in a heartfelt way for the first time since they had begun working together. "I call parents the quote primary providers and not just in a positive sense. What they give us and what they do for us – and to us – include some unfortunate things. But it can include a lot of good things too."

Diane looked back at her and tried to keep her face an unemotional mask. She managed pretty well, even when the doctor said, "I've seen a lot of parents in here and I've seen a lot of people in here because of their parents. Whatever's troubling you, Mrs. Corde, don't be too hard on yourself. My opinion is that Sarah is a very lucky girl."

Technically this was trespassing. But boundaries in the country aren't what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody's land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.

Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued for a ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout's skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.

She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.

To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.

"You used to live in St Louis, didn't you?" Jennie Gebben asks.

Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.

"Well, I did," he answers. "As a matter of fact." He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.

"Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren't you in the news or something?"

"All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conferences or something. Drug bust."

Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.

"It seems it was something more than that," she says. "More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was…"

She stops speaking.

Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow longer to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.

Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond…

Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.

… this session of the St Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing…

Corde thought he'd be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he'd say that he'd forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.

A. Well, sir, the perpetrators…

Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?