Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

At night Sarah sits and stares out the window. Once, when the waning moon is bright, she thinks she sees the form of a man walking through the woods. She flashes her bedside light and waves. Whoever it might be stops and looks at the house but does not respond. He seems to vanish. She stares after him until the trees begin to sway and the night sky opens up in great cartwheeling streaks of stars and planets and giants and animals, then she crawls under the blankets. She holds tight to her piece of magic quartz and, knowing the Sunshine Man may be out there, sends him a message in her thoughts.

Sarah wishes her father would start working late again. And sure enough, after just two days, she gets this wish. He's up and gone before breakfast, and home long after she's gone to bed. One morning, when he hadn't seen her for two days, her father left a note at the breakfast table for her; it sounded all stiff. Sarah sadly thinks the Sunshine Man is much smarter than her father.

She hopes the wizard will come back and make her smart. She believes he can do it. She also knows though that this will be a very hard wish to grant so she tells herself to be patient. She knows she'll have to wait just a little while longer.

Philip closed his bedroom door and immediately they were warriors once again, tall and dignified and ever correct, struggling to understand this strange dimension.

Jano looked around the room. "Your sister here?"

"Nope."

The boys who knew Philip's sister, and that was a lot of boys, did not call her "Rose" or "Rosy"; they called her "Halpern," which seemed to Philip to say everything there was to say about her.

Jano whispered urgently, "Well?"

"What?" Phathar shoved a dripping handful of popcorn from a half-gallon bag into his mouth.

He whispered, "Did you do it?" Jano's eyes were red and it looked like there was a streak of dried snot under his nose. Phathar wondered if his friend had been crying (Phathar assumed he was the only freshman boy who still cried).

Jano repeated, "The girl at the pond. Emily something. Did you?"

He ate another mouthful. "Nope."

Jano whispered, "I don't believe you."

"I didn't do it, dude."

"You wanted to fuck her so you killed her."

"I did not." With a pudgy finger Phathar worked a hull out from between an incisor and his gum.

"I am like totally freaked. What are we going to do?"

"Have some popcorn."

"You are like too much, man. She's dead too and you're like -"

"So what? You saw the way the Honons mowed down the Valanies. They just like went in with the xasers and totally mowed them down. The women and the kids, everyone."

"That's a movie."

Phathar repeated patiently, "I didn't like kill her."

"Did you find the knife?"

"I might have if I hadn't been alone."

"I couldn't make it. I told you. Maybe you didn't lose it."

"I lost it."

Jano said, "Man, we've got to get rid of everything."

"I told you, I put a destructor on the files. It's great. Here look." Phathar walked to a locked metal file cabinet. He unlocked it and pulled a drawer open. Inside were stacks of charts and drawings and files. Resting on top of them was a coil from a space heater. "Look, this is a lock switch that I got from Popular Mechanics. It's great. If you open the cabinet without shutting off the switch…" He reached inside the cabinet and pointed to two pieces of wood wound with wires pressing against each other, like a large clothespin. "… Somebody opens the drawer and it closes the circuit. The coil gets red hot in like seconds and torches everything."

"Totally excellent," Jano said with admiration. "What if it burns the house down?"

Phathar did not respond. Through the closed door, they heard Philip's father singing some old song. "Strangers in the Night."

Jano looked in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. "What's that?" He picked up the brown purse, smeared with mud.

Phathar froze. He was in a delicate position. This was his only friend in high school; he couldn't do what he wanted to – which was to scream to him to put it back. He said simply, "It's hers."

Jano clicked it open. "The girl's? The second one! You did do it!"

Phathar reached out and closed it. "Would you just chill? I saw her but -"

"I don't see why you're denying it, man."

"- I didn't kill her."

"Why'd you keep it?"

"I don't know." Phathar in fact had wondered that a number of times. "It smells nice."

"You get over with her too?" Jano had stopped looking shocked and was curious.

"Are you deaf? Like are you totally deaf?"

"Come on, Phathar, I tell you everything. What was it like?"

"You're a fucking hatter. I followed her for a while but then I took off. There was some dude wandering around."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"They found her in the pond. Yuck. If you did it with her your dick'll probably fall off, with that water. What's in the purse?"

"I don't know. I didn't open it." Phathar stood up and took the purse away from his friend. He put it in the file cabinet and laid another heater coil on top of it. He closed the drawer.

"I don't think that's a good place for it," Jano said.

"How come?"

"Even with the destructor it'd take a while for the leather to catch fire."

Phathar decided this might be true. He retrieved the purse. He held it out to Jano. "You take it. Throw it someplace."

"No way. I don't want to get caught with it. Why don't you burn it?"

"I can't. My dad'd whack me again. Maybe I'll hide it under the porch and some night when he's playing cards I'll burn it."

The terrible, glass-splintering crash came from the living room. The boys each stared at the dirt-smeared wall through which the sound had come. Philip dropped the purse into the empty popcorn bag and wadded it, along with some trash, into a green plastic garbage bag, which sat in the corner of this room. They stepped into the hall.

Philip's mother was on the floor, on all fours, her knees spread out, skirt up to her trim waist. The eyes in her pretty face were nearly closed and her head lolled as the muscles in her smooth arms tried to keep her shoulders from dropping to the ground. Mr. Halpern stood above her, his hands gripping the stained orange blouse, saying desperately, "It'll be all right, it'll be all right. No, no, it'll be all right."

And she was repeating louder and in a shrill soprano, "Lemmealone, lemmealone!" In her hand was a white wad of cloth. On the stained carpet was a fresher stain of vomit. The smell of sour gin was thick in the air. Philip started to cry.

"Mrs. Halpern," Jano whispered.

Philip's father looked up. "Get the fuck out of here, both of you."

Jano said, "But she's sick."

Whimpering, Philip said, "She's not sick."

"Get the fuck out!" his father shouted. "Both of you. Out out out!" He stamped his foot as if he were spooking dogs.

Philip said to Jano, "Please."

"But -"

"Please," Philip said. His friend fled outside. Staring out the front window Philip heard the scuffling of his mother's shoes. His father had lifted her into an armchair and was whispering to her. Philip walked past his parents and out the back door then he slipped under the porch.

Philip hid the bag containing the purse under a mound of soft black dirt. He rocked back and forth in the crisp dusty leaves.

Oh, he was tired.

He was tired of so much. His father wore torn T-shirts and made the handy man visit. His mother packed him greasy sandwiches for lunch – when she made his lunch – and forgot to wash the clothes. There were enemies everywhere, everywhere you looked. His sister was a 'ho, he was fat. She was Halpern, he was Philip. Phil-lip. He got a D in phys ed and a B in biology and, while another glass shattered somewhere in the house above him, a single thought centered in his head – an image of a shy young girl leaning on a lab table and telling him how brave he was while Philip stuck a needle way deep into a frog's brain then slit its belly open and watched the slick lump of a heart continue to beat on and on and on.