Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

Ribbon said, "All right, Bill, I understand -"

Corde's teeth pressed together fiercely. "No more with that guy! I don't want him crossing my path."

"He's -"

"Let me finish. It may be that Jamie knows a little more than he's saying but you know him as well as any boy in town and he wouldn't take those pictures. I'm not going to listen to this crap anymore!"

"But Mahoney doesn't know Jamie at all and you can't condemn him for asking the question."

"Hell yes I can! This thing is way out of hand. The town's scared out of its mind. We got the paper counting down the days till another moon and we're going to get ten more folk shot."

"You'll remember it was my thought not Charlie's about the moon."

"Was he interrogating Jamie?"

Ribbon paused. "He's been helping out some. Bill… Look, he's a famous homicide detective."

"Oh, Steve, come on."

"We need all the help we can get. This isn't a frat hazing that got out of hand."

"Do you know where T.T. took my son?"

"I don't know if he did. Or where."

Corde opened the door and walked into the squad room.

Mahoney said, "Hold up, Detective."

Corde walked toward the door.

"Hey, Detective…"

Corde kept going.

The window was open, letting in the scent of lilacs and whatever snatches of breeze might penetrate the staleness of the room. The morning was quiet. Philip's father was at the warehouse. His mother was asleep. She hadn't wakened her children in time for school. Philip lay in bed, eating from a box of graham crackers. Crumbs dusted his chest and stomach. He'd wait until ten, when his PE class was over then wake his mother and have her write him a tardiness excuse.

Outside he heard footsteps. He rolled over and looked out the window. "Hey, Phil!" The voice was urgent.

Philip looked into the stand of lilac bushes. He saw Jamie Corde, sweating and pale. "Hey, Jano, what's the matter?"

"I went by the school. What're you doing home?" Before Philip could answer he continued urgently, "Come on out here. I gotta talk to you."

Philip rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt then walked through the house. His sister was asleep under a mound of pink satin comforter. In his parents' room Philip's mother also lay asleep. Her mouth was open and her lipstick had left wet, red blotches on the pillow around her face, like stains of fresh blood. He continued outside, onto the back porch.

"Hey, man," Philip called, walking barefoot down the stairs, "what's -"

"I was just at the police."

The boy stopped walking. "What did you tell them?"

"Nothing," Jamie whined. "Nothing."

Shit. The knife. That's what it was. He knew it. He felt sweat break out on his forehead. Philip continued into the bushes and sat down. Jamie sat too.

"What do they know?"

"They know I was there and they know I was there with somebody that night. They've got a sort of description of you."

"Shit. Like, how did they find that out?" Suspicion filled Philip's round face.

"I didn't say anything. My father…" Jamie said. "He…" He couldn't bring himself to say anything else about it. He pictured his father going through the dirty clothes, finding his underwear, putting it in an evidence bag… He began to cry. "They said we're going to prison! What are we going to do? Oh, man."

Jamie's hands were shaking but Philip was calm. In the dimension where he spent much of his time nothing was impossible, nothing was what it seemed. Maple trees were sodium boosters of intergalactic vehicles. Sidewalks were crystal walkways a thousand feet above the plasma energy core of the planet. Stars weren't stars at all but holes in the paltry three-dimensional world through which the all-powerful, all-brilliant Guardians trillions and trillions of light-years big looked down. In Philip's world fat boys in dirty jeans were sinewy, lithe heros, who could pull on cloaks and disappear from their terrible crimes. "We have to vanish," he said softly.

"Vanish?"

"Like, dimensionally." He added in a whisper, "Permanently."

Jamie whispered, "It was just a movie, man."

Philip continued in his quiet voice, "We're both nicked. You want to go to prison? Then what? Come back and live at home? With your father?" He smiled in a weary way. "This dimension sucks, Jano."

Jamie was silent.

"We took an oath," Philip said quietly. "We took an oath -"

"We shouldn't have done it to her."

"An oath to the death." Philip looked up at the sky through a cluster of faint purple lilacs. " That dimension's real. This one isn't. We took an oath. Are you going back on it?"

Jamie grabbed a black branch dotted with buds and small blossoms. He stripped the sinewy twigs away, like peeling skin off bones, and flung the branch away furiously with a low moan.

Philip said, "Remember Dathar? The way he leapt off the Governance Building? They thought they had him but he got away."

"He didn't get away. He died. The Guardians brought him back but he died."

"It's the same thing," Philip whispered. "He got away."

Jamie said nothing.

The sound of a siren, howling like a dentist's drill, filled the front yard. Philip's smile vanished as the squad car skidded to a stop. He stared at his friend. "You told them!"

"No!" Jamie scrambled to his feet.

Footsteps sounded. Running, the men spread out. Ebbans and Slocum and Miller and two other deputies.

"You turned me in!" Philip screamed as he began willing his huge body to run, feet pointing outward, stomach and tits bouncing with every step, feeling the sting of his chafed legs and the deeper pain of a struggling heart.

"Whoa, boy, hold up there!"

"Stop him! Slow him up!"

Slocum was chuckling. "He's doing okay for a big fellow."

Somebody else laughed and said, "We need ourselves a lasso."

The men easily caught up with Philip and pulled him to the ground. They were laughing as if they'd grounded a suckling pig for a barbecue. Handcuffs appeared and were ratcheted on pudgy wrists.

One of the cops asked Jamie a question but the boy missed the words. All he could hear was the sound of Philip's voice, filling the backyard, as he shrieked, " You turned me in, you turned me in, you turned me in!"

Corde paused outside the house.

He saw: a broken lawn mower, termite-chewed stacks of black firewood, a V-6 engine block sweating under a foggy plastic tarp, rusty tools, four bloated trash bags, bald tires, a garbage can filled with brackish water. The lawn was riddled with crabgrass and bare spots of packed mud. Showing through the scabby white clapboard of the house were patches of milky green from an earlier paint job.

Three brilliant bursts of color tempered the grim scene – orange-red geraniums in clay pots.

Inside were T.T. Ebbans, Jim Slocum, Lance Miller and the two county deputies. Charlie Mahoney was not there. On the couch sat Philip and Jamie. Creth Halpern stood over his boy, staring down at him. His arms were crossed and he had an eerie smile on his face. Jane Halpern sat in a chair off to the side of the room. Her eyes were red and her lips were glisteningly wet. Corde didn't know much about her. Only that she'd been a thin, pretty cheerleader in the New Lebanon High School class behind his, and she was now a thin, pretty drunk.

The house smelled bad. Food and mold. He also could smell animal and he vaguely remembered a dog nosing in weeds behind a shed in the backyard. With the door wide open the brilliant outdoor light, which looked unnatural in the dank room, revealed a coat of grime and spheres of dustballs. The windows were mostly shaded. Corde stepped on something hard. He kicked away a small, dried dog turd. He crouched next to Jamie. "You all right, son?"