Dead Certain

hanging out at the country club, Claudia had been marching against nuclear power and boycotting grapes.
    I remembered that Elliott had said that Mrs. Stein was taking it hard. I couldn’t imagine any other way to take it. How could two people who had devoted themselves to advocating social justice ever even begin to come to terms with the senseless murder of their only child? How could anyone?
    Professor Stein was one of the last people off the airplane. For a minute I almost didn’t recognize him, he seemed so much older than the last time I’d seen him. It was a shock to realize that it wasn’t the passage of time that had wrought the change, but rather grief that seemed to have shrunken him.
    He was a small man, like his daughter, with a face that had delighted campus cartoonists for generations. His eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars, and his hair, receding from a high forehead, was white and long enough to reach his collar. But today he just looked like a beaten old man, a refugee from someplace terrible. He’d also developed a new habit overnight, an involuntary shaking of the head, as if mentally he was arguing against some terrible tide that only he could understand. I stepped up and hugged him.
    He didn’t have any luggage, just a single black duffel that he carried on a strap over his shoulder. As we made our way slowly down the concourse the silence between us was excruciating. Unlike Claudia, her father and I both made our livings from our words and from our wits. Somehow tragedy had robbed us of our gifts.
    As we took the escalators up to the relative quiet of the ticketing level I did my best to explain the arrangements that had been made so far. I don’t know if he actually heard me. His wife, he explained, was too devastated to make the trip and was in bed under a doctor’s care.
    The Jaguar was where I’d left it. The skycap gave me back the keys, and I opened the trunk to put in Professor Stein’s bag. For a minute I just stood staring at the box of patient files from Prescott Memorial. They were sitting right there, exactly where I’d left them, last night or a thousand years ago, whenever I’d brought the box home to return them to Claudia.
    I laid Professor Stein’s bag beside it, curious to find that it was heavy. As I slammed the trunk on top of it I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that you packed when you went to fetch your daughter’s corpse.
     
    Professor Stein said he wanted to go back to Hyde Park and see the apartment. He explained that his wife had made him promise that he would choose the clothing that Claudia would be buried in. Inside I cringed, imagining his pain at going through her things, but I realized that he also might need to visit the place where she had been killed, to see it for himself so that he could understand that she was really gone.
    “So,” he said after I’d retrieved my purse from under the seat and we’d pulled away from the curb, “do they know who did this terrible thing?”
    “The police think she may have surprised a burglar.”
    “But you don’t think so,” he replied. I remembered what Claudia had once said about her father, that he was the most intuitive man on the face of the earth.
    “It’s too early to say,” I answered. “We have to give the police a chance to do their job. One of the homicide detectives that is investigating the case is a man I know, very bright, a graduate of Princeton,” I added, knowing that to an Ivy League professor that would mean something. “I honestly believe he won’t rest until he finds out what happened to Claudia and brings whoever is responsible to justice.”
    “Justice,” sniffed Morton Stein, “now there’s a relative term. Of my entire family I am the only Holocaust survivor. Everyone else was lost, killed in the camps. I grew up in Brooklyn with a woman who I called Nana, but actually she’s no relation. She was just another survivor from the camps who’d promised my mother that she would take care of me.
    “Even though we never talked about it much at home, I think Nana used to tell Claudia stories about the war. I think that was part of what made Claudia choose a career in medicine. She wanted her life to be a force for good.”
    “She did,” I said. “Even though her life was cut short, I know she made a difference. You know, for as long as we’d been friends, I’d never really seen Claudia at work before a couple of nights ago. A client of mine had a heart