The Lesson of Her Death

mind?” The boy’s eyes were glazed. He didn’t speak. His face wasn’t particularly sad or frightened. He seemed to be possessed.
    Philip played at the Corde house once or twice aweek. But was this the boy who’d taken the pictures of Sarah? Who had put the threatening newspaper article on the rosebush? And in Diane’s diaphragm case?
    Was this the boy who murdered Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter?
    He looked at Philip’s round, soft face, smudged with dirt or chocolate, a face that did not appear so much guilty as bewildered.
    Corde said, “Jamie, come here.”
    Slocum’s head turned. “Say, Bill … maybe it’s not such a good idea. Uh, talking to him in private, I mean.”
    Corde squashed his temper and ignored the deputy. He motioned to his son. The boy stood and followed him onto the porch. Ribbon stepped forward.
    Corde stopped him with a look. “Leave me alone with my boy.” The sheriff hesitated only a moment before stepping away.
    Jamie leaned against the porch bannister and turned to his father, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
    “Jamie, why are you being this way? I want to help you.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “Just tell me what happened.”
    “I don’t
know
what happened.”
    “Son, it’s murder we’re talking about. They’re looking for somebody to send to jail for this.”
    “I know
you
are.”
    “Me?”
    “You want me to make up something about Phil?”
    “I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell it to me right here and now.”
    “Bill?” Ribbon came to the doorway. “You can be present at questioning but—”
    “Oh, goddamnit,” Corde exploded. “Goddamnit! You don’t have probable cause to charge him. Call the DA. Ask him!”
    Ribbon said delicately, “We do for conspiracy andobstruction. You’ll just make things worse for everybody.”
    “Jamie, why?” Corde’s eyes begged, his hand reached for his son’s arm but stopped short of contact. “What did I do? Why won’t you tell me?”
    Eyes downcast, the boy let Ribbon lead him into the filthy house, while his father’s desperate questions fell like shot quail, silent and flimsy.
    The tall grass waved in the wind and the sunlight flickered off the leaves of thin saplings. Sarah stepped into her circle of stones and sat down. She crossed her legs carefully. From her backpack she took the bear she was going to give to the Sunshine Man and set him next to her.
    She looked at her Madonna watch. It said 2:40. She closed her eyes and remembered that this meant twenty minutes to three. She hated numbers. Sometimes you counted to a hundred before they started over, other times you counted to sixty.
    Twenty minutes until the Sunshine Man arrived.
    She remembered a drill at school—her second-grade teacher would move the hands on a clock and then point to different students and have them tell the time. This exercise socked her with icy terror. She remembered the teacher’s bony finger pointing at her.
And, Sarah, what time is it now?
She screamed that she didn’t know she couldn’t tell don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask.… She cried all the way home from school. That night her daddy bought her the digital watch she now wore.
    A sudden breeze whipped her hair around her face and she lay down, using her backpack as a pillow. Sometimes she took afternoon naps here. Looking around her, wondering where the Sunshine Man would come from, Sarah noticed just above the horizon a sliver of new moon. She imagined that the sky was a huge ocean and that the moon was the fingernail on a giant’s hand as heswam just below the surface of the smooth water. Then she wondered how come you can see the moon in the daytime.
    She closed her
eyes and
she thought of the giant as he swam, lifting arms as big as mountains from the water, kicking his mile-long legs and speeding across the sky. Sarah was afraid of the water. When the family went to the park downtown she would still play in the baby pool, which made her ashamed but wasn’t as bad as the terror of bouncing on the adult pool floor with the water inches from her nose and thinking she might get swept into the deep part.
    She wished she could swim. Strong strokes, like Jamie. Maybe this was something else she could ask the Sunshine Man to do for her. She looked at her watch. 2:48. She counted on her fingers. Two minutes … No!
Twelve
minutes. She closed her eyes and kneaded the grass bunched up at her hips and pretended she was swimming, skimming across the