The Lesson of Her Death

he’s gone now. He’s scooted, hasn’t he?”
    “Maybe. Not necessarily.”
    Diane paused for a moment. “You’ve wanted this for a long time. Everybody in town thinks more of you than Steve Ribbon. You could get yourself elected as often as you want.”
    “I can’t tell you I don’t want it bad.… And I better say it: With Steve gone, they need a new sheriff. It’ll be either me or Slocum. We’re senior.”
    Diane said, “Well, honey, I don’t think you should pass it up. You can’t be working
for
Jim. I just can’t see that at all.”
    Corde smiled in frustration. “It’d be hard to do that to New Lebanon. Believe you me.”
    She ripped open a cello pack of beef chuck cubes. They fell out glistening and soft on the cutting board. She picked up a knife and began to slice the cubes smaller. She wished she could talk to Ben Breck about this. Not ask his advice but just tell him what she felt. Without looking at her husband she said, “I’ve got to be honest with you, Bill.…” She rarely used his name. Sometimes in connection with expensive presents he’d just given her, more often in connection with sentences like that one. “Jamie’s coming up on college age in a few years and you know all about Dr. Parker’s bills.”
    “Five thousand’d go a long way,” Corde said.
    They were silent for a long time. Diane broke the stillness. “Okay, I’ve said what I wanted to. Why don’t you go talk to Jamie? He’s got to call if he’s going to be out past suppertime. He just came back then went into his room without saying hello or anything and he’s listening to some gosh-awful rock music that’s got screams and howling on it.”
    “Well, maybe that means he’s feeling better.”
    “He could celebrate feeling better by getting home when he’s supposed to and listening to the Bee Gees or Sinatra.”
    “I’m not in the mood for giving him a talking-to tonight. Maybe tomorrow I will.”
    She wiped her hands, full of dust and old flour. Corde was studying the ingredients of Budweiser and didn’t see her wrench her lips into a narrow grimace or tighten her hand into a fist.
    He doesn’t want to do anything at all for those two girls dead by the pond—who wouldn’t be dead if they hadn’t been where they shouldn’t’ve, campus sluts both of them. No, no, he wants to save those cops he thinks he laid out on the concrete floor of Fairway Mall, laid them out like the broken dolls they seemed to be on the front page of the
Post-Dispatch.
    Well, it’s too late for them, Bill. It’s too late
.
    Diane said to her husband, “Quit looking so glum. You think about it tonight and whatever you decide we’re still going to have my special burritos for dinner. Then we’ll watch that Farrah Fawcett movie and I’ll let you guess who the killer is. Now go water that new strip of lawn, whatever the birds’ve left.”
    And she turned back to the sink, smiling brightly and scalded with anger at herself for this complete cowardice.
    At eight-thirty in the morning Bill Corde walked into the Sheriff’s Department and hung up his blue jacket and his hat. Then he went into Steve Ribbon’s office where he saw assembled the whole of the department except for the two deputies on morning patrol. They all nodded to him. He paused in the doorway then sat down among them—across the desk from Jim Slocum who was sitting in Ribbon’s old high-backed chair.
    Resting on the desk prominently was that morning’s
Register
. The headline read:
“Sheriff’s Dep’t Reopens Auden Slay Case.”
A subhead:
“Youth’s Death Termed ‘Tragic Accident’.”
    “Well, gentlemen,” Slocum said, “welcome. You’ve all heard the announcement about Steve’s move up and we’re real happy about that situation. I’ve asked you here to chew the fat a little and tell you about some of the changes I’m going to institute. And I want to say, if there are any questions, I want you to interrupt me. Will you do that?”
    Lance Miller, his volume hampered by the surgical tape around his ribs, said, “Sure we will.”
    “Good. First off nothing I’m going to do is too, you know, radical but I’ve been thinking about the department and there are some things we can do different that’ll be helpful.” He looked down at a sheet of paper. “Well, number one, we’re going to change the radio codes. We’re used to a lot of casual talk on the radio andI don’t think we should be doing that. You can get yourself into some