The Lesson of Her Death

door and walked in before there was an answer.
    The man swiveled slowly in a shabby office chair, bleeding upholstery stuffing. Kresge wondered if he’d found the chair on the street in his poor graduate student days and kept it for sentiment. Kresge’s nostrils flared against the old-carpet smell, basement water in wool. He had a strong urge to walk directly to the nearest window and fling it wide open. The papers and books filling every available space added to the stifling closeness as did the jumble of old-time photos stacked against the wall. Everything was covered with thin films of dust.
    Randy Sayles put a pencil tic next to his place in the massive volume he was reading, slipped a paperclip between the pages and closed the book.
    A jay landed on a bush outside the window and picked at a small blond mulberry.
    Bill Corde said, “Professor Sayles, we’re here to arrest you for the murder of Jennifer Gebben.”

S ayles leaned back in the ancient chair. Sorrow was in his face but it seemed a manageable sorrow like that in the eyes of a distant relative at a funeral.
    He listened to Corde recite the Miranda rights. Corde unceremoniously took his handcuffs out of the leather case on his belt. Sayles said a single word softly. Corde believed it was “No.” The professor’s tongue caressed his lips. One circuit. Two. He lifted his hands and rested them on his knees; they looked dirty because of the fine dark hairs coating his skin. Corde noticed that his feet pointed outward. He said, “Will you hold your wrists out, please?”
    “Why do you think it’s me?” He asked this with unfeigned curiosity. He did not offer his wrists.
    “A witness came forward and identified your picture in the yearbook. He saw you by the dam that night. Your hands?”
    Sayles nodded and said, “The man in the car. He almost ran me over.”
    Kresge said, “And your bootprint matches one found at the scene of the killing.” He looked at Corde to see if it was all right to volunteer this kind of information.
    “My bootprint?” Sayles looked involuntarily at a muddy corner of the study where presumably a pair of boots had recently lain. “You took prints of mine from the yard?”
    “Yessir,” Kresge said. “Shot pictures, actually.”
    Sayles fidgeted with his hands, his face laced with the regret of a marathoner pulling up cramped a half mile shy of the finish. “Will you come with me?” Sayles stood up.
    “For what?” Corde asked.
    “I didn’t kill her.” Sayles seemed stricken with apathy.
    “You’ll have your day in court, sir.”
    “I can prove it right now.”
    Corde looked at the eyes and what he saw was a load of disappointment—much more than desperation. He motioned with his head toward the door. “Five minutes. But you wear the cuffs.” He put them on.
    As they left the house Kresge whispered, “So, okay, let me get this straight. If they say they didn’t do it we give them a chance to show us some new evidence? I just want to know the rules.”
    “Wynton,” Corde said patiently, “there are no rules.”
    The two men followed Sayles outside. They walked to the back of the house—ten feet from the place where Kresge had taken photos of Sayles’s footprints. Corde recognized the ruddy box elder root from the Polaroids. Corde glanced toward the front of the house. He believed he smelled cigarette smoke. Corde saw Sayles’s wife standing in the kitchen thirty feet away.
    Sayles walked to a patch of dug-up earth like two wide tread marks about twenty feet long. Small greenshoots were rising from precisely placed intervals along the strips.
    “Dig here.” He touched a foot to the ground.
    Kresge picked up a rusty spade. Corde now felt contempt in the air. Sayles’s eyes were contracted like nipple skin in chill water. The deputy began to dig. A few feet down he uncovered a plastic bag. Kresge dropped the spade on the ground. He pulled the bag out, dusted it off carefully and handed it to Corde. Inside was a length of clothesline.
    “That’s the murder weapon,” Sayles said.
    Corde said to him, “Do you want to make a statement?”
    Sayles said, “This is the proof.”
    “Yessir,” Corde said. “Do you wish to waive your right to have an attorney present during questioning?”
    “He killed Jennie with it. I saw him. It’ll have his fingerprints on it.”
    “You’re saying you didn’t kill her?” Kresge asked.
    “No, I didn’t kill her,” Sayles said. He sighed. “Jennie and I