The Lesson of Her Death

these stories in Sarah’s exercises. Her learning will be exponentially increased if she works with words that she herself has created.”
    Exponentially
. “Sure. It’s probably a lot of fun too.”
    Some blunder here. Dr. Parker was frowning. “It’s
mostly
a great deal of work.”
    “Sure. I’ll bet it is.” Corde riffled the pages again and let the breeze scented with typewriter oil and expensive bond paper blow into his face. He rose and started toward the waiting room, where Sarah was waiting. “She did this all by herself? Hell, I get sweaty hands every time I have to write out an incident explanation on an MV-204 form.”
    “Maybe your daughter can teach you a few things, Mr. Corde,” Dr. Parker said, and allowed herself an indulgent smile.
    Bill Corde doesn’t know what to think.
    He sits on a folding chair in his den and flips back and forth through Sarah’s book. He’s read about shape-changingwizards, about dragons and princesses and talking cars, flying loaves of bread, dancing blackbirds and bobcats that sing opera under full moons.
    “Why bobcats?”
    “Because that’s what they are,” Sarah explains.
    “Why opera?”
    “Because,” she answers with such exasperation that Corde, who asked the question solely because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, feels ashamed and therefore doesn’t ask why the full moon, which he’d intended to.
    “This is what Dr. Breck and I are doing,” she explains, touching the typed sheets first then a blank piece of paper in front of her. “We move all these words over here like they’re on a magic train.”
    “A train. Ah.”
    They sit in the den, Corde with his shoes off, stretched back on the couch feeling like a dog in front of a fire. Sarah is at the wobbly desk. Corde had been by the hospital at seven that morning. He is utterly exhausted though much of that fatigue is held at bay by his daughter’s enthusiasm for copying her book. Her leg vibrates with excitement at her task.
    It’s a mystery to Corde, all these stories of magic otters and flying eagles and trolls and shining wizards. Corde’s library contains mostly hunting and fishing nonfiction. The animals he reads about are wolves and grizzlies and damn clever trout who elude the most well-placed tufts of fly. They do not wear aviator hats and wetsuits and they do not hold parties in tree trunks or sing any kind of music in the moonlight.
    He decides that his daughter would be the kind of film director whose movies he would not go to see.
    But he can compliment her on her work, which he does, and watch with fascination as she leans forward, writing with the awkward elegance of a doe on ice.
    Corde notices her techniques. With her index finger she writes letters and words on her palm, she traces the letters in a dust of salt on the tabletop, she tears sheets ofpaper containing a single word into portions of the word and stares at them. Corde himself forgets what the fragments of words are called.
Syllabus?
No. Then he remembers,
syllables
. Although her spelling still needs much work, her self-confidence is bursting. He has never seen her enjoy herself this way. He looks at the first page of the slim stack of sheets Sarah has printed.
    MY BOOK
    BY SARAH REBECCA CORDE, FOURTH GRADE
    DEDICATED TO DR. BRECK MY TUTOR
    Corde stares at this for a few minutes, wondering if jealousy will surface. It does not.
    When she finishes, Corde rises to leave. He watches her for a moment then leans forward and hugs her suddenly and hard. This surprises and pleases her and she hugs back enthusiastically. Corde does not tell his daughter that the complex gratitude he is filled with is only in part for her.

A n officer in the Fitzberg Police Department’s Demographics and Vital Statistics Division made the discovery.
    The DemVit man had been cross-checking prints of the bodies of recent DCDS’s found at crime scenes against Known Felons (Warrants Open) and was at the tail end of his shift so it took him longer than it normally would have to find the glitch. He marked his conclusion down on an EID form and was about to drop it in the interoffice mail to the Detective Division when he noticed that the body was due for shipping out later that day.
    Oh, boy
.
    Reluctantly he called Mister Master Sergeant Super Detective Franklin Neale.
    “Detective? This is Tech Officer Golding in DemVit?”
    “Yes, Golding, what’s on the agenda?” Neale said.
    Hup, two, three four
…
    “There’s an EID