The Lesson of Her Death

first. Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
    Gilchrist studied Corde’s eyes. “I think you might,Detective. All right. Follow me. I’ll have to show you. It’s hard to find.”
    “No. You stay here.”
    The professor shrugged and said, “You’ll have to turn left at the foot of the stairs then go down a corridor then—”
    Corde handed him the cuffs.
    “—up a few stairs. You don’t have to worry; She’s fine, just fine.” Gilchrist was speaking like a pediatrician who’d nursed a child out of a fever.
    Corde smelled the man’s scent, sour, old cloth, sweat. He realized suddenly how close they stood.
    Gilchrist, reaching for the cuffs, calmly closed his long fingers around Corde’s wrist, the nails dug into flesh, and he threw himself backward down the stairs, dragging Corde with him.
    The detective grabbed futilely for the handrail. The gun fired, the bullet sailing into a wall. Together they tumbled down the sharp-edged pine stairs. Snaps and thuds. Corde felt his left wrist pop. The gun flew from his hand. There was a huge reverberation as his head smacked hard into the rickety handrail and he heard another snap of joint that must have come from Gilchrist’s arm or leg.
    They cartwheeled down and down the wood steps then crashed into the concrete floor and lay still, curled like lovers on a cold winter morning. In the small, dim basement around them were rusted tools, a sprinkling of coal, a half dozen cans of paint. And not another living soul.
    Wynton Kresge rested across the trunk of the green Pontiac, in prone firing position. It was the pose of the dressed deer he tied onto his Olds hood when he drove home from hunting. The checkered grip from the Remington had imprinted its design into the pads of his fingers.He smelled gun oil and gasoline and he thought Corde had been inside too damn long.
    Then he heard the gunshot. A short crack from inside the house, the ground-floor windows flexing for an instant under the muzzle burst.
    Front or back, front or back?
    Pick one, damn it
.
    Kresge stood up, hesitated, then ran over the barren lawn and through the open front door.
    “Bill!” he shouted, and in response the poker caught him in the corner of the eye and laid open six inches of cheek. He fell backward hard. The shotgun went off, a chunk of clapboard exploded from the impact of the heavy shot. Hot blood streamed into his eye and mouth and he had a distorted image of Gilchrist limping forward to pick up the fallen shotgun. The professor’s right hand was swollen and dark and he too was bloodied about the face.
    “Bill!” Kresge called, sputtering through blood.
    Gilchrist lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at Kresge’s face. The deputy rolled over and tried to scramble away. He heard Gilchrist’s grunt as he pulled the trigger and realized that there was a spent round in the chamber. Kresge prayed that he didn’t know enough about guns to pump a new shell in.
    He heard the double snap of the slide going back and forth and the tap of the old shell falling on the porch.
    “No,” Kresge moaned, groping for his automatic. It had fallen from his holster and he could not find it. He crawled another few inches and pressed against the wrought-iron railing. He felt the heavy cold touch of the shotgun barrel on his back.
    Then the explosion.
    And another and another. Gilchrist reeling over, clutching his chest and stomach, where Corde’s bullets had exited. The shotgun fell on Kresge, who grabbed it in his blindness and pointed the muzzle toward the forest. Gilchrist dropped to his knees then fell forward.
    Wynton Kresge was surrounded by numb silence, which was broken a moment later by a voice intruding on and finally destroying the deputy’s relief: the sound of Bill Corde crying, “Sarah, what have I done to you, what have I done?”

H e walked unsteadily, the tufts of grass and wiry roots reaching out and snagging his feet. His voice was hoarse as he cried, “Sarah, Sarah?” Skittish birds flew up from their ground nests as he stumbled past. Sometimes he heard his own desperate echoes, which fed him momentary false hope.
    He had sprained his wrist in the fall down the stairs but had refused any treatment and hurried outside to search for his daughter.
    Or for what he was now beginning to believe with despair: his daughter’s body. She had been nowhere in the house or the garage.
    Prodded by the horror of loss, his mind in chaos, Bill Corde was combing the five tricky acres