The Lesson of Her Death

crouches down. “He’s gone away, honey. He’ll never come back. I’ve sent him away.”
    Diane looks at the house. She says, “He lives
there
, your wizard?”
    Sarah says, “I saw him behind the cow pasture a couple times. I wanted him to cast a spell to make me smart so one day I followed him here. But I was ascared to ask so I left.”
    “And she wrote a story about it.”
    Corde pulls the two stained pages from his breast pocket and reads the words he near to memorized earlier in the day. “
‘And the girl climbed onto the back of Cloud-Tipper the eagle and hugged his feather neck. They sailed away from the yellow house. They followed the Sunshine Man home. They flew into the yard then past the cow field and past the old well and the burned-down silo that looked like whale ribs and over the railroad bridge and along the path to the river. Finally, they came to a clearing in the woods. Cloud-Tipper landed gentle. And there was the Sunshine Man’s cottage.…’
”
    “You came here by yourself, Sarah?” Diane’s eyelids lower at the insolence of tragedy averted by the smallest slip of fate.
    “I just wanted him to make me smart, Mommy.”
    Diane casually slips her arm around her daughter and they walk toward the squad car. Corde hobblesalong behind. Mother and daughter separate for a moment, the girl running ahead.
    Corde catches up with his wife, who is now silent, the same wary expression on her face that she’d worn at Jamie’s bedside. Corde knows why but doesn’t want to consider it now. The pain in his arm is making up for lost time and he’s half faint by the time he slides into the backseat of the Dodge, next to Diane. Sarah has claimed the front. Diane brushes her daughter’s hair with her fingers.
    When Corde sits closer to his wife she shies away from him. Her motion is subtle but is clear.
    Miller starts the car and drives slowly over the rough ground, the Dodge sashaying like a canoe in a powerboat’s wake. Corde lowers his forehead to his thumb, as if administering Lent ashes, and lets his palm take the whole weight of his head. This is what he thinks:
I am just doing my job the only way I know how. What more is a man supposed to do?
Though Corde suspects that a man must do more and probably a lot more. He knows that when your daughter gets well your son gets sick and when the car is paid off the mortgage goes up and when you decide you love your wife she’s gone to another man.… There’s no end to the burdens life lays on you. Oh, there is so much to do and more after that. And more and more and more … But it seems to him that this isn’t so much the problem as is finding somebody or something that can show you exactly
what
has to be done. This is the lesson. This is what Bill Corde doubts he’ll ever get right.
    “Everybody buckle up now,” Lance Miller announces and turns the cruiser onto the highway.
    Corde got the new FI-113 written up but it was a chore. He was extra careful because he knew it was going to be the basis for Jim Slocum’s comments to the press and Hammerback Ellison’s as well and he wanted it to be asclear as possible. He tried dictating into Sarah’s tape recorder but he kept getting tongue-tied and had to go back to ruled paper and a Bic medium-point.
    The
Register
lost its exclusive. The killings had been laid at the feet of a college professor who’d taught at Harvard and had written book reviews for the
New York Times
. The Associated Press and some big-city newspaper reporters came to town, along with a herd of earnest young TV reporters (one from CNN, to the town’s delight) with their hair spray and crisp outfits and fancy electronics. One journalist referred to Gilchrist as the “New Lebanon Cult Killer” but Sheriff Jim Slocum said that “this didn’t appear to be so much a cult situation as a romance-oriented homicide and some follow-up homicides to cover it up.”
    Corde had been granted dispensation from learning the radio codes and was now in charge of what Slocum was calling the Felony Desk, something he’d thought up after watching
America’s Most Wanted
one night. Things were slow though, the only felon at the moment being Dell Tucker, a New Lebanon farmer who’d turned an AR-15 full-automatic and had been heard testing it on gophers. Corde figured that was mostly a federal offense so why bother? Besides Corde had gopher problems himself.
    Wynton Kresge had drawn a tough rotation from Hammerback Ellison. Being new