The Lesson of Her Death

face troubled by acne when young. He was Midwestern and he was middle-aged and he was rich. For men like Gebben, life moves by justice not fate. Corde suspected the man’s essential struggle right now was in trying to understand the reason for his daughter’s death.
    “You drove all the way here yourself,” Gebben said.
    “No, sir, took a commuter flight. Midwest Air.”
    Gebben rubbed the face of his Rolex compulsively across his pocked cheek. He touched his eyes in an odd way and he seemed to be wondering why he was not crying.
    Corde nodded toward her dresser and asked, “May I?”
    “I remember when she left for school the last time she was home, Thanksgiving.… I’m sorry?”
    “Her dresser. I’d like to look through it.”
    Gebben gestured absently. Corde walked to the bureau but did not yet open it. “Thanksgiving. She’d left the bedclothes all piled up. In a heap. After she’d gone to the airport, Jennie’s mother came up here and made the bed and arranged it just like that.…” Corde looked at the three pink-and-white gingham pillows on top of the comforter, a plush dog with black button eyes sticking his head out from under them. “My wife, she took a long time to arrange the dog.”
    Gebben took several deep breaths to calm himself. “She … The thing about Jennie was, she loved …”
    What was he going to say? Loved
life?
Loved
people?
Loved
flowers kittens poetry charities?
Gebben fell silent, perhaps troubled that he could at this moment think only of the cheapest clichés. Death, Corde knew, makes us feel so foolish.
    He turned away from Gebben to Jennie’s dresser. He was aware of a mix of scents. She had a dozen bottles of perfume on the mirrored dressing table. The L’Air duTemps was full, a bottle of generic cologne nearly empty. He lifted it, looked at the label and set it down. His hand would retain for days the sharp spicy smell, which he recalled from the pond last night.
    The bureau contained nothing but clothes. Above it a hundred postcards and snapshots were pinned to a corkboard. Jennie’s arm twined around the waists of dozens of boys, faces different, poses similar. Her dark hair seemed to be darker in summer though that might be a trick of Kodak convenience photography. She often wore it pinned back. Her sport was volleyball and a dozen pictures revealed her playing the game with lusty determination on her face. Corde asked if he could have one of these, a close-up of Jennie, pretty face glossy with sweat. Gebben shrugged. How Corde hated this part of the job, walking straight into the heart of people’s anguish.
    Corde touched several recent snapshots of the girl with friends. Gebben confirmed that all of them were away at other schools—all except Emily Rossiter, who was Jennie’s current roommate at Auden. Corde saw: her high school ID card. Ticket stubs from a Cowboy Junkies concert, a Bon Jovi concert, a Billy Joel concert, a Paula Poundstone show. A greeting card with a silly cartoon rabbit on the front offered her congratulations on passing her driving test.
    Corde pulled the chair away from her desk and sat. He surveyed the worn desktop in front of him, nicked, scratched, marked with her doodlings. He saw a bottle of India ink. A framed picture of Jennie with a scruffy cocker spaniel. A snapshot of her coming out of church one recent spring, maybe at Easter, blue crocuses at her feet.
    She died on a bed of milky blue hyacinths
.
    In a lopsided clay cup was a chewed yellow pencil, its eraser worn away. Corde lifted it, feeling beneath the thick pads of his fingers the rough indentations and the negative space of Jennie Gebben’s mouth. He rubbedthe wood, thinking that it had once been damp from her. He replaced the pencil.
    He went through her desk, which held high school assignments, squares of wrapping paper, old birthday cards.
    “No diaries or letters?”
    Gebben focused on the detective. “I don’t know. That’s where they’d be.” He nodded toward the desk.
    Corde again looked carefully. No threatening letters, no notes from spurned boyfriends. No personal correspondence of any kind. He examined the closet, swinging aside the wealth of clothes and checking the shelves. He found nothing helpful and closed the double doors.
    Corde stood in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, looking around him.
    “Was she engaged? Have a steady boyfriend here?”
    Gebben was hesitating. “She had a lot of friends. Nobody’d hurt her. Everybody loved