The Lesson of Her Death

you should cut out the part about getting pissed on. That’s too sick for words. Nobody around here’d buy that.”
    “Good point,” Okun said, always willing to take good advice. “A little paraphilia goes a long way. Kiss me.”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you scare me, Brian.”
    “Me?”
    “Yes, you.”
    “Kiss me.”
    “No.”
    “Yes,” he commanded. And she did.
    The security guard led Corde and Ebbans through the garbage room of Jennie’s dorm to an emergency exit.
    It was early the next morning and the air was humid and filled with smell of lilac, dogwoods and hot tar from roofers forty feet above their heads.
    Corde and Ebbans had returned to the dorm to see if they could find Emily. Corde thought they might catch her before she left the dorm. She wasn’t here although her bed had been slept in and the bar of Camay in the cream-color soap dish was wet. The detectives had waited in her room for nearly twenty minutes but she never returned. Just as the antsy guard seemed about to complain, Corde glanced out the window into the parking lot.
    “Huhn.”
    He’d written a note to Emily on one of his business cards and had left it on her desk. He then had said to Ebbans, “Follow me.”
    Ebbans did, trailed by the guard, a man with a huge swelling of latticed nose, who hadn’t smiled at the men all morning.
    Bill Corde pushed the stained bar on the gray fire door and stepped into the parking lot behind the dorm. The three men walked along a small grassy strip that separated the building from the parking lot. Grass and weeds. And oil drums painted green and white. Corde asked the guard, “Are those the school colors?”
    “Nope. They’d be black and gold.”
    “Ugly,” Ebbans said.
    “You salute it, you don’t wear it,” the guard grumbled. “Least, I don’t.”
    They saw however that not all the oil drums were green and white.
    One was black.
    “Fire?” Corde asked now as he walked up to the drum.
    “Pranks.” The guard rubbed his great crosshatched nose and muttered, “That the way they be. Think they own the world, the students, you know what I’m saying? Be spoiling stuff for everybody.”
    Corde peered into the drum.
    “Let’s get it over. But slow.”
    Together they eased the heavy drum to the ground. A small avalanche of ash puffed up a gray cloud. Corde and Ebbans went onto their knees and probed carefully, trying not to shatter the thin pieces of ash. There were two blackened wire spirals that had been the spines of notebooks. The rest was a mostly unrecognizable mound of ash and wads of melted plastic.
    Corde found several fragments of unburnt white paper. There was no writing on them. He eased them aside. He then found half a scrap of green accounting printout paper filled with numbers.
    “What’s this?”
    Ebbans shrugged. “I don’t do brainy crimes.”
    Corde put the scrap in a plastic bag.
    Ebbans plucked a small pair of tweezers from the butt of a Swiss Army knife and reached forward. He gently lifted a bit of crinkly purple paper. All that remained was the upper lefthand corner.
    March 14, 1
Jennie Ge
McReyn
Aude
New
    “Her letters,” Ebbans said. There was triumph in his voice. “There you go, Bill.”
    “A pile of ash is all they are.”
    Ebbans often worked like a dog on scent. “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s keep going and see what we can find.”
    Together the men crouched down and began theirsearch again. When they finished, an hour later, they had nothing to show for their effort but the scraps of paper they had found right off, and two uniforms filthied, it seemed, beyond saving.
    Even from the distance he sees fear in their eyes, in their posture, in their cautious gait.
    Driving along Cress Street, a shortcut to the Sheriff’s Department, Bill Corde watches people on the sidewalks of New Lebanon. Shades are drawn. More than the usual number of stores have not yet opened this morning although it is a glorious spring day in a town that has wakened early for a hundred and fifty years.
    The people are skittish.
Like cattle in thunder
. Corde drums the steering wheel and wishes he hadn’t compared his good citizens to fed-out slaughter animals.
    Ace Hardware, Lamston’s, Long’s Variety, Webb’s Lingerie and Foundations.… Stores or the descendants of stores identical to them that have been here forever. Stores he has walked past for years, stores he has shopped in and answered 911 calls at, stores whose owners he sees at PTA meetings.