The Lesson of Her Death

her.”
    “Did she break up with anybody recently?”
    “No,” Gebben said and shrugged in such a way that Corde understood the man had no idea what he was saying.
    “Anybody have a crush on her?”
    “Nobody who knew Jennie would hurt her,” Gebben said slowly. Then he added, “You know what I was thinking? Since I got the call I haven’t told anybody. I’ve been working up courage. For all those people—her grandparents, her friends, my brother’s family—Jennie’s still alive. For all they know she’s sitting in the library studying.”
    “I’ll leave you now, sir. If you can think of anything that might help us I’d appreciate a call. And if you find any letters or a diary please send them to me as soon as you can. They’d be very important.” He handed Gebben one of his cheap business cards.
    Gebben studied the card. He looked up, sloe-eyed and earnest. “It’s going to be all right.”
    He said this with such intensity that it seemed as ifhis sole purpose at the moment was to comfort Bill Corde.
    Wynton Kresge sat in his office in the main administration building of Auden University. The room—high-ceilinged, paneled in oak—was carpeted in navy blue, pretty much the same color as that in his Cutlass Supreme though this pile was twice as thick. His desk was a large mahogany piece. Occasionally when he was on the phone listening to someone he had no desire to be listening to (which was pretty often), Kresge would imagine ways to get the desk out of the office without knocking a hole in the wall. On particularly slow days he actually considered trying to remove it. He would have been a good candidate for this project: Kresge was six foot four and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. His upper arms measured fifteen inches around, his thighs were twenty-four, and only a minor percentage of those dimensions was fat. (He had never lifted a barbell in his life but had retained much of the muscle he cultivated when he was a college linebacker for the Tigers not the Missouri Tigers the
Dan Devine
Tigers.)
    The top of the desk held one telephone with two lines, one brass lamp, one blotter, one leather desk calendar opened to this week, one framed photo of an attractive woman, seven framed photos of children, and one piece of paper.
    The paper, held down by Kresge’s massive hand as if he were afraid it would blow away, contained the following words:
Jennie Gebben. Tuesday ten P.M. Blackfoot Pond. McReynolds dorm. Lovers, students, teachers, robbery? rape? other motive? Susan Biagotti?
Beneath this was an awkward diagram of the campus and the pond and the road around it. Kresge touched his earlobe with the butt of his Schaeffer sterling silver ballpoint pen, which he had polished just the night before, and considered what he’d written.
    Kresge drew additional lines on the paper, crossing off words, and adding others. He was drawing a dotted line from the campus to the pond when a knock on the closed door made him jump. By the time his secretary walked into the room without announcing herself further the piece of paper was wadded up and slam-dunked into Kresge’s wastebasket.
    “She wants to see you,” said the secretary, a pretty woman in her late thirties.
    “She does.”
    The secretary paused then said, “You’re holed up in here.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    She said, “I used to think that that phrase was ‘hauled up.’ Like they hauled somebody up in a tower so he could escape from the police or something.”
    “The police?” Kresge asked.
    “But then I found out it was ‘holed up.’ Like, go into a hole.”
    “I don’t really know. Now?”
    “She said now.”
    Kresge nodded. He unlocked his top drawer and from it took out a dark gray Taurus 9mm semiautomatic pistol. He looked to make certain there was a full clip in the grip of the gun then slipped it in a belt holster. He left the room with what the secretary sensed, though Kresge himself did not, was a look of intense, almost theatrical, determination on his face.
    This was how she would build the house: She would find some land—there, that beautiful field with the gold and white flowers in it, there through the window, surrounded by green-silver trees. She could see, from her cell, the tall grass waving in a breeze soft as a kitten’s lazy tail. Then she would call her friends the animals and—
    “Sarah, are you with us?”
    Her head snapped away from the window and she found thirty-two children and one adult