The Lesson of Her Death

about her companions on these outings though what she did share caused a considerable stir. Sex was Jennie’s favorite topic. Not boys or dates orengagement rings.
Sex
. Jennie had been found masturbating in the dorm bathroom a number of times and she didn’t mind being watched. She got pleasure from blunt talk
(“One time Jennie and I were in the study room, okay? And it’s all quiet and she like looks up and goes, ‘You ever take it up the ass?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, did you really say that?’”)
.
    Her reluctance to discuss her lovers fueled the rumors that she slept with professors. Last year she supposedly went out with one professor for much of the spring term. They kept it intensely secret though it was believed that he was in the Education School and that they had contemplated marriage.
    A number of girls call Jennie’s sexual behavior disgraceful but when they do, the disdain is transparent and there is envy beneath.
    Many students say that they considered her a searcher, unsettled, unhappy. Several give similar versions of the same incident: Late one night Jennie was in the stairwell of the dorm by herself. She was crying and the echoes of her voice on the concrete walls made a terrible, mournful moan. “I’m so
lonely
.…” one student believes she was saying. Another, on the floor below, heard, “If only I had him.…”
    She was not religious and had never attended a church in New Lebanon. She had some tapes by New Age musicians and several crystal necklaces but little interest in spiritualism or the occult. Students have given conflicting reports about her relationship with her parents. Jennie was cool toward her mother. Her connection with her father, on the other hand, was turbulent. On the phone she sometimes told him in oddly passionate terms that she missed and loved him. Other times she slammed the phone down and announced about him, “What a prick.”
    Bill Corde drops his quarter on the table and scoops up his index cards, considering all these facts, and he tries to picture the killer. But he sees woefully little. Far, far less than the profile in the
Register
(which infuriatedhim partly because he doubted he himself could ever create such a vivid image of a criminal). Corde’s own profiling technique, that of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, is charted on the yellowed sheet of paper pinned on the corkboard behind his desk. It is a lengthy process of inputting voluminous facts, arranging them into models, assessing the crime and finally creating then fine-tuning the criminal profile. (He knows that the NCAVC procedure includes an optimistic sixth and final step: apprehension of the killer—a stage that seems despairingly unattainable at this moment, eight long days after Jennie Gebben’s demure body was found in a bed of muddied hyacinths beside that gloomy, still pond.)
    Corde knows many details about Jennie Gebben. He knows that Brian Okun has lied to him and that Professor Sayles might have. He knows that two boys were near the dam shortly before her death and one of them may have had a knife. The trail is cooling and there is so much more to learn. More interviews, more facts to unearth.… Though he secretly wonders: Is he merely stalling, hoping for a picture of the killer to flutter down from heaven, a picture as clear as the portrait of Jennie taped inside his briefcase?
    Bill Corde riffles the index cards.
    He believes much and he knows little. A mass of information is in his hands but the truth is somewhere between the facts themselves, in the gaps of his knowledge, like the shadows between the flipping cardboard. For now, Corde sees only darkness as dense as the water in Blackfoot Pond. He sees no deeper than the reflection of double moons in the facets of a dead girl’s necklace.
    Corde hopes for startling illumination and yet he fears it will be a long, long time coming.

H er trouble came with the first asymmetrical block.
    Resa Parker flipped through the green booklet, its cover printed with the large black letters
VMI, Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration,
and noted the exact point where Sarah Corde’s abilities failed her: trying to copy a line drawing of an uneven rectangle.
    Setting this aside the psychiatrist reviewed the
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised
, examining the snaky plot of the verbal and performance tests in the WISC-R profile blocks. The
Revised Gray Oral Reading Test
, which was