The Lesson of Her Death

serial killer was involved. You feel differently now?”
    Corde ignored her, and Ebbans repeated, “Ten minutes. Press conference.”
    Addie didn’t pursue the question anyway; she noticed a photo opportunity and sent her photographer to shoot the body being zippered up and carried toward the ambulance that stood in the driveway of a house, next to a child’s pink-and-white tricycle. The cameramen were scrambling like panicked roaches to get the tricycle and the body bag in the same shot.
    The County Rescue Squad scuba divers arrived and suited up. One of them looked at the pond and muttered, “Whore’s pussy.”
    Corde sternly told the man to act professionally.
    On the periphery of the action Wynton Kresge leaned against an old, beige Dodge Aspen crowned by a blue revolving light. On the door was the Auden University seal, printed with the school name and the words
Veritas et Integritas
. Ebbans nodded in his direction. Corde and Kresge ignored each other.
    “I step into a mantrap on this one, or what?” Corde asked Ebbans.
    “You play it like you see it, Bill. That’s all you can ever do.”
    “Crime Scene have a chance before everybody started padding around?”
    “It was virgin. We didn’t find much other than the boot prints but it was a virgin.”
    Corde glanced at the cluster of policemen beside the pond. One was the blond man he had seen in the back of Ribbon’s car.
    Ebbans followed his eyes. “Charlie Mahoney.”
    “What’s he doing here?”
    “Representative of the family.”
    “Uhn. What family?”
    “Works for Jennie’s father.”
    “And?”
    “Don’t ask me.”
    “Well, let’s see what we’ve got.” Corde started down to the water.
    “Wait up a minute, Bill.”
    He stopped. Ebbans stepped beside him and when he spoke his voice was a whisper. Corde lowered his ear toward the man. “I just wanted you to know,” Ebbans began then hesitated. “Well, it’s bullshit is what it is.…”
    Corde was astonished. He had never known Ebbans to cuss. “What, T.T.?”
    Their eyes were on an indentation in the grass—a wheel tread left by the gurney that had carried Emily’s body to the ambulance.
    “Was there any connection between you and Jennie?”
    Corde looked up and kept his eye on the mesmerizing lights atop the ambulance. “Go on. What are you saying?”
    “There’s some talk at County—just talk—that you burnt those letters because you were, you know …”
    “I was what?”
    “‘Seeing her’ is what somebody said. And because of that maybe you wanted to deep-six the evidence. I don’t believe—”
    “I didn’t do that, T.T.”
    “I know that. I’m just telling you what I heard. It’s just a rumor but it’s one of those rumors that won’t go away.”
    Corde had been in town government long enough to know there are two reasons rumors don’t go away. Either because somebody doesn’t want them to go away.
    Or because they’re true.
    “Who’s behind it?” Corde asked.
    “Don’t know. Hammerback seems to be on your side. But with the election he’s paying out his support real slow and if you turn out to be a liability he’ll burn you in a second. Who else it could be I just don’t know.”
    At Corde’s feet drops of dew caught the flashing lights and flickered like a hundred miniature Christmas bulbs. “’Predate your telling me, T.T.”
    Ebbans walked to the ambulance and Corde headed down to the pond, whose turgid surface was filled with bubbles from the divers as they searched for clues to the death of this beautiful young woman—whose story and whose secrets were now lost forever and would never be transcribed on one of Bill Corde’s neatly ordered index cards.
    He stood for a long time, with his feet apart in a patch of firm mud, looking over the water, and found himself thinking not at all of fingerprints or weapons or footprints or fiber traces but meditating on the lives of the two girls murdered in this dismal place and wondering what the lesson of those deaths would ultimately be.
    “She’s calm now.” Diane Corde was speaking to Dr. Parker in her office. “I’ve never seen her have an attack like that. Bill said he asked her to spell a word and she just freaked out.”
    Mother
. That was what Sarah was supposed to spell. Diane didn’t tell the prim doctor this. Neither did she say how much she resented Corde’s callousness in telling her which word so panicked Sarah.
    Dr. Parker said, “I wish you’d called me. I could have