The Lesson of Her Death (25 page)

“Mr. Mahoney.”

“I’m a cop, you’re a cop …”

“Charlie
. Charlie, it might not look good for … Well, politically is what I’m saying, to have an outsider
here. It might look like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“It might also look like you thought so highly of the community that you had the foresight to call in some special help.” Mahoney took a leisurely moment to study his watch. “Well. There you have it. Now, you can kick my ass out of here tomorrow if you want. But I’m stuck in town for the night at least and don’t know a soul. How ’bout you and me get a drink and trade war stories. There’s not much else to do in this town, is there?”

Ribbon almost made a comment about one pastime being raping co-eds by moonlight but caught himself. “Well, there are,” he said, “but ’cept for fishing none of ’em’s as fun as drinking.”

She lifted the card off her desk with a trembling hand and stared at it, the little white rectangle. It was stiff and the corners were very sharp. One pressed painfully into her nail-chewed thumb, which left a bloody smear on the card.

Emily Rossiter started to sit on the bed but then thought that
they
might have sat here. They’d probably looked between the mattress and the springs. They’d felt the pillow. They’d run their hands along the same sheets where she and her lover had lain. She dropped the card and saw, as it flipped over and over, the words
Please call me
.…
Det. William Corde
flash on and off then disappear as the card landed in the wastebasket. She wondered if even the trash had been violated. Emily walked into the hall then into the telephone alcove.

She made a call and stiffened slightly when someone answered. “It’s Emily.… I have to see you. No, now.” She listened for a moment to vehement protests then answered defiantly. “It’s about Jennie.” The voice on the other end of the line went silent.

“So I go like you are too much why don’t you just sit on it and then Donna’s like he is too totally much it’s like you know like his eyes have this total hard-on and I go …”

Philip Halpern thought:
Shut. Up
.

In the room he and his sister shared there was one telephone. His sister, fourteen, used it most of the time.

The cool breeze of an April evening flowed through the window, rippling the green sheet that separated Philip’s side from his sister’s. Taped on the poorly painted walls were dozens of creased posters, the sort that come stapled in the centerfold of teen magazines. The wind momentarily lifted aside the Kmart sheet, studded with tiny red flowers, and for a brief moment Luke Perry and Madonna faced off against the Road Warrior and Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.

In Philip’s half of the stale-scented space: stacks of comic books, science fiction novels, drawing tablets, plastic figures of comic book heroes and villains. Hundreds of magazines,
Fangoria, CineGore, Heavy Metal
, many missing their covers; unable to afford them, Philip regularly swiped the unsold, stripped copies from trash bins behind New Lebanon News. On his dresser and desk rested elaborate plastic models of space ships perfectly assembled but coated with grime. In the corner, a hatrack project for shop class, partially completed, hid a massive dustball.

Dominating the room was a huge hand-printed sign. In oddly elaborate script it read:
Entry Forbidden
, the message surrounded by dozens of letters from the runic alphabet and tiny sketches of gargoyles and dragons.

Philip lay in his sagging bed on a mattress now dry but marred with a hundred old urine stains. He had told his parents that he had to study for a test and went into the bedroom. His father had seemed pleasantly surprised at this news then turned on
Wheel of Fortune
. Philip did not however study. He read Heinlein, he read Asimov,
he read Philip K. Dick (he believed at times he was possessed by Dick’s spirit), he lay on the bed, staring at flowers and mentally designing a laser, until his sister came into the room and made the phone call to her girlfriend.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up
.

Their father opened the bedroom door abruptly and said, “Off the phone. Lights out. Now.” His hand swept the light switch down. The door closed.

“… naw, my old man … gotta go. Yeah, tomorrow.”

Philip turned the laser onto the afterimage of his father to see if it would work. It did, spectacularly. Philip invented very efficient weapons.

His voice hissed as he fired it again.

Rosy said, “Asshole.”

“Say that to him.”

“I’m talking to you,” she said. He heard the zipper of her jeans. He wondered what she was going to wear to bed.

Philip said, “You’re a ’ho.”

She said, “You wish.”

“Bitch.”

“Fag.”

The springs of her mattress squeaked as she flopped into bed. Philip lay unmoving for ten minutes—until he heard her steady breathing. Fully dressed, he sat up, feeling the cool air from the open window wash over him. He climbed through the window and as he fell to the spongy ground he slipped into the Lost Dimension; it was Phathar the warrior who staggered briefly then righted himself and strode confidently out of the moonlight-flooded backyard.

P
rofessor Randolph Sayles wondered why there were no crickets or cicada here. He listened. It was late April. Was it too early for them? He didn’t know entomology. He’d struggled through life sciences, biology being the one course that had deprived him of a four-point grade average in undergraduate school. Twenty-six years later he still resented this.

He stood in the Veterans Memorial Park for ten minutes before she appeared. He thought Emily Rossiter was one of the most beautiful young women he’d ever seen. She had curly brown hair, surrounding a round face of Italian or Greek features, very pale. On her beauty alone he could have lived forever with her, sufficiently happy, sufficiently in love.

Yet as she approached him now—under a trestle of budding maples, the defiantly glaring moonlight silver against the riffling underside of the young leaves—what he saw shocked him. She was like a homeless woman,
disheveled, her face puffy, her hair in tangles and unclean, her mouth slack, clothes dirty. Her eyes unfocused, her weak smile mad.

Yet despite her crazed demeanor, despite his anger toward her, despite his fear of her, Randy Sayles wanted nothing so much as to make love to her. Here, immediately, on the grass, on the dirt, hot flesh on flesh in a sea of cool spring air.… He wanted to force her down and press on her, harder harder.… He wanted to sample her vulnerability. He wanted her salty, unwashed flesh between his teeth.…

He had once tried to seduce her, an incident that ended unconsummated and dangerously close to rape. She had finally repelled him with a slap, drawing blood. He had apologized and never approached her again. Curiously this scalding memory exponentially increased his hunger for her now.

He stood slouching, hands pocketed, as she stopped two feet away from him. They stood under a streetlight that seemed duller and more eerie than the light from the full moon. “Emily.”

“You know what happened to her, don’t you?” The words seemed to stumble from her mouth.

“What is it you want?”

“To Jennie, You know what happened to her?”

She began to walk, suddenly, as if she just remembered an appointment. Sayles followed, slightly behind. They moved this way, together, for five minutes then turned north along a path that led to a circle of brick surrounded by concrete benches and behind them a tall boxwood hedge. They would have three or four minutes’ warning in case somebody walked toward them.

When speaking with female students Sayles automatically considered escape routes.

“Where are you staying,” he asked, “in the room?”

“Ah, kiddo,” Emily whispered to no one.

“You should think about going home. Take incompletes. I’ll arrange it if you like.”

“Kiddo.”

“What were you trying to say on the phone? You didn’t sound very coherent.”

“I didn’t know it would be this hard. It’s so hard without her.”

“What do you want?”

The moonlight shone on her cheeks
in
two streaks leading from her eyes to her mouth. Sayles stood with his hands still in his pockets, Emily with her arms crossed over breasts he had never seen. She asked, “You saw her the night she died, didn’t you?” She spoke from some brink whose nature he couldn’t fathom; was it resolution or resignation?

Sayles said, “No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

They were in the small park off the quad, a place where lovers over the years had unzipped and unbuttoned all manners of fashions as they lay struggling on fragrant Midwest grass. Tonight the park was, or appeared to be, deserted. Emily said, “You know what happened to her, don’t you?”

After a moment Sayles asked, “Why are you asking me?”

“Ah, kiddo,” Emily muttered. “Ah kiddo kiddo kiddo …”

Sayles asked in a furious whisper, “What are you saying? What do you know?” He was engulfed with emotion and couldn’t will his strong hands to stop as they grabbed her shoulders.

She seemed to waken suddenly and stood back, shaking her head, crying. “You’re hurting me.…”

“Hey, anybody there?” a gruff voice called. Footsteps behind them. Someone walking in the woods nearby, separated from view by the boxwood hedge. Emily broke away. Sayles started toward her. She waved her hand wildly, as if brushing away a riled bee.

“Tell me!” Sayles whispered viciously.

Emily walked quickly down the path. He started after her but the intruder, a security guard, shone his light in their direction. They both dodged it. Emily ran.

Sayles whispered, “Wait!” Then he stepped through the bushes, out of sight of the guard. He hurried through the darkness in the direction he believed she had gone.

Phathar jogged slowly down the path, gasping for breath. It reminded him of dreaded PE class tomorrow; the students were going to run the 880—the purest form of Honon torture for him. He pictured himself plodding along, fat bouncing, as the others—who’d all finished—hooted and laughed.
“Way to go, Phil. Hustle, Phil. Hustle!”
His bowel churned.

He came out of the woods and walked for fifty feet before he smelled the water and the mud. He found himself at the foot of Blackfoot Pond dam. Phathar felt a stirring in his groin, and he painfully admitted to himself that despite the horror of last Tuesday night Phathar wished in his Dimensional soul he could relive the half hour he had spent here.

Lights
. The sound of a speeding car. He crouched and ran to a low hemlock. The lights swept over his head like searchlights in a prison camp and the car disappeared with a hiss of tires, loud in the damp air. Phathar walked into the dish of mud and began his search for the knife that he had discovered to his horror had been lost that night. He was stung by this carelessness, not worthy of Phathar at all (but typical of a fat clumsy high school freshman). Back and forth, using a small penlight he’d wrapped with black construction paper to mask the light, he searched.

Phathar slowly grew serene. Smelling the mud and water, hearing the groan of bullfrogs reminded him of biology class—his best course. He remembered the time he had helped the teacher collect frogs from the banks of the Des Plaines one night and the man had thanked Philip in front of the class the next day. Philip’s face had burned with rare pride at the compliment. He had felt bold enough to volunteer to pith frogs for anyone who
didn’t want to. He jabbed a probe into the heads of a dozen frogs that day. One girl thanked him and said he was brave. Philip had stared at her, dumbstruck.

After a half hour of futilely scanning the muck for the knife, he gave up. He couldn’t stay any longer; his father might make an unexpected raid on the bedroom. He started for the path. Then: footsteps. The boy froze, sweat bursting on his forehead, his neck bristling with panic. He retreated to the hemlock. The steps grew closer and he cowered beneath the muffling boughs. He leaned out and looked.

A girl!

Philip calmed immediately and a thrill rippled through his plentiful body.