第 57 页

They cartwheeled down and down the wood steps then crashed into the concrete floor and lay still, curled like lovers on a cold winter morning. In the small, dim basement around them were rusted tools, a sprinkling of coal, a half dozen cans of paint. And not another living soul.

Wynton Kresge rested across the trunk of the green Pontiac, in prone firing position. It was the pose of the dressed deer he tied onto his Olds hood when he drove home from hunting. The checkered grip from the Remington had imprinted its design into the pads of his fingers. He smelled gun oil and gasoline and he thought Corde had been inside too damn long.

Then he heard the gunshot. A short crack from inside the house, the ground-floor windows flexing for an instant under the muzzle burst.

Front or back, front or back?

Pick one, damn it.

Kresge stood up, hesitated, then ran over the barren lawn and through the open front door.

'Bill!' he shouted, and in response the poker caught him in the corner of the eye and laid open six inches of cheek. He fell backward hard. The shotgun went off, a chunk of clapboard exploded from the impact of the heavy shot. Hot blood streamed into his eye and mouth and he had a distorted image of Gilchrist limping forward to pick up the fallen shotgun. The professor's

right hand was swollen and dark and he too was bloodied about the face.

'Bill!' Kresge called, sputtering through blood.

Gilchrist lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at Kresge's face. The deputy rolled over and tried to scramble away. He heard Gilchrist's grunt as he pulled the trigger and realized that there was a spent round in the chamber. Kresge prayed that he didn't know enough about guns to pump a new shell in.

He heard the double snap of the slide going back and forth and the tap of the old shell falling on the porch.

'No,' Kresge moaned, groping for his automatic. It had fallen from his holster and he could not find it. He crawled another few inches and pressed against the wrought-iron railing. He felt the heavy cold touch of the shotgun barrel on his back.

Then the explosion.

And another and another. Gilchrist reeling over, clutching his chest and stomach, where Corde's bullets had exited. The shotgun fell on Kresge, who grabbed it in his blindness and pointed the muzzle toward the forest. Gilchrist dropped to his knees then fell forward.

Wynton Kresge was surrounded by numb silence, which was broken a moment later by a voice intruding on and finally destroying the deputy's relief: the sound of Bill Corde crying, 'Sarah, what have I done to you, what have I done?'

15

He walked unsteadily, the tufts of grass and wiry roots reaching out and snagging his feet. His voice was hoarse as he cried, 'Sarah, Sarah? Skittish birds flew up from their ground nests as he stumbled past. Sometimes he heard his own desperate echoes, which fed him momentary false hopes.

He had sprained his wrist in the fall down the stairs but had refused any treatment and hurried outside to search for his daughter.

Or for what he was now beginning to believe with despair: his daughter's body. She had been nowhere in the house or the garage.

Prodded by the horror of loss, his mind in chaos, Bill Corde was combing the five tricky acres around the house - tangled woods, pine needle dunes, a couple deep wells and plenty of dirt soft enough for a shallow grave. Wynton Kresge, stitched and in agony, strode through the same fields. As much as Corde, he dreaded finding a small overturn of earth. Bringing such news about a child to her father was unthinkable to him; still he searched frantically. Other deputies joined in, even Lance Miller, wheezing against the grip of the elastic tape around his ribs. Jim Slocum and two off-duty New Lebanon deputies, entitled to be home with beer, wives and the tube, also combed the scruffy landscape.

Corde staggered through grass and whips of thin branches. He scrambled and shuddered his way through head-high brush. He fell over a cruelly hidden arc of barbed wire and bloodied his good palm to save his jaw. Every reclining blotch of pink seen through the weeds was a well of agony, every distant yip of a dog or owl's hollow call. Once Corde cried hard as he leapt through tall grass to what turned out to be a beige IGA bag filled with empties.

'Sarah, Sarah?" he called in a whisper and continued across a stand of trees into another field, which was a dozen acres of fresh-plowed dirt.

By seven the sun is low, and narrow shadows of trees stretch out for yard and yards. Bill Corde sits on a hillock of chunky earth covered with dandelions and catnip and stalks of milkweed. His voice is gone, his strength too. He reaches out and affectionately strokes a yellow leaf in a wholly mad way. He thinks he should be searching the fields but he knows it is useless. He can do nothing, nothing but sit and mourn his daughter, and another loss too, for Sarah's death will in an obscure, brutal way also poison the life he shares with Diane, and that with Jamie. The three of them will now be wedged forever apart.

While he searched, hope had been his only instrument and now it too is gone.

He sits for ten minutes in this paralysis then watches as a police cruiser rocks over the uneven ground toward him, Lance Miller cautiously piloting. It stops on an incline. The door opens. Diane gets out.

Then Sarah behind her.

Corde stands uneasily and steps forward. He hugs the girl hard, embracing then wholly encompassing her. 'Honey, honey, honey!' he cries. His intensity begins to confuse her and he forces himself to grow nonchalant. Then a giddiness, which is not faked, set in. He laughs hard and squeezes her hand.

Diane explains that Sarah came running up the road to their house twenty minutes before. She whispers to Corde, 'She's shaken up bad. She saw Gilchrist attack Ben and she ran and hid at the school. Then she came home on foot.' Corde cocks an anxious eyebrow and Diane reads the signal. She mouths, 'She's fine. He didn't touch her.'

Diane then nods toward the ambulance parked at the entrance to Gilchrist's driveway. They gave her a pill that will keep her relaxed. Didn't they, honey?'

'I feel sleepy, Mommy.'

Although there are a thousand questions he wants to ask, Corde knows not to pursue this conversation with his daughter now. He says, 'Almost suppertime. How about we go home and fire up the barbecue?'

'Okay, Daddy. You hurt your hand.'

'It's nothing.'

They start toward the Dodge in this holiday atmosphere but the weight of the events is suddenly too much for Sarah. She is staring at Gilchrist's house as if gazing at a friend who has betrayed her. Although it is at some distance Corde slowly steps between her and the house on the slim chance that she might see blood. 'He hurt Dr. Breck, Daddy. The Sunshine Man hurt Dr. Breck. I thought he was my friend.'

'It's all right, honey. You're going to be all right.'

'I feel sleepy. I lost my backpack.'

We'll get it later, honey.'

'I left it in Dr Breck's car. It has my tape recorder in it. Dr Breck made me run when the Sunshine Man...' Her tiny voice fades.

Diane's fingertips rise slowly to her lips but she is determined not to reveal any more horror in front of the girl. She forces a smile onto her face.

Corde asks Diane, 'How's Breck?'

She hesitates. Corde knows she's considering if she should admit the existence of this knowledge. 'I called the hospital,' she whispers. 'Hell live. Hundreds of stitches.'

Sarah looks groggily away. 'I don't like it here. I'm afraid he's going to come back to his house.'

'Who?' Diane asks.

'The Sunshine Man.'

Corde crouches down. 'He's gone away, honey. He'll never come back. I've sent him away.'

Diane looks at the house. She says, 'He lives there, your wizard?'

Sarah says, 'I saw him behind the cow pasture a couple times. I wanted him to cast a spell to make me smart so one day I followed him here. But I was ascared to ask so I left.'

'And she wrote a story about it.'

Corde pulls the two stained pages from his breast pocket and reads the words he near to memorized earlier in the day. 'And the girl climbed onto the back of Cloud-Tipper the eagle and hugged his feather neck. They sailed away from the yellow house. They followed the Sunshine Man home. They flew into the yard then past the cow field and past the old well and the burned-down silo that looked like whale ribs and over the railroad bridge and along the path to the river. Finally, they came to a clearing in the woods. Cloud-Tipper landed gentle. And there was the Sunshine Man's cottage..."'

You came here by yourself, Sarah?' Diane's eyelids lower at the insolence of tragedy averted by the smallest slip of fate.

'I just wanted him to make me smart, Mommy.'

Diane casually slips her arm around her daughter and they walk toward the squad car. Corde hobbles along behind. Mother and daughter separate for a moment, the girl running ahead.

Corde catches up with his wife, who is now silent, the same wary expression on her face that she'd worn at Jamie's bedside. Corde knows why but doesn't want to consider it now. The pain in his arm is making up for lost time and he's half faint by the time he slides into the backseat of the Dodge, next to Diane. Sarah has claimed the front. Diane brushes her daughter's hair with her fingers.

When Corde sits closer to his wife she shies away from him. Her motion is subtle but is clear.

Miller starts the car and drives slowly over the rough ground, the Dodge sashaying like a canoe in a powerboat's wake. Corde lowers his forehead to his thumb, as if administering Lent ashes, and lets his palm take the whole weight of his head. This is what he thinks: 'I am just doing my job the only way I know how. What more is a man supposed to do? Though Corde suspects that a man must do more and probably a lot more. He knows that when your daughter gets well your son gets sick and when the car is paid off the mortgage goes up and when you decide you love your wife she's gone to another man ... There's no end to the burdens life lays on you. Oh, there is so much to do and more after that. And more and more and more... But it seems to him that this isn't so much the problem as is finding somebody or something that can show you exactly what has to be done. This is the lesson. This is what Bill Corde doubts he'll ever get right.

'Everybody buckle up now,' Lance Miller announces and turns the cruiser onto the highway.

Corde got the new FI-113 written up but it was a chore. He was extra careful because he knew it was going to be the basis for Jim Slocum's comments to the press and Hammerback Ellison's as well and he wanted it to be as clear as possible. He tried dictating into Sarah's tape recorder but he kept getting tongue-tied and had to go back to ruled paper and a Bic medium-point.

The Register lost its exclusive. The killings had been laid at the feet of a college professor who'd taught at Harvard and had written book reviews for the New York Times. The Associated Press and some big-city newspaper reporters came to town, along with a herd of earnest young TV reporters (one from CNN, to the town's delight) with their hair spray and crisp outfits and fancy electronics. One journalist referred to Gilchrist as the 'New Lebanon Cult Killer' but Sheriff Jim Slocum said that 'this didn't appear to be so much a cult situation as a romance-oriented homicide and some follow-up homicides to cover it up.'

Corde had been granted dispensation from learning the radio codes and was now in charge of what Slocum was calling the Felony Desk, something he'd thought up after watching America's Most Wanted one night. Things were slow though, the only felon at the moment being Dell Tucker, a New Lebanon farmer who'd turned an AR-15 full-automatic and had been heard testing it on gophers. Corde figured that was mostly a federal offense so why bother? Besides Corde had gopher problems himself.

Wynton Kresge had drawn a tough rotation from Hammerback Ellison. Being new he'd been assigned to a month of speed-trap duty out in the unincorporated portions of Harrison County. Corde told him they couldn't all be glamour assignments.

'S'hardlyfair,'Kresge had muttered. Sitting on Corde's desk in the New Lebanon Sheriffs Department he was now looking over the felony investigation report. 'Gilchrist flew back here the day before Jennie was killed..." He was speaking to himself, picturing it. "He bought a new ticket under a different name.'

'We should've checked passengers, IDs and forms of payment. The information was there.'

Kresge said, 'Seems like you can't think of everything.'

Corde thought for a moment. 'True, you can't. But you have to.'

'Flew back all the way from San Francisco?' Kresge mused.

Corde continued, 'And he just stayed in New Lebanon. He rented that house in the woods, the place we found him in. He rented it for a month, laying low. When he called people he just told them he was calling from San Francisco and they believed him.'

'How'd you find that out?'

'I didn't find it out. I figured it out. From what he told me. The best source of information on a murder is the perpetrator. Remember that.'

'Well, I will.'

'I think he was going to stay there for a little while then reappear like he'd come back from the conference. But that first morning he must've seen Sarah in the woods. He decided to use her to get to me. Her and Jamie too.' 'How?'

'His threats against Sarah might've stopped me. Or if anything'd happened to the kids, I would've been in no shape to keep going. Remember, everybody else was looking for the Moon Killer. T.T. Ebbans and me - and you too - were looking for somebody like Gilchrist. He knew that. I was the one he had to stop. Hardly Ribbon.'

'Or Werewolf Slocum,' Kresge whispered. 'When you were at the house, where you shot him, he said he had Sarah. Why'd he say that?'

Corde grimaced. 'To do just what he did: get the advantage on me. I didn't play it too smart. It never occurred to me that she'd gotten away. I walked in and asked first off where she was. That gave him something on me and he used it pretty damn well considering he was making it up as he went along. He was playing with me. He got me pretty riled then calmed me down telling me that Sarah was safe and telling me why he killed Jennie. Put me off my guard.'