The Lesson of Her Death

they had learned mostly from pulp thrillers and TV, just like they knew about guns from stubbly autumn fields, not from the state pistol range up in Higgins. Still they had been ordered to search the crime scene and they had, doggedly and with fervor.
    But not one of them had found the piece of paper toward which Bill Corde now struggled through thick brush.
    Oh, you poor girl
…
    …
who lies at the foot of a ten-foot-high earth dam
.
    …
who lies in this chill wet dish of mud and low grass and blue flowers
.
    …
whose dark hair is side-parted, whose face is long, whose throat thick. Her round lips curl prominently. Each ear holds three wire-thin gold rings. Her toes are lanky and their nails dark with burgundy polish
.
    …
who lies on her back, arms folded over her breasts, as if the mortician had already done her up. The pink floral blouse is buttoned high. Her skirt extends so modestly below her knees, tucked beneath her thighs
.
    “We got her name. Here we go. It’s Jennie Gebben. She’s a student.”
    Last night Bill Corde had crouched down beside the body, his knee popping, and put his face next to hers. The pearlish half-moon was reflected in her dead but still unglazed hazel eyes. He had smelled grass, mud, methane,transmission fluid, mint from her lips and perfume like pie spices rising from her cold skin.
    He had stood and climbed to the top of the dam, which held back the murky waters of Blackfoot Pond. He had turned and looked down at her. The moonlight was otherworldly, pale, special-effects light. In it, Jennie Gebben seemed to move. Not living, human movement but shrinking and curling as if she were melting into the mud. Corde had whispered a few words to her, or to whatever remained of her, then helped the men search the ground.
    Now, in the morning brilliance, he pushed his way through a final tangle of forsythia and stepped up to the rosebush. With his hand inside a small plastic bag, Corde pulled the paper from the russet thorns.
    Jim Slocum called, “The whole shebang?”
    Corde did not answer him. The boys from the department had not been careless last night. They could not have found this scrap of paper then because it was a clipping from this morning’s
Register
.
    Slocum asked again, “The whole, uhm, place?”
    Corde looked up and said, “Whole thing. Yeah.”
    Slocum grunted and continued unwinding yellow police-line tape around the circle of wet earth where the girl’s body had been found. Slocum, after Corde, was the next senior New Lebanon town deputy. He was a muscular man with a round head and long ears. He’d picked up a razor-cut hairstyle in 1974, complete with sideburns, and had kept it ever since. Except for theme parks, hunting trips, and Christmas at the in-laws’, Slocum rarely left the county. Today he whistled a generic tune as he strung the tape.
    A small group of reporters stood by the road. Corde would give nothing away but these were rural news hounds and well behaved; they looked all filled up with reporters’ zeal but they left the two officers pretty much alone, content to shoot snaps and study the crime scene. Corde figured they were sponging up atmosphere for tomorrow’sarticles, which would brim with adjectives and menace.
    Corde lowered the newspaper clipping, now wrapped in the plastic bag, and looked around him. From the dam, off to his right, the ground rose to a vast forest split by Route 302, a highway that led to the mall then to a dozen other county roads and to a half-dozen state highways and to two expressways and eventually to forty-nine other states and two foreign countries where a fugitive killer might hide till the end of his days.
    Pacing, Corde looked over the forest, his lips pressed tightly together. He and Slocum had arrived five minutes before, at eight-thirty. The
Register
started hitting stores and porches at about seven-fifteen. Whoever had left the clipping had done so in the past hour.
    Listening to the hum of wind over a strand of taut barbed wire, he scanned the ground beneath the rosebush. It was indented by what seemed like two footprints though they were too smeared to help in identification. He kicked over a log that appeared newly fallen. A swarm of insects like tiny armadillos scurried away. Striding to the top of the dam, he placed his hands on green metal pipes sunk into the dirt as a railing.
    He squinted deep furrows into his forehead as he looked through the morning sunlight that crackled off the wind-roughed