The Lesson of Her Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the pictures again. Ribbon leaned forward and tapped the book. “Hang on to that. You’ll enjoy it. It’s a real, what do they say, page-turner.”
    The Incorporated Town of New Lebanon reluctantly owned up to its mouthful of a name. By the time the village was chartered in the 1840s all the good names—the European capitals and harmonious-sounding biblical locales—had been taken. The final debate had pitted the New Lebanonites against New Luxumbergians. Becausethe former had a respectful ring of Old Testament, the vote was predictable.
    The town was in Harrison County, named after William Henry, not because of his thirty-day term as president but for his tenure as Indiana Territory governor during which he decimated native Indian tribes (Tippecanoe, of campaign-slogan fame) and allowed counties like this his namesake to congeal into what they were today: mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly rural. New Lebanon’s economy floated on milk, corn, and soybeans, though it had a few small factories and one big printing plant that did a lot of work for Chicago and St. Louis and New York publishers (including the ever-scandalous and -anticipated
Mon Cher
magazine, scrap bin copies of which flooded the town monthly thick as shucked cobs at harvest).
    Also located in New Lebanon was the only four-year college for a hundred miles. Auden University goosed the town population up to fourteen thousand from August to May and gave locals the chance to sit through performances of second-tier orchestras and avant-garde theater companies, which they boasted about being able to attend but rarely did. The NCAA was about the only real contact between Auden and the natives, virtually none of whom could afford the seventeen-thousand-dollar tuition, which bought you, times four, just a
liberal arts
degree and what the hell good was that?
    The residents had ambivalent feelings toward the students. The school was a bounty, no denying: thousands of young people with nothing to do but eat out, go to movies and redecorate their dorm rooms, and what’s more there was a new brood of them every year just like hogs and veal calves. And some locals even felt a nebulous pride when Auden University Economics Professor Andrew Schoen appeared on
Meet the Press
or a book by English professor John Stanley Harrod was favorably reviewed in the
New York Times
, to which a grand total of forty-seven New Lebanonites subscribed.
    On the other hand Auden was a burden. These money-shedding young people got drunk and puked and sneered and teepeed trees with toilet paper and broke plate glass. They shamelessly bought Trojans and Ramses in front of grade-school children. They walked around looking important as bankers. They burned effigies of politicians and occasionally a flag. They were gay and lesbian. They were Jewish and Catholic. They were Eastern.
    Bill Corde was not a product of Auden though he was of New Lebanon. Born and reared here, he’d ventured away only for four years of service (standing guard with his M-16 over missiles in West Germany) and a few years in Missouri as a patrolman then detective in the St. Louis Police Department. He returned to New Lebanon and after six months of feed and grain, teaching Sunday school and thinking about starting a contracting business, he applied for a job at the town Sheriff’s Department. His experience made him a godsend to Steve Ribbon, whose closest approximation to police training had been the Air Force (he and
his
rifle had protected B-52s in Kansas). After a year as the department’s oldest rookie Corde was promoted to detective and became the town’s chief felony investigator.
    On the neat wall above his neat desk in the hundred-and-four-year-old town building were some framed documents: a diploma from Southwestern State University and certificates from the ICMA’s Police Business Administration Institute of Training in Chicago as well as one from the Southern Police Institute in Louisville. The