Read Online The Lesson of Her Death by Jeffery Deaver - Free Book Online

her mother fixing dinner downstairs.
    In the film, when the girl ended up in New York she lived in the alley and had to eat bread somebody had thrown out and she smoked a cigarette and just before this big guy was going to take her up into his apartment and do something to her Sarah didn’t know what, the girl’s mom showed up and hugged her and brought her home and dumped the stepfather. And they showed an 800 number you could call if you knew any runaways.
    What a stupid movie—about as real and interesting as a cereal commercial. But it solved a big problem for Sarah because it showed her how to save all of the wizard’s money and still get to Chicago.
    She was thinking of the railroad train.
    There were no railroads in New Lebanon. But there
was
a truck. It was a big one that looked sort of like a train and it passed the house every afternoon. The truck had a platform on the back that she thought she could hold on to, and it went past the house real slow. She could catch the truck easily and then climb onto the back and sit there. When he stopped for the night she could ask the driver where to find another truck going to Chicago.
    Sarah packed her Barbie backpack. She took Mr. Jupiter her shooting star bank, pairs of Levi’s and sweatshirts and socks and underpants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, and a skirt and a blouse, her Walkman and a dozen books on tape. Of course Redford T. Redford the world’s smartest bear would be traveling with her. And she took some things from her mother’s dresser. Lipstick, mascara, fingernail polish and panty hose.
    It was now five-thirty. The truck usually went past the house about six. Sarah walked around her room. She suddenly realized she’d miss her father. She started to cry. She’d miss her brother some. She thought she’d miss her mother but she wasn’t sure. Then she thought of the wizard telling her, “I’ll look out for you,” and she thought about school.
    Sarah stopped crying.
    She lifted the window, which opened onto the backyard of their house. She tossed the backpack out, hearing the coins in Mr. Jupiter ring loudly. She climbed out, hanging from the ledge, her cheek pressed hard against the yellow siding, then she let go and dropped the few feet to the soft ground.

W hen he hung up the phone Brian Okun recognized a contradiction that would have made a tidy little philosophical riddle. As the black receiver started downward he thought,
He’s got no right to talk to me that way
. As it settled in its cradle:
He’s got every right to talk to me that way
.
    Okun was lanky as a cowboy and his face was obscured by the strands of black beard that weaseled unevenly out of his wan skin. Inky Brillo hair hung over his ears like a floppy beret. He sat in his tiny cubicle overlooking the quad, his tensed hand still clutching the telephone, and developed his thought:
He has no right because as a human being I’m entitled to a mutual measure of respect and dignity. John Locke. He has every right because he’s in charge and he can do what he fucking well pleases. Niccoló Machiavelli cum Brian Okun
.
    The man he was thinking of was Leon Gilchrist, the professor for whom Okun worked. When Gilchristjoined Auden two years before, the horde of eager Ph.D. candidates seeking jobs as graduate assistants largely bypassed him. His reputation preceded him from the East—a recluse, a foul temper, no interest whatsoever in campus sports, politics or administration. While this put off most grad students it merely upped the ante for Okun, who was as intrigued by Gilchrist’s personality as he was impressed by his mind.
    Any doubts that remained about the professor were obliterated when Okun read Gilchrist’s
The Id and Literature
. The book changed Okun’s life. He stayed up all night, zipping through the dense work as if it were an
Illustrated Classics
comic book. He finished it at exactly three-ten in the afternoon and by four was sitting in Gilchrist’s office, being