The Lesson of Her Death by Jeffery Deaver Page A

four times. It was like a code, a secret that bound them together in this alien world.
    “Phathar, I’ve like called you ten times.” Jano’s voice was agitated.
    Phathar whispered harshly, “Just chill, will you? Shut up.”
    Jano—full name Jano-IV of the Lost Dimension—climbed through the lattice gate of the porch. He said, “Why didn’t you call me back? I thought you’d been arrested or something. Man, I almost puked this morning. I mean, like really.”
    “Chill … out. Okay?” Although Phathar-VII, also a warrior from the Lost Dimension, was calm and in control, Philip Halpern, young and overweight, was close enough to panic without his friend’s adding to it. He said, “So what is there to do?”
    “I don’t know. I almost puked.” Jano repeated, looking as if he had. His mouth was wet and his eyes red and though it was too early in the season for serious freckles, the brown dots stood out on his face in sickly contrast to his pale skin.
    Phathar said, “How can they even find us?”
    “Oh, Jesus.”
    “You’re like a total pussy.”
    “I am not!” Jano’s eyes blazed.
    Philip, whom Jano could have pounded to the dirt floor with a single fist, backed off. “All right, dude, all right.”
    Jano said, “We’ve got to destruct the files.”
    “You know how long it took us to make those up?”
    Jano said, “We’ve got the names of half the girls in class on them. All the codes, all the pictures.”
    “I’ve got them in a secret file. If anybody tries—”
    “But the pictures—” Jano whined in a voice that wasn’t at all the voice of a Dimensional warrior.
    “No, listen,” Phathar said. “If anybody tries to open the drawer everything self-destructs. It’s automatic.”
    Jano gazed into the night. “Oh, man, I wish we hadn’t done it.”
    “Stop talking that way,” Phathar whispered ruthlessly. A fleck of saliva shot onto Jano’s arm. The boy’s revulsion showed in his face but he didn’t brush the dot away. Phathar continued, “We
did
do it! We. Did. It. We can’t bring her back to life.”
    “Dathar could,” Jano sniveled.
    “Well, we can’t so quit like crying about it.”
    “I almost puked.”
    Above them: A squeak of opening door. A low voice snapped, “Phil!” Both boys froze. “Phil-lip!” His father’s voice stabbed through the night like a Dimension-cruiser’s engine kicking into antimatter mode. “The fuck are you? You got school tomorrow.”
    Philip wondered if he himself was going to puke. Even Phathar was trembling.
    “You can hear me, you got ten minutes. I have to come looking for you it’ll be with the handy man.”
    When the screen door slammed Phathar said, “You gotta leave. He finds you here he’ll whip me.”
    Jano stared at the underside of the porch above them then said, “Tomorrow.” He left silently. To his shadowy, receding form, Phathar lifted his arm and closed his fingers in a Dimensional warrior salute.

    Oh, she struggled. She wrote the words a dozen times, careful always to tear up the ruined note and drop it into a garbage can. She’d failed him once. She wasn’t going to make it worse by letting her mother and dad find out about him.
    Sitting at her desk she hunched over the tricky letters, willing her pen to move one way then watching it move the other. She would tell it to go up to make the top of a b and instead it went down and became a p. Left instead of right.
    Is this how an S goes? No. Yes
.
    Sarah Corde hated S’s.
    She heard the crickets playing their tiny squeak-fiddles outside in the cool night, she heard the wind brushing the trees. Neck and back cramped with tension she wrote for another half hour then looked at her work.
    Im sorry. I cant’ go awya, they wont let me anb a police man is coomign comming in the mourning to watch us. Can you help me? You can have yor mony back. You are the Sunshine Man aren’t you? Can I see you?
    She signed her name carefully.
    She felt a moment of panic, worrying that