The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  She wanted to weep, but knew it would not be permitted.

  “Boswell!”

  She looked up sharply at the sound of Douglas Jeffers’ voice. She jumped from her chair.

  “Take some water in to our guests.”

  She nodded and ran to the kitchen. She found a pitcher in the cabinet above the stove and filled it with water. Walking quickly, but careful not to spill any, she maneuvered past the living room, where the two brothers sat opposite each other, now wordless, after a day of talk. She opened the door to the downstairs bedroom and entered softly. She thought they might be asleep and didn’t want to wake anyone. But at the scraping of her feet on the wood floor, she saw four sets of eyebrows soar in panicked anticipation.

  She felt wretched.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said. She knew how silly her words sounded, how foolish it was to try to comfort them. She knew they would die, and soon. That had been the plan all along.

  That they were nobodies didn’t matter to him, this she knew. What was important was that they were there, in this location, which she knew was important to him. She remembered his words, spoken under his breath, seconds before breaking in through a sliding porch door, left benignly unlocked, open to summer breezes:

  “I need to fill this house with ghosts.”

  She put her hand on the woman’s arm gently, reassuringly. “I’ve brought you some water,” she said. “Just nod if you want a drink. You first, Mrs. Simmons?”

  The woman nodded, and Anne Hampton loosened the gag from the woman’s mouth. She held the jug up to the woman’s lips. “Don’t take too much,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll let me take you to the bathroom.” The woman stopped in midgulp and nodded again.

  “I’m scared,” the woman said, taking advantage of the loosened gag. “Can’t you help us? You seem like such a nice girl. You’re not much older than the twins, please, please . . .”

  Anne Hampton was about to respond when she heard a voice from the living room. “No talking. Just one drink. Don’t make me enforce the rules.”

  “Please,” the woman whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” Anne Hampton whispered back. She replaced the gag, but not so tightly. The woman nodded gratefully.

  Anne Hampton moved first to one of the twins, then the other. “Don’t talk,” she whispered to each. When she reached the father she hesitated. “Please,” she said, “don’t try anything. Don’t force him.” The man nodded and she loosened the gag. He drank and then she replaced the handkerchief. For a moment he strained against the rope that bound all of them together. She heard the man say, despite the gag in his mouth, “Help us, please,” but she could not respond.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She closed the door on the family and went back into the main room.

  “How’re they doing?” Douglas Jeffers asked.

  “They’re scared.”

  “They should be.”

  “Doug, please,” Martin Jeffers said. “At least let them go. What have they done . . .”

  The older brother cut the younger one off abruptly.

  “Haven’t you learned anything all day? Christ, Marty, I’ve explained and explained. It is important that they haven’t done anything. That’s crucial. Can’t you see? The guilty never get punished, only the innocent. That’s the way the world works. The innocent and the powerless. They make up the victim class.”

  Douglas Jeffers shook his head.

  “It can’t be that hard for you to understand.”

  “I’m trying, Doug, believe me, I’m trying.”

  Douglas Jeffers looked harshly at his brother.

  “Try harder.”

  They lapsed into silence. Douglas Jeffers toyed with his automatic pistol while Martin Jeffers sat quietly. Anne Hampton moved across the room and took up her seat, opening a new notepad.

  “Get it all down, Boswell.”

  She nodded and waited. She thought: It is all madness. Everywhere. There is no normalcy left in the world, only hurt and death and insanity. And I’m part of it. Completely.

  She took the pen and wrote: No one gets out alive.

  She surprised herself. It was the first time she’d written any thought of her own in the notebooks. She stared down at the phrase. It terrified her.

  The words on the pages shimmered and wavered like heat above one of the black highways they’d traveled. She fought off the exhaustion and the deadly thought and reconstructed the day in her head, blocking fear with memory.

  She did not know why Douglas Jeffers had postponed killing the Simmons family, only that they had herded them all from their beds, tied, blindfolded, and gagged, into the side room. He’d left them there while he’d relaxed, feet up on the couch, savoring the rising sun. He’d then fixed a leisurely breakfast. He had only said that keeping them caged for a day heightened the game. She had been surprised; it had seemed almost as if he did not want to hurry himself, that he was luxuriating in the situation, not wanting to rush on to the next. The jeopardy of their circumstances seemed not to affect him. She did not know what it was that was causing him to pause and greet things with such studied delay, but it scared her.

  We’re at the end, she had thought.

  It’s the last scene, and he wants to play it for what it’s worth. Two thoughts had intruded in the maze of her fears:

  What will he do to them?

  What will he do to me?

  Douglas Jeffers had made eggs and bacon, but she had been unable to swallow anything. They were just finishing when the car came down the driveway. She had been horrified at the thought of somebody stumbling in on Douglas Jeffers. Then her terror had redoubled at the sight of the brother. She had instantly assumed he would be the same. When he wasn’t, it had confused and disturbed her more.

  She looked at the two men again.

  They were only a few feet apart, but she wondered how distant they really were. She had the vague understanding that it was important to her, but she could not guess why.

  She wanted to scream at them: I want to live!

  But, instead, she sat patiently, quietly, awaiting instructions.

  So far they had spent the day just as one would expect any pair of brothers. They’d talked of old things, of memories. They had laughed a bit. But by the early afternoon the conversation had disintegrated, wilting under the inexorable pressure of the situation, and now they sat apart, waiting.

  She looked back a half-dozen pages in her notebook and saw some of what she had written down. Martin Jeffers had said, “Doug, I can’t believe why we’re here. Can we talk about it?”

  And Douglas Jeffers’ reply: “Believe it.”

  She looked up at the pair and saw Martin Jeffers shift in his seat. She did not know what to think of him. Will he save me? She wondered suddenly.

  “Doug, why are you doing this?”

  “Asked and answered. That’s what the attorneys say in a court case when they’re trying to protect their witness from cross-examination. Asked and answered. Go on to the next question.”

  “There is only one question.”

  “Not true, Marty, not true. Certainly there’s why, I’ll grant you that. But there’s also how and when, and what are you going to do now. That seems most relevant.”

  “All right,” Martin Jeffers agreed, “What are you going to do now?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Douglas Jeffers burst out laughing. The sound seemed alien, impossible, in the small room. Anne Hampton recognized the laugh from all the worst moments. She hoped the younger brother would have the sense to back down.

  He did. He sat quietly. After a few moments the older brother waved his hand in the air as if clearing the space between them.

  “Tell me,” said Douglas Jeffe
rs. “How much do you know?”

  “I know everything.”

  The older brother paused.

  “Well, that’s not good. Not good at all.”

  He hesitated before continuing.

  “So that means you went to my place. I thought you would wait until it was over. You were supposed to wait.”

  “No, actually, someone else did.”

  “Who?”

  Martin Jeffers stopped. He suddenly had no idea what to say. He thought of all the times he’d been in intense conversation with one criminal or another. He’d always known what gestures to make, how to act. This time he drew a complete blank. He stared across at his brother, and at the gun waving about in his hands. But he saw the child behind the man and realized: I am one, too. The younger brother. A massive, burning resentment started to grow within him. Always last to know. Always the last to get anything. He always did exactly what he wanted, regardless of what I thought. He never listened to me. He always treated me like some unwanted appendage. He was always in charge. He was always important. I was always nothing. The afterthought. Always, always. He suddenly hated everything and wanted to hurt his brother.

  “A detective.”

  The word was out of his mouth swiftly. He regretted it immediately.

  “He knows, too?”

  Martin Jeffers saw his brother stiffen, struggling but maintaining composure. But in the same moment whatever lilt and relaxation emptied from his voice, replaced with an instant harsh noise. It was a tone Martin Jeffers had never heard before, but which he knew with a familiarity born of years. He thought: Killing tones.

  “Yes,” he said. “Actually, it’s a she.”

  Douglas Jeffers waited, then said:

  “Well, that brings dying time a bit closer.”

  Detective Mercedes Barren had trouble controlling the large American car, with its mushy suspension that bounced and yawed back and forth, trying to take the bumps in the dirt road. A high-pitched scratching sound filled the interior as a tree branch scraped paint from the side of the automobile. She heard the tailpipe slap the ground, but she continued on, doggedly, ignoring the difficulty.

  She would not acknowledge that she was lost. But the enveloping black of the night and the forest created a sense of despair within her, as if reason and responsibility had been abandoned back on the main highway, and she was descending into some netherworld where the rules were created by death. The shadows seemed to leap from the headlights, each one a bansheelike wraith with the face of Douglas Jeffers. She gasped in fear and drove on, her heavy gun now clutched in her right hand, balanced on top of the steering wheel.

  When she arrived at the multiple fork in the road, her headlights picking out the four different-colored arrows, she stopped the car and got out.

  She stood, looking at the four different paths.

  Her heart was filled with frustration. She remembered the police chief’s description, and she formed a mental picture of the map that hung in his office. But it had no correlation to the dark choices that faced her now. She thought of the lady and the tiger, but knew that she wanted to open the door that contained the beast.

  “It must be that one,” she said, pointing down one black path. “I’m certain,” she added in defiance of the fear of her actual uncertainty. The disjointed idea that she would arrive, gun in hand, at some other summer vacationer’s house, floated about for an instant in the back of her mind. Then she dismissed it.

  “Let’s go,” she said, the sound of her own voice seeming small and puny against the forest. She got back behind the wheel of the car and drove ahead.

  Two hundred yards down the road, it forked again and she followed her instincts to the left. She knew that she was searching for the pond, and that the point of land where she would find her quarry waiting was long and narrow. She rolled down the window, trying to get a sense of where the water was, but only the night penetrated into the car. She kept driving, rolling through an open wooden fence and a large keep out this means you sign. She ignored it, pushing deeper and deeper into the scrub brush and pines, until the forest seemed to envelop her. She was afraid of being smothered and she sucked in air, hyperventilating.

  She would not allow herself even to think for an instant that she might be heading in some completely wrong direction.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  She saw a break in the trees ahead and she punched down on the accelerator gratefully. The car jumped forward, then crunched down, seeming to fall, like an athlete tripped just short of the finish line. She shouted out in sudden fear. She heard a snapping sound, followed by a grinding noise.

  She stopped the car and stepped out.

  Both front wheels were driven into a small yet unfortunately effective pit. The car’s front axle was ground into the sand.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. Keep going, she told herself again. She opened her eyes and got back into the car. The rear wheels spun furiously when she tried to back out of the pit. She pounded the wheel in momentary frustration, then swallowed hard and looked about her. She shut off the engine and switched off the lights. All right, she told herself. You can go the rest of the way on foot. This isn’t terrible; you planned on abandoning the car soon anyway. Just keep going, keep going.

  She headed toward the break in the trees, her eyes adjusting rapidly to the night light. She kept her pistol in her hand and started to jog, just gently, afraid that she would do to her ankle what the pit had done to the rental car. But the hurried movement encouraged her, and she pressed farther, listening to the thudding sound her feet made as they hit the sandy road surface.

  The road seemed like a tunnel to her, and she could see the end. She picked up her pace and suddenly shot out of the overhanging trees into a wide grassy field awash with moonlight. She dizzily stared up into the skies, overwhelmed by the thousands of star lights that blinked and shone in the endless expanse. She felt minuscule and alone, but comforted by being out from under the trees. For an instant she thought she would be blinded by the moonlight, and she stopped, breathing hard, to get her bearings.

  She saw a great glistening reflection off to her left and she stared out at the pond. She could clearly see the strip of sand that stood between the edge of the field and the start of the pond water. She held her breath for a moment and realized that she could hear the steady rhythmic pounding of surf against the shore. She looked toward the sound and could easily make out the black line of South Beach a half mile distant.

  I found it, she thought.

  I’m there.

  She looked ahead, expecting to see the house, but could not. She turned and looked to her right, expecting to see the pond, also, but all she could see was the dark forest stretching back into the island.

  “That’s not right,” she said out loud, hesitant, suddenly worried. “That’s not right at all. Finger Point is supposed to be narrow, with water on both sides.”

  She moved forward ten feet, as if by looking at it from a slightly different angle the topography would change.

  “This isn’t right at all,” she said.

  Dozens of conflicting emotions reverberated like so much dissonance within her.

  “Please,” she said. “It must be.”

  She walked down to the edge of the water and stared out across the pond. The moonlight shimmered on the light, choppy waves. She stared into the night, across the water.

  Then she sank down to her knees in the sand.

  “No,” she said softly. “Please, no. No, no, no.”

  In front of her was the pond water, stretching out in one direction across to the rolling sandy dunes of South Beach. But back, just across from where she knelt, she could see a single long, black spit of land that pointed out into the center of the pond.

  “No,” she said, under her voice. “It’s not
fair.”

  She could see the house on the end of the point and knew then that she was looking at the place where the Jeffers brothers waited. She concentrated her eyes in the darkness and saw the moonlight catch what she guessed was the white shape of the rental car checked out to Martin Jeffers.

  She pitched forward at the waist and pounded her fists on the sand. “No, no, no, no, no,” she moaned. Still kneeling, she turned and looked back at the forest. The wrong road, she thought, the wrong damn road. I’ve come down the wrong edge of the pond. All this way, just to take the wrong damn turn. Dismay filled her precipitously. She battled within herself against herself.

  Finally, breathing hard, as if she’d just run a race, not was about to start one, she gained control.

  She stood.

  “I will not be defeated,” she said out loud. She raised her fist at the house. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  Holt Overholser pushed himself back from the table, staring at the few remains of his second helping of bluefish casserole that were left on his plate, and said, “Damn, damn.”

  “What is it, dear?” his wife asked. “Something wrong with the fish?”

  He shook his head. “Just something happened that’s kinda bugging me,” he said.

  “Well, don’t keep it to yourself,” his wife replied, clearing the dinner dishes. “What’s on your mind? Worries just get in the way of digestion, you know.”