The Passenger

by Lisa Lutz

“A gift from an old friend,” I said.

  “You plan on sticking around for a while?” Domenic asked.

  Good question. One that I didn’t have the answer to. I shrugged.

  “If you ever feel like talking or confessing or . . . something else, you have my number,” he said.

  “That’s mighty professional of you,” I said.

  Domenic wrapped his hands around the chain-link fence. His finger lightly grazed mine.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Debra.”

  I heard Margo wailing from the other end of the yard. She was in the middle of a soccer game and had taken to flopping after a long weekend of watching Premier League football on ESPN. Asphalt and flopping, however, are a rotten combination.

  “I better go. There’s a fake injury I must attend to.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Domenic said.

  “Like what?”

  “Run.”

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  WHO was that tall drink of water?” Cora asked as I returned to the lunch benches.

  “Just an old friend,” I said.

  “From where?”

  The bell rang. I had never been more grateful to return to class. The second lesson of the day involved making homemade thermometers with Mason jars, straws, Play-Doh, and rubbing alcohol. It wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped since we had no heat source in the room to show the rise in temperature. Billy Peters was so impatient with his ho-hum product, he pulled out a lighter from his pocket and held it under the glass.

  Lighters were generally frowned upon at the school, so I had to confiscate it. It was one of those ornate metal deals. The initials JP were inscribed on the back. I gave Billy a look that informed him I knew I was handling stolen goods. I gave him a follow-up look indicating that I wouldn’t rat him out. I’m not a rat, which some people might consider an asset, but I’m fairly certain it is my fatal flaw.

  I DON’T remember what time it was when I heard the knock at my side door. It was long past bedtime hours, I know that. The knock woke me from a deep sleep and set my heart pounding; I shot upright in bed gasping for air, disoriented by my still-unfamiliar surroundings.

  Three more steady knocks took me from groggy to wide awake. I assumed that Domenic had returned, to finish our conversation or start something else. The side door had no peephole. I opened it as if I were expecting company. It wasn’t the company I was expecting.

  The ordinary-looking man was standing there. Same boring khakis and blue shirt that he wore when I saw him loitering outside the schoolyard. He was so dull in appearance, I wasn’t scared, which was a mistake. I was alone in the schoolhouse for another seven hours. If I screamed, no one would hear me.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” he said.

  “More like good morning,” I said. “It’s a bit late for a house call, don’t you think?”

  “I do apologize from dropping by at such an hour, but I just wanted to make sure I caught you by your lonesome. I had intended to call on you last night, but you were otherwise occupied.”

  “I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced,” I said.

  The ordinary man extended his hand in a perfectly ordinary way, as if we were having a business meeting.

  “Jack Reed, pleased to meet you,” he said.

  I thought for sure I’d buried Jack Reed in a state park a few months back. But that’s not the kind of thing you say to someone upon first introduction.

  I shook his hand and said, “What can I do for you, Mr. Reed?”

  “You wouldn’t by chance be Debra Maze, from Cleveland, Ohio?”

  “Most people around here just call me Miss Maze.”

  “Well, Miss Maze, why don’t you tell me where on this godforsaken planet my wife is?”

  “I’ve never met you before. How would I know where your wife is?”

  Jack took a few steps closer. He was breathing on me now. He smelled like Old Spice, sweat, and decay. It wasn’t that good kind of man smell.

  “Blue might have told you a few stories about me,” Jack said. “Tell me the truth, have you heard any stories?”

  His eyes were so dark I could barely see the pupils. He didn’t seem so ordinary anymore. I could have played dumb a little longer, but I didn’t see the point.

  “Maybe a few,” I said.

  “Then I’ll ask you again, ma’am. Where is my wife?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.”

  His hands clamped around my neck, squeezing slowly like a boa constrictor’s embrace. It gave me ample time to think about what was happening to me, to feel each breath I was missing, to experience the slow fade into unconsciousness. He released his grip right before I went dark. I gasped for air, like coming up from a deep dive. He backhanded me across the cheek before I’d had my fill of oxygen.

  “Where is my wife?” he asked again.

  Before I could answer, Jack kicked me in the gut. It made me wonder what particular character traits had attracted Blue to him in the first place.

  “Are you a rich man?” I asked.

  “What was that?” Jack said, clearly confused by the question. “You are not trying to extort money from me.”

  “God no,” I said, still wheezing. “I’m just trying to figure out why Blue married you. Because you do not have a single quality that recommends you as a mate.”

  He kicked me again. “Don’t be smart.”

  “I’m clearly not smart. Or I would have seen this coming.”

  “Where is my wife?”

  I crawled against the corner of the room to get some distance, hoping to avoid another blow. My oxygen-deprived brain was scrambling for an exit route out of this hellish maze.

  “We switched,” I said. “She’s my old me. I’m now her.”

  Jack’s hands unclenched. I had finally given him the kind of information he could use.

  “Keep talking.”

  “She’s going by the name Amelia Keen. Born 1986, Tacoma, Washington. I think I have my old ID in my car. I will give you everything you need, including her social—although she might be staying off-grid, and she might have changed her last name to Lightfoot. I can’t say for sure. We haven’t been in contact since we parted ways in Austin.”

  Jack stepped back, giving me space to stand. He gallantly opened the door for me. I swiped my car keys from my desk and stepped outside. The cold air jolted me into another level of alertness. My car was parked only about twenty yards away, but it felt like a two-mile stroll.

  I unlocked the passenger door, sat down in the seat, and opened the glove compartment. I reached inside, gripped the gun, and aimed it right at Jack’s forehead.

  “Step back,” I said.

  “Do you even know how to use that thing? I must say, it does not look natural in your hands,” he said.

  He didn’t step back. I could see him thinking of ways out of this, and I didn’t need him thinking, so I shot him in the shoulder. He stepped back then. More like a stagger. I got out of the passenger seat, circled the car, and took a page from Blue’s playbook.

  “Get in the trunk, Jack.”

  “Now I’ll have to kill you,” Jack said.

  “That seems improbable right now since I’m the one holding the gun, but I can’t fault you for having ambitions. Now could you please get inside the trunk before you bleed all over this parking lot? You’re making a hell of a mess.”

  Jack staggered about, muttering expletives and searching for a way out of this nasty fix that, let’s be frank, he had gotten himself into.

  “Jack, I will shoot you somewhere less pleasant if you don’t get in the trunk right now.”

  He thought about it and realized that there were places way worse to be shot than the shoulder. He got in the trunk. I shut the hood. I scanned the parking lot, just to be sure no one was watching. Then I got into my Cadillac and drove. I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular. I needed time to think, to weigh my options, to decide what kind of person I was, what kind of person I had beco
me, and what kind of person I was going to be.

  I DROVE around for two hours. Jack started kicking during the final twenty minutes. I was worried he was going to disengage the taillight and I’d get pulled over by highway patrol. I’ve gotten pretty good at thinking on my feet, but explaining away a man with a bullet wound in the trunk of your car is an ambitious undertaking.

  I came upon Bitter Creek Road and remembered it from our ill-fated fishing excursion. Dead Horse Lake would be quiet this time of night, so I followed the roads to the best of my recollection. The high beams on my car could barely pierce the darkness, but I eventually found the lake and pulled the car into the clearing. Jack’s bucking in the trunk quieted as the car bounced on the uneven terrain. I put the car in reverse, backed as close as I could get to the water’s edge, turned off the ignition, picked up my gun, circled the vehicle, and opened the trunk.

  I shot Jack once in the head and once in the heart. I thought it would be more humane if he didn’t have time to contemplate his demise, although he was probably contemplating it plenty during our two-hour road trip. I had looked at the situation from every angle during our rambling drive and come out of it with one simple fact: it was either Jack or me. If I didn’t kill him right then, I’d be spending the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. It was not a decision I made lightly.

  An old rowboat was on the shore. I dragged it up to the bumper of my car and hoisted Jack into the bed and dropped the gun in after him. With all of my might, I shoved, dragged, and pulled the rowboat back to the shoreline and set the boat into the water. I climbed inside the boat, my feet straddling the dead guy, and rowed us out to the middle of the lake. I was hot from exertion, but the night air still sent chills through me. Sweat turned icy on my back. I tossed the gun into the water.

  My plan to dump Jack in the lake was a tad ill conceived. There was no way I could get Jack out of the rowboat without spilling into the water myself. I stood up, stepped onto the edge, and capsized the boat. Jack and I fell into the frigid lake in unison. I watched him slip under the water with his gun. It seemed like the two should be buried together. While I was treading water, saying a silent prayer for Jack, I lost track of the oars.

  My brain felt foggy from the cold, and I was running out of time before hypothermia would set in. Rather than try to locate the oars and right the boat, I headed for shore. I swam head down, fighting the wind current, ignoring the shooting pain that sliced from the tips of my fingers down to my toes.

  When I reached the shore I crawled to my car, removed the keys from the trunk, got inside, turned on the ignition, and powered up the heat as high as it had ever gone. I drove home in my soaking-wet pajamas.

  Everything was quiet and still at JAC Primary. The headlights illuminated the bloodstains from Jack’s wound, so I parked over them until I could figure out another plan. I raced inside and climbed into the shower and let it burn me back to life.

  That was when I realized what I had done. In a way it was self-defense, and maybe it mattered that Jack Reed was a piece-of-shit human being, but I’d still killed a man. When you take another person’s life, it changes you. It doesn’t just change how you look at the world or how you see yourself. It alters you to your core, your DNA. All of the things I had once believed about myself, about my inherent decency—I didn’t have the same foothold on them as I once had.

  I got out of the shower when I realized that nothing would ever make me clean again. I drank the rest of the bourbon and tried to fall asleep.

  As I drifted off, I had to wonder if this was part of Blue’s plan all along. The gun, the identity swap, the burying of that poor man I thought was Jack. Did Blue know that Jack would find me? If this was all an elaborate plan, one part didn’t make sense: how did she know I could kill him?

  MY DRUNKEN sleep was fueled by dreams, the likes of which would probably interest only me. That moment when I first woke I thought I was still in the original nightmare, not this new one. It wasn’t until my bare feet touched the overworked carpet that I remembered what I had done.

  I had worked hard at becoming Debra Maze, and I wasn’t quite ready to give her up. Jack Reed was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. As far as I could tell, there had been no witnesses. So I brushed my teeth, washed my face, dressed in a cheery blue sundress, checked under my fingernails for blood, and arrived fifteen minutes early for class.

  Since I had been otherwise occupied the night before, I hadn’t prepared a lesson plan. As my students filed in and I looked at all of their innocent faces, I knew I was no longer fit for this job. I felt like I was sullying their souls just being in the same room with them.

  “Miss Maze. Miss Maze.”

  I don’t know how many times Andrew said my name before I woke from my stupor.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you all right? You look sick or something.”

  “Everyone, take out your journals,” I said. “I want you to write one page on what you want to be when you grow up, and then one page on what you want to be if that first thing doesn’t work out, because sometimes things don’t work out the way we’d like them to. Then another page on what you’d do if the first two things you’d like to be don’t work out. Then two pages on the one thing you definitely don’t want to be no matter what. It’s really important not to let the bottom drop out of your life.”

  It was time for me to hang up my chalk and ruler, based on the distressed glances that came my way. The only student who didn’t look at me as if I were wearing a straitjacket was Andrew. He got out his notebook and pen and made a big show of starting the assignment.

  “Do you mind if I work my way backward?” Andrew asked. “Start with the thing I definitely don’t want to do?”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  The class got to work. I turned my back to my students and studied the road maps of the US, plotting the course to my next destination.

  CLASS DISMISSED. I started packing. I would have to lose the car as soon as possible, which meant leaving most things behind. I counted the money I had earned from three paychecks. I couldn’t stick around long enough for the fourth. After rent, food, and the Lantern, I had just over eighteen hundred dollars. Not much when you’re on the run—beer and taxes certainly add up. I wrote a note to Principal Collins saying that I was making a last-minute trip to visit a sick family member. I would be back as soon as I could. No one would believe it, but I figured it would buy me a day or two.

  I wanted to thank Collins for the opportunity he gave me, and I wanted to say good-bye to Cora, and I wanted to have one final drink at the Lantern and give Sean a hug. I wanted to tell him he was a good man and that if he really wanted to get out of Recluse, he still had time. I couldn’t do any of those things. I knew just about everyone would be fine without a proper good-bye from me.

  But Andrew was different. I couldn’t take off without a word to him. I returned to the classroom, pulled the road maps from the board, neatly folded them one by one, and put them into an envelope. I had so many things I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t overstep my bounds. I just wrote on the envelope, Dear Andrew, One day you might need these, and I hoped he would.

  I zipped up the suitcase, put it in the trunk of my car, and returned to the place I’d called home for almost two months to give it one final inspection. That was when I decided to wipe it for prints. I took the pillowcase off the bed and began polishing every shiny surface I laid my eyes on.

  In retrospect, I should have just hit the road. It was possible to shine away all of my prints, but what was the point with my DNA all over the place?

  There was a knock at the door. I put the money in my bag and searched the room for anything I might have to take with me. I sat quietly on the floor, next to the bed, and tried to wait out my uninvited guest, but the knocks continued.

  “I know you’re in there, Debra. Open up.”

  It was Domenic. I grabbed my purse and jacket and left my apartment through the school entrance, walking d
own the hallway to the kitchen where there was a servants’ entrance off the pantry. I unlocked the door, slipped outside, and crouched down in the shrubbery. I could see Domenic’s car parked next to mine, but he was no longer standing by the door to my apartment.

  I crab-walked along the old house, trying to pinpoint his whereabouts. Maybe he had moved to the front of the school, anticipating my alternate escape. The servants’ exit wasn’t well-known. I had a clear shot to my Cadillac. If I got there in time I could probably get a head start, and he might never be able to catch me even with the V-8 engine in that truck of his.

  I’ve made split-second decisions my whole life. I can’t comment on the quality of any of them since I can’t go back and see where the alternate route would have taken me. What I can say is that standing in the shrubbery of John Allen Campbell Primary School all night wasn’t going to do me any good. So I made a run for it. I ran straight for my car. Got inside, gunned the engine, burned rubber as I backed out of the space and pulled out of the lot. I drove down Recluse to Greenborough, then pulled onto Moorcroft. When I saw the signs for the interstate I thought I was free, or free in the way I’d come to know freedom, which isn’t exactly freedom at all.

  Just as I’d caught up on my breath, I lost it again. My passenger leaned over the backseat and whispered in my ear, “Where are we headed, Debra?”

  I swerved like a snake on meth over the double yellow line. Horns blared and high beams flashed in warning as I steadied the car and slammed on my brakes.

  “Hardly seems like the right vehicle for a road trip. But it is a beauty. I’ll give you that,” said Domenic. “What kind of mileage does this thing get?”

  “Not good,” I said.

  “Do you mind if I ask you where the blood came from?”

  For a second I blanked and had no idea what he was talking about, which seemed like a bad sign.

  “What blood?”

  “I noticed a fair amount of blood under and near your Cadillac. Do you know anything about that?”

  “I do not,” I said.