The Traveller (44 page)

Not allowing herself to hope for anything, she bent down and picked up the broken frame and photograph. She moved over to the desk and put it under the light. She examined the corner that had peeled. She touched the paper and saw that there seemed to be a double thickness. She grasped the top photo and tugged it gently.

It slid back another inch, revealing a black-gray background beneath.

She touched this underneath paper and felt the glossy exterior of a photograph.

She breathed deeply.

Move cautiously, she said to herself.

She pulled at the photo again and it slowly peeled off, like an apple skin.

One inch, then another. The two sheets of photo paper had not been glued solidly together. She worked the paper carefully, making certain that she did not rip the two. When it stuck, she moistened a finger with saliva and gently worked the top loose.

It was only when the entire photograph came free that she dared to look beneath. She thought in that instant of the sensation a child feels when picking off the top of a scab, that it is painful, but there is a great release when it comes off.

She looked down and saw that there was a picture beneath the picture.

She dropped the riot scene to the floor and looked at the other. It was black and white.

The breath rushed out of her suddenly as the image took shape in her eyes.

It was a nearly naked body.

It was a young woman.

Detective Barren’s hands shook. She could feel an instant clammy sweat moistening her forehead.

‘Susan,’ she said.

But then she looked again.

The young woman’s legs were chunkier. Her hair was shorter. She was lying in a different position than that her niece had been found in. And the underbrush, illuminated by the flash which cut away the darkness, was different; no Florida fronds and palms. The photograph’s subject seemed to be lying amidst Northern forest leaves. Detective Barren’s head spun and she felt flushed with a dizziness created by reining in sharply on her imagination. What she could make out of the young woman’s features seemed to be all wrong.

‘It’s not Susan,’ she said.

For the briefest of moments she felt defeated. It’s just another one of his damn pictures, she thought.

Then she realized: It’s a snapshot. She saw none of the composition, the care, the attentiveness and thought that went into Douglas Jeffers’ work. It was a picture taken hastily, under duress. Under fire.

She held it up.

‘You’re not Susan,’ she said to the picture.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

She looked again and saw a large dark splotch on the young woman’s chest. Blood, she thought.

She scanned the pictured quickly for the signs of search, of police presence, of official investigation.

There were none.

And then, creeping unbidden into her imagination, came a thought that she would not contemplate. She dropped the picture to the table and looked up wildly. Around her were dozens of pictures, Jeffers’ home gallery. She jumped from the chair and tore from the wall a large photograph of two Far Eastern farmers and their brace of water buffalo, outlined against the changing sky of evening. She threw the picture frame violently to the floor.

From the shattered glass, she picked up the picture. She felt the double thickness of paper. She tried to peel this photo back, but this time it seemed stuck. She bent it and creased it and worried at it swiftly, finally seizing a small X-acto knife from the desk and scraping away a part of the top picture.

Beneath was another black and white image.

She could see a naked leg. Then a naked arm. It was streaked with dark. She had seen too much blood in too many crime-scene photographs not to know what this was.

She stopped and looked in panic at the walls.

‘Susan,’ she said again, her voice a mirror reflecting agony. ‘Susan, oh, my God, Susan. You’re here somewhere.’

Again her gaze swept the photo gallery. Suddenly she felt stupid, embarrassingly so.

‘Oh, my God, Susan, you’re not here alone.’

It was so obvious that it terrified her more.

‘Oh, God, you’re all here,’ she said to all the eyes in all the pictures that stared out at her. ‘All of you.’

She felt nauseated. She pictured Douglas Jeffers, sitting casually in his living room, glancing up at the picture in her hands, of the men and the water buffalo. Only he wouldn’t see this image, he would see the one concealed beneath it.

She sat back hard on the floor, overcome by the faces that looked down from the walls at her. She slid past despair into a realm of utter agony. She thought: I am a reasonable person. I use logic, precision, science. My life is ordered, routine. I deal in facts that lead to logical deductions. I do my job with effectiveness and devotion. Things are in place.

She shook her head.

I lie poorly, she realized. Especially to myself.

She spoke then, out loud, hoping that the sound of her own voice might chase her sudden runaway fear and comfort her.

It didn’t.

‘Oh, my God, you’re all here. I don’t know who you are} or how many of you there are, but I know you’re all here. All of you. All of you. Oh, my God. All of you. My God, my God, my God. You’re all here. Oh, oh, oh no.’

And then a thought she realized was worse:

It’s up to me.

10 Many roadside attractions

15

Anne Hampton sat alone in the car, half-watching Douglas Jeffers as he fiddled under the hood, checking the oil and water. It was early morning and they were outside the Sweet Dreams Motel in Youngstown, Ohio, a short drive from Interstate 80. Jeffers had made a joke shortly after they had first set eyes on it, calling it The Bates Motel. She turned away and her eyes rested on the stack of notepads that she kept near her seat. She lifted up the pile and counted: eleven. She picked one out from the center of the stack and flipped open to the middle. She saw the words from one of Jeffers’ frequent history lessons: January 1958. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Lincoln, Nebraska, and environs: ‘Murders without plan, without much rhyme, without thought or care, random pretty much, except for her family. A true American nightmare, when our children turn on us. Charlie styled himself a rebel after James Dean and killed ten people, including her baby sister. He went to the chair in ‘59.’ Below that entry she’d scrawled her synopsis of Jeffers’ terse commentary. ‘They were in love, but in the end she turned on him. She was fourteen years old.’

When she had to hurry, her handwriting grew large and childlike, she thought, not like the careful, precise note-taking that she remembered from her courses at school. That was a vague and distant memory, as if her time at the university had been years beforehand, not merely weeks.

Anne Hampton considered: ‘ … In the end she turned on him.’Jeffers had said this bitterly, as if this were what

was shocking, not the events that preceded it. She spoke the words out loud, under her voice, so that he could not hear her: ‘In the end she turned on him.’

She must have wanted to live, thought Anne Hampton.

She must have believed that life was dear and precious and that she could make something special of herself or maybe even just ordinary of herself despite all the blackness and blood and death, and that living was not ruined by what had happend to her. She was only fourteen and she knew there could be more. She must have felt something magical and wonderful and strong and decided to live.

At any cost.

Anne Hampton wondered where she could find this something, too.

She gazed back down at the words on the white, blue-lined pages. Jeffers had once watched her as she wrote furiously and told her that she reminded him of many of the reporters that he’d worked with, men who’d had their own systems of shorthand that resulted in hieroglyphics that not even an expert cryptographer could read, but which to the author were as clear as a printed page.

She shivered and remembered the dizzying sensation she’d felt two nights earlier when he’d announced that he needed to check her notes.

The moment had been terrifying.

He made the demand late, after they’d checked into another forgettable motel, dragging from too many hours on the highway, depleted by noise and speed and headlights that cut through the dark right into them. Jeffers had grabbed their bags and grunted, ‘Bring the notebooks’. She had carried them gingerly, agonizingly, as if she were not strong enough to hold anything else. He had opened the door and tossed their bags onto one of the twin beds. ‘Let me see,’ he’d said. He had sat at a small vanity, poring over the pages. She had shrunk into a chair in the corner, trying to blank her mind. But one thought had flooded her imagination: He won’t be able to understand the words and he will realize how useless and ineffectual I’ve been and, oh God, I’m lost. She’d shut her eyes, trying to shut

out fear, but the scratchy sound of the pages turning had seemed deafening. After a few minutes he’d tossed the note-Docks aside after quickly flipping through the final entries. He then stretched and said, ‘Christ, I’m tired. Look, these are okay. Good, actually. I can read them fine. Oh, there’s a rough spot occasionally, like when you were trying to write on that road up in Michigan with the frost heaves from last winter. Felt like a roller coaster and the writing kinda goes up and down, up and down, on the page.’ He’d smiled. ‘But all in all I’d say you were doing a good job. Just fine. Like I knew you would.’

She wished she’d felt less pleased by his praise. He had handed her back the notepads and then touched the top of her head, almost like patting an animal or bestowing a benediction. The sensation was relaxing to her at first. She’d remained seated, watching him exit into the bathroom.

Then another fear returned. You are alone, she’d told herself. Don’t forget it. Don’t confuse the pleasure of praise with the pain of a blow. She’d tried to toughen her heart, lying awake in the darkness until sleep had captured all her mingled confusion and resolve.

In the morning he’d told her how to use her memory as

well as her notes; to take just a word or phrase down and

then, through concentration, to recall word for word what

was said. To her surprise she had discovered that by using

his techniques it seemed her memory had gained a novel

precision, which had pleased her, like receiving a gift. He

also told her to note situations and times, that it would

help her reconstruct the notebooks when he needed her to.

She wondered, though, whether that was possible. It

seemed to her that everything was disjointed, each location

they visited was distinct and apart; the only linkage

between the spots was Jeffers’ memory. Each stop, like his

mood swings, was unexpected and equally frightening and

dependent solely on his own rationale and his design.

They’d driven as far north as Hibbing, Minnesota, as far west as Omaha, Nebraska, almost close enough for her

to envision the Rockies rising up above the plains, stirring memories of her home and family that seemed as elusive as the sight of the mountains. Kansas City, Iowa City, Chicago, Fort Wayne, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, and Akron. The locations had blended together in her mind in a melange of rural areas and urban streets. Oddly, she thought that she was fortunate that Jeffers had insisted on such careful note-taking, because even with her newfound precision, her memory still jumbled together the details of the trip.

Outside the car she heard Jeffers humming. He did this, she now recognized, when he was pleased as he performed simple tasks.

She closed the notebook and her eyes and tried to remember. She knew that Chicago had been a lecture on Richard Speck and the nurses and the detective-gene theory of murderers. Thin, bony men with acne and arrested sexual development, he’d said. This had been funny to him, and he’d scoffed with laughter. Then they’d driven to the suburbs and a look at Wayne Gacy’s house, where the one-time kiddie clown buried the thirty-three boys in the basement. Jeffers had made her get out of the car and stand in front of the unpretentious white clapboard home. Then he’d quickly taken her picture. It had been raining and he’d said ‘Smile’ and ‘Say cheese’ as she huddled nervously, miserably, against a tree. But northern Minnesota had been dry and hot and she remembered light brown wheatfields that seemed to wave in invitation like the sea as they drove past That had been a trip to … she hesitated, unable to remember the name. But Jeffers had told her that the crazed farmer who’d eviscerated and stuffed his victims had served as the spiritual basis for the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he’d disliked, although he’d said he’d admired the director’s sense of expressing fear through visual imagery. She had been unable to understand this, but had not asked him to explain. When Jeffers pontificated, which he frequently did, she knew it wise to let him ramble. It was when he entered more personal areas, that, contradictorily, he allowed her to ask questions.

He told her that he’d wanted to drive past the Clutter farm in Kansas, but that it was too far out of the way. though that seemed odd to her, as the trip to Minnesota was farther. But near Madison, Wisconsin, he showed her the shopping mall where he had picked up a young woman named Irene, and said her death had been attributed to a rapist-murderer who had plagued the malls and campuses

of Minnesota and Wisconsin for nearly a year in the late seventies. In Ann Arbor, he showed her the road outside the university where a half-dozen hitchhiking young women had, in his portentous words, taken their last ride. He claimed one of those as well, saying it had been particularly easy. He drove some five miles down a secondary road, through some wooded areas, slowing and pointing into the forest at one moment, telling her that he’d left the victim

‘ two hundred yards in. ‘Campus Killer, they called him. He was in 1982. The papers made up the same name as they did for that guy in Miami.’

When they had headed to South Bend, she thought that it would be another campus murder, but he’d stopped beside a brace of nondescript middle-class houses on a quiet, tree-lined street. She saw for sale signs on each lawn. She did not need to look at her notes to remember the words of his long description: ‘Now, this was interesting,’