The Whole Truth

  “Amen,” I echo.

  “Okay,” she says, in a tiny voice. “Now let’s go see where the little girl lived.”

  This time we only drive by, because Katherine doesn’t want Tony or Susan to see us. There’s nobody visible on the whole cul-de-sac. It’s as if all the parents have become afraid to let their children play outside. Katherine urges me to drive around it quickly, and then head back out again. I tell her that they wouldn’t know who she is, but she’s afraid they could have seen her on television, and she’s scared to death of offending them. She turns and looks behind her until we have driven far out of sight of their house.

  It’s another world back along the New River.

  It’s late afternoon by now, and Katherine and I have driven into a place of shade and coolness, of Spanish moss hanging from tall trees, of twining vines as thick as your arm, and huge, green leaves that fold in on themselves like hands. There are dank aromas here, and a sense of a million things crawling, eating, flying, biting. We have the windows rolled down, and our elbows hanging out, and we hear bird calls and twitters, and a murmur of verdant life, always moving, never still in the backwoods.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, “but I don’t like it very well.”

  I know what she means. Although I have friends who live in wonderful homes back in secret places like this, I don’t think I could do it. I need salt water and sunshine and fresh air; in a place like this, I’d go to sleep worrying about what might be crawling over the sheets to bite me. These are subtropical regions, where even cute little lizards or frogs can be poisonous, and snakes and spiders proliferate.

  I’ve been out here once before, on research for the book.

  The road turns and turns again, and suddenly we’re there, at a barbed wire fence in ill repair, with a “gate” that’s only an open drive with nothing to block the entrance. There are indications that there may have been an actual gate at one time, but Donor Miller didn’t keep it, or anything else, in good repair. There’s no sign saying CHECKER CRAB, but we drive past other signs saying NO TRESPASSING and PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT.

  The owner’s gone; there’s nobody to keep us out.

  “Is it okay to be here, Marie?”

  “No reason not to.”

  We see the buildings: the office, the repair shed, and an outbuilding that’s falling down and wasn’t used for anything. As we move in closer, the docks come into view, but now all of the boats are gone except for the water taxis.

  I say, “It’s not much to look at, is it?”

  “How long was Johnnie here?”

  “That’s hard to say, Katherine. Donor Miller told the police that Johnnie showed up here about a year to a year and a half before the murder, but we know now that’s probably not true. He may have been here the whole time Donor was here, and I believe Donor bought this place about ten years ago.”

  She knows the police are now tracing Miller’s past life.

  For now, we still don’t know where he went after he left Kansas with Ray, or where they went after that, although we suspect they came directly to this state.

  “I’d like to get out and walk around,” she says.

  We both get out of the car, and walk toward the marina.

  I try to follow close enough to answer any questions she may have, but far enough away to give her a little private space. When we get to the river, she turns to me, and asks, “Which boat was it?”

  “Number six, but it’s not here, Katherine.”

  “Oh. I guess the police have it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think we could look in the office?”

  “Sure, let’s see if we can.”

  It’s not even locked, we discover, but when we step inside, Katherine gets overtaken by emotion, and pushes past me to get back outside again. I hurry after her, and rub her back as she takes deep breaths.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Do you want to leave now?”

  “No, not yet. If you don’t mind, Marie.”

  “We’ll stay as long as you want to.”

  “Would you wait here for me?”

  “Of course. Do you want some time to yourself?”

  She gives me a tiny, grateful smile, and just nods.

  I watch her go off toward the repair shed, and my heart follows her, even though I do not. There’s really no place to sit where I won’t have to worry about bug bites, or snakes—

  “Katherine!” I call out. “Watch out for snakes!”

  She raises a hand in the air to show she’s heard me.

  I wander down to the docks to throw sticks in the river, while the sun begins a slow descent behind my back. As it gets lower in the sky, the air turns cooler, back here in the woods. At home, my patio will be really heating up right now, driving Kim inside, if she’s been sitting out there.

  Thirty minutes later, Katherine has not returned, and I wonder when she will. Fifteen minutes after that, I begin to feel a little anxious. Has she wandered off into the thick vegetation around us, and gotten lost? I don’t even know if Katherine can swim, and there’s water all around us.

  That’s crazy, I chide myself, about my own nervous thoughts.

  Stepping in the last direction I saw her, I call out, “Katherine?”

  There’s no reply from any direction.

  She has just sat down on a tree stump to cry, I tell myself, and any minute now, she’ll come walking out of the woods, ready to go home again. I near the repair shed, peek in to find rusting equipment. I walk past it toward the third building that’s in falling-down condition. Once there, and seeing there’s no place here where Katherine could be, I call out for her again, “Katherine?”

  There’s still no reply, but there is a path leading into the woods.

  I feel better, upon seeing that path.

  That’s where she went, on a walk into the beauty of the forest.

  But it’s getting late, and will be dark before very long, and although I hate to disturb her reverie, I think I’d better round her up and get her out of here while we can still see our way to the car. There’s a flashlight in it, and I consider going back for it, but that seems ridiculous. It’s only twilight, after all, with plenty of light to see by. She can’t have gone that far down the path, can she?

  I start down it, after her.

  A hundred yards later, the path is narrower still, and I’m brushing Spanish moss out of my hair, and fretting about critters that might land on my face or my shoulders.

  I start to call out her name, but then pause.

  There is a thread of music weaving through the trees, and my heart stops as I realize what it is: a guitar, with a tune being plucked one note at a time. Yesterday, all my troubles . . .

  I am suddenly terrified, for her, for myself.

  It’s Ray, I know it is, it has to be.

  Should I run back for help, or go on looking for her?

  As soon as I pose that dilemma to myself, I know the answer: I can’t leave her, not without knowing where she is, what kind of situation she’s in, and if Ray’s there, too.

  I can’t step off the path, the vegetation’s too thick, and I’d be noisy, and quickly lost, as well. My only choice is to tread as quietly as I can toward the music, following the notes that seem to keep a steady beat now with my pounding heart.

  Something moves in the woods to my right, and I nearly scream.

  . . . all my troubles seemed so far away . . .

  The guitarist plays steadily, apparently unaware of me.

  And then I almost miss the second path, a tiny, overgrown branching off that leads to the left, deeper into the woods. When I step onto it I feel as if I am stepping into an envelope that is closing behind me, and being sealed. The music is louder now, though still soft, because it’s being played with great delicacy.

  There is a patch of sun ahead, and I see Katherine.

  She’s standing, looking down at something.


  I move close enough to see what it is: Ray, seated on a fallen log, looking down at the strings of a guitar while his mother stares at him. He looks much the same, though dirtier, grubbier. They are talking, over the sound of the music, kind of between his slow notes, and I stop in my tracks to listen to their words.

  “. . . northern Florida, that’s where Donor had a cabin.”

  “How long were you there, Johnnie . . . Ray?”

  “Dunno. Long time, I guess. Then here.”

  “Do you remember anything about your other life?”

  He looks up, and I flinch, thinking, what must she feel upon seeing him at last? This is no beauty, her son. He looks as I remember, maybe worse.

  “Huh-uh,” Ray says, meaning no.

  “Nothing at all? Not me, or your father?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “You have a brother, and two sisters.”

  “No kidding.” He doesn’t sound very interested, or even as if he particularly believes it.

  “We’ve never stopped loving you, Johnnie.”

  He squints at her, as if to say, Huh?

  After a minute, Katherine asks so gently, “Why did you kill her?”

  “Didn’t want her to die.”

  I am baffled by that answer, and I can tell that Katherine is, too.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ray plucks a few strings, and then he says, “Donor told me, go pick up a little kid, and bring it back to him. He said I was too old for him now, and he was feeling too old, and he needed a new little kid. He said I should find a kid for him, like I used to be. So I found her.”

  “But you killed her.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to do that!” He looks around, as if he’s still afraid of getting caught. “I had to, though. I had to kill her so she wouldn’t die.”

  “I don’t understand.” I hear tears in Katherine’s voice.

  “This is death!” Ray tells her, looking upset. “Don’t you get it? What we’re in right now. Life is death. Death is life. That’s what I figured out. If I gave her to Donor, she’d die. He’d do to her like he always did to me, and she’d die, like I’m dead in here.” He took his right hand off the guitar strings, and struck himself first on his chest, and then on his head, to show her where he was “dead”: in his head, in his heart. “But if I killed her, she wouldn’t have to die like me.”

  Oh lord, my own heart turns over, hearing him.

  If I’m understanding Ray, he killed Natty to “save” her from Donor. He saved her from the terrible fate of becoming Donor’s little girl, as Ray was Donor’s little boy.

  Please, Katherine, ask about the bridge . . .

  She’s openly weeping now, though he doesn’t seem to care.

  “But you mutilated her brain, you took that—”

  “Did not!” This was the Ray who sounded more like a child than a grown-up. “I did not do that! Donor did that! I brought her back here, and I came off in the woods for a while, and then I took her to the bridge.”

  “Why . . . the bridge?”

  “Scared.”

  “What were you scared of, Johnnie?”

  “Donor. He’d of made me go get another kid. A new kid.”

  “You didn’t want to do that, did you?”

  He shakes his head, without speaking.

  “You were trying to stop Donor.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t understand the police would put you in prison, and convict you, and want to put you to death.”

  “That would have been okay, the death part. It was just the jail part I couldn’t take anymore.”

  Katherine sinks to her knees on the spongy earth.

  “Johnnie? Why did Donor do that?”

  “What?”

  “Take that part of her—”

  “I guess ’cause he wanted a soul, whatever the hell that is. He said if he could get an innocent little soul he would be . . . some word he used . . . oh yeah, redeemed.” Johnnie shakes his head, looking unsure of himself. “I never knew he meant it like that. I thought he just wanted a kid, like me.”

  For a moment, neither speaks.

  “Are you really my mother?”

  “Yes, Johnnie.”

  He nods as he plays a tune I’ve never heard. I wonder if he wrote it. I wonder what kind of creativity is latent in this strange, sad person, that will never emerge. But now I have to figure out what to do. Make myself known to them?

  Or slink away, and race for help?

  Is Katherine in danger? Am I?

  There’s a sound behind me. I turn, but before I get all the way around, something shoves into my back, violently propelling me forward toward the clearing.

  “Shut up, Ray! Shut up!” a man’s voice shouts.

  I’m being kicked and shoved, and I’m falling, then crawling to get away from the kicking feet and whatever else it is that is striking and hurting me. Jesus, it’s a shotgun! I twist around, look up, and see a man whose face is so twisted in fury that I don’t even recognize him. “Move, bitch!”

  I stumble to Katherine, who grabs me, looking terrified.

  The man levels the shotgun at the two of us, huddled together.

  Then he swings it toward Ray. “What’d you tell them?”

  “Nothin’, Donor! I didn’t saying nothin’!”

  Katherine shudders in my arms as I think: Donor! If this is Donor, then who is the man who was found dead in the Everglades, with Donor’s wallet and scorpion necklace?

  “You two,” he shouts at us, “get up!”

  We struggle to our feet, doing as he says.

  “Come here, we’re going someplace.”

  As we get close to him, he grabs Katherine by her hair, swinging her around back of him, while he’s staring at me, as if to say, You make a move, and I’ll hurt her more.

  I am frozen, but Ray shouts, “No! Let her alone!”

  Suddenly Ray is flinging himself toward us.

  Donor releases Katherine and swings the gun toward Ray. I launch myself toward the barrel of the gun, but it goes off before my arms strike it. I feel as if the woods have exploded. There is a flash of fire, a roar of sound. Ray looks as if he’s flying for a moment, and then he goes down. I fall against the side of the gun, which knocks me to the ground. Donor grabs for me and jerks one of my arms, yelling, “Get up!”

  Katherine screams, and tries to go to her son.

  But Donor puts the gun to my head to stop her. I know, as he must know, that if he had put the gun to her head, he would have had to shoot her before she would halt. The expression on her face is so desperate, so painful, I turn away, unable to bear it.

  “We’re going someplace together,” he says again.

  He marches us back down the trail, Katherine first, followed by me with the shotgun in my back, then him. We are leaving Ray on the ground, and once again he’s been shot, and again, I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. Katherine is stumbling, weeping, crying his name: Johnnie.

  I am driving us away from the marina.

  Katherine is behind me in the backseat, and Donor is seated beside her with the gun pointed into her right thigh.

  “You’re the writer,” he says to me.

  I nod: yes.

  “What?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Take us to your house.”

  “Why?”

  “Shut the fuck up, and drive.”

  We drive in utter silence back into Bahia, up cheerful familiar streets under streetlights, stopping at stop lights, passing hundreds of cars. My mind is frantically trying to figure out a way to wreck my car without getting Katherine shot, and I can’t imagine a way to do that. I don’t know what to do, but drive. If it were just me, with the gun pressed to my side, I swear I would drive up the steps of a post office. I would find a police station, and drive into the side of it. I would ram this car into a fire plug. But it isn’t me with the shotgun pressed against my thigh, it is Katherine.

  I cannot even imagine
what she is feeling at this moment.

  There’s nothing for me to do but exactly as he says.

  We glide on past the guard at the gate of my cul-de-sac, and there is no way to transmit a message to him.

  Into my garage, we go, and now all I can think of is Kimmie.

  She’s waiting inside my house for us, not knowing, coming innocently to greet us when we walk in the kitchen door.

  I have to make this horror stop right now.

  After I turn off the engine, I say quietly, “May I ask you something?”

  “What?” he says. A killer’s ego, I am thinking, a killer’s ego. “Ray says you took Natty’s pineal gland. Most people don’t even know where it is. How’d you know how to do that?”

  He bangs the end of the shotgun against my skull.

  I cry out in pain, and grab my head.

  Blood runs down my fingers.

  “It’s up there,” he says, meaning in my head, where he hit me. “I know all about that shit, from being a medic in Korea. That’s where your soul is. I could take it. I could steal your soul. I could take yours, but it wouldn’t be innocent enough for me.”

  You are crazy! You are a sick, perverted lunatic!

  He forces us out of the car.

  “What do you want?” I ask him, because I have to know.

  He pushes Katherine into my kitchen, before he answers.

  “You’re going to drive me back home to Kansas.”

  He starts to laugh at the expression on my face.

  “Don’t you know who I am now?” he asks me.

  I shake my head as he reaches into his back pocket while still holding the shotgun level with my stomach. He pulls out a wallet and tosses it to me. When I open it, I see a driver’s license with a photo of a man about his age, and the name: Fred Kepler.

  “I’m Fred Kepler now,” he says, laughing. “And he’s me, feeding the alligators in the Everglades. First I got me a new soul. Now I get born again as Fred Kepler. I’m going back to Kansas, as Fred, and then I’m going to disappear. Everybody thinks Donor Miller is dead. But Fred Kepler is alive and he’s going home to Kansas!”

  He shoves me into the kitchen.

  I hear my telephone ringing, and see that it is eight o’clock, and the woman who knew my parents is calling right when she said she would. It rings again.