The Truth of the Matter (6 page)

I remembered how everything—even Alex’s murder— faded into the background of our lives as Beth and I discovered the depths of our feelings for one another. We were together every moment we could find, walking, talking, laughing, feeling like we had stumbled on the whole point of our lives and that that point was for the two of us to be together, to find each other, like two halves of a single person that were created to snap into place.

As I stood there, watching my younger self—wishing I could be back in his body, in his world, in that past, happy life—I looked over his shoulder and saw a new message appear on the monitor.

Beth:
i don’t think it’s fair, that’s all.

My younger self tapped back at the keyboard:
y
not talk to her?

Beth:
and say what? “Hey, I’m a much better
writer than that grade you gave me?”

I tapped back:
sure, y not? you want me to?

Beth:
no!!!!!!

And me:
why so many !!!?

Beth:
cuz I no what yer like, CW. no karate chopping
my eng teacher!

My younger self and I both laughed.

Then my younger self and I both stopped laughing. Just as we were about to tap an answer to Beth into the keyboard, the monitor went completely black.

My younger self blinked, startled. “Oh, no,” he said aloud. He slapped the side of the monitor. “Come on!”

He—I—was beginning to jiggle the On/Off switch at the base of the monitor when the screen crackled in a strange way and a message rolled across the bottom of it. The message was in white letters on the dark background.

It said:
Open your cell phone, Charlie
.

With that, the monitor flashed back on again. There was the Schoolyard home page with the last message from Beth still there, just as before.

Puzzled, I—the younger me—looked around and saw my cell phone lying on the desk, at the opposite end of the keyboard from my calculator. I picked it up. It wasn’t ringing or anything. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. All the same, I shrugged and opened it as the message directed.

Instantly, a man’s voice said: “If you want to know who killed Alex Hauser, come to the Morgan Reservoir in half an hour.”

“What?” I said. “Who is this?”

“Come alone. Don’t tell anyone.”

“How do you know who killed Alex? Who am I talking to?”

“If you tell anyone, I’ll know. Do you understand me? I’ll know and I won’t show up.”

“Wait, listen . . . ,” I began.

“Do you understand me?”

The younger me looked around the room as if searching for help. Finally, I raised my hand in a gesture of surrender. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand you, sure.”

“Do you want to know who killed Alex or not?”

“Yes, of course I do, but . . .”

There was no click, but the silence at the other end of the line became somehow suddenly more complete.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

No answer. The mysterious man was gone.

The present me stood at the edge of the scene, at the edge of my old room at home, watching the past me as he sat there wondering what to do. I didn’t know what was going to happen next, but I wanted to call out to myself, to warn myself, to say:
Don’t do it. Don’t go. Stay where
you are. Answer Beth’s message, stay with Beth, love Beth,
have your life
.

But at the same time, I thought that I could feel what was going through the heart and mind of the past me; I could feel his curiosity, his desire to find Alex’s murderer and clear himself of any possible suspicion . . . and I could feel something else too. I could feel his sense of adventure. His need for excitement. His burning ambition to get out of his small-town life and do something important and thrilling and dangerous. I was already planning to try to get into the Air Force Academy. I had even gotten my mom to let me take some flying lessons by way of preparation. But I couldn’t apply to the academy until next year. This was now.

I—the present me—wanted to reach out and stop the old me, but I couldn’t. All at once, I was fading away from the scene, helplessly drawn back out of my room, back and back into . . .

Nothing. Blackness. Where was I now?

My room was gone. The trophies, the poster on the wall, the computer, my former self. It had all vanished.

And suddenly, I was scared. Very scared. I was alone in the darkness and now there was . . . something . . . a noise . . . an awful noise . . . someone screaming . . . terrible screaming in the distance . . . And I knew: it was me, it was me, in the chair in the Panic Room, screaming in pain . . .

I didn’t want to go back there, back to that room, back to that chair, back to that agony.

I turned this way and that, looking for another way out.

There . . . up ahead . . . a dim gray light . . .

I moved toward it.

Now I was on a street. No, a country road. It was night. Dark. No streetlights, no houses. Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking.

I looked around, confused. I saw a sparkle, very faint—the stars on water. My eyes began to adjust. I recognized this place. Reservoir Road, up in the wooded hills above my hometown. I could see a hill of dark trees rising up against the night sky to my right, a sandy slope falling away to my left. There was the Morgan Reservoir at the bottom of the slope, the water glinting in the starlight.

I looked around. I half expected to see myself—my younger self—as I had seen him before. But he was nowhere to be found. I was alone. I looked down and . . .

What was this? I wasn’t wearing my fleece anymore. I was wearing a windbreaker. I could feel the brisk air of early autumn on me.

Slowly, I lifted my hands, touched my cheeks, felt my hair. I understood.

I didn’t see my younger self because I
was
my younger self. I had become my own memory.

The fear, then, was all mine. I knew why I was afraid too. I was here to meet the man behind the mysterious voice on my phone.

If you want to know who killed Alex Hauser .
. .

Before, back in the safety of my room, I’d been excited by those words, excited at the prospect of this mysterious meeting, at the idea that I might possibly solve Alex’s murder. But now, now that I was actually out here, out here alone in the dark with no one knowing where I was—now suddenly it occurred to me: what a knucklehead I’d been! What an unbelievably stupid idea it was to come out here to meet some voice on the phone without even letting anyone know I was doing it! I mean, didn’t I think? Didn’t I realize? There was only one person who could possibly know who had killed Alex—and that was the murderer himself! And the only reason the murderer would want me to come out and meet him on an empty road in the middle of the night . . .

Well, let’s just say visions of autopsy scenes from
CSI: NY
flashed in my head, with me starring as the body!

I thought I better get out of there—fast, before this killer clown showed up. I was about to turn around, about to head back to my car, my mom’s SUV parked on the road behind me . . .

But before I could, two lights flashed at me out of the darkness. Headlights. On for a moment. Then off.

There was another car parked on the Reservoir Road.

This didn’t seem like a memory now at all. I didn’t feel separated from my younger self. I felt I
was
my younger self again. I felt I was there, really there, really standing in the dark on the road, expecting to see the person who had killed Alex Hauser come leaping out at me at any moment.

I stood where I was, uncertain. Did I go toward the headlights and find out who had called me? Or did I do the smart thing and jump in my mom’s car and drive out of there, tires squealing, just as fast as I possibly could?

I know, I know. The smart answer was obvious. I should never have gone out there in the first place. There could be no good reason to follow a mysterious voice into the darkness. There could be no good reason to stay here now that I’d come to my senses. I felt as if my heart were hammering in my throat—and that meant my body was trying to tell me something. It was trying to tell me:
Hey! Don’t be an idiot! Go home where you belong!

But I couldn’t. What can I say? It was a guy thing. I knew I should never have come, but now that I was here—well, no way I was going to run for it. I didn’t want to feel like a coward. I didn’t want to let my dead friend Alex down. I wanted to finish what I’d started and find out who his killer was and be a hero, even if it got me killed. A guy thing, like I said. So no matter what the consequences, running away was just not an option.

Before I even came to a conscious decision, I was already moving along the road toward the place where I’d seen the headlights. With every step, my heart beat even faster. My body tensed as I tried to prepare myself mentally for any surprise attack. Soon, I could make out the shape of the car on the road ahead of me. It was a long black car of some kind: a limousine. Now I was close enough to see the silhouette of the man sitting behind the wheel. Was that him? I wondered. Was that the man who had killed Alex?

But as I took another step, the back door of the limousine came open. The light inside went on. I could see the driver was not alone. There was someone else sitting in the backseat.

I came around the side of the limo, closing the final distance to the rear door. The light inside was very dim. It didn’t illuminate much. The driver’s face was still in shadow—though I could make out a deadpan expression and cold, lidded eyes. And the man in the backseat was obscured by the top of the door frame. From where I was, I could only see him from the neck down, the suit and tie beneath his open overcoat.

I took another step toward the open door. Then I stopped. I bent down to get a look at the man’s face. I didn’t know him. He was older, fifty or something. A serious sort of person, a businessman or something like that.

“Get in, Charlie,” he said. It was the voice I had heard over my cell phone.

I hesitated. Hadn’t my mother been telling me since I was a child that I should never get in a car with a strange man?

The strange man in the car took out a wallet and flipped it open. I saw the government identification inside. I recognized the name of the agency. “Come on,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to talk.”

Well, my mother always was a worrier. And I was a black belt, not a child anymore.

I took a breath and slipped into the limo’s backseat. I pulled the door shut and turned to the man beside me.

“It’s nice to meet you, Charlie,” he said quietly. “My name is Waterman.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
Out of the Past

Then I woke up. I was lying on the floor of the Panic Room. I was curled up on my side. The cot was right above me, as if I’d been lying on it and had fallen off. My clothes were damp with sweat. I smelled. And the room stank of puke.

I felt as though I had been lying there unconscious for a long time. I looked at my watch. I couldn’t believe it. Almost ten hours had passed! It must be nearly morning now.

I started to uncurl. Bad idea. I was hit with a sharp cramp in the stomach. I gave a growl and clutched at myself, curling up again, until the pain passed. Then, again—more slowly, more cautiously this time—I started to unwind my body. I rolled over.

The first thing I saw was the chair—the metal chair in the middle of the room. It stood above me, looming, threatening, frightening, the handcuffs dangling from the chair-arms, where they’d held my wrists.

I groaned and turned onto my back. The light from the fluorescents on the ceiling seemed to slice right through my eyes into my brain. Flinching, I raised a trembling hand to shield myself. With the other hand, I reached out blindly until I found the edge of the cot. Then I slowly pulled myself into a sitting position.

From there, climbing over the cot, I worked myself to my feet. For a moment, all I could do was stand there, swaying. The room seemed to turn and tumble this way and that. My stomach seemed to turn and tumble with it. I was light-headed. I was afraid I was going to throw up.

I moved to the steel toilet on the wall. That’s where the smell of vomit was coming from. It made me feel even sicker. I reached out quickly and flushed the toilet, turning away so I wouldn’t have to watch the swirl.

I moved to the middle of the room. I moved like an old man, my legs stiff, my feet shuffling. I had to pause after a moment, resting my hand on the back of the chair to keep myself steady.

I felt like I had been run through a blender. For a minute or two, I was so dazed from the experience, I couldn’t even really remember what had happened. Then it came back to me in flashes: the injection . . . the pain . . .

How much time had passed? I wondered. How long had I been in the chair? How long had I been lying on the floor?

The rest of it was coming back to me now too. The way I’d separated from myself, as if my soul had left my body. The way I’d stood on the sidelines and watched my own memories unfold . . . and the way I’d become one with the memory of myself standing in the dark on Reservoir Road . . . living through that walk to the car again and then . . .

I straightened. I whispered: “Waterman!”

I remembered now! That mysterious message on my computer monitor. The mysterious voice on my phone. Reservoir Road in the middle of the night. The mysterious black car. Waterman.

Even in my weakness and sickness, my mouth opened and I let out a syllable of joy and hope. I gripped the back of the chair, holding myself steady. Yes—yes!—I was beginning to remember! I was beginning to remember it all. The days after Alex’s murder. Beth and I falling in love. Then that message . . . that voice on the phone . . . that moment when I got in the car with Waterman . . .

I stood there, gripping the chair, fighting hard to remember what had happened next. I closed my eyes. I strained to see it. It seemed just out of reach, like a word you can’t remember that’s right on the tip of your tongue. I wanted so badly to get my memory back, to recall my life, but . . . No. Nothing. It just wasn’t there. It hadn’t come back to me. Not yet.