Andrew Klavan - The long way home

I stepped up on the porch and went to the door. I rang the doorbell and waited for a minute or so. There was no answer. Now I was sure there was no one inside.

I looked left and right and behind me to make sure there was no one watching.

Then I broke into the house.

Maybe I should have gone around the back. Maybe I should have looked for an open window. Maybe I should have done a lot of things, but I didn't. I was in a hurry to get inside. I could see the lock on the door was nothing fancy, just a cheap bolt. I knew I could get past it easily.

There was a screen door. I pulled it open, braced it open with my shoulder. I tried the doorknob first. In a safe neighborhood like this, sometimes people just leave their doors unlocked. But no, the lock was set; the knob wouldn't turn. I opened the thinnest blade of the Swiss Army knife. I worked the blade into the space between the door and the jamb. I had to really dig to get it in. The wood of the jamb dented and the paint flaked off. I knew someone might notice this, but I was in too much of a hurry to care.

I worked the blade down to the bolt and forced it back. I pushed the door and with a little more cracking of wood and flaking of paint, it opened.

I went in.

I closed the door behind me and locked it again. Then I had to lean against it for a moment. I was breathing fast and my heart was beating hard. I stayed where I was and listened for any noises in the house. There were none. I started moving.

I was in a small foyer. The stairs were right in front of me. To my left, I could see a hall and the kitchen at the end of it. To my right, there was a living room. Even with the daylight coming through the windows, it was all mostly in shadow. All the lights in the house were off.

I went to the stairs and started up. I figured if Mr. Sherman had a home office it would be on the second floor somewhere.

Sure enough, when I got to the second-floor landing, I turned and saw the room I wanted at the end of the hall. The door was open. I could see right into it, could see the desk with the computer on it and part of a shelf of books.

I went toward it, past a bedroom, past a bathroom, past some sort of exercise room with a stationary bicycle and some free weights and a TV and stuff. Then I was there.

Sherman's office looked pretty much the way you'd expect a teacher's office to look. It was cramped and messy with shelves on every wall and books on every shelf, some of them stuck in on top of other books because there were too many to fit. There was a big wooden desk against one wall. The computer was there. The computer was off, the screen dark.

I went to the window first. The window looked out on the side of the house, at a big oak tree and a strip of grass. You could see a section of the street and sidewalk too. When you were close to the glass, you could see about half of the house's driveway. I could still hear the lawn mower going down the block, but I couldn't see anyone out there.

I went to Sherman's computer and turned it on.

With a whispered whir, the computer booted-and then stopped. A password screen came on, just the way I'd figured it would. I took the disk with the Private Eye program out of my fleece pocket. I opened the computer's disk drive and slipped the disk in.

The program started playing automatically. It fed directly into the computer's operating system. Some prompts came up. I'd read the instructions earlier and I typed in the proper commands quickly. There was a pause-then the program started to upload into the computer.

A message came onscreen, blinking white letters. It said that 0% of the program had loaded so far-then 1%, 2%, 3%… 5%… The numbers increased slowly but steadily.

While they climbed, I searched the room.

I went through the desk drawers first. They were all unlocked. I found papers, files-some school stuff, some personal papers, insurance, bank accounts-but nothing that was helpful.

I checked the computer. Ten percent of the Private Eye program had loaded.

I found a filing drawer and looked in there. More papers, more notes. There were files with various names on them. Hotchkiss. Jefferson. Parker. I glanced inside a couple of them, but it just looked like research for some kind of history project.

Fifteen percent of the program had loaded now.

I moved to the bookshelves. I didn't know where to begin looking. I didn't even really know what I was looking for. Something about Alex. Something about me. Anything that would suggest there was some link between Mr. Sherman and that "Real True America" article.

I moved a couple of books aside. Looked behind them. There was nothing. Just a lot of dust.

Then something caught my eye. It was kind of silly, really, nothing important. It was just a book-a book of short stories. But the title of it was Homeland. I pulled it off the shelf. The second I did, I knew I had found something. The book didn't feel right. It didn't feel heavy enough. It felt hollow. I opened it.

Sure enough, the pages inside had been cut away to make a hiding place. In the hiding place, there were photographs.

I lifted them out. They were snapshots. They all showed one man. A tall man, bald, serious-looking. I don't know how old-forty or fifty maybe. He was wearing a black suit and a dark tie. He looked as if he didn't know someone was taking his picture.

In the first few pictures he was just pushing through the door of what looked like a big office building. Then there were more pictures of him walking away. He was on the sidewalk of a busy street, a street in a big city. I could see the tall buildings all around him. In one picture I could even see the street signs on the corner. One sign said Madison Avenue, the other said 54th Street.

There was nothing particularly strange about these photographs, not on the surface anyway. But something about them held me. I had this faint, strange feeling that I knew this man. I went through the pictures again. The first one of him coming through the door, then the second, then the third… and on the third, I froze, staring.

There was something reflected on the dark glass of the door. Some letters from a sign in the office building's foyer. A-M-R-E-T-A-W. For a second, the letters meant nothing to me. But then, realizing they were backward in the reflection, I turned them around in my mind: W-AT-E-R-M-A… The last letter was at the very edge of the door. But I was willing to bet there was another letter after it. N-it must've been N. The sign in the foyer said WATERMAN.

I remembered the stranger who had whispered to me just before he freed me from police handcuffs:

You're a better man than you know. Find Waterman.

I stared at the face of the man in the picture. That strange sense that I knew him came back to me. Was this the man I had to find? And if I did find him, would he be an enemy or a friend?

I was still standing there, staring at the photograph, when I heard the front door open downstairs.

I stopped breathing. My whole body went rigid, vibrating like a plucked string.

I heard a soft bang. It was the screen door swinging shut. Then there were footsteps.

I came back to my senses. Quickly, I fumbled the photographs back into the book. I fumbled the book back onto the shelf. I listened, my heart hammering hard.

The footsteps sounded like they were going down the hallway to the kitchen. They sounded like a woman's footsteps because of the way the heels hit the floor-they sounded like a woman's heels. The footsteps went into the kitchen and stopped.

My teeth gritted with care, every muscle tight with fear, I tiptoed across the room, back to the desk. I checked on the computer screen.

The message was now reading 21%, 22%, 23%… It seemed to take forever to move from number to number.