The Traveller Read Online Free PDF

finally returned to her home, empty, cold, alone, she had vowed to start over somewhere warm. Miami.
    She placed the flowers on the passenger seat of the rental car and drove out of Lambertville, across the bridge over the river to New Hope. The town, filled with the quaint, the precious and the upscale, stretched out on either side of the river; in a few moments she had left it behind, travelling slowly through the warm afternoon, down a shaded road, toward the cemetery. She wondered for a moment why the family had ever moved closer to Philadelphia when it was so pretty in the country. She had a sudden picture of her father, learning of his appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, swinging her mother like some buckaroo at a square dance. He had taught mathematical theory and quantum mechanics; his intelligence daunting, his worldliness absent. She smiled. He would not have understood for an instant why she was a policewoman. He would have admired some of the deductive reasoning, some of the investigative tactics, some of the apparent precision of police work, but he would have been confused and dismayed by the truths of the profession and the ever-present rubbing up against evil. He certainly would not have understood why his daughter loved it so, though he would have admired the basic simplicity of her devotion: that it was the easiest way to achieve some good in a world filled with — in her mind she hesitated, as she had so often over the past few days — filled with creeps who kill eighteen-year-old girls suffused with life and promise and future and goodness. Detective Barren drove on, the warm memory of her father sliding away in the shadows, replaced by a sketchpad in her mind, and her imagination trying to draw in the features of a killer. She almost missed the entrance to the cemetery.
    Someone had placed a small American flag on John
    Barren’s grave, and for a moment she wasn’t sure that she wanted it there. Then she relented, thinking, If this gives the local VFW some satisfaction, who am I to refuse it? That was what gravesites and memorials are for, she thought, the living. She could not look at the headstone and the parched grass that covered the plot and envision John below in a coffin. She caught her breath suddenly at a memory:
    Remains nonviewable.
    The coffin had a tag on one handle. It was probably supposed to be removed before she saw it, but she had seen.
    In her unruly grief she had puzzled at the tag.
    Remains nonviewable.
    She had thought first, strangely, that it meant that John was naked, and that the Army, in a silly, foolish, masculine way, was trying to protect everyone from embarrassment. She had wanted to say to the men surrounding the coffin. Don’t be so stupid. Of course we saw each other naked. We delighted in those moments. We were lovers in high school, in college, on the night he was drafted and in the hours before he took the bus to basic training, and constantly in the two short weeks of leave before he went overseas. In the summer, down at the Jersey Shore, we would sneak out after our parents had gone to bed and meet in the moonlight and roll naked in the sand dunes.
    Remains nonviewable.
    She’d considered those two strange words. Remains — well, that was John. Nonviewable — well, that meant she couldn’t see him. She wondered why. What had they done to him? She tried to ask, but discovered that a young dead Ban’s bride didn’t get straight answers. She’d been hugged instead and told that it was all for the better, and told it was God’s Will and war was hell and any number of things that, to her mind, didn’t seem to have a great deal of relevance to the issue. She had begun to grow impatient and increasingly distraught, which only made the military Ben and family men all the more frustrating in their denial. Finally, as her voice had started to rise and her demands
    grew more strident, she’d felt a hand clamp her arm tightly. It had been the funeral