Tunnel Vision

by Aric Davis

The bell rang, making both of them jump, and as they gathered their things and signed out of the library desktop computers, Betty shouldered her bag and said, “I’ll e-mail Nickel after school. If he’s up for it and I can get out of the house, I want to go to that house tonight. Are you in?”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Betty had been prepared to e-mail Nickel and ask if he wanted to go on exactly the sort of adventure she had assured her mothers that she was over, but there was a pair of messages from him waiting for her in her inbox. The first one said simply, “Let me know if you still want to go to the house. Hope you’re feeling better. N.” Betty responded, “Yes!” and asked him if she could meet him at the gas station by his house.

  The second of the two, a few hours older, said, “Think this is him?” followed by a masked hyperlink that said, “Hmmmm.” Betty clicked the link, which led to the Facebook page of someone named Anne Lattrell. There were numerous pictures of this Anne and what appeared to be members of her family, as well as a man—presumably her husband—with whom she was shown going to amusement parks and posing for cheesy portraits. This man—balding, at least semi-well-off, happy—looked nothing like the image conjured up in Betty’s mind of how an aged Jason Lattrell would look.

  Betty wasn’t quite sure why this profile was on Nickel’s radar, and then she got to the bottom end of the photo gallery and saw pictures of a tired-looking, skinnier, hairier, long-ago version of Anne’s husband, a maybe-Jason posing in front of a brick wall with a group of other punk rock kids. Duke and Mandy were nowhere to be seen, but the manner of dress was correct for the time period. Betty wondered if current-day Jason even knew the picture was on here. He looked like hell. The picture was surrounded by shots of Anne with braces, Anne wearing a figure-skating dress, and Anne with her parents in a graduation robe, but the picture of the maybe-Jason was posed in front of a very familiar address: 4527. Betty knew without a doubt the house had to be on Lincoln, and if Duke was telling the truth, had probably been taken around the time Mandy was killed.

  It’s not a smoking gun or a confession, or even proof of a man in a green jacket, but it’s something.

  Betty flipped back to her e-mail and saw that Nickel had responded to her, saying simply, “Gas station, as soon as possible.” Betty snapped her computer closed, left the room, and bounced down the steps. She walked to the closed basement door, funk rock again pouring through the seams, and called to Ophelia, saying, “I’m going to June’s house, to study, OK?”

  “All right,” said Ophelia. “Call me if anything changes or if your head hurts too much to drive.”

  “OK, thanks,” shouted Betty, the lump of guilt in her throat almost too much to swallow. Lying had been bad enough before Jake had attacked her, but now that she’d made her other promise, everything about their research was just a further extension of the same lie.

  It’s too late to worry about that. This is more important than a lie and more important than school.

  Betty dialed June as she drove, but was forced to leave a message when there was no answer. Leaving her phone on her knee so she wouldn’t miss anything—every parent’s worst fear: a teenager far more in tune with the phone than the road—Betty and her car made it unscathed to a waiting Nickel at the gas station. Nickel got in just as the phone began to ring, and Betty waved at Nickel as she answered it.

  “Hey,” said June. “What’s up?”

  “I’m driving to that house with Nickel. Are you in?”

  “I wish. I have to go to my dad’s again. Some insurance forms he needs to sign so Mom can fax them in, and then he’s going to work on my car. I might try to talk to him about Mandy, but honestly, I don’t think I’ll actually do it. It seems bad enough before I’m in front of him, but it’s impossible once I’m actually there.”

  “Sorry,” said Betty. “Well, hopefully I can get a hold of you later and we can fill each other in.”

  “Yeah, well, much later, maybe. I’m going to be stuck there for a few hours at least. Today is over already, as far as I can tell.”

  “That sucks,” said Betty.

  “Totes,” said June. “But I have to get over there. He can keep me waiting for hours at a time, but if I’m ten minutes late with him, I’m dead meat. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  When they’d said good-bye, Betty turned to Nickel. “Well, looks like it’s just the two of us.”

  “Fine by me,” he said, then cracked a thin smile. “Unless you have any other angry admirers that have set off after you for revenge. If so, I’d really like to know ahead of time.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Betty, but instead of blushing, she was smiling. “He was a pretty good guy for a long time, and now, well, you saw what happened.”

  “He must have cared about you a lot,” said Nickel. “People can be funny when they’re hurt like that, or scared for a loved one. That’s why moms can lift cars off of toddlers and why defense attorneys use terms like crime of passion.”

  “Yeah,” said Betty, “he loved me so much he punched me in the head.”

  “It’s not as strange as it sounds. I bet if you asked most people who killed a loved one, they’d be confused, remorseful, and possibly even in denial when they were confronted with what they’d done.”

  “People are crazy,” said Betty. “Jake was telling the cops all about how someone mugged us and beat him up when he was trying to protect me. I thought he’d just lied through his teeth, but hell, maybe he really believed it. That actually makes some sense.” Betty paused and then said, “Well, as much sense as getting beaten up by your ex-boyfriend can.”

  “So what did you tell the police about me?” Nickel asked as Betty turned out of the gas station, and Betty smiled.

  “Do you really think I would tell them anything?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, I know what my threshold is for lying during something like that, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Well, I didn’t say anything,” said Betty. “I told the cops I made a friend at the park, Jake just came out of nowhere and attacked us, and that was the last thing I remember.”

  “Did you give them a description? It’s OK if you did, I just need to know if I need a haircut and some new clothes.”

  “No, I couldn’t do that,” she said. “My mom let the cop know that everything was OK, and that was the end of it.”

  “You’re just lucky they believed you,” said Nickel. “Me in that same situation, I’d be completely fucked.”

  “You’d be OK,” said Betty. “It’s not like it would be your fault you got hurt, and eventually your dad would have made everything all right with the cops, no matter what they decided to believe.”

  After a beat of silence, Nickel asked, “Do you think Jake’s parents are making everything OK for him?”

  “No,” Betty allowed. There was a flinty look in Nickel’s eyes, not a cruel one, but something cold and impermeable. Not for the first time, it occurred to Betty that she really never was going to know all there was to know about this boy, and perhaps no one on earth really did. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to presume anything.”

  “I know,” said Nickel. “It’s just hard for me to think in shades of gray. Everything in my life is either peachy or a complete disaster, and it’s a razor’s edge that separates them. I could tell you stories that you’d never believe, but there’s no point. I’d just look like a fool.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. I’d never want you to feel like that on my account, especially not if you promised me you were telling the truth.”

  Betty was inching her right hand closer to Nickel’s on the console when Nickel said, “Hold up,” and she jerked her hand away as if it had been scalded.

  Nickel was just looking at her with a grin. “We’re here.”

  Betty smiled at him and then parked the car.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The neighborhood was a ruin, exactly the sort of place a girl like Mandy would have been killed
in. It was the sort of post-apocalyptic suburb that moistened movie producers’ panties at the thought of the money they’d be saving, the kind of neighborhood that made its way onto placards telling people that something had to be done.

  This was the sort of place Betty and her friends had been warned away from their whole lives, but now here she was, feeling as out of place and vulnerable as a newborn child.

  She stood next to her car, staring at a house. The door and windows were boarded shut, black gaps showing through the missing boards like the spaces between knocked-out teeth. To Betty, it seemed impossible that ten minutes in a car could take her to such a place. She knew there were people who lived with less than she did, but this was an unimaginable level of poverty and desolation.

  Mandy lived here. Mandy died here.

  “C’mon,” said Nickel as he walked toward the house with a duffel bag in his hands.

  Betty wanted to follow him, but her feet felt nailed to the street. Finally she began to move toward him, not entirely sure if her feet were moving under her own power or if something far worse was beckoning her to the house, a siren song that Nickel was too brave to see for what it was. Death. That was what the house cried to Betty. As she moved toward it, she decided that was just as it should be. I am here because of death, so what else did I expect?

  Nickel grinned back at her, his smile an odd joke under the circumstances. He smiles because he’s afraid, thought Betty, but for him, there is joy in being afraid. What fire forges someone like this? There was time to wonder but not to solve the bizarre puzzle.

  Nickel was happy here, so why shouldn’t she be?

  Betty smiled as well as she was able, took an offered flashlight from Nickel’s open bag, and looked over her shoulder to make certain they weren’t being watched. The neighborhood was as quiet as Nickel’s, but in a far more sinister way. There, curtains had been closed, but she knew the houses were lived in. Here, everything appeared abandoned, but it was impossible to tell how many pairs of eyes were set upon them.

  Nickel walked to where the front door of the house had once been. Attached to the door were several signs warning against entry, a faded and cracked strip of police tape, and a barely legible notice marking the house as condemned. Ignoring all of it, Nickel began peeling boards from the entryway as if he owned the place. Once the way was clear enough to slip through, he took his own light from the duffel and flicked it on. “Are you ready?” he asked, and when Betty nodded, he slipped inside.

  Betty shuddered, gave a last look to the suddenly-no-longer-as-forbidding neighborhood—she could now imagine happily having a picnic on that weed-choked lawn, so long as she didn’t have to go inside this house—then flicked on her own light and slid into the gloom.

  There was more light in the abandoned house than their flashlights cast. Thin beams of illumination cut through boards in the hastily sealed windows, as well as through the rotting ceiling above them. Yellow police tape littered the inside of the house, “Police Line” and “Do Not Cross” far less faded than they had been outside the door.

  Betty watched Nickel slowly traverse the floor ahead of her, letting his beam guide his eyes while he checked the wood below for rot before trusting it with his full weight. Mimicking him, she started after him, the wood creaking and barking at her as she made her way over it.

  Then Nickel stopped a few feet from the front door, at a spot in the hallway that sat at an intersection between the kitchen and living room. “Look.”

  If there had ever been an effort to clean up the mess made from Mandy’s passing, the task had been short-lived and handled lazily. The boards in the hallway were stained a dark blackish brown. Neither Betty nor Nickel spoke as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and let their flashlights dance over the permanently stained wood.

  This is where Duke found her, thought Betty. Or where he killed her.

  As if to confirm her thinking, Nickel said, “It feels like all of this has been waiting for us to walk in and find it, the place where she died.”

  Betty nodded, not sure how to answer. The house was exactly as she had figured it would be, but she hadn’t been prepared for seeing the dried blood on the floor. That was worse than anything she could have imagined. There wasn’t going to be a ghost or some rotting Mandy zombie rushing down the stairs at them, but that stain was worse. It was Mandy’s last and only mark on this world, and it had been dismissed and forgotten in the wake of her murder, just like everything else about her. Only Duke, her lover and possible killer, persevered as the last living artifact of her death, and Betty thought that might have been the most unfair thing she’d ever heard.

  “Let’s go,” said Nickel as he stepped gingerly over the stained floor, and then used the beam from his flashlight to point down the hallway. At the end of it Betty could see another boarded-over doorway, but just to their right was a staircase leading up. Nickel headed straight for the steps and then began to ascend them.

  Once again Betty followed his lead, but she wanted to shout at him to stop, to tell him they’d made a mistake. There might not be secrets or bodies buried here, but this sure feels like we’re robbing a grave.

  Nickel stopped at the top of the steps and let his light play on the floor, and then Betty slid into the doorway beside him. “Hold up,” he said, not that she had any intention of continuing past him. “The floor up here is bad. Look.” He toed a shoe onto the floor and Betty watched it sink through the rotten board without a sound. “Broken leg territory.”

  Betty nodded and let her light twitch over the room’s exterior walls. If there’d ever been interior walls, they’d been cleared out to make the upstairs one giant room. Bleached-out flyers hung from the walls, and trash and what could’ve been smashed bits of furniture (or, really, anything at all) littered the floor.

  And there, across the room from them, a barely discernible shape that had been either painted or pressed into the wall. Even with her flashlight, Betty couldn’t quite make out what it was, but she was strongly drawn to it.

  Feeling the floor with her own foot, Betty found none of the squishy wood Nickel had showed her. Looking down, she could tell why.

  “I’m going over there,” she said, pointing with the flashlight to the shape and then, lowering the light to the beam she now perceived to be stretching out from her to her goal, she skipped around Nickel’s outstretched arm as he tried to block her.

  “It’s OK,” said Betty in answer to Nickel’s sputtering, “I’m on a crossbeam. See? Look at the nails.” Nickel’s beam joined hers at her feet, doubly illuminating the neat line of nail heads she was walking along.

  She slid one foot in front of the other, making sure to stay atop the crossbeam, which felt rock-solid under her weight. Eight years of gymnastics is finally paying off. Thin rays of light were blasting up from the bottom floor, and Betty smiled as she crossed the ruined room.

  I figured it out before Nickel, thought Betty as she made the halfway point across the upper floor. She paused to look back and give him a grin.

  Nickel returned her grin with one that was both hopeful and terrified, and then Betty continued her journey.

  Her last glance at Nickel had confirmed that she was most definitely on her own. Betty considered whistling as a distraction, when her foot edged just a few inches away from the beam, and the board under her misstep promptly cracked like a rifle shot under her shoe. Without thinking, she simply stepped on past it. Anything else would have turned out poorly.

  “Are you OK?” Nickel yelled from what felt like a million miles away.

  Betty nodded her flashlight in answer before continuing, shocked that she wasn’t panicking. Is this how a stage and a microphone feel? Is this being alive? Betty didn’t know, she couldn’t know, but now she could see what was waiting for her on the wall ahead.

  She slid the last fifteen feet without lifting so much as a toe from the line of nail-heads, and when she finally made her way to the wall she let out a sigh she was unaware she’d been h
olding in.

  “It’s a heart,” she called behind her. “She painted a giant heart on the wall!”

  “OK,” said Nickel in return. He might not know what it meant, but Betty did. This had been Mandy’s heart. This was her private spot, where she cried and fantasized and wished for a way out, but also where she got high and dreamt her opium dreams.

  This was her prison and her honeymoon suite.

  Betty knew that knowing such a thing was impossible, but she knew it all the same. This was Mandy’s spot, it was sacred, and she had earned her way in.

  The only problem now was what to do next. As usual, Nickel knew exactly what was required.

  “Do you have a knife?” he called to her, and Betty shook her head. “Tap the wall, down by the bottom of the heart,” he said. “Give it a good hard knock, but don’t lose your balance.”

  Betty did as she was told, rapping her right knuckle hard against the wall, and the sound that came back wasn’t drywall. When she looked at Nickel, she saw he’d heard it, too.

  “It’s plaster,” said Nickel. “You’re not going to be able to kick your way through, at least not without falling over. I’ve got a blade, but I’m not sure I can bring it to you. You’ve got me beat as far as weight is concerned.”

  Betty chuckled into her fist despite the perilousness of her position on the beam. Nickel didn’t look any bigger than her at all. But then again, she’d seen the fight with Jake. He had to be carrying some heavy muscles around.

  “Throw it to me,” said Betty.

  “No.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t want to waste time dragging my ass back there, so just throw it to me, OK?”

  “All right,” said Nickel, but Betty saw he was already disagreeing with himself as he dug through the duffel bag. He did something with his fingers and then a knife appeared in them, the wan light from the holes in the ceiling giving it an almost magical glow. “Duck low,” he said, holding it by the tip and winding up like a freaking circus knife-thrower. Betty dove to the floor atop her magic crossbeam, then felt and heard something hit the wall above her.