Tunnel Vision

by Aric Davis

  “I think I did it,” called Nickel. “Which is weird, because I’ve never really thrown a knife before.”

  “You threw it?” asked Betty breathlessly as she stood. The knife was buried halfway down the heart, and Betty gave it a yank to free the thing from the plaster. “I meant toss it to me, or slide it. You know, closed.”

  She could see Nickel’s grin from across the room, despite the dim light. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I could’ve done that. Crap.” He laughed a choked-sounding laugh. “I guess I just heard ‘throw the knife,’ and then I was doing it. I was just following orders. And it worked out pretty well.”

  Betty wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Hang on,” she said, happy to change the subject. “I’m going to start cutting the wall.”

  It was far easier to sink the knife in than it had been to remove it, and after a couple hacks at the heart painted on the wall, Betty understood why. The back inch or so of the blade was serrated, and though the whole blade was sharp, the serrations grabbed on to the plaster and shredded dust onto her forearms. Betty used the thing as carefully as she could, holding the flashlight between the crook of her neck and her shoulder, making sure to keep her fingers away from the blade. When she had carved an outline around half of the heart, Betty began slicing at the other half, forced, finally, to sidle close to the wall to move to the next crossbeam, an exercise she accomplished so quickly it never even occurred to her that she should have been nervous.

  Tracing the second half of the heart went far faster. Not only was Betty cutting better, but the new beam was holding her weight as steadily as the one she’d crossed on. Betty ran the knife down the outermost lobe of the heart, and then brought it down to the point at the bottom, finishing with a flourish that was as much for her own ego as it was for Nickel’s eyes.

  She wasn’t sure what to expect now that the tracing was done, but she had figured that something might just magically happen. Instead, the wall was cut, the heart molested, but there was still no reveal. Frustrated, she pulled the knife free from the heart and smacked the wall, and then the heart broke and fell between the floor and the beams . . . and then came a deeper rumble within the wall, and a sound like a small rock slide inside the house.

  Nickel whistled, and Betty felt her own thudding heart rise high in her chest as the building continued its complaints, sounding as if it might collapse. And then the noise was gone—save for the occasional screaming of displaced rodents and still-falling crumbs of plaster—and Betty knelt on the crossbeam until her pulse stopped thundering in her ears, and began to search the hole she’d made in the wall.

  She shoved the knife into her pocket and used the flashlight to help her look for the diary she was convinced was there. Some of the floor of the revealed space within the wall had fallen away, and all that remained were bits of plaster and loose nails. It has to be here, thought Betty. There’s nowhere else that would have been safe enough for her to hide her thoughts from Duke, and for the police to have missed it in their search. No matter how sure Betty was of its placement, however, the diary still eluded her. She leaned further into the hole and went from methodical searching of the detritus there to frantic scratching and banging.

  “Calm down!” called Nickel across the span, and the sound of his voice made Betty nearly teeter off the beam. “You need to look more gently. We don’t know what condition anything in there might be in, and you don’t want to ruin it by rushing.”

  “All right,” she said, but she only slowed her pace for a moment, then redoubled her efforts. There’s nothing here. The idea of having to cross the room and its rotten floor empty-handed made her feel like she could throw up. But at last she had to pull herself out of the hole in the wall and face facts.

  “There’s nothing here,” she admitted.

  Across the room, she could see Nickel nodding with a half smile on his face. “It’s not your fault, Betty,” he said. “Come on back, but remember to go slowly. Concentrate.”

  Betty nodded, and then she began the walk across the beam.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Betty slowly slid atop the crossbeam. Her heart was roaring in her chest as she moved, especially as the beam began moving underneath her, swaying ever so slightly as she crossed the span. Then, suddenly, the beam went from a slight bounce to a full-on funhouse wobble, accompanied by exactly the sort of wooden groans she didn’t want to hear.

  It will hold, just keep moving.

  Nickel seemed much further away than he had when she’d been at the heart, even though he was getting closer every second. The bravado she’d exhibited over what felt like a sure thing was gone, replaced by a growing terror over the new beam’s swaying misbehavior and a deepening despair over the futility of her efforts to date. There had been no diary, and once again the sands of truth were slipping through her fingers. We did everything right, but it still didn’t matter, thought Betty, and for the first time she understood Duke’s frustration.

  If Duke really was innocent, then the trial, fallout, and eventual Free Duke movement had to have seemed equal parts horrible and impossible. And even worse, Mandy was still dead, regardless of his fate. Betty had seen such a small part of it, felt such a small measure of the frustration, that it remained impossible for her to even properly empathize with a person who had been locked up for most of his life. What happened in this house is either the truth Duke has been hoping for over the past decade and a half, or something he wishes desperately would just go away.

  Flushing the thoughts from her mind, Betty tried to focus solely on her return slide across the beam, but her mind kept offering useless and pointlessly dangerous ideas about which of the remaining walls she should carve into. She knew she wouldn’t, though, no matter how many harebrained ideas offered themselves up. If there had been a diary, it would have been behind that wall. Since it wasn’t there, either it had never existed at all or it had been stolen away years earlier. Whichever it was, the lack of a diary meant there might never be an answer. Even if Duke were released, the real truth would probably always stay buried.

  With maybe ten feet still to go, the floor below Betty now erupted in bursts of what sounded like screaming. Even as Nickel began to shout at her that she needed to hurry, Betty ignored him, ignored the noise, concentrating on the floor. Every step brought more wood screams, every move she made was the possible catalyst for the ruined floor’s collapse, but Betty knew that sitting and waiting for help would see her falling through it just as surely as a misstep would.

  You wanted to show off and get to that wall. But that didn’t work, so now you just need to get back to the stairs.

  Nickel was silent now, but he was shining his light on the floor before her, just away from her own unsteady light but close enough so she could see further than with just the lone flashlight. Some of the nails connecting the floorboards to the beam were popping up, dancing free from the wood, and the sight of them bouncing about in the dust was hypnotic. Stepping over the lifted nail heads, she felt herself losing her balance and tried to recover but her next step strayed. Feeling a floorboard give beneath her, she drove her weight off her foot and heard the board snap behind her, but it didn’t matter. She was already on her front foot then and driving off that one, too scared to slide or hold her line anymore.

  She began to sprint.

  The boards snapping in her wake sounded like a television gunfight. Betty was watching her feet so intently that when she felt arms wrapped around her a scream burst from her mouth, and then a hand curled over her mouth and a kind voice said, “Betty, it’s Nickel. You’re OK, all right? You made it, so please don’t scream anymore.”

  Nickel slowly took his hand from her mouth, but he held on to her as she looked out over the room. Aside from the ruined wall and a few extra nails on the floor, it still looked exactly as it had before Betty had traveled across it, a booby trap in the purest sense.

  “I want to go,” she said.

  “Don’t blame you in the least.”

/>   “But we can’t go. We can’t.”

  “Betty,” he said. “The house is a bust. There’s nothing here to be found but trouble and old blood. We can still look into Jason Lattrell and see if there’s anything else there, but I have a feeling that’s going to be another dead end, too. Not that I don’t think we should explore it, of course. I mean, we have to look in the darkest and least likely places if we’re going to find anything out.”

  “We’ve been looking in those places.” Betty broke free from him and walked down the stairs. His arms had felt wonderful around her, but solid ground under her feet would feel even better. “I’ve been to prison, the hospital, and now a murder house, trying to get information on a fifteen-year-old crime,” she whined over her shoulder at him, “but there’s nothing left. Whoever was panning this case for information before must have gotten all the pieces worth getting, and when the people that want Duke free came along, they took everything else.”

  “If it’s so hopeless, then why are you still at it?”

  They were standing at the bottom of the stairs now. Not solid earth, but an improvement.

  “Because I don’t want to give up,” said Betty. “This was June’s aunt—my best friend’s aunt—who maybe never even knew June was alive. If we don’t try and really find out who hurt her, then who will?”

  “That’s it, all right.”

  He’d spoken in just over a whisper, as though he was talking more to himself than to her. “What do you mean?” she asked him.

  Nickel looked at her gravely then, and this time he was definitely talking to her. “That’s why I do what I do,” he said. “I try and do the things regular people won’t do, see things they refuse to see.”

  Betty had turned to face him, her feet finally planted on something solid and the shaking feeling in her calves fading. “You sound like . . .” She trailed off, but he knew what she was going to say.

  “I don’t think I’m some superhero, believe me,” he said. “Sometimes I wish to hell I was, but I’m not.” He was still looking further into her eyes than anyone ever had. “Do you remember that day in the park when we met?” Betty nodded. “I was there because I had a meeting with a client. She hired me because she was worried about her daughter. June.”

  “No.” Betty was too shocked by the admission to say anything else, even though her tongue was burdened with questions she was desperate to ask.

  “She wanted this all to stay a secret,” said Nickel. “If not forever, then for just a little longer.” He swallowed, then took a matchstick, tucked it into a small gap between his left incisors, and sighed. “There’s more. I said I’d help, and then I met you and everything changed.” He grinned—a sardonic and sad grin—and Betty wanted to grab him the same way Nickel had latched on to her when she was finally off the collapsing floor.

  “There’s more than that, even,” said Nickel. “June’s mom had me look into her ex-husband. She thought maybe he was the one that killed Mandy. I broke into his house, followed him around, but there was nothing there. I stopped looking when I saw him out with June’s mom—divorced or not, they still have some sort of a relationship going. I never meant to get this far into this situation.” He worked his matchstick to the other side of his mouth and looked away. “And I never thought I’d meet someone like you on a job.”

  “Does your dad know what you do?”

  “My dad is dead, Betty,” said Nickel. “He’s been dead for years, and this is my life, this work. Helping people that need me, and punishing people that manage to avoid the police. That’s what I do. This work we’ve been doing has practically been a vacation compared to my last job.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want to,” said Nickel. “Because I think there’s a small possibility you might not think I’m some creepo liar. And because . . . because I think you’re the same as me. There are terrible people out there, and more often than not they do awful things for years before they’re caught. Even worse, their victims fall through the cracks, too. I live my life because of them, and I see that in you, too. I think it’s been there all along, but what happened upstairs let me see it for what it is. This isn’t just some project for you, and I don’t think it’s ever been.”

  Betty did grab Nickel then, hooking her arms around his body, and then finding her mouth on his. The kiss was electric, a fire in her belly that made every other stolen kiss seem childlike. It was over in seconds, and then the embrace faltered and they were two teenagers again, staring at one another as if they weren’t entirely sure what had just happened or what they were going to do about it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Betty. “I know that’s not what you’re looking for, and—” The first kiss was fire but the second was better still. Nickel pulled her toward him by the hand, and in that broken house, with its bad death and bad living, they fell into each other’s arms. Betty felt the heat rising in her face, and could never recall having been so happy. It was the adrenaline from the floor above, the impossible admission from Nickel moments earlier, the strength in his arms. He was exactly the fractured person she longed for, and he didn’t need a guitar to find a song.

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Nickel when he pulled away. “Please don’t be sorry for that.”

  Looking down, Betty could see the dried blood on the ground, but what they were doing felt like the furthest thing from desecration.

  “All right,” said Betty, flashing Nickel a grin. “I’m not sorry at all.”

  But Nickel wasn’t looking at her. “Betty,” he said, nodding off the way he was looking, “I don’t want to spoil the moment, but what the hell is that?”

  Betty turned to look over her shoulder and then she followed Nickel’s gaze to the foyer. The floor there was covered in rubble from the collapsed wall. Bits of plaster and pieces of heart had been flung across the already filthy floor, and then Betty’s eyes fell on the same thing Nickel’s had. At the center of the rubble, sitting there as if it had been placed there for them by Mandy herself, was a spiral-bound Mead notebook. What looked like dental floss was wrapped around the leather cover, and strings of it trailed off into the filth.

  Betty and Nickel fell away from one another to walk to the notebook. Betty felt almost as if she were in a trance. She’d given up all hope of finding a diary, and she was so scared to pick it up and have it amount to nothing that she wasn’t sure she wanted anything to do with it. The fear of it being empty was simply too much to deal with, but she was only able to hold out for a moment. Her hands found the notebook, stripped it of the floss that had clearly been used to lower and retrieve it from its secret space in the wall, and then opened it greedily.

  “Let me see, too,” said Nickel, and with shaking hands Betty held the notebook open so Nickel could see and shine his flashlight on the pages.

  “She wrote this,” said Betty after a moment, and Nickel said, “Turn to the last page. That’s the important part.” Betty nodded, then flipped to the end. There were several blank pages at the back of the book, and then Betty found writing. She flipped back a few more pages, and then found the beginning of the last entry in Mandy Reasoner’s diary.

  I know who beat me up, because it happened again, but this time I saw his face. I thought it would be a good thing to know, but it’s not, it made everything worse. I didn’t think it was possible for anything worse to happen, but this makes all the drugs, the hooking, all the shit look like nothing by comparison. All I want to do is get high and forget any of this ever happened, but that’s not how it works.

  I can’t hook right now, not as ugly as I look, and even if I weren’t hurt I’m not sure I’d ever be able to again. He knows where to find me. I don’t know why he wants to fuck with me when all I want to do is be left alone, but that’s what he wants, and I know if I go back out there he’s going to be waiting for me. Stupid motherfucker. Asshole. Fucking rapist piece of shit.

  This is my punishment, my penance for all of the horrible things I’ve
done to get off. Why did I have to know him? Why can’t I just tell D. and then wait for this asshole with him and let D. kill him? Because I know he’d kill D. Bad as D. is, he’d kill him and like it. If I thought anything different, we’d already be doing it. D. would be stomping his face into grape jelly, but instead I’m sitting here with a busted-up face, feeling sorry for myself. I feel so low I even miss Jason, and I’d grown to hate him. At least he was someone else to talk to, someone who could sort of understand what was happening to me, but D. told him to leave and there’s no way Jason would disobey D.

  I don’t know what to do, but for the first time in a long time I’m serious about calling my sister. I need to just tell her I need help. I need to own up to so many things so I can start to get better, but I just can’t do it.

  There’s a place in this world for me, I know there is, I just need to accept what I am and get past it.

  The first step is going to be telling my sister everything. Claire needs to know about Jack. She needs to know about what happened five years ago, when he raped me. She needs to know that he’s been watching me, stalking me for whatever psycho-ass reason. She needs to know that he’s attacked me twice and I’m scared that if he sees me on the street again he’s going to kill me.

  I should never have put myself in that position that first time, but I was practically a kid and didn’t know the type of man he was. We were just flirting, and then the next thing I knew I was dizzy from the wine and we were alone. He raped me and made me feel like such a piece of shit, and nothing’s ever been the same since.

  Nothing is ever going to be the same, but it can still be better than it is now. I can call my sister and tell her the truth. If he’s been beating me and attacking me, I’m sure he’s been beating her, too. I can throw her a life preserver at the same time I’m reaching for one, and maybe then Jack can go away. He can leave Claire alone, leave me alone, and hopefully leave June alone. I’ve never even seen her, but I think about her growing up in that house with that poisonous man and I feel sick to my guts.