Tunnel Vision (22 page)

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 holding 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.

“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.”