Authors: Aric Davis
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Running a little behind, are we?” Ophelia asked drily as Betty walked in, and Betty could only nod.
“Yeah, sorry about that. I was talking to June about our project in the parking lot and then I realized I was late. I was going to call, but I’m not supposed to when I’m driving, and I figured you would have been busy painting anyways.”
“Well, I was busy working,” said Ophelia with a frown, “but if you think I wouldn’t notice that my child was late coming home from school, then you’re crazy. Just remember, you are still grounded, and being tardy isn’t helping that any.”
Betty found it impossible not to feel bad for her. Andrea had always been the disciplinarian; Ophy the one most likely to wipe away tears and offer a hug. It was Betty’s fault she was in this position, and Betty could tell they were enjoying the gentle dressing down in equal amounts.
“I know, I know,” said Betty. “Speaking of that, though, how much longer do you think I have?”
“Have you broken up with that boy?”
“Not yet. It’s harder than I thought.”
“If you still have feelings for him, then maybe you shouldn’t break up,” said Ophelia.
“It’s not like that,” said Betty.
Should I just tell her what he asked me? She’d understand, you know that.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was just another secret of childhood, one more strand of connective tissue broken, and the snap of the deceit sent a cold chill through her body.
“It’s not like what?” Ophelia asked. “If you don’t care for the boy, then why do you string him along?”
“I can hear Greece in your voice,” said Betty with a smirk, and Ophelia shook her head.
“You know that only happens when I’m mad or have too much to drink.”
“So should I go check the basement for empty bottles of wine?”
“I wish,” said Ophelia. “This painting is tearing me in two. But none of that answers my question: Why won’t you just end it with this loser?”
“He’s not a loser, Mom, he—”
“Anyone who asks a girl your age to compromise herself in such a way is a loser in my book. Do you know how many times Andrea has had to talk to girls your age and younger because they destroyed their lives by doing something like that? She had a patient last year that killed herself because she sent pictures of herself to a boy and he put them on the Internet. Even her best friends called her a slut, shaming her because of a mistake she made so young, and now she’s dead.”
“Ah, spring in Athens.”
“You see how upset this makes me?” Ophelia asked with a chuckle. “I get so mad that my voice forgets it’s been in the States for thirty years. You still don’t answer my question.”
“Fine,” acquiesced Betty, “I’ll try to explain.”
“Good, I can’t wait.”
“Jake’s not a loser,” said Betty, and Ophelia rolled her eyes. “I’d laugh if they got stuck like that. I’m serious, though. Jake can be stupid, and he’s a total jock, but he’s not a loser. He’s a good kid who sent me something as a joke—that part I’m sure of—and I responded in kind.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
“I know,” said Betty.
“You want this grounding to end, yes?”
“Yes, of course,” said Betty, “but I also don’t think you guys forcing me to break up with my boyfriend is a fair way to get out of being in trouble.”
“Hmmm,” said Ophelia, “that may be true. What if the grounding ended, with the provision that you slow things down with Jake? I don’t mean don’t speak to him at school, just don’t do things outside of school with him, and let the relationship cool off a little bit.”
“Wouldn’t that basically be the same thing as breaking up with him?”
“I’m sure it sounds that way,” said Ophelia, “but remember,
you
said you wanted to break off things with him. This would give you some freedom, and the chance to think about what you really want.”
“All right.”
“Not too hasty,” said Ophelia. “I need to talk to Andrea about this, and if you recall, she was the one that wanted your car keys and everything else over this.” Ophelia frowned. “I know there’s some part of this you’re not telling me. You’ve never been one to drag things out when you were bored of a relationship. Why is this time so different?”
“I don’t know, it just is,” said Betty. “Will you talk to her tonight?”
“I will,” said Ophelia, “but I want a favor out of you.” Betty’s eyebrows rose, as if to say,
Ask away
. “If she says no, you be respectful.”
TWENTY-NINE
Betty sat alone in her bedroom. Ophelia had given her a perfect opportunity to fill her in on what was going on with Jake, but Betty had blown it. And she was still messing things up by not racing downstairs and just blurting it all out. She wasn’t going to do it, though. It was sickening to think about her mothers discussing the matter, and Betty hated that they were deciding her fate without her even telling them the whole truth about the new developments with Jake.
Sick of even thinking about Jake Norton’s stupid proposal, much less forcing herself to actually deal with the reality of the situation, Betty checked her e-mail. She was glad she did, as among the mostly bullshit contents of her inbox were three very interesting pieces of mail. She clicked on the first of them, a message sent to her mother from Detective Van Endel, and then forwarded to her.
Betty frowned—her mother had obviously removed part of it before sending it—and then decided it was probably just something about work. The e-mail said:
In any case, here’s the address for you. 4527 Lincoln Ave. I already told Betty not to go inside that house, but when you give her this make it clear that I was serious about that. The area isn’t the best, but if they go during the day they should be fine, as long as all they’re doing is taking pictures from the car. There have always been transients living there, and there’s no good reason to think there aren’t any staying there now. Not to mention the place is probably falling apart.
Betty closed the mail with a grin. The get wasn’t quite as exciting as talking to Duke would be if they pulled that off, but it was something more than just research on the Internet.
It would be the best if we could go inside that house
,
thought Betty, but she knew Van Endel was right. The idea of walking into the house where Mandy was killed was freaky enough. Happening upon a bunch of drunk-or-worse homeless people in an abandoned building did not sound like the best situation for two high school girls to be getting involved with.
Betty clicked on the second e-mail, this one from the Michigan Department of Corrections. It was all business, explaining that both of them would be permitted to visit with Duke Barnes. There was a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo below the important bits, but Betty ignored it. They would already be breaking at least one law by visiting Duke with fake IDs, and she didn’t want to know if they were going to be breaking any others that might be buried in the fine print.
Finally, Betty double-clicked on the one she’d saved for last, a message from Nickel. It was short and to the point, just like everything with the mysterious ginger boy:
Problem solved. Meet me tomorrow with your friend, same time and place, and we can go to my house. My dad has to work so we’ll have a few minutes to take care of everything without having to explain to him what we’re doing.
N
Betty closed that last mail for a second, then rethought things and deleted it. Coming home late twice from school in the middle of a grounding would be bad enough. Being late because she was in a boy’s house without a parent could easily threaten the freedom she planned to enjoy over the summer.
After hopping off the mail tab Betty began a bored perusal of the Internet, before finding herself back at the Free Duke page. She looked at it for what felt like only a few minutes, but when Ophelia called her down to dinner, she’d been at it for over two hours, most of it looking at pictures of Duke and Mandy and wondering about men in green jackets, disappearing roommates, and a missing diary.
Blinking twice at the shock of dinnertime, Betty snapped the computer shut and headed downstairs.
THIRTY
It’s been a long time since anyone else has been in the house, years, but in just a few hours Betty and her friend will be here. It makes no sense, but for some reason I find the idea of letting a couple teenage girls into my house to be a lot scarier than brokering a several-thousand-dollar drug deal. That’s stupid, I know, but I can’t help it.
I
should
be damned scared about the drug deal. Paul is going to be calling me in a few days, and I’m going to need to get him about fifteen pounds of weed and haven’t even figured out how I’m going to transport it. My old cabbie, Lou, is up for just about anything, but a job with weight like this is out of the question.
That’s the problem I should be focused on—how to haul pot, make a sale, and then get out alive and with the money—but instead I’m spending my afternoon picking up the house, mowing the yard, and even sweeping and mopping the floors. All the while, there’s a rotten feeling in my gut telling me that Betty and June aren’t even going to show, and that all this stress and work is nothing but a waste of time. Yeah, I admit the house needed the work, but it didn’t need to happen today.
Thinking about Betty and June coming to visit makes me think of the last time I had a visitor, when Arrow came over. The similarities are striking. I was involved in a job because of a girl, but got roped into something else because of another girl. While it’s true I haven’t fallen for Betty the way I did for Arrow, I’m a lot older now, and Arrow is so far in the rearview mirror she almost seems make-believe. Not that I’m likely to ever forget what made her unique, or what she did for me. She hired me to find her missing sister, Shelby, and I did it, but without Arrow both Shelby and I would be dead. Arrow was pulling the strings from behind the curtain the entire time, and then,
poof!
she was gone.
Arrow would be eighteen now. I’m sure she has a boyfriend and college plans, and everything in her life is going well, but I like to imagine she thinks of me sometimes the way I think of her. She and I were a menace together, and with her help I hurt some very bad people. That job was the one that gave me the confidence to take on some things I should have known were too ambitious, and if Arrow had been there to help me, maybe I could have saved myself a lot of pain.
Arrow was in my heart, though. She was with me inside when I sent those bastards up a roller coaster at 120 miles an hour without the wheels that keep it on the track, and I felt her behind my eyes when I was killing that piece of shit Spider at that damn camp. Spider was one of the worst men I’ve ever met, and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve known some choice individuals. None of them enjoyed torturing kids any more than Spider did. Watching him fall and then bleed out in the snow after I led a rebellion was one of the vilest things I’ve ever seen, but it was also beautiful. Of course, the aftereffects of that scene weren’t beautiful at all. Arrow could have talked me down from that. I was at my best with her, the purest version of what Dad wanted me to be, but since she left, the bad guys have gotten worse, and so have I.
The house is clean enough, I suppose, but I don’t really have a good measuring stick to know if that’s even true. I don’t own a TV, and the only furniture is a ratty couch, my bed, a kitchen table and chairs, and the desk in my office. Plus, the house smells like a skunk from the dope in the basement. At least there is something I can do about that problem; I installed a pair of exhaust fans in the basement years ago, and they let out into an herb garden in the backyard. I hit the switches, then open the windows on the front of the house, a harder proposition than it should be, because I’ve never opened the damn things. When that’s done I want to go to my computer, but I don’t. Instead, I go to the couch, sit, and stare into the apartment.
I think it’s probably in good enough shape. Now I’m not sure I am, though. Betty and June aren’t coming over for a make-out session or anything, I get that, but I’m still nervous about letting someone in. This is my world, these are my secrets, and if I had just kept my big mouth shut I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Of course, not keeping my big mouth shut is how I met Arrow.
I check my pager again to see if I’ve missed anything, but I haven’t. Checking for word from Paul has become a nervous twitch. I could check a thousand times in a day and still wake up every few hours to give it another look. I don’t think you realize just how desperate you can become until your back really is against the wall, when you really need to put up or shut up. If this deal doesn’t work, I’m going to be completely broke, but I’m spending my time printing fakes for a couple of teenagers.
Par for the course, I guess. June’s mother is paying me to keep her safe, but instead of honoring my contract with her, I’m making her daughter a fake so she can visit a prison. Maybe I do have a thing for Betty, because otherwise this just doesn’t add up.
THIRTY-ONE
“So who is this mystery boy?” June asked, and then both of them set to giggling. “Also, have you been to his house before? This home-alone stuff is pretty earth-shattering.”
“Cram it,” said Betty. “I told you I barely know the kid, but he’s going to help us anyway. I think we should consider ourselves lucky.” Betty gave June a stern look but failed in the attempt and both of them were laughing again, despite the glaring librarian and sign begging them to be quiet.
“Hey, do you think we should get Mystery Boy to make them so we’re twenty-one?”
“I seriously wonder about you sometimes,” said Betty. “First of all, the guy’s name is Nickel. It’s weird, but it’s not like it’s that hard to remember. Secondly, we’re getting IDs that say that we’re eighteen or nineteen. It won’t do us any good to be able to maybe buy beer at shitty liquor stores if we get arrested for giving fakes to a prison guard whose only job is looking at licenses and cataloguing them.”
“I guess so,” said June, pouting. “So we get our fake IDs from Nickel, but then what?”
“I e-mail the prison with our visitor request forms to let Duke know what day we want to come,” said Betty. “All he has to do is approve us, and then we’re in, assuming our IDs work. Probably better not to think too much about that part.”
“What else?” June asked, and Betty considered that.
“We could go check out the house, but I promised that cop we wouldn’t go inside no matter what,” said Betty. “I guess I’m sort of banking on this ID thing working out. If it doesn’t we can go take some pictures of the house and then start writing the paper, I suppose. It’s not like there’s going to be a whole lot more to discover if Duke doesn’t give us some sort of a lead.”
“If he’ll even talk to us,” said June, sourly. “I still have mixed feelings about meeting the guy.”
“Totally understandable,” said Betty. “If you decide not to go I completely get it, but I’m going—at least, if Nickel comes through, I am. Mr. Evans made it clear that there was going to be a lot riding on this, and I don’t think he was exaggerating.”
“I don’t think he was, either, but you can’t think that he expects us to solve an ancient crime the cops still believe they figured out a decade and a half ago, right?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Betty. “Not until I talk to Duke, and maybe I still won’t know after that.”
“Seriously, Betty, we don’t need to do all of this just to get a passing grade,” said June. “Even a paper written with what we’ve already done would be good enough, I bet, especially if we got those pictures.”
“Like I said, if you want to stay home, that’s fine, but I’m going to see Duke if I can swing it at all. We might not need to do it just for a grade, but I need to take this as far as I can. Not just because she’s your aunt, and not because of some stupid concert. We need to go because we might be the only people left who actually care about finding out who killed Mandy.”
“That concert is like the least stupid concert ever,” said June. “Seriously.”
“OK, fine. It’s a great concert, but that’s not my point. All of the adults knew about this, every single one of them, but somehow we never knew until we were at an age where we could have a chance to add our names to the story.”
“So it’s fate, then.”
Betty just shrugged, then narrowed her eyes at her friend. June didn’t seem to be trying to be funny, though. She just looked thoughtful, like she was trying on for size the idea that they could be fated to find justice for her dead aunt.
“Betty,” June said after a minute, “you’re already in trouble. Are you really sure you want to risk this?”
“Like I said, it’s worth it to me. If you don’t want to do it, or just can’t bring yourself to, well, I understand. But there’s no way I’m not going to go talk to Duke if I get half the chance.”