Seconds Away

CHAPTER 36

I could smell the charred remains of the Bat Lady’s house.

It was eight P.M.-not too late. Night had fallen. I had a flashlight, but for now, standing on the sidewalk, the streetlight gave me enough illumination. A few wooden beams from the house remained upright, stretching up into the darkness like fingers on a giant hand.

“Hey.”

I turned. It was Ema. “Hey. How did you get past Niles?”

“Are you kidding? He’s so happy I have a friend, he practically shoved me out the door.”

I smiled. I thought about how wonderful the hug we shared earlier had been and tried to sort through my feelings about it. Ema was my friend. My very best friend. That was where that overwhelming sense of warmth came from, right?

We slowly approached the house. I kept my flashlight off because I didn’t want the neighbors to see. We stopped at the crime-scene tape. Ema turned to me, shrugged, and ducked under it. I followed her up those front porch steps and inside the house. There was debris all over the floor.

“This was the living room,” I said to her.

The light was getting pretty dim now. I still didn’t want to use the flashlight, but I figured that maybe the light of my mobile phone would do the trick. Ema did the same.

“What’s this?” she asked.

The frame was shattered, but I recognized it right away-the faded color photograph of the five hippies.

“Is that…?” Ema pointed to the attractive woman in the tight T-shirt in the middle. Across her chest was the Abeona butterfly.

“Yep,” I said. “I think it’s Bat Lady.”

“Wow. She was kind of hot.”

“Subject change,” I said, and Ema smiled. I tried to pick up the frame from the sides, but it pretty much fell apart. I slid the picture out and slipped it into my pocket. I figured that it might come in handy at some point.

The old record player had been damaged. There was no vinyl on the turntable, but I did manage to find the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Who albums. I doubted that they were in working condition anymore. I looked for the album that Bat Lady seemed to always play-Aspect of Juno by HorsePower-but it had either been burned completely or…

Or what?

“Should we head to the garage?” Ema asked.

I shook my head. That had been the original plan. We would go to the garage, try to break in, see if we could find the tunnel. But the tunnel I had gone through had led from the garage to the basement below us, to a door that no longer existed between the kitchen and this living room. With the garage locked, wouldn’t it be simpler and probably more productive to simply go in reverse-to start in the living room, go down to the basement, see where it led?

Okay, the basement door was gone. So was most of the kitchen. I tried to picture the house’s layout as it had been before the fire. I moved closer to where I thought the basement door would be. The remnants of the second floor and roof had collapsed over it. I started to pull up the plywood, trying to dig through the rubble. Ema joined me.

We worked in silence, removing debris, carefully moving it to the side. When I stopped and thought about it, we were, in fact, tainting a crime scene. I was already in plenty of trouble, but what about Ema?

“We should stop,” I said.

“Huh?”

“We’re tainting a crime scene.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Ema kept on digging.

“Seriously,” I said, “this was a mistake.”

“You didn’t tell me what happened with Detective Waters.”

Ema was trying to distract me, but that was okay. “He got pretty annoyed with me.”

“Annoyed how?”

“Annoyed like he wants me to stay away from it all.”

“Annoyed like we got it right about Rachel’s father?” Ema asked.

“Yes.”

“Whoa.”

“Remember I told you about those two hoodlums talking to Mr. Caldwell right after I left?”

“What about them?”

“Detective Waters had a picture of the guy with the scar. He said he was dangerous.”

“So they have to be drug dealers.”

“Or at least bad guys.”

“And you saw Rachel’s dad being all friendly with them.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So then we still believe that Rachel found something incriminating about her dad-some kind of package that backed what her mom had said about him?”

“Yes,” I said, back on the floor, moving debris. I tried to make sense of it. What had Rachel done with the package? Had her father gone ballistic when he found it missing?

Had Scarface?

Ema stopped digging. “Mickey?”

I shook away the thoughts and looked toward her voice. The debris was gone now. I could see steps leading down into the basement. I bent low, took out my flashlight, shined it down into the hole.

Nothing much to see.

“I’m going down,” I said, “alone.”

“It’s cute when you get all macho bossy on me,” Ema said, “but no. I’m going too.”

“The floor up here may be weak. It could collapse.”

Ema looked as though someone-me, I guess-had punched her in the stomach. “You think I’m going to break the floor?”

“What? No. Listen, I need you to be my lookout.”

She wasn’t appeased. “Excuse me?”

“Someone might come. Be my lookout.” I grabbed her shoulders and made her look up at me. “Please. Just this once. For me?”

“Just this once what?”

“Don’t be a pain in the butt. I don’t want you to get hurt. That’s all.”

The tears in her eyes broke my heart, but she nodded through them. “All right, go. I’ll be your”-she wiped her eyes and wiggled her fingers at me-“lookout.”

I didn’t wait for her to change her mind. I quickly started down the steps into the black hole. Now that I was pretty much out of view, I turned on the flashlight. I descended slowly.

“What do you see?” Ema called down in a whisper.

“Give me a second.”

The basement was, as you might expect, dingy and dusty and, well, old. There were rusted pipes and broken glass and old cardboard boxes filled with who knew what. There were spiderwebs in the corner and mud on the floor. The mud could have been wet soot from the fire, but I suspected the origin was somewhat older. Okay, the garage would be behind me and to the left, ergo, that was probably where the door to that tunnel would be.

Found it.

“Mickey?”

“I found the door to the tunnel.”

“Wait for me.”

“No. Hold up.”

The door was made of some kind of reinforced steel. I remembered that from my previous visit with Shaved Head. There were other doors and corridors too, but he wouldn’t let me go down them. I grabbed the door handle. Locked. I grabbed it again and shook.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“So now what?” Ema asked. “Oh, enough. I’m coming down too.”

Ema started down the stairs. I swung my flashlight in her direction-and that was when I saw it. I stopped, retraced the beam back to the spot on the floor, and stared. Ema came up behind me.

“What is it?”

I said nothing.

“Wait,” Ema said. “Is that a picture of Ashley?”

I nodded. Ashley. The girl we-Rachel, Spoon, Ema, and I-had risked our lives to rescue.

“That’s the portrait you saw upstairs?” Ema asked.

I nodded numbly.

“So somehow her picture survived the fire.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no? You said you saw it upstairs with, like, thousands of others, right?”

“Right.”

“So now it’s down here-somehow it survived the fire,” Ema said.

“No.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“There were thousands of pictures up there. Yet only one managed to float down to the basement, make it all the way through the debris, and end up on the floor right in front of the door to the tunnel?”

Now Ema looked skeptical.

“Forget the odds of any photograph making that voyage,” I said. “What are the odds that the one that does happens to be the girl we rescued?”

Ema swallowed and said, “You have a better explanation?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What?”

I felt a chill even as I thought it. “Someone left it for us.”

“Why would someone do that?”

I picked up the photograph of Ashley. I turned it over. On the back, there was a butterfly with two animal eyes on the wings. The Abeona butterfly. It looked like the other butterflies I had seen-and yet the coloring was just slightly different.

The eyes were purple. Like the one on Rachel’s hospital door.

It hit me like a surprise wave on the beach. “Oh my God,” I said.

“What?”

“I think I know where Rachel hid the package.”