Tunnel Vision

62

“Volker and Gretch killed my brother. And the woman was Gretch’s cousin—one of their witnesses who claimed they saw nothing.” Zack handed Sarah the obituaries he had printed up.

“What?”

It was sometime after two in the morning, and he had called her to come over, terrified at his discovery.

“And these were the same people you saw in your NDEs?” she said as she read them.

“Yes.” Photographs were included with the obit. “I recognize them.”

“Maybe it’s just bizarre coincidences.”

“What, that my brother’s killers got murdered and I was there each time? Sarah, I saw them. I felt their deaths. I was there. Jesus, I’m either losing my mind or I killed them.” He had been drinking a glass of warm milk and had to hold the glass with two hands, he was shaking so badly.

Sarah looked at the obits. “I don’t believe either.”

“But that tetrodotoxin is lousy with side effects,” he said. “What if I blacked out and went after them? Killed them and don’t remember anything?”

While she read the printouts, he moved to the sink to steady himself, looking into his glass of milk and thinking that maybe he had lost his mind—that maybe the combination of head trauma, the coma, and the zombie anesthesia created some weird brain damage that had turned him into an insane stalker bent on vengeance. He had had nightmares throughout his life like anybody else. But these had been like no others—intense, brutally vivid, and through the eyes of someone else—of that he was almost sure.

Sarah’s voice jarred him back into the moment. “But this says Volker died on June tenth. That’s when we were at Grafton’s. A neighbor says he always worked out after supper.”

“Yeah, and we left around nine. I could have gone over there after we split and killed him … and blocked it from my memory.”

“But he lived in Waltham. Even if you took the T, it would take over an hour,” she said. “Do you even know where he lived?”

“Yes.” Volker moved from Allston to Waltham after the court decision. Zack’s mother hadn’t wanted to know where, but Zack had looked him up. And even before he’d gotten his driver’s license, he’d fantasized about driving to Volker’s apartment and firebombing it while he slept. Later he would sometimes drive over and follow Volker to work or the supermarket or to friends’ places. “I had my bike, and it’s only seven miles down the river.”

“Do you remember doing that?”

“No.”

“Not exactly something you’d forget,” she said. “Remember pedaling home?”

“No. Just walking you back to your place.”

Sarah picked up another obit. “This says Gretch died in Vernon, Connecticut, on Saturday the twenty-fifth, eight days ago. Do you remember where you were?”

“The library.”

“Can you verify that?”

“I checked out a book.” From his desk he pulled out a collection of essays on Mary Shelley. The slip inside gave the date and time—same date as Gretch’s death.

“What time?”

“Four eighteen.”

“There you are. A motorist found him around one in the morning a hundred miles from here. There’s no way you could have biked down there.”

“Except I had Damian’s car that weekend.”

Her face stiffened. “Do you remember going down there?”

“No.”

“So how can you remember borrowing his car?”

He removed his wallet and pulled out a slip of paper. “Receipt from the Gulf station on Huntington. I put in forty-three dollars’ worth of gas at five that afternoon.” No MassPike receipt, but the entrance was a mile east down the avenue.

“And you don’t remember where you went?”

“No.” Fear shuddered through him as if there were a core of ice in his chest.

They were silent a long moment as Sarah stared at him, probably afraid for her own safety, he thought. Then she said, “But that means you’d have to have looked him up, where he lived, worked, what he was doing that night. That’s a lot of unknowns.”

He nodded.

“Remember doing any of that?”

“No,” he said. “But sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and be at my computer and not remember getting there.”

“Sleepwalking. Is that something you’ve done?”

“Not until recently.” He downed the rest of the milk, which had done nothing to calm him down. “He worked at the local Sears. Maybe I called and got stuff from a coworker.” Even as he said that, nothing inside clicked.

Sarah said nothing. She looked scared.

He picked up the obit notice on Celia Gretch, the jogger. She was run down on a rural back road in Reading, fifteen miles north of Boston, on the afternoon of June 25—the same day her Volker was found dead in his garage.

“Wouldn’t Damian have mentioned damage to his car?”

“Not if she was just knocked down.”

“But she died by getting hit.”

“She died by being crushed under the wheels.”

Her eyes were dilated with fear. “So what does this all mean?”

“It means I don’t have an alibi for three murders I saw myself commit.”

Sarah backed up to the kitchen sink, her arms folded protectively across her chest. “You’re scaring me, Zack.”

“I’m scaring me.”