Chapter 25 A World That Won’t Stand Still #2
By the time she gets to the bungalows, early evening seeps in like a bruise, gray and purple.
Lights turn on in living rooms, and shapes move through kitchen windows.
Families readying for dinner. Frankie parks beneath a carob tree, and a diamond of faint sun spreads on the hood of her car.
Again, her mind returns to her parents—the slim glimpse she’s held on to of them—and she wonders if there’s even a point in looking for them.
What could possibly excuse their actions?
What would it take to believe that their giving her up was for any reason beyond her own likability? Her own lovability?
Bungalow number one is dark, and the absence of light feels poignant, a reminder of an end. Inside, Frankie remembers the other glass for champagne. Was Jack right? Was June waiting for someone? Did the person not show up? Frankie stops walking in the hall, a chill on her shoulder.
Then, a noise outside the window. Heart racing, Frankie approaches the glass from the side so no one can see her right as a squirrel’s tail lifts up only to shoot back down into the hedge below the window. She wants to laugh and cry. Her nerves are shot.
Standing in the middle of the main room, Frankie recreates the scene in her mind.
June’s bag was on the desk, she remembers.
Her gun missing. The report came back indicating that she was killed by the same caliber bullet that her gun shot, and given that it’s missing, it’s assumed to be the murder weapon.
Then Frankie thinks of Tank. Why would Tank want the woman he was obsessed with dead?
Did someone tell Tank that June didn’t love him, and did that send him over the edge?
Was the fact of the child she was carrying too much for him, evidence that she’d moved on and no longer loved him?
Betrayal in a physical, undeniable form. Reason enough to make him snap.
Looking around the room, Frankie lets it play out. Tank arrives, angry. June, feeling threatened, pulls the gun for self-defense—but he’s big and strong, and in a step or two, he’s there, yanking the gun away from her. A flash. White heat. And noise.
Actual noise.
There is actual noise. Not just in her mind but around her—loud and terrifying—and she wants to run from this noise, but she can’t because it’s fast and growing, and she bursts into the kitchen just as the shaking begins.
Earthquake. The word slips into her mind, useless.
She tries to get to the door, but her knees are buckling over and over, and with her arms out, she stumbles toward the wall.
The sound should be impossible: the fury of the earth, the separation and pulverizing grind of land.
The breaking of rocks and glass and streets and cities.
Tectonic plates, angry and ancient and lurching.
All of it comes together in a single sound that is like nothing she’s ever known.
And then she hears glass shattering nearby and sees the cupboards beside her swinging open and the ceramic plates rattling with such intensity that they appear blurred.
Ten seconds. That’s the time frame that people will cite later, one that doesn’t correspond to any second she’s ever experienced. These are new seconds. Long and vicious.
Finally it stops, and there is nothing but silence. A pure, horrifying silence. No ticking. No humming. No cars. Just complete, shocked quiet.
Frankie stumbles outside, looking for someone, anyone.
She needs to know the world still exists.
Jack—that’s who she wants, and thinking of him fills her with an anxious pain, because she doesn’t know where he was when the quake hit, and she doesn’t know if he’s all right, and what if it was worse where he is?
What if he was driving? Or is trapped? She knows he was released today, but when?
Was it long enough ago that he was able to get home by the time the quake struck?
The fountain by June’s back door is split, one half dropped on the brick path, algae exposed and the ground wet. A glance up—roof shingles are missing like teeth knocked loose. Behind her, bungalow two has a broken window. She turns. Bungalow one’s chimney is gone.
Desperate to see other people, she starts to walk, heading toward the front, toward Glenhollow Street, but there are bricks on the path from the chimney.
A look up reveals more on the roof, precarious and on the edge.
One more bout of shaking could send them right onto her, so she turns, going back toward bungalow two and Arlington Way, but something catches her eye off to the right.
Something else is wrong. An absence where usually there is not.
She blinks in the falling dark and tries to focus on the lush yard between the bungalows.
At the far edge of the property is a hill.
It’s there that something is different. The stone retaining wall against the hill is broken, one spot gaping black.
With a glance over her shoulder, she approaches, wary.
Tall weeds scrape at her legs. Thistles stick to her pants.
Closer, she sees that there is stone, but in one spot, the stone has fallen away.
But no, what’s fallen was fake stone that covered a door, painted to look just like the rest of the wall.
Now the thin door hangs by a hinge, cracked and revealing a dark entrance to what looks like a cellar.
Another, smaller shaking. A flock of birds startles into the sky.
As fast as she can, she navigates the pile of bricks on the path and hurries to her car, swiping a small branch off the hood before getting the flashlight she always keeps inside.
Up the block, a woman stands in the middle of the street, arms out as if to maintain balance.
Frankie watches her a moment longer to make sure she’s okay until a man approaches the woman and draws her to him.
Then Frankie rushes back to where she found the hidden entrance.
Aiming the light into the dark, she sees old stone steps that lead down and under the hill. This isn’t a cellar at all, she sees. It’s a tunnel, with wood beams for support and dusty bottles near the entrance that spell out the purpose: This is one of the old bootlegging tunnels.
And then she understands. Someone could’ve exited June’s back door and started walking toward bungalow two and Arlington Way, just as Darlene reported, but then veered off the path and come here.
And doing that, leaving the brick path before reaching the border of Darlene’s property, means her dog wouldn’t have had a fit.
This tunnel is how someone could kill June and disappear.
She needs to see where it leads. If it leads to a road, that could be where the killer either left his car or escaped to.
But the tunnel is pure dark. Unknown and terrifying.
Are the walls sturdy? Or would one more shake be too much?
No one would know where to look for her. She’d be buried in the earth.
With a deep breath, she steadies the light, takes a few steps inside, and is hit with cold, dank air.
All she can see is what the flashlight’s beam illuminates.
Rough-hewn stone. Chiseled rock. A turn, and there are spiderwebs and an old wooden crate.
Dark-green wine bottles on their sides, uncorked.
She keeps walking, praying to make it to the other side without another bout of shaking.
When she finally gets to the end, there’s a closed wooden door without a handle.
Panic is closing in. There has to be a way out.
There has to be. Frantically, she pats down the door, feeling for any way to get leverage enough to pull.
But there’s nothing. Suddenly, the stories Jack told of the trenches in the war return to her.
Belowground mazes that were hell itself: rats and disease and decomposing bodies, ceilings and walls that caved in, trapping people in a suffocating soup of horror.
Her heart rate soars, and her breaths come up shorter.
Frantic, she hurls herself at the door—once, twice, the third time, the flashlight blinks off, and there is a moment of pure dark before a blast of evening light.
She wants to laugh and cry—the door just needed a hard push.
After such dark, even the fading light hurts her eyes. Then she thinks of Jack. If she experienced what she did from only his secondhand memories, what might he be going through?
Having passed through the hill, she’s now at the base of another retaining wall, this one made of old railroad ties that disguise the door from the outside.
To the right, there are only trees. But to the left, there’s a house, all the windows dark, save for one on the first floor with a bright lantern on a table.
At the side of the house, a man closes a gate.
When he sees her, he approaches, concerned. “You all right there?”
“I’m fine. Just didn’t know where this ended up.”
“You’re on Washburn.”
She looks around, trying to get her bearings. “Right.”
“All good with that earthquake?”
“Good as can be.”
“Are you with that man? I don’t see his car.”
Now she turns to him. He’s wearing brown suspenders and a light-blue button-down shirt, his brown tweed hat on at an angle. Even as she asks the question, she knows the answer. “What car?”
“Don’t know what you call it, but it’s orange and black. Fancy. He’s the only one I ever see use that tunnel. Claims the parking on this street is better. My wife and I won’t go near that thing.”
Nico’s Bugatti. If you value your paint job, she hears Nico say, don’t park on Glenhollow. But if you value your life and time, don’t even think about Arlington Way, because that was made for horses. She didn’t realize there was a third option.
“I’m with him, but he’s not here now.” And then, a feeling. “When did you last see him?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know. Been a while.”
The premiere was nine days ago. Nico knowing about this tunnel and using it to help keep his prized car safe is one thing, but add in Darlene’s assertion that she called him the night of the murder and his claim that his phone never rang, and it feels like there’s something at her back, something she doesn’t want to turn around to see.
“It’s been a while, like, months?” She hears the hope in her voice.
“Maybe. I don’t spend all my time looking out the window.” He laughs, then turns serious. “Why, he do something?”
“No,” she says, too firmly. In her mind, she hears Nico’s excuses about Darlene’s call. “We just couldn’t remember when he was last this way.” In one last effort, she adds, leadingly, “He thought it might’ve been a couple weeks ago. Or a week and a half.”
The man shrugs. “Can’t help you. But listen, I’ve got a nervous wife I gotta get back to. Maybe you should take the streets, though. That tunnel looks anything but safe, and seems this world is ready to be done with us.”
Frankie thanks him and watches him disappear inside the house.
She glances back at the tunnel. Though he’s right, and she has no business going through a possibly unstable tunnel right now, she also has no idea how to get back to her car if she takes the streets.
While she’s sure she could find her way, the tunnel is the straight shot.
Taking a deep breath, she pushes the door open, turns on her light, and almost walks smack into a spiderweb she somehow managed to avoid before.
She studies the strands, trying to see where they go so she doesn’t walk into them.
Carefully, she ducks, training the beam of light on the path before her, afraid to shine it anywhere else for fear of what might lurk in the dark.
Suddenly she stops walking. Dust sifts through the light.
Looping in others helps sell a story.
Nico told Frankie he asked Angela if the phone rang. He said there were too many people who saw him late at the party for him to have posed as Jack’s alibi. Was that on purpose, so Frankie would hear the mention of others and not question the story?
She makes herself keep going, glass crunching under her shoes. Imagine loving someone so much that you can’t let anyone else have them. You’d rather they be dead than with someone else. Her roommate’s words about Jack and June’s movie.
Nico loved June. But was he in love with June?
Tank was obsessed with June, but Nico was the one who used this tunnel. Unless he told Tank about it as well. But why? Was Nico a part of Tank killing June? It makes no sense.
And then, for one second, an idea flashes: Nico paid Tank to kill June, to bump the studio’s ticket sales.
It’s so ridiculous, so far-fetched, that Frankie stops walking and actually laughs in the tunnel.
The rock walls immediately swallow the sound, the world stifling.
Nico wouldn’t hurt June, ever. And besides, she also knows he would turn on Tank in a heartbeat to save Jack.
Callous and vile, but that’s the truth. He would never lose two stars.
No, the simple explanation is that what Tank regretted was his trouble with the law, because that’s what led to him losing June. And at the studio’s urging, he’s keeping quiet about what they once shared.
Almost toward the end of the tunnel, the temperature seems to dip.
There’s a chill like a breeze, though, of course, there can’t be one, not inside like this.
Frankie rubs her arms as she keeps walking, and is mere feet from the closed exit door when there is that noise again—the rumble and shake of anything and everything.
Panic. She scrambles, arms out, the flashlight’s beam jumping and faltering, and for a second she is lost in a shuddering black tunnel that could be collapsing.
Her hand scrapes the wall. Her breath comes up short.
When the shaking stops, she stumbles to the door and pushes it open. Light is a smack of relief.
Outside, she stands in the weeds, trying to catch her breath, worn out from worrying that the person she most trusted might have lied, and exhausted from trying to make sense of a world that won’t stand still.