13 1/2

Andrea Yates. Drowns five kids. I can’t condemn the woman. I can’t even get up a good steam of outrage. How can anybody blame her? She’s young, alone, depressed; her husband is off at his job but micromanages her life. She can’t send the kids to school. There’s no money for help. She’s supposed to be teaching them lessons. The whole religion thing is coming down on her.

Then a voice tells her there’s a way out.

You’ve got to hand it to Andrea. She fought the voice. Tried to get help. Told her husband she had thoughts of killing her kids. That must have taken courage. Jesus, is there any worse thing that a woman can admit? Nobody helped her, or not enough, and she landed back with that killing pressure.

And the voice, telling her there’s a way out.

Poor woman must have been so desperate by that point, I doubt she could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Her reality was insane, so insanity looked logical.

The voice gets pushier. The kids get wilder. She thinks she’s a lousy mother, and anything’s got to be better for the kids than a lousy mother.

Then, one day, the voice wins. She drowns them because there is no other choice left.

I admire Andrea Yates. Not for the killings, but for the heroism and strength she showed in fighting insanity in an attempt to save them. Had anyone stepped in and helped her with this battle the kids would have survived. And so would Ms. Yates’s mind.

22

Married. Standing on the cathedral steps at twilight, watching the lights come on around the square, Polly resisted the urge to look at the rings on her left hand. A breeze filtered through the cooling bodies of the tourists ruffling her hair. Letting the magic take her as she always did when she came for a reading, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The French Quarter smelled like a traveling carnival: cotton candy with a whiff of naughty sex, stale beer, and urine dressed up with French perfume, and running through it like a current of unstoppable life, a mother on a rampage, a teenaged girl on a tear, the smell of the river.

On such a fine evening the tarot card readers were out in force, lined up umbrella to umbrella in a postpsychedelic mushroom patch, facing off against the gleaming white stone of St. Louis, the forces of the old magic in tawdry defiance of the Christian interloper. While debating which reader to patronize, Polly wondered what the cards would say. For years they’d hinted at a mystery man waiting in her future to sweep her off her feet. There’d been men and there’d been mystery but only with Marshall had she been swept away. Surely the Lovers would be in her reading, and the World, and the Moon. Polly smiled. Love had made her such a fool.

Two girls-children in Polly’s eyes but of the age she’d been the first time she’d come to Jackson Square-rose from a table tucked between the benches opposite the cathedral doors. They were tricked out in the unfortunate fashion that decreed female children dress as prostitutes in a world full of predators.

The girls looked around like actors searching for an audience, then, catching her eye, the bolder of the two-at least that was what Polly surmised from the acreage of skin exposed-called, “If you’re going to get a reading, you should go to the Woman in Red.”

“The fat-fat one,” the second girl said rudely, but at least quietly.

“The Woman in Red,” the first girl repeated insistently, “is truly awe-some.” Stretching out an arm displaying half a dozen bracelets, she pointed to the table they had just vacated. There a voluminous woman-the very air around her swelling and rippling along with her layers of scarves-beckoned. Palms up, her screaming scarlet nails waggled as if she tickled a trout from midair.

“The Woman in Red it shall be,” Polly said and smiled as ghosts of her past walked away giggling. She’d noticed the reader on previous pilgrimages to the square in search of her future. It was hard not to. Shades of shrieking sunset, roses, and hearts of fire, cherries, apples, blood, and wine were thrown together. If one shade of red was loud, this woman’s ensemble was cacophonous.

Before time and sunlight had taken its toll, her khaki-colored setup had evidently been as red as the rest of her. As she shifted her considerable weight, her chair’s wooden frame moved and flashed thin ribbons of the canvas’s original color, that of freshly butchered meat. Polly descended the cathedral steps and the fortune-teller leaned forward, reaching out with a beggar’s aspect-or that of a drowning woman bent on pulling her rescuer down. “For zee lady, zee reading eez free,” she said in a voice both ruined and childlike, the worn-out voice tape of a Chatty Cathy doll with a fake French accent.

Hucksters and harlots never honestly meant anything was free. Having been a little of both in her time, Polly knew “free” just opened the bargaining. She settled into a rickety captain’s chair.

Crimson fluttered, cheap jewelry jangled, and the woman shuffled the oversized cards with the ease of long practice. Grubby things, told through her fingers many times, the corners were dog-eared and the edges worn soft. Polly cut the deck. With a theatrical flourish, the reader began dealing.

Tarot cards depicted hanged men, hearts pierced by swords, priestesses, forts, golden goblets, astrological signs, wands, Jungian archetypes, numbers, and a thousand other symbols cobbled together in a mishmash of the world’s myths and religions, a dim sum of the spiritual, psychic, and psychological worlds.

Candle flames igniting the colors, the cards kaleidoscoped down with hypnotic speed. Fabric, paper, dye, paint, and uncertain light confused the eye. The familiar pattern of staff and cross seemed to rise up from the designs on the tablecloth.

“The Celtic Cross,” the reader said. Her voice was no longer accented. France had been replaced by the echo of someplace cold, the northern Midwest or upstate New York. Fingers flying over the filthy bits of cardboard, long acrylic nails creating colorful exclamation points, words began to pour out flat and fast. Like a third grader terrified of forgetting her lines, Polly thought.

But these weren’t the words of a child. Repelled and fascinated, Polly moved closer to hear the hushed rapid-fire monologue. An errant thought sparked: in his sleep, had Hamlet’s father leaned just so, anxious to receive the poison in his ear?

Paralyzed, she listened as the reader told her of real things, secret things: the abortion Polly had seven hours before the high school prom, one of her stepfathers watching her through a hole he’d drilled in the bathroom wall, the student-aid counselor she’d seduced to get a full scholarship her freshman year at Tulane, Gracie at eight months rolling off the bed and Polly living in terror she’d grow up brain damaged.

As suddenly as it had begun, the outpouring stopped. The woman pursed her lips, the lipstick so heavy it ran in bloody feathers up wrinkles, and studied the cards lying between them on the table.

Around the edges of Polly’s consciousness, like dancers around a fire, thoughts came in and out of the light: of knocking the cards to the ground, of rising and running, calling the police.

The reader pushed her face nearer to the cards, and Polly saw the white roots under the Lady Clairol-red hair. Without relaxing her lipsticked mouth, she began to speak in a Halloween-like moan. “You are mired in deceit. Lies grow up around you in choking vines. Your children are threatened. Your life hangs by a frayed rope. Old evil has taken root and begun to grow.”

Her eyes, heavy with mascara, narrowed in the fleshy face. She pressed her bulk across the small table, so close Polly could smell cigarettes and alcohol. A hand bearing a burden of dime store rings shot out; acrylic nails dug hard into the skin of Polly’s forearm.

“Your husband is not who you think he is,” the woman hissed. “You will kill him.”

Polly tried to jerk free. Acrylic talons dug deeper. The woman shoved her nose within inches of Polly’s.

“Your husband will die at your hands.”

For a short eternity, Polly stared into the reader’s face. Drugstore foundation, showing orange in the strange light of dusk, caked in the wrinkles. The black-rimmed eyes were rheumy, the whites yellowed with age and abuse. The cloying stench of despair rolled off her, a mental levee breached, poison waters flooding out.

“No,” Polly managed finally. Finding strength in the sound of her own voice, she yanked her arm free, leaving pieces of her flesh beneath the Woman in Red’s fingernails. Standing so fast her chair toppled over, she backed from the table.

“Open your eyes,” the beast was saying. “Open your eyes.”

Polly fumbled in her purse, pulled out three twenties, and threw them on the table.

“The reading is free,” said the beast, but she eyed the money greedily.

“Nothing is free,” Polly whispered. She ran to the corner, turned, and walked rapidly down the shadowed lane between the park and a row of shops.

She would have cut through the garden, but it was locked at sundown. At a side gate a young woman, hands clutching the wrought iron bars, gazed into the garden. As Polly neared, she turned and looked at her. “Cats,” she said. “Everywhere.”

Polly saw only the cockroaches. They lived like kings on the crowds’ droppings. A nauseating clot of the insects fled from around the girl’s sandal-clad feet. She didn’t seem to notice.

Or she didn’t mind.

“What are all the cats doing?” she demanded of Polly.

Polly stepped up beside her and looked into the fenced garden. A spangling of tiny white lights on the trees deepened rather than illuminated the shadows beneath. Pale concrete paths caught the lights and glowed. Into this almost colorless dreamscape had come at least a dozen cats: grey tigers with long legs, short fur, and languid attitudes. They bathed. They stretched. They napped with half-open eyes. They stared without blinking. Safe behind the wrought iron fence, they preened with studied indifference.

Polly looked at them, and they looked back through her. “I don’t know,” she said to the girl. “I don’t know what they are doing.”

“Probably waiting to kill something,” the girl said darkly.

Polly fled.

23

The story of the tarot reading, as Polly told it over dinner, was funny and silly, the scary parts exaggerated for comic effect. Emma and Gracie took up the tale and predicted even direr events.

Their laughter was torture, eating was torture. Peas, bread, even the mashed potatoes stuck in Marshall ’s throat. He worked to get them down. A snake swallowing, swallowing, swallowing a rat down the length of its body. A rat in his throat, not clawing, not fighting, but alive; he could feel it swell against his esophagus as if it struggled to breathe.

“Don’t.”

Marshall had spoken aloud. Conversation around the table stopped. Three sets of eyes looked at him: Emma, Gracie, Polly. They’d been a family for only a few months. It had started after they got back from Venice. It had come into the house. Now, somehow, it was reaching out, touching Polly. “Jesus, no,” he murmured.

“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity,” Gracie said. “I read that somewhere.”

“Uh oh,” Emma joined in. “Tell us if you start hearing voices.”

“Especially in dog language. Who was that guy whose dog told him to kill people?”

“Sam,” Emma said.

“Son of Sam,” Marshall corrected. Too abrupt. Too loud. Startled into silence, Emma, Gracie, and Polly stared at him.

“Neither Sam, nor his son, nor his son’s dog are welcome at our dinner table,” Polly said, shooing away the unpleasant silence with the ease of a born hostess. With the tip of the serving spoon, she scooped up three peas and put them on her younger daughter’s plate. “I am so sorry, darlin’, but I believe I inflicted more of these on your sister, and one does strive to be fair with one’s offspring.”

Normalcy reinstated for at least the three of them, she asked Marshall, “Don’t what, sugar?”

“Don’t mind me,” he said and tried for a smile. It must have passed muster. The girls looked relieved. “I’ve got a little indigestion is all.”

“If it was my cookin’, I’ll make it up to you. The kitchen isn’t my best room.” Polly batted her eyes at him, a fluttering of the lashes that was both sexy and satiric.

Caught in the universe of her eyes, Marshall pushed at the darkness in his mind hard enough that it brought jagged lightning to his peripheral vision. First harbinger of a migraine.

It was happening again.

Nothing happened, Marshall silently shouted down the voice in his head. A slip. A bad dream.

He loved the girls nearly as much as he did their mother, and he had planned to adopt them. They were so beautiful. Emma was lithe and olive skinned; Gracie was blonder, broader of smile and wider of eyes. Her birthday was in two weeks.

Polly wanted to get her a kitten.

A flash of memory showed him Tippity, the Chihuahua, with ice around its tiny jaws.

Did people outgrow that kind of thing? Was there a statute of limitations on human misery? BTK, Bind, Torture, Kill. Wichita. Coming forward after so long. But Dennis Rader wasn’t repentant. He wanted credit for his work.

“I’ve got some work to do,” Marshall said abruptly and stood up. Memory lightning-flashed again. This time it brought a faint ghostly virga. He needed an Imitrex and quickly. Polly looked concerned but said nothing. Gracie and Emma were still young enough to accept that all stepdaddies came and went with sudden sweats on their foreheads, rocky clenches in the muscle of their jaws. One day they would realize they’d been cheated out of a normal papa.

If they lived long enough.

Fear-or a migraine-clawed the back of his neck so sharp and mean he half-thought if he looked in a mirror, he’d see a monster with scales and talons attached to his back, its fangs buried in the base of his skull. Walking straight, keeping errant words and sighs tight within him, he left the dining room and made his way up the stairs toward his office.

A spectral hand pressed hard on the back of his neck. Marshall squeezed his eyes tightly closed, his face scrunching up like a child’s.

Like it was yesterday. Like it was now. Like it had never stopped happening. Pressing one palm to his forehead and the other to the back of his head to keep his brain from smashing out through his skull, he stopped on the landing.

He could smell the past, shit-sharp in his nostrils. The odor gagged him, and the spasm tore through his head with the force of a band saw.

His wife, the girls-he saw them superimposed over the images in his mind, and cried out.

“Sweetheart, are you okay?” Polly called from the room below in the voice he so loved he sometimes pretended he didn’t hear so she would say things a second time. He who, with the exception of his brother, had never loved at all since he was a kid, now loved too much.

Danny knew that would trigger it. He’d done everything to stop the marriage but stand up during the does-anyone-know-why-this-couple part of the service and volunteer the truth.

“Sweetheart?”

“I’m okay,” Marshall managed to call back. Forcing his eyes open, he again started up the stairs. Faintly, from the depths of the dark places in his mind, he heard sirens, felt the hands of police and EMTs, still cold from the outside, lifting as he writhed and twisted in fear and pain.

He was going crazy.

No. He’d always been crazy; he just made himself believe he’d left it behind. Now, crazy was coming back to get him.

Concentrating on moving and not thinking and the pain, he succeeded in muting the movie in his head, but he couldn’t stop it. Black and white and blood-red, the familiar frames clicked behind his eyes.

In the upstairs bathroom, he fumbled a pill bottle from the medicine cabinet. Feminine clutter avalanched into the sink, razor and blades making a noise that cut as sharp as tempered steel. He stopped and stared at Polly’s Lady Schick and the packet of blades.

Death held an allure; he’d admitted that to himself a long time ago. But suicide was death without honor, a way for a coward to avoid his debts. Before Marshall had become an architect, he didn’t have much to be proud of in his life, but he had taken pride in the fact that he took what was dealt him without whining or shirking.

The razor in the sink, pink and thick-handled, Polly’s razor, made him think that maybe death was the better part of valor. He pushed the thought away, opened the envelope Danny had given him, shook two pills into his hand, added an Imitrex, and washed them all down with water from the tooth glass.

Thank God for Danny and drugs.

He replaced the bottle, closed the door of the medicine cabinet, and stared into the sink to avoid the face in the mirror.

A kitten. Why in God’s name did she want to get Gracie a kitten? If he’d stuck a Chihuahua in the freezer what would he do with a cat? Deep-fry it?

Jesus.

Vertigo caught him on the crest of a wave, and he held onto the sink to keep from falling. The razor was between his hands, the mirror waiting for him to look into it. Turning, he half fell into the upstairs hall.

Seventeen more steps and he’d be at his office. Despite what he’d told Polly, he hadn’t come upstairs to work; he’d not come for the drugs, though he wished he’d dared to take twice as many.

Marshall had to come upstairs because he had to see.

Leaning into the psychic wind, he pushed forward two more staggering steps. Outside the master bedroom the mental storm reached gale force. Holding onto the door frame, he tried to overcome the need to go in. Three times this evening he’d made the pilgrimage through the stairwell’s nightmares to this room to see if it had reappeared. He didn’t know whether this time would be a relief or further proof that he should get to know his wife’s razor more intimately.

Maybe he’d imagined it in the first place; maybe it had never been there at all. A fourth time was killing him; his head was imploding behind his right eye. A fourth time was beyond careful, beyond compulsion. It was not normal.

Normal was something he knew about. His life had been a case study in normal. Normal didn’t live in a garbage heap; nor did it obsess about minutia. Normal wore clean clothes but did not panic if a stain or a spill marred the fabric. Normal shook hands for one point seven seconds.

Normal did not look repeatedly for something that wasn’t there because he, himself, had taken it away. That was the hitch. He’d taken it back to the basement and hung it on the two nails driven into a beam for that purpose.

As if from a distance, he watched himself cross the carpet to the bed, saw himself staring down at the coverlet. His doppelganger fell to its knees, reached down, and folded the bed skirt neatly up onto the mattress.

With a suddenness that snatched the breath from his lungs, Marshall slammed back into his body, a body kneeling in prayer to a dead or indifferent God.

Taking a lungful of air as if he was about to free-dive forty feet, he bent double and looked under the bed.

Nothing.

Shoe boxes, hat boxes.

Nothing.

With exaggerated care, he folded the bed skirt back into place and smoothed the bedspread. Then he laid his head on his fists, thumbs hard in the corners of his eyes to keep the tears from beginning.

24

The Woman in Red, she thought as she leaned across the tiny bathroom sink to get closer to the mirror. The sink was black with use, and the mirror hazy from years of accumulated dust, hairspray, bath powder, and other bathroom effluvia. In a way, the filth was her friend; as footage shot through gauze, it softened the less pleasing aspects of her face. Blubber drowned the ravages of age, lard filling out wrinkles and rounding what would have been a sagging jaw line. Close in, just eyes and lips in focus, she occasionally even felt attractive.

Her left eye crossing slightly to accommodate close vision, she concentrated on her lipstick. Red. Always red. Tired of it after so many years and tubes, she’d tried other colors, but they’d looked wrong, as if her mouth belonged to some other woman.

“Fuck,” she whispered as the shaking of her hand smeared a red line nearly to her nose. “Darn,” she amended firmly. Mr. Marchand did not like the F word. He used to like it just fine, but a year, or two, or twenty ago, he had slapped her silly for using it in front of him. After that she never heard him say the word. It was like he’d gotten religion or culture or something. He didn’t have to slap her like he did. All he had to do was ask. Saying no to him had never been an option.

Not since that first night.

Remembering then was better than remembering now. Snow was drifting down from a low dark sky. The world was cold and quiet, not hot and hungry like Louisiana. Her mom and dad were at a prayer vigil for a deacon who had passed. Stillness, snow, and darkness swaddled the house. She was at the window on the second-floor landing looking into the next-door neighbor’s house.

Through snowflakes half as big as her fist falling through the halo of the street light, she watched his mother, wearing a flannel nightgown with matching robe and slippers, just like June Cleaver, kiss his brother on the cheek, then sit on the edge of the bed and sing to him.

He came into the doorway and watched them. She loved the way his hair waved, long in front and short over the ears. She loved his dark eyes, the four-square way he stood, feet shoulder-width apart, like he could take on the world. He was what her grandmother used to call an “old soul.”

Leaning against the window to be closer, she’d fallen asleep. Then, for no reason she could think of, she opened her eyes. It wasn’t like waking up; it was like already being awake, and suddenly, in a pitch-black theatre, the movie comes on.

He was right in front of her, walking down his dimly lit hallway toward her window. He stopped, looked right into her eyes, and smiled that slightly crooked smile that made her weak at the knees.

“Sssshh,” she heard herself hissing. The sound dragged her back to the mirror and the lipstick running up to her nose.

She needed a little something. A stiffener.

A glass of bourbon sat on the back of the commode in a space carved out by repetition. The rest of the toilet tank was obscured by a broken eye shadow container, hair pulled from brushes, two bottles of hairspray, a dirty washcloth, and assorted hair pins and tissues. The overflow hadn’t far to go. A pile had built up over time until the space between the side of the tank and the sink cabinet was full. Where the glass rested was an almost perfect circle in the mess delineated by old rings from the bottom of the tumbler.

Lifting it carefully, she pushed out her lips to do the least amount of damage to her makeup and took a sip. “Cocktail,” she said to chase away the word “booze” that clicked into her mind.

The bourbon was just to steady her hand; she didn’t want to get tipsy tonight. Fortified, she tried applying the lipstick again. Better. Not perfect, but better. At least most of the color was within shouting distance of her lip line. Since her lips were naturally thin, she colored outside of it anyway to make them look fuller. Admiring the effect, she shook a cigarette from a partially crushed pack of Dorals and lit it. “Shit.” The lipstick was okay, but she had another cigarette burning on the edge of the sink, adding its burn-and-nicotine footprint to half a dozen others. Pinching it up, she dropped it in the toilet and set the new one down in its place.

Another hit of bourbon and she began on her eyes. Most days she just ringed them with black shadow and piled on the mascara. Back when she was boring, before she’d come to New Orleans and become the Woman in Red, she would never have dared wear so much makeup. If she had, either her mother would make her wash her face or some nosey parker would say, “And just who are you supposed to be?” and then that biddy would tell her mother. New Orleans loved masks, and makeup was a mask of sorts. Paint to cover youthful extravagances and sins, to let a woman be who she should be instead of who she had to be. When she’d first caked it on, she’d been putting on a character, the Woman in Red. Now heavy base, white powder, carmine lipstick, charcoal eye shadow, and gobs of black mascara were part of the persona she’d worn for so long it ceased to be an act.

Tonight, she wanted to look nice, have the charcoal shadows neat and the mascara without clumps. Squinting through the fog of bourbon, smoke, and dirt, she carefully combed out her lashes with an old toothbrush. At least she hoped it was the old one.

At eight o’clock she was going to meet Mr. Marchand, and she wasn’t going to shame herself. Not this time. She wasn’t going to be too tipsy. She was going to have it together: nice dress, face on straight, hair done. This meeting was a big deal. Mr. Marchand was like family, but better-closer-and meeting him wasn’t a casual thing.

“It’s him moving forward in our relationship,” she said solemnly to the face in the mirror. In her heart she knew that wasn’t the way it was. He did things for his own reasons and hadn’t bothered to tell her what they were for years. No, he’d never bothered to tell her why he did things or had her do things. “This is like Mr. Marchand taking me home to meet his mother,” she said and took a long drag on the cigarette. Her heart put in its place, she picked up the hairbrush.

Before moving to New Orleans she’d never heard of tarot. Because she needed to stay close to Mr. Marchand, she’d had to find something to do that would let her hang around Jackson Square where she could keep an eye on his office door. Since she couldn’t paint or draw caricatures, and there was no way she could stand still like the statues, not even when she was thinner, tarot reading seemed easiest.

Turned out she was good at it. Too big, and too red, and too much of most things, and too little of everything else, she didn’t think she’d ever be good at anything, but she saw things in the cards that were true. People liked to mock her when she said that, especially Mr. Marchand, so she didn’t brag about it-but she didn’t stop believing it either. There wasn’t anything else she could say good about herself except for that. It was true and right and she would not think it wasn’t.

Privately she believed she was a good reader because she’d spent her life being not enough-not pretty enough, smart enough, rich enough, lucky enough-and that gave her a special insight into people.

Ego didn’t get between her and the deck. She could see where the clients who came to her table were broken, and the cards told her how to help them. Of course, lots of times it was an act. Tourists paid for the act as much as for the reading. But not always. Once in a while there was a true “seeing.” Like when she’d warned Mr. Marchand’s wife. That had blown her mind. The act was mirrored in the cards so exactly she knew it wasn’t an act at all. A window between now and the future had opened for just that few minutes. She’d looked right through it, right into the awful place that woman was headed. The words weren’t hers, at least not all of them, but the seeing, that was all her.

Her hand twitched and she jammed the mascara wand into her eye. Pain shot through her and she knocked the lit cigarette to the floor. Not the floor, the floor was no longer visible; a crust of garbage an inch or two deep at its thinnest covered the hardwood. The smoldering butt fell into a stack of magazines and rolled behind the toilet. Bourbon got her as she bent down, and she fell into the toilet, banging her hand against the bowl.

She’d accidentally gotten tipsy.

Grunting, she dug the cigarette out and pounded the place it had landed in case anything had ignited. Dropping the butt in the toilet, she saw the acrylic nail of her right index finger had snapped off, exposing a scabby stub where the real nail had been filed down to take the epoxy.

“God damn it!” she hissed as she levered herself back to her feet. Her nails were fake, but they were pretty, the prettiest thing about her. Upright, her finger in her mouth, she turned to the mirror once again. Sucking had smudged her lipstick and black tears poured down through her makeup leaving gray runnels that would be a bitch to cover up.

“Fuck!” She threw the mascara wand at the mirror. Leaving a black smear, it bounced off the glass and fell into her half-empty bourbon glass. “God damn it!” she shouted and started to slam her fist into the mirror.

Bad luck, seven years of it. That was all she needed!

Sucking in her breath, she closed her eyes and began to mutter. “Seventy-eight cards, twenty-two major arcana, trumps, cannot be changed, fifty-six minor arcana divided into four suites… ”

When she’d gone to read in Jackson Square, she’d memorized the paragraph marketers put on the card boxes for the tourists. That was the extent of her knowledge when her first customer sat down. The oft-repeated litany calmed her. As a little girl she’d used the Lord’s Prayer. It had never paid off in nearness to Mr. Marchand, let alone twenty-dollar bills like the tarot did.

“Okay. Okay.” She opened her eyes but didn’t let them veer to the mirror. “We’re moving slowly, carefully,” she coached herself, as she picked up the bourbon, fished out the mascara wand, and let it fall to the floor. “Both hands, that’s my girl.” Holding the tumbler as a believer might hold the grail, she took a long sip. Later, when her hands were steadier, she’d fix her makeup. That way it would be fresher for her date.

Date.

That cheered a smile from her. He would laugh if he heard her use that word. That, or he’d get mad. Lately, since Mr. Marchand’s wife had come into the picture, he’d been on edge. Before she’d come along, he’d made fun of her but he didn’t get so mad so much. He didn’t pace and hit. Polly Marchand and those little girls kept him upset. He was going to do it again. Mr. Marchand had told her that.

A shame. Ms. Pollyanna seemed nice, but it was hard to tell; the cards told a lot, but they had their secrets.

Tonight she didn’t want to think about Polly Marchand. There was another thought she’d liked. For a moment she couldn’t remember what it was. The grail made another trip to her mouth, and it came back to her.

A date. The Woman in Red has a date, she thought and laughed. Nobody had to know she used that word. If he could keep secrets, so could she.

All night she’d think of it as a date, a real date. He thought he could read her mind but she didn’t think he could, not most of the time.

“Date, date, a date, I have a date. So there to you, Mr. Marchand. We are on a date,” she sang as she threaded her way through the crap on the floors to the cupboard in the next room. She was running low on bourbon.

Mr. Marchand paid for her to have air-conditioning, and she kept it turned up high so the apartment didn’t smell too bad. He’d promised he’d get her a nicer place if she’d clean this one up. She was going to do it soon. Lots of valuable things, though. It would be crazy to just throw them out. She’d make time to go through it. Things kind of kept getting away from her these last few years.

Two bottles left of the cheapest stuff. “Neat, straight up,” she said to an imaginary bartender as she poured three fingers. A swallow soothed the pain in her eye and her disappointment over breaking a nail. Refill clasped to her chest, she returned to the bedroom.

“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date,” she sang as she rifled through red in her cramped closet, and more red, each garment more tired than the last. Over half of them no longer fit, but she kept them. As soon as the weight came off she’d be wanting them. Finally, she settled on a red polyester caftan. The fabric didn’t breathe in the heat, and there were tiny irons and coffee pots and mixing bowls in black on it but it fit and, if she wore it backwards, it didn’t look too stained. Back or front, what did it matter? The thing was shapeless.

Dragging it from the pile, she wondered when the clothes had migrated from the hangers to the floor.

Two winters before there’d been ice and she’d twisted her knee. Healing took a long time. The place had gotten out of hand while she was injured. The closet was one of the places she would start on first. There were probably some nice outfits in there, new shoes. As soon as she got squared away, she would organize the closet, she decided. Could be there was a whole new wardrobe just waiting for her.

The caftan had been squished, so she spread it over the stuff on the bed and ironed the wrinkles out with her hands as best she could. A small slop of the bourbon got on it but that would dry fast. Alcohol dried fast. Congratulating herself for remembering to mash her lips together so she wouldn’t get lipstick on the dress, she pulled it over her head. Too late she remembered she had planned to put on a brassiere and panties.

Didn’t matter. Sexier this way.

Dressed, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror screwed to the back of the closet door. Really looked. Days, weeks, years went by when she didn’t. She’d fiddle with her makeup or her hair, buy cheap rings and arrange them in different ways on her fingers, file the acrylic nails or paint them, but the territory between lipstick and toes she didn’t address except to drape it with ever-growing yards of fabric. Red fabric. By the light of a single-shaded lamp she’d thought it would be okay-red light, red dress: romantic.

The shock of what she saw sobered her unpleasantly.

I don’t fucking fit in the mirror.

Maybe she was standing too close. Piles of clothes and shoes spilling out from the closet had held the door open for God knew how long, but she pushed it anyway. An inch or two was gained.

“I am not this fat. This is like a circus sideshow. Shit!”

With relief, she remembered the bourbon in her hand and took a healthy swallow from the cut-crystal tumbler. It was real crystal; she’d picked it up in a junk shop. Drinking out of a nice glass was okay. Swigging it out of the bottle was what alcoholics did. She was no alcoholic.

Another pull lowered the bourbon half an inch. Careful not to dislodge the unstable stack of unopened mail and socks from a scarf-draped phone table, she set the glass down. That mattered too. Alcoholics never set their drink down, just carried it with them all the time.

Shuffling backward, bulldozing dirty clothes, old newspapers, and two empty Diet Pepsi cans into an eight-inch berm of refuse with her heels, she gained a couple more feet. Still the mirror showed only her face and neck. And red, red from one side of the frame to the other. No arms, hands, hips, just red and fucking red.

A goddamn, freak, sideshow, circus-fat Woman in Red.

In the nineteen eighties the sobriquet had seemed marvelously mysterious. Sick unto soul-death of the pasty lump she had been since the cradle-or since she could remember-she had grabbed onto the colorful handle as she had grabbed onto her colorful new city.

Mister Marchand had been nicer to her in those days. They’d gone to the shops on Decatur. The Quarter was rougher then; stuff was still cheap, and drugs and real sex shows could be had any time, day or night. He’d bought her everything she wanted. She’d point and he’d pay. They’d come away with armloads of bags containing red scarves, shoes, hats, dresses. The grand total had been one hundred seventy-eight bucks.

Big spender, big fucking spender, she thought as she stared into the Wal-Mart mirror on the back of her closet door. But it had been big to her then. It was the most she’d ever spent on clothes at one time in her life. Mostly, it was big because he was with her; because he’d done it to make her happy she was happy, happier than she’d ever been before or since. That day she became the Woman in Red.

The neck of the caftan was pooching out. With the flat of her hand she smacked it down. Not even tits. I’m a fat freak with no tits, she thought as she smashed the neckline down again. She’d put it on backwards and the label wouldn’t lie right. Hooking a finger under the loop of cloth, she gave it a yank to rip it out. The label held. She jerked harder. When it came free it tore the neck of the caftan halfway to her gut. White flesh rolled into the red in the mirror, limp, deflated breasts over mounds of flab.

“Fuck you!” she screamed and backed away. “Not okay. Not okay.” She crashed into the other room and began throwing things off one chair onto another, digging like a badger and chanting, “Fuck you, fuck me.” At last her hand closed on what she sought. Clutching it to her bare chest, she staggered back to the bedroom, held out the can of flat black spray paint she’d gotten to refurbish her setup, depressed the nozzle, and crying, “Fuck yoooooooooou!” sprayed the mirror and the closet door until all that remained in the looking glass was her disembodied head floating on a sooty cloud. “’Bout damn time,” she told the head. “’Bout damn fucking time.”

A sharp knock on the door froze her in her tracks.

Her hands were splotched with black paint that had leaked from the nozzle, her dress torn; mascara ran down through the thick makeup. Tonight was important, really, really important. She had to look her best, she had to be her best, but she couldn’t remember why.

Mr. Marchand.

He was here.

“No, no, no, no,” she whimpered, looking around as if there would be a new escape door, a place big enough for a circus sideshow fat woman in red to hide.

Knocking.

“Just a minute,” she sang out. “I’m coming.”

She could tell him that a man-a black man-broke in and raped her. Ripped her dress. Hit her. She could, she could… She couldn’t find her drink, her glass of bourbon.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

This time the knocking shook the flimsy wall.

Ripped her dress. Hit her…

He’d never believe it. Maybe, if she did something nice for him, something special, he would overlook her dress and her face; if he said anything it would be that she had taken good care of him and he’d had a good time. That was better than the rape story. Nobody cared whether you were raped or not.

She’d give him a blow job.

Men liked that. And it was a nice thing, easy. Most were real quick so it didn’t ruin the whole evening or anything. When business was slow, and Mr. Marchand didn’t think to send her anything, she often gave little blow jobs to keep some money in her pocket.

“Coming,” she sang with false good cheer. She grabbed the bourbon from the cupboard and took a healthy slug right from the bottle. If he didn’t want a blow job, it wouldn’t matter whether or not she was an alcoholic.

25

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of the caftan in hopes of diluting the whiskey smell. Lipstick smeared across her cheek and chin.

“I am the Woman in Red,” she said.

Pulling from the depths of a battered past the confidence and allure that name had once inspired, she clutched the torn caftan to her shoulder in what she hoped would come across as sexy dishabille, threw the deadbolt, and opened the door.

“Why, Mister Marchand,” she said coyly. Then, “You said… ”

“Never mind what I said. What kind of woman answers the door looking like that? What happened to you?” He pushed by her and surveyed the trashed sitting room. “I’m doing the world a favor,” he muttered.

“What did you say, honey?”

He was carrying a package, a big one, like the boxes holding a dozen long-stemmed roses she’d seen delivered by bellboys in old movies. There was no ribbon on this one, and it was bigger. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been given a present. Fear that had her verging on tears was instantly ameliorated by a warm buzzing excitement.

“Honey, just let me change. This old dress tore when I was putting it on, but I didn’t want to make a guest wait on the welcome mat.” There was no welcome mat. Like much else it had turned to rags and drifted away. But it sounded nice to say it.

“Never mind that. Sit down. If you can find a place to sit.” He looked around at the rubble of her life. Without waiting to see if she obeyed him, he swept a pile of junk from an old Naugahyde recliner.

He was wearing gloves.

With clarity as sudden as it was unwelcome, she saw her home through his eyes. Filthy. Unsanitary. So disgusting it could not be touched by bare skin for fear of contamination. Before she imploded with shame, the vision blurred. “I’ve been meaning to straighten up a bit,” she said. “My knee isn’t what it used to be-you remember when I fell and twisted it?”

Of course he wouldn’t. Mostly she knew what she knew and lived with it. Tonight for some reason-maybe the gloves or the broken nail or the torn dress or the ruined makeup-she needed to believe he thought of her sometimes when he didn’t need her, that he cared she’d been hurt. He didn’t answer but kicked the crap on the floor out of the way so he could move a footstool.

He didn’t remember; she could tell by the nothing on his face. Against all reason, it hurt her-not that he didn’t remember. Who’d remember she’d been injured? It hurt her that he didn’t pretend to remember. What would pretending have cost him?

“And I’ve let the place go a little,” she finished lamely.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said kindly, the hostility of a moment before seemingly forgotten.

Relief flooded her. She was to be forgiven. “I won’t be a minute.” She again started toward the bedroom to change.

“Stay. I like it like that,” he said, and there was a spark of something in his eyes. Interest. Or humor. Maybe he was laughing at her. He did that. She’d gotten used to it; it was just his way. Still, there were times it made her feel bad. Not that he thought she was a clown or a fool, but that he didn’t care enough to hide it from her. This time, though, the spark was ambiguous. It really could be interest, the kind a man has in a woman.

It had been a long time since she’d seen anything in men’s eyes but a passing smirk, if they noticed her at all. Usually, despite the red of dress and hair and lips, they didn’t see her anymore. That spark in Mr. Marchand’s eyes thrilled her. She let the caftan slip an inch to show the top of her breast. No more than that. Mr. Marchand would not be pleased by crude behavior.

“Why don’t you pour yourself a drink?” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

Again he looked around the ruin of her apartment. This time she did not suffer the instant of clarity. The offer of a drink made her realize how much she needed a little courage, a little comfort. Careful not to seem too eager, to move too quickly, she followed the path to the cupboard. The bottle was still on top, the cap off, lost in the clutter on the floor. Shielding the bottle with her body so he wouldn’t see it was already open, she found her tumbler and poured. “Can I get you a drink, honey?”

“No, thank you.”

No, thank you. He was being a gentleman, a gentle man. This was going to be a good evening. A date, she remembered. Smiling, she took a drink before she turned around. She needed to get one sizable shot into her, then she could sip politely.

“Come sit,” he ordered, a hint of sharpness returning.

Holding her drink in both hands so it wouldn’t slop, she scurried back. It would be just like her to ruin everything by being stupid, trying his patience, saying the wrong thing. The eggshells she walked on were fragile and the breakage cost dear.

Don’t say the F word. Don’t gulp your drink. Don’t laugh too loud. Don’t talk too much. Don’t burp. Please, please, please don’t let me fart, Lord, she prayed as she made her way to the chair he’d so peremptorily cleared for her.

“Aren’t you going to sit, honey?” she asked, as she lowered herself carefully into the chair. Like a lady, not plopping; lowering.

He smiled.

God, but she loved that smile.

Even through the bourbon, and the excitement, and the fear, she knew he wasn’t smiling because the offer pleased him. He smiled because to sit in her home appalled him. Still, she could pretend, and so she did. “Let me tidy a chair for you,” she offered and tried to rise. The chair and the booze conspired to suck her back down and she laughed.

“Oops-a-daisy,” she said as she fell back, drink in hand, sloshing onto the chair arm. Bad. She was acting drunk. Contenting herself with the fact that she had not said the F word by accident, she smiled up at him.

He set the package down near her feet and pulled up an ottoman. Tilting it so the papers, shoes, and two purses she had forgotten she had slid off into the rest of the litter, he moved it so he could sit facing her. Before he sat down, he stared for a moment at the nubbled brown fabric scarred with cigarette burns and, in a flash of ESP, she knew he was thinking of getting his handkerchief out and spreading it over the top. That he didn’t, she took as a compliment and smiled as he sat on the stool at her feet.

“It’s so nice having you here,” she said and meant it so much she nearly ruined everything by crying. “It’s like family, you know.”

“Like family,” he said in a distant voice, a sound from a long way off, coming through years of darkness and cold.

For reasons she did not identify, she shivered. “You brought something,” she said brightly to make him come back from wherever his voice had gone.

“It’s a present,” he said. “I need you to do something special for me tonight.”

Blow job, she hoped, but he didn’t act like a man who wanted a sexual favor.

Methodically, he began unwrapping her present, talking as he did. She would rather have unwrapped it herself while he watched. That would have been more special, more intimate, but she didn’t spoil the moment by pushing what she wanted on him. A present was enough.

He was here, and sitting in her home, and giving her a present. She said those words in her mind because she wanted to remind herself how happy she was.

The gift wasn’t wrapped in white paper as she had first thought but plastic, two enormous sheets of it. Painters’ drop cloths or clear shower curtains. As he unwound them, he took out roll after roll of packing tape, the superstrong kind with fibers all through it.

“Are we building something?” she asked. The tape and the plastic were giving her a bad feeling. Nobody wrapped gifts in plastic and tape you had to cut with a knife.

“Sort of,” he replied. “A box for a friend of mine.” He smiled more to himself than to her. The bad feeling didn’t go away. She poured bourbon on it to quiet it down.

At last, the plastic and the tape had been set aside in a neat pile, and all that remained was the gift loosely wrapped in brown paper.

No long-stem roses for her. What it was she couldn’t guess.

“Before I give this to you I want to tell you a story,” he said and, looking her in the eyes, his gloved hands resting on his knees, he began: “Once upon a time there was an ugly duckling… ”

“Does she turn into a beautiful swan?” Her hand flew to her mouth. She had interrupted him. He hated it when she interrupted him. Before she could say she was sorry, he went on.

“No. This is a true story. In real life, ugly ducklings, at least the ones that aren’t savaged by dogs or eaten by cats, grow up to be big ugly ducks. Big fat ugly quackers,” he said. Relieved he’d not gotten angry at her interruption, she scarcely noticed the hard edge his words took on.

“This ugly duckling was a nosey little bird, a spying little bird. She had very sharp eyes, and she saw things that she wasn’t supposed to see.”

The set of his mouth, the mocking way he was telling the story, cut through the alcohol, and she realized he was talking about the Woman in Red, about her. She knew this the way she knew things, the way the tarot had unlocked for her.

She was the spying little bird.

She tried to think of what she could have seen that she wasn’t supposed to. He knew she’d been watching the office, but even so he hadn’t done anything interesting. He’d gone over to Polly Whatsername on the bench that day. Anybody could have seen that. That was about the most interesting thing he’d done. Other than that, it was clients and business.

“What did she see?” she asked. Bourbon slurred her words and she was ashamed. He didn’t get mad though.

“You know what she saw.”

She didn’t, but she was afraid if she said it he would think she was stupid or being contrary. Then he really would get mad, so she nodded.

“The prince-every story has to have a prince,” he said, and there was genuine warmth when he looked into her eyes and smiled.

I would die for an hour of his love. The thought floated like a bubble on the bourbon and the fear. He was so beautiful.

“The prince paid the ugly spying duckling to keep what she had seen a secret. Oh, they never talked about it; a prince doesn’t share things with fat ugly birds, but he paid. He paid so much that the ugly duckling came to owe him.

“One night the prince came to the duck’s nest to collect the debt.” At this point in the story, he reached down and meticulously loosened the masking tape holding the wrapper in place and folded the brown paper back.

“An axe,” she said stupidly.

“Melodramatic, isn’t it? A child’s weapon, but I need historic continuity so an axe it has to be.” He didn’t move to pick it up or touch it but kept looking at her, smiling warmly

She couldn’t take her eyes off the blade, blunt on one end, sharp and shiny sharp on the other.

“Yore gimmin me nax?”

What she had meant to ask was, Are you giving me an axe? Usually, she didn’t get to the point her lips numbed and her words slurred until she was alone.

“Sort of. See all this plastic? I’m going to spread it out over the floor-assuming there is a floor under all this dross-and you’re going to stand in the middle of it. Sit in the middle; I doubt you are in any shape to stand. That’s okay. Bourbon is a good anesthetic. I don’t wish to hurt you, so I will make the first blow count. If you don’t move, you shouldn’t even feel it.”

The smile was still cozy and comforting on his face. Smile and words were at such odds, it took a moment for the meaning of the latter to sink in. “You are going to kill me.” A jolt of adrenaline sobered her for a minute. “Why?” she wailed and tried to stand. He leaned forward, put a gloved hand on her chest, and pushed her back. Forgotten, the caftan gaped open, her left breast exposed. “Why?” she repeated, the wail degenerating into a confused whimper. “I love you.”

“I know. It will be better if you don’t think about it as me killing you. Think about it as you giving me the thing I need right now. I’m not mad at you. This isn’t punishment. I know you didn’t mean to be a spying, prying little duck. That’s the least part of it, really. It’s something I need you to do so I can make right a wrong. It’s the way you can show me you really do love me.”

While he talked in a nice reasonable voice, he shook out the plastic sheets and spread them over the detritus of the room, careful to overlap them several feet. Together, they covered nearly the entire space.

Watching him, she did not know what to feel. He would kill her; she knew that. Part of her thought to get up and run for the door, but she knew she’d never make it. Screaming crossed her mind, but she didn’t do it. The fear was there, so intense she tingled with it, but it wasn’t the bowel-loosening fear she suffered when she crossed him.

“What do you have to live for anyway? Look at yourself. You are middle-aged and pathologically obese; you live in a sty that any self-respecting pig would be ashamed of. The people you know laugh at you. The people you don’t know laugh at you. The greatest emotion you inspire in others is disgust. You’re a drunk. Liver disease will probably kill you in the not-too-distant future. This is your chance to make your pathetic miserable life end with some spark of meaning. You don’t want to keep on living do you? Not a drunken slut selling blow jobs for five dollars a pop? Yes, I know about your little side business. You have made yourself a whore, and a cheap one at that. Let me take you out of this mess.”

He’d come back to her chair and now held out his hand to her. Tears were pouring down her face; she knew this because she felt the warm drops hitting her bare chest.

“Could you take off your glove?” she pleaded, her voice small and sweet, the way it had been when she was little, before she’d become a lump, then a lard, then a whore, and a cheap one at that. “Please? For just a second?”

If she could feel his flesh, hold his hand, it would be okay.

For a moment she thought he would refuse her but, in the end, he did care for her; he took his glove off and helped her to her feet. She staggered and would have fallen, but he steadied her with an arm around her waist.

We could be dancing, she thought. Her hand in his, moving gracefully around the floor, candlelight turning the world to gold, and him smiling down at her, holding her as if she were the most precious thing on earth.

When they stood in the middle of the plastic he’d spread, he looked around. “This should do it,” he said matter-of-factly. “There will be some spatter, but I think we’ve got it covered. I’ll do you with the blunt end of the axe and let you lay for a minute. If your blood isn’t circulating it will be neater.”

He wasn’t talking to her; he was talking to himself, so there was no need for her to listen, no need at all. She concentrated on not plopping as he helped her to sit on the floor.

Like a lady.

“I’m giving you a present,” she said and was proud that her words were clear.

“Yes, you are. A fine present. ’Tis a far, far better thing and so on.” He took up a towel that had somehow found its way into the living room. “Think of this as a blindfold,” he said as he dropped it over her head. “If I hit too hard, this should take care of any mess.”

“Please, I want to see your face,” she begged, but he made no move to take the towel off.

He wanted her to have the towel over her.

At first, she didn’t think he was going to answer, and she waited for the blow that would end her life.

“Okay, sure,” he said.

He cared about her.

She could feel him leaning close. His hands touched her head gently through the terrycloth. He folded the towel back so her face showed. The smell of his cologne brushed her senses. More than anything in life she wanted him to kiss her-not because she asked, but because she was necessary to him, because she was the Woman in Red and only she could give him whatever it was that meant so much to him, because he was the miracle around which she had formed her life.

He stood and surveyed her. “I think it will be fine. Leave it there, though.” He fetched the axe and came back. “This isn’t something I particularly enjoy. I’m not a lunatic for God’s sake. It has to be done to make things right; there’s no passion involved to speak of.”

He lifted the axe, turned it so the blunt end was down.

The last thing the Woman in Red heard was, “I guess that’s the difference between art and science.”

26

Danny set down his menu and waved as his sister-in-law swept into the Bluebird Cafe and settled with offhand grace. Tension pulled at the skin around her eyes; she looked as if she hadn’t slept.

But wasn’t that how brides were supposed to look? Danny doubted she had begged a meeting in order to regale him with the glories of married life. Neither spoke until the waitress, efficient as always, had taken their order, tucked the ticket between the salt and pepper shaker, and hustled away.

Then, “Tell me,” he said.

“I do love a direct man.” Polly’s usual twinkle was dulled, the half-hearted flirting merely habitual.

“Very well. Marshall is… ” Polly stopped and took a sip of the coffee the waitress had unobtrusively set on the table. “He is suffering and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. We had a wonderful time on our honeymoon in Venice. The girls adore him and he them. He and I haven’t had so much as a squabble. But things changed nearly the minute we returned. Marshall started staying at work until past nine. When he does come home, he takes a valium and goes to sleep-with his back to me more often than not. He’s distracted. He isolates himself from us and he won’t talk to me about it. Absurd as this sounds, I think he is frightened of something. Has he said anything to you?”

Danny chose not to answer. “On the phone you said something happened that made it worse.”

As her coffee grew cold, she told Danny the bizarre tale of her tarot reading. Her description of the reader as a “shattering racket of reds” made him smile, but he did not underestimate the impact the event had on her.

“I told Marshall about the reading. Danny, I swear that man turned to stone right then and there. It was as if, like Lott’s wife, he looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.”

“I am not surprised he was upset… ” he began in defense of his brother.

“Upset is not the half of it, sugar. He couldn’t eat. He could barely talk. He left the dinner table to rush upstairs. I found him standing in the upstairs bedroom staring down at the bed. He very nearly jumped out of his skin when I came in. You would think I had caught him in that bed with the entire Russian gymnastic team rather than woolgathering all alone. His face turned the color of old cigar ash, and he left. He was gone for over three hours.

“I was so worried… ” Tears welled up in Polly’s eyes. She covered this lapse of good manners with a shake of her head and touch of her napkin.

Danny appreciated it. “Any man might get a little sensitive if his wife told him she’d been to a tarot reader who told her that her husband was a fake, a liar, and, what’s more, she’s going to kill him. It doesn’t help matters any that you believe in that stuff,” he added pointedly.

Over the rim of his coffee cup, he watched his brand-new sister-in-law. She had to be in her late forties-with Southern women it was hard to tell and she wasn’t telling, at least not the truth-yet she was easily the most beautiful woman in the Bluebird Cafe. Not to mention the one with the fewest tattoos.

A lot of things about his brother’s wife appealed to him: the taper of her fingers, the manicured nails, the way she tilted her head and didn’t windmill her hands when she talked, that she walked as neat-footed as a cat. Beautiful women didn’t disturb his peace the way they did that of other men. He couldn’t imagine going through the emotional storms Marsh was weathering for a woman. Or a man, for that matter. Once, when he was too young to know, but old enough to care deeply, he’d thought he was gay. Over time, he’d realized he wasn’t. Having anyone in his life in that way would be too complicated. And dangerous. Life would have been a good deal easier if Marsh had shared that epiphany.

Thinking of his brother, he smiled and shook his head.

“I must say, I am having a difficult time seeing the humor in this,” Polly said, a hint of lemon in the natural honey of her voice.

Realizing he was not responding appropriately, Danny apologized. “Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I don’t know why you open yourself up to those so-called fortune-tellers. Most have day jobs as hookers or drug dealers.”

“You are right. I suppose I have a streak of superstition in my makeup. No, that is not totally true. I know I have a streak of superstition. Try as I might, it bothers me when black cats cross my path or the girls run under ladders. I probably shouldn’t have told Marshall about the reading but I thought he would laugh at it, and I dearly needed someone to laugh to get the taste of that awful woman out of my mouth. Sorry about the image that must conjure up while you are trying to eat your lunch; it was an exceedingly unappetizing episode.”

“Not a problem,” he assured her. “A lot of people have a vein of the old dark magic: witches or angels, lucky bowling shirts. Mom was a court stenographer with a college education, but she’d believed in that sort of thing. Scaring the dickens out of her was a piece of cake. A little knocking, a few whispers, and she wouldn’t go to sleep until Frank got home.”

“Your father? You call him Frank?”

“We weren’t all that close,” Danny said dismissively. “Anyway, I was about to say that our folks died around this time of year. Psychologists say the subconscious doesn’t let go of those dates, even when the conscious mind can’t recall them. It hit us both hard, but I think Marsh got the worst of it. Mom made a pet of him. He was that kind of Leave It to Beaver kid.” He stifled the impulse to look at his watch or reach for the bill.

Discussing his brother with Polly was putting him on edge. She spoke of Marsh as if wife and brother were equals. Women took on an irritating sense of proprietorship when they married, an unquestioned belief that with the ring on their left hand, came a profound understanding of the man who’d put it there. A few weeks of marriage was not on a par with half a century of blood.

Polly might have marched into Marsh’s id like the Germans into Warsaw, but she didn’t know him like his own brother did. Danny was finding it grating to have to pretend she did.

“What did you make of the tarot reading?” he asked to change the subject. “Aside from the effect it had on Marsh, it must have jolted you considerably.”

“Considerably,” Polly agreed. “When I first came to New Orleans, for a brief time, I lived in that subculture. They are not without honor. There are customs and taboos, as there are in any culture. Those who are serious about their trade-or as serious as one can be when one’s clients are wearing feathers and silly hats-would never tell anyone they are sick or dying. It’s an unwritten creed.” Polly lifted her coffee cup and took a sip.

“This creed was undoubtedly unwritten in stone because readers predicting great evils got their heads taken off by irate customers,” she said looking as mischievous as Emma. “Which is what I should have done when this floozy, a-flap with scarves, told me I was going to kill my husband.”

“It’s hogwash.”

“Yes, it is.”

The waitress brought their food. A moment passed. Danny ate two French fries.

The Bluebird did them up fine, but then he’d never had a bad meal in New Orleans -maybe one or two in the weeks after the flood waters abated, but he’d been so glad to be out and fed, he’d not been critical.

“Pure balderdash,” he said. “Absolute poppycock. So why let it bother you?”

Polly took a deep breath and gazed into space above and to the right. Danny’d read somewhere that people gazed in one direction to remember and another when they were trying to think of a lie. He couldn’t remember which was which.

“I thought that reader was a mad woman,” Polly said finally. “I wondered what side of the world she’d gotten out of bed on that inspired her to do something that mean. The wretched thing was clearly unbalanced.”

She stopped speaking. Danny let the silence sit.

“That awful woman knew things about my life that I have not shared with anyone but Marshall,” Polly admitted after a few moments. “There is no logical way this great red harpy could have known. Strange as it may be, she had to have seen them in the cards.” Her hand, the one with the two-point-five carat diamond, twitched. It was her nature to touch people. To her credit, early on she had picked up on the fact that Danny didn’t like to be touched and honored his idiosyncrasy.

“That would be unsettling,” he said with no trace of humor or sarcasm. “It would be hard not to take it seriously.”

“Thank you,” Polly said.

“Some of these people are clever,” he said. “Professionals make a living doing mentalist shows in Vegas. You’re sure you told no one but Marsh of these events from your past?”

“Believe me, I am sure.”

“Are you sure Marsh told no one?”

“Of course.”

In the way she firmed her lips and delicately flared her nostrils, Danny saw the dawning of suspicion. He watched her shake its icy tentacles from her mind with a toss of her head.

“You are right, of course,” Polly said. “Could they genuinely see the future, they’d not be on the square but making their fortunes at the track.” She took another sip of coffee, made a moue of distaste-it would have grown as cold as Danny’s-and said carefully, “What concerns me is that this absurd woman’s words somehow damaged Marshall. Since I told him, Mr. Marchand, my Mr. Marchand,” she added in polite acknowledgement of Danny’s existence, “walks this earth like he’s haunting it rather than living on it.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Danny promised. He’d planned on talking with Marsh about the bogus reading anyway. Marsh was beginning to fray a little at the edges.

“That would be wonderful.” Relief and hope made her voice lush. “ Marshall loves you very much. You are good for him.”

“And he for me,” Danny said curtly. It irked him that she would attempt to define a relationship she knew nothing about.

He took the check the waitress left. “I’d better get to work or they’ll rob me blind. Today, it’s meetings and on-the-ground checks.”

“It’s so romantic havin’ a brother-in-law who’s a drug dealer,” Polly drawled and waved as he crossed toward the doors opening out onto Prytania Street.

A drug dealer. Danny was amused. In the eighties, when money grew on trees, he had invested in a pharmacy. With the one-size-fits-all mentality of Walgreen’s, Rite Aid, CVS, and Wal-Mart, moneymen believed the individual pharmacy had gone the way of the dodo and good service.

He’d restructured the business into what was being hailed a “boutique pharmacy.” Designed along the lines of an old apothecary shop- Marsh’s idea, Marsh’s design-his four-link chain of stores carried the usual pharmaceuticals as well as traditional folk herbs and medicines. Drugs, even legal drugs, were exceedingly profitable, but what brought the high-end clientele into Le Cure was quick, knowledgeable, and very personal service.

Danny had not intended to do site visits today, but his meeting with Polly reminded him there were more reasons for being a drug dealer than money. If he didn’t get Marsh relief before he became too tightly wound, his brother could snap.

That wasn’t something his wife and children would want to see.

Scott Peterson. Wife and unborn baby. 2005. Why this one I don’t know. I haven’t written about this for a long time. Maybe because I can identify with Peterson. Not with what he did, but with his living a secret life, a life of lies, knowing what people liked about him was a lie. The truth was shameful. He was nothing without those lies. They were him. He’d told the lies so long, he may have felt that being exposed, having his fiction struck down, was tantamount to killing him. The “him” he’d constructed, the persona in which he was a man to be reckoned with, was going to be killed. In his twisted world he acted in self-defense. He started with a new woman who knew nothing about him and destroyed the woman he believed would rip away the Scott Peterson he wanted to be and expose the pathetic little man hiding beneath.

That Peterson did such a bad job of it is the best I can say of him. I believe the slaying of his wife and unborn child destroyed him from within, and because of that, he bungled it, was captured, and sentenced to death. I would hope my fiction would not demand such a price should it be threatened.

27

Harsh sun highlighted fine lines in Polly’s face, invisible even two weeks before-the velvet glove of autumn over the iron fist of summer. Glare forced her to narrow her eyes and the heat pressed down. She should have worn a hat.

Any southern woman with an ounce of good Christian vanity should wear a hat, she thought absently.

Tilting her head back so tears would not spill over her lower lids, she pushed back on the bench deeper into shade of Jackson Square ’s live oaks and let the disquiet blossom into a frisson of true fear.

The things that terrorize are those you don’t see coming.

The unexpected. “That which we must embrace,” the tarot reader had said. Or endure. The sixth card in the Celtic Cross, that which is to come.

“That which we cannot find,” Polly murmured aloud.

“You talkin’ to me?”

A young, African American man had joined her on the bench. Sandwich held suspended halfway to his mouth, he looked at her with concern. The tears, though unshed, must have shown. Polly was sorry for that. Not that tears weren’t a perfectly good expression of emotion-or means to an end-but to lose control was unseemly. And usually ineffective.

“I have been trying to find one of the tarot readers,” she said. “A generously constructed woman: red hair, red dress, red nails, red lipstick.”

“Sounds like the fire truck,” the man noted and took a bite.

“Ye-ess,” Polly said, making two syllables of the word. “A siren at any rate. She certainly got one’s attention.”

“I pretty much know the regulars.” The sandwich had gone in three bites. He wadded up the paper and tossed it expertly into the trash barrel several yards away. Polly made no comment. He was sufficiently pleased with himself, she needn’t add a thing. “Haven’t seen her in a while.” He stood to go. “Try the readers. They’d know better than me.”

Though she had promised herself she wouldn’t, Polly opened her handbag and took out a white unsealed envelope. She pulled out a card, pinching it fastidiously between the tip of her index finger and thumb, lest its inherent filth come off on her hands. The envelope wasn’t there to protect the card from the elements, but the elements from the card. Or the inside of her bag, at any rate.

Slightly smaller than a standard postcard, it was not of a size the post office would usually deliver, but this was New Orleans and, despite Katrina, the city’s tradition of aiding and abetting human idiosyncrasies survived.

Polly did not doubt where it came from. It was from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, worn and darkened by handling with unclean hands, the edges frayed from use. Had Polly access to criminal forensic laboratories she would have bet the red seeress’s DNA would be all over it. It was the ugliest of the cards, suggesting the true evil that inhabited the world. The Devil was a squat, potbellied satyr with ears that grew into hairy points and a skull sprouting rams’ horns. The wings of a bat sprung from his shoulders; the talons of a bird of prey took the place of hooves. Chained at his feet were the naked figures of a man and a woman.

Symbolic rather than literal, the Devil had many meanings: bondage, addiction, greed, obsession, lies, betrayal. Unlike other cards in the tarot, none of the meanings were auspicious. Only the Devil’s placement in the layout could ameliorate his dark presence.

Polly’s card had had a special placement. She’d found it in her mailbox. On the back of it, printed across the faded, dirty, white-and-blue checks, was the Marchand address and a stamp. On the face, scrawled across the Devil’s genitals in what looked like red nail lacquer, were the words, “Help me.”

There was no return address.

Handling it as if it had been dusted with anthrax, Polly returned the card to its envelope. Fear and anger coalesced into hard tears in the corners of her eyes. If this keeps up, I must begin to wear waterproof mascara, she mocked herself.

She’d received the card several days before and had done nothing, told no one, shown it to no one, not even Marshall. He was acting so strangely, she had no desire to exacerbate matters by showing him the Devil in all his naked glory.

A sensible woman would have consigned it to the garbage, but it was contrary to her nature to ignore a plea for help from even the least savory of supplicants. There had been a time when she, as had Blanche Dubois, relied upon the kindness of strangers.

The card readers huddled under the meager shade of their ratty umbrellas talking desultorily among themselves. Only one of the six tables had a client. Tourists were not as likely to want to see their future in the stark light of day as they were on romantic evenings, when all things seemed possible.

Polly started at the corner of St. Ann ’s and the square. A man, grizzled and looking as if he’d slept in his clothes not just the previous night but for many nights over many years, listened to her description.

“For twenty bucks, I’ll read your palm. It’s all written there,” he said cagily.

Polly moved on to the next umbrella where a rail-thin woman, her skin so damaged by years in the sun that it was impossible to determine her age, sat on a metal folding chair, a cooler beside her, an aging dachshund on her bony lap. A teal evening dress, half the spangles gone from the bodice, hung off her bones by spaghetti straps. One had broken and been patched with an oversized safety pin. Her long, narrow feet were encased in stiletto heels, the black rubbed off the sides and backs.

She looked as if, twenty years ago, she’d had one hell of a night on the town and, come morning, could not find her way home. The dog and the woman’s genuine smile encouraged Polly. She sat in the other folding chair. Smarter by one rejection, and feeling compassion for the old dog and the dachshund on her lap, she took out a ten-dollar bill and laid it on the table.

“All I want is information,” she said.

“That-and love-is all any woman needs,” the reader said, catching up the bill and folding it neatly into a plastic purse. “For ten dollars I can give you both. What a deal, huh? My name is Emily.” Her voice and her smile were so full of kindness that Polly laughed and felt better for it. She described the woman she sought and waited.

“Red,” Emily said immediately. “The Woman in Red-that’s what she likes to be called. Forty years and forty pounds ago it might have caught on. Now, well… She can’t help it, bless her heart.”

Polly smiled. In the South, one could say anything and, if it was followed by that incantation, the sayer was freed from the stigma of speaking ill of others.

“Do you know her real name?”

“Most of us can’t even remember our own real names, let alone anybody else’s, hon. Red has worked the square for years. She’s here almost every day, but I haven’t seen her for a week or so.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

Emily gave an enigmatic smile.

“I’m not with law enforcement or anything of the kind,” Polly blurted out and was mildly offended when Emily laughed, as if that were patently obvious. “Here.” Polly pulled the envelope from her purse and took out the card. “I got this in the mail. I think it’s from her. She may be in some kind of trouble.”

Emily shifted the dog and leaned in to look. Like Polly, she seemed to have an innate aversion to touching it. “The Devil,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Kind of theatrical. What with cell phones, faxes, instant messaging and whatever, you’d think somebody in trouble would be able to do better than this.”

The same thoughts had plagued Polly. The grubby card, the lack of a return address, the melodramatic words in red paint; it had more to it of a trick or trap than a genuine plea for assistance. A game designed to draw Polly into something she’d rather not be a part of.

“Do you have any idea what it is about?” Polly asked.

“Monkey business,” Emily said succinctly. “And I don’t even need the cards to foresee that. What kind, I can’t say. Smacks of evil, though. Would you like me to read your cards and see?”

The offer was well meant, but Polly had had enough of the tarot for several lifetimes. “Thank you, but not today. Do you know where she lives?”

“Red is a loner, doesn’t mix much with the rest of us. That’s not unusual for the dilettantes, but it is for those of us who’ve worked the square for a while. We kind of need to hang together.”

“Or we will most assuredly hang separately,” Polly said.

“No shit,” Emily said. “Greta,” she called to a woman two tables down. “Do you know of anybody who might know where Red lives?”

As Emily and Greta discussed the possible whereabouts of their fellow practitioner of the dark arts, Polly found her eyes and mind straying to the cathedral, to the clean, white stone of the façade and the solid safety of the great double doors. St. Louis seemed to offer shelter and decency, a respite from the Devil in his hairy crouch, the muck of the world’s weaknesses caked under his painted nails, crazy lies behind his oily smile. It interested her that a momentary belief in the Devil brought with it a momentary belief in the church.

“Greta thinks that Red’s got a place in Center City, off Jackson on Loyola,” Emily told her.

“Thank you,” Polly said politely. “And thank you, Greta.”

The part of the city where Red was reputed to live had been an unheralded slum before the hurricane. Now it was famous for its murders. The streets were broken and filled with potholes, the houses in various states of disrepair, some ruined by fire or collapsed by the wind. Cleanup in this part of town had not moved with the speed it had in wealthier neighborhoods.

At one time, the area had been middle-class, lined with charming homes and apartments. Only their bones remained, their souls cobbled up into duplexes, quadraplexes, and cheap rooming houses. The residue of fast-food lunches and blasted buildings littered the gutters. Lawns were bare dirt.

Polly parked her Volvo in the shade of one of the live oaks-the last of the gentility living in this part of town-but left the ignition running for the air-conditioning. Not knowing quite what to do next, she studied the street where the Woman in Red was said to have her lair.

Abode, Polly corrected herself. It was hard not to think of the poor, raddled woman as a beast.

The decaying buildings told her nothing. She was not sure what she had expected. Perhaps to see the woman in all her fiery glory sailing down the street or, in a Valentine-red robe and fuzzy slippers, having a cigarette on her porch. The only visible life at the moment was a small girl squatting on a broken walkway having an earnest conversation with a dog who outweighed her by at least fifteen pounds.

Little girls saw much and were seldom averse to talking about it to anyone who would listen. Reluctantly, Polly left the cool of her car. The child was tiny-four or five maybe-and small for her age. The dog was large, black, and apparently devoted. Polly didn’t guess at his age.

“Pardon me for interrupting your conversation,” she said to the two of them. “But I am in need of assistance.”

Both child and dog looked up at her.

“You lost?” asked the little girl. She stood and smoothed down the hot-pink tank top she wore over lime-green shorts with a pink frog appliquéd on the pocket. Barefoot, she padded down the walk to where Polly waited. Her little feet had to be hard as rocks. She didn’t flinch at the burn of the superheated concrete. The dog, his head as high as his mistress’s shoulder, walked beside her. The child’s face was open and trusting. The dog’s was not, and Polly was relieved. Children needed bodyguards.

“I am not, myself, lost, but thank you for asking. It is a friend of mine who is lost. She is very big and dresses all in red, even her hair and fingernails and lips. You looked like someone who notices things, and I hoped you’d seen her.”

“Yes, ma’am. She don’t like kids much. There’s a man comes to see her sometimes, but nobody else. He’s not from around here. I went over there one time, and she yelled at me to get off her porch. I wasn’t on her porch. Well, I was on her porch, but I was getting this thing, this round, throwy thing, like a flying saucer that Kaeisha had throw’d, and it had floated down there. And me and Newt was just going to get it, and she come out and yelled like we were going to steal things; but she don’t got nothing to steal anyways. She’s just a poor old white lady, Momma says, and to leave her be because she maybe got troubles we don’t know nothing about.”

“Your momma is a very smart lady,” Polly said.

“Yup.”

“Which porch did you and Newt chase the Frisbee onto?”

“Yeah, a Frisbee, that was the throwy thing. We chased it up there.”

The girl pointed back the way Polly had come. Three houses down, on the corner, was a two-story pink quadraplex, porches below and balconies above, forming a wooden shadowbox front. Nothing on the building was straight. Shingles shagged off the roof’s edges; the porch and balcony posts tilted drunkenly; the ridgeline sagged like the saddle-back of an old nag. Raw and sunburnt, pink paint peeled from eaves to foundation.

“The top one?”

“Yeah. Kaeisha’s real strong, stronger than a boy. She threw it up there, but she’s a scaredy cat and, even though she’s bigger than me, she said I should go get it because I’ve got Newt, and Newt won’t go with her. He’ll go with her, but only if I go with her; and so me and Newt got it ourselves, and we were about to throw it back down, and out comes the lady that lives there and starts yelling.

“She called me a bad name,” the little girl added, more in shame than anger.

“Her momma must not have taught her good manners like your momma taught you.”

“I guess.”

“Thank you, you’ve been most helpful,” Polly said and reached out to touch her hair. Newt bared his teeth. “Good boy,” she said.

Stairs led up a dark passage sandwiched between the two downstairs units. The stairwell was unlit and stank of lives lived out in clouds of cigarette smoke and boiled sausage.

Having climbed to a narrow landing with a door on each side, Polly paused, straightened her collar, and ran her tongue over her teeth to dislodge any unsightly foodstuffs or migrating lip color. Habits from a lifetime of benevolent seduction.

Then she rapped loudly. No one answered, but the door moved inward, and icy air poured out of the dark apartment. Blinds had been drawn and drapes pulled.

“Hello?” Polly called. “Is anybody home?” There was no answer. Probably the Woman in Red had moved out when whatever was troubling her caught up with her.

Polly pushed the door, and an unseen barrier gave way with a slithering noise. The scant light from the landing didn’t penetrate the darkness. Reaching around the doorsill, she fumbled for a light switch, found it, and flipped it up.

“Lordy!” she whispered.

It was a garbage house. Polly remembered one in Prentiss, the children taken away by county services, a photo of the parents and their living room on the front page of the local paper. Carver, the father of Emma and Gracie-and all the atonement Polly thought she would ever need to guarantee her a place in heaven-had a mother like that. He spent nearly a month literally shoveling out her house. The Woman in Red’s shotgun apartment was half the size of Polly’s ex-mother-in-law’s, but it would take more than a month to clear it.

It would take an act of God.

The heap that had fallen with the slither of many snakes when she’d forced the door was a three-foot stack of old magazines. Junk covered every square foot of the floor: newspapers, boxes, bags, books, half-empty pop bottles, dryer lint, garbage bags spilling food wrappers and toilet paper, clothes, and clothes, and clothes, pots for planters and cooking, buckets, shoes, hats, purses-dozens of purses, some still with the price tags tied to the handles-candy wrappers, television guides, overflowing ashtrays, pizza boxes. The detritus of the woman’s life was deepest in the corners, creating slopes of man-made scree from the picture rail down.

The floor was buried in two, three, and four feet of garbage. A narrow path from the front door to the adjoining room had been stomped through the hills of junk. Off this path, there were places Polly could not have walked upright. Furniture had been buried. The end of a chair arm, covered in gray, nubbled fabric aerated by cigarette burns, thrust out from a corner slope, and what looked like rabbit ears poked out of a pile of clothes.

TV aerial, Polly thought. Or car antenna.

The image of an automobile lost in the crud on the second floor of the old house brought laughter up in her throat. Nerves, or absurdity, or pity would not let go of the laughter and, as she crossed the wasteland of a woman’s life, she could not stop the gusts as she imagined ever more absurd things lost beneath this sea of trash.

The room at the end of the trodden path was faintly lit as if by a nightlight. Polly stepped in through a door that had not been closed since July of 1991. At least that was the date on the Glamour magazine on top of the waist-high pile leaning against it.

It was the bedroom. One side of the double bed was relatively clear of debris, and the path leading to the bathroom showed hardwood in places. A small television sat on a dresser in a tangle of cosmetics, scarves, hair decorations, and undergarments. Open, overfilled drawers made a colorful stairway up from the floor. The room’s only window was blocked by layers of curtaining, the sill gone to a slide of knickknacks and papers that continued unbroken to the seat of the chair beneath. A closet regurgitated cheap red clothes.

An oddity in this house of oddities was the full-length mirror on the closet door. The bottom two-thirds had been spray-painted black. The job had been done quickly; clouds of paint discolored the door behind the glass. When Polly looked at her reflection, all she could see of herself was her head. The image was surreal, threatening, as if, in some unknown future or universe, she had gone to the guillotine.

She quickly looked back to the only space that could still support life, the bed. Empty hamburger wrappers and paper cups were piled high enough to fall and begin spreading beneath, the tide rising around the woman’s last island of space.

No wonder she had reeked of despair.

Across the room was a small bath with barely enough space for a tub with a shower curtain around it, a commode, and a small sink. The bathroom looked as if it had been force-fed beauty products until it had foundered. Claustrophobia and compassion began to suffocate Polly. She had the answer, not only to the Devil card with its plea for help but to the bizarre and terrifying reading.

The woman was mad.

The weight of the horded misery pressed on her rib cage, making it hard to breathe. Whatever help this Woman in Red needed, it would be more than Polly could give. Turning to leave, she saw that the tub, too, had been filled. A great plastic sheet had been bundled into it and strapped ’round and ’round with packing tape.

Suddenly certain what she would find, Polly pulled back the shower curtain in one quick ripping motion that tore half of it from its hooks.

The cloudy plastic cocooned something very large and very red. Oddly empty of feeling, Polly stared down at the bundled dead. Why would the Woman in Red have thought she could help, could have stopped this? Polly had nothing to do with this poor thing’s life. No connection but the reading.

You will kill your husband.

At lunch with Danny Polly had told him the woman knew things that she had told no one but Marshall. Had Marshall shared them with this awful woman? A mind game? Gaslighting the new wife? Had he told this woman he was going to kill her, hence the Devil card in the mailbox?

When her house burned Marshall had called to awaken her and been there before the fire department to rescue her. And take her and her children into his home.

Like he’d wanted.

No time for her to think about it clearly, to get to know him better.

Once married, he’d become evasive, secretive, spending more time at work and with his brother than with her and the girls.

The emptiness in Polly began to fill with black ice. A sense of falling took hold of her and she knocked half a dozen oddments to the floor as she clutched the edge of the sink to remain standing.

Maybe the card had been sent so she would save this woman. More likely it had been sent so she would find the body. Why? In this hell hole of a place was there evidence hidden to frame her? Why would anyone frame an English professor for murder? To get custody of her children?

The ice began to break apart, slivers of cold knifing along her veins. Atop the body was a piece of lined, three-hole-punch binder paper crumpled into a fist-sized wad. She watched her hand float out over the sea of red-stained plastic and pick the paper up the way a mechanical arm in an arcade game might pinch up a stuffed toy.

She flattened it against the wall. In the top left corner, written in pencil, was a single sentence.

Why kids? Is killing them easier? More fun?

The handwriting looked like her husband’s.

Polly didn’t call the police. She’d not been raised to trust them and, until she knew why she had been dragged to this apartment to find what she had been meant to find, she would tell no one.

Taking the note, touching nothing else, she left the way she had come. She closed the apartment door behind her and wiped her fingerprints from the knob.

28

Polly rifled through two floors of her husband’s things and found nothing suggestive of murder, nothing of betrayal, only a man with simple needs and too many prescription drugs in his bedside table. Turning out small envelopes of collar stays and bundled business cards, she felt for the first time how little she knew of Marshall Marchand. They’d married in the fairy glamour of first love when nothing matters but the moment and the man.

If he had friends, there was no trace of them in his personal belongings. No family but Danny, no photographs of him as child.

Finally, she reached the cellar. Half a dozen boxes were stored on stacked wooden pallets. This high-water storage was set along the two-by-four studs bisecting the basement lengthwise.

One was out of alignment with the others, peeking from beneath a tarp as if it had been recently moved and hurriedly put away. Perhaps upstairs, in the sunlight instead of skittering like a cockroach around a dank basement, she might not have noticed it.

With the heightened awareness sleuthing engendered, Polly knew this was what she’d been searching for-whatever she’d been meant to find-and she eyed it with loathing. Lifting a stick from the scrap lumber bin, she used the end of it to push the tarp off of the carton then, again using the stick, flipped the cardboard lid off as if the box contained water moccasins.

When she saw it was free of snakes and three-quarters full of papers thrown in willy-nilly the anxiety didn’t lessen. Wishing she could walk away and accepting that she couldn’t, she gave up her stick, carried the papers to better light by one of the windows, and looked at the uppermost page: handwritten, no date, no name. She read the first line.

“I spend most of the time wondering if it feels good to kill people. A rush like good weed or what? And little kids, are they more fun? Killing them feel different?” Nearly the same words on the page in Red’s sepulcher. Had that been copied from this? Or a theme revisited?

Polly retrieved the page found at the tarot reader’s from her pocket and laid the pieces of paper side by side. The writing was not identical but that proved nothing either way. One’s own signature differs from signing to signing.

Polly flipped to the next. “I had the dream again last night. Blood all over me so fresh it’s warm, and me, laughing like a lunatic.”

And the next.

“Why an axe? Because you get more splatter? The only noise is screaming? It’s macho?”

“I think about killing all the time-I mean all the time. Day and night. I guess once wasn’t enough. Not like I’m jonesing to do it again, just thinking about it.”

The pages were not numbered and were in no apparent order. Some of the paper was college ruled, some wide ruled; some was graph paper. The random journaling of a deranged mind.

A deranged mind expressing itself in her husband’s handwriting.

Nausea took root in her, a poisonous plant with fast-growing vines, so harsh and voracious it doubled her over. Vomit burned the top of her throat. Her heart pounded bruisingly against her ribs. She made it to an old, cushionless wicker chair, collapsed, and hung her head between her knees.

Blanking her mind, Polly reined in the organs of her body bent on flying out of her mouth. Breathing in and breathing out, she slowed her heart. Self-preservation had always been strong in her, but never had it been as strong as after Gracie was born. Alone, Polly could fail; she could be severely injured; she could even accept dying. With two of the most precious little girls in the world depending on her, she looked both ways before she crossed streets and took her vitamins.

Emma and Gracie would not be back from the zoo until three-thirty. Marshall seldom got home before nine. Upstairs, she was guaranteed privacy and air-conditioning, but the idea of carting a box filled with sickness into the space where her daughters played was anathema. In life, there were poisons for which there was no antidote, filth no amount of Clorox could clean up. Mothers did not keep these things under the sink where children could get into them.

Polly compromised by bringing the box to the rear stairs where there was enough light to read. Sitting on the first tiny landing beneath the window where the narrow stairwell made its first twist, the file carton between her feet, she stared through the dirty glass into the backyard. Flowers were in full autumn glory. The garden’s lushness, shadow filled with color, usually soothed her. Now, she saw only steamy fecund overgrowth, dead flies on the windowsill, a spider waiting in its web to suck the life out of her neighbors.

With a repressed shudder, she turned her attention back to the carton and lifted a pile of newspaper and magazine clippings and computer printouts onto her lap.

“The Boston Boy Fiend,” “Bad Seed Kills Toddlers,” “Murder for Kicks,” “Jury Unconvinced in Phillips’ Case,” “Raines Indicted for Family Slaughter,” “BTK Killer Confesses,” “Speck ‘at Home’ in Prison.”

The stories chronicled children killing children, children killing parents or neighbors, wives killing husbands, mothers killing their babies, brothers killing sisters, Bundy and Speck and Gacy and Dahmer killing everybody.

“The Boston Boy Fiend” was a mimeograph-something she’d not seen for years-of an article written in 1874. “The Boston Boy Fiend has struck again, and the great tragedy is that this little girl did not have to die. After this beast in boy’s clothing confessed and was convicted of killing four-year-old Horace Mullen and sexually torturing seven others, he was released early by a reform school board that chose to ignore the court’s warnings. He has now been convicted of the brutal death of a ten-year-old neighbor girl.”

In fading blue ink, next to “sexually torturing seven… ” was scribbled in Marshall ’s idiosyncratic hand, “Why didn’t I do this?” and “Incest or pedophilia, take your pick.”

Nausea, temporarily quiescent, raged back. Eyes closed, Polly rode it out until the danger of vomiting or running screaming from the house abated, then pushed on.

“Bad Seed Kills Toddlers.” Another mimeograph. “1968 England ” was penciled at the top of the page. “Eleven-year-old Mary Flora Bell, ‘Fanny’ of ‘Fanny and Faggot,’ as they styled themselves, was today convicted of two counts of manslaughter for the slayings of two toddlers, one gone missing and believed to have perished of an accident three months previously, and the second, found four weeks later, dead of strangulation, the body mutilated.”

“Two toddlers” was underlined. In the margin Marshall had written, “Two? Shoot, and I thought I was the record holder.” Then, “Why little kids? Because they’re so easy?”

“Murder for Kicks” was clipped from a newspaper. No date, but the paper had discolored with age. “According to the testimony, Cindy Collins, age fifteen, and Shirley Wolf, age fourteen, were trying doors in their apartment building. They’d planned to get keys and steal a car, they said. An elderly woman let them in. Shirley Wolf confessed to pulling the woman’s head back by the hair and stabbing her to death. An autopsy report said the victim had been stabbed twenty-eight times. Both Wolf and Collins told the court that they thought the murder was “a kick.”

Scrawled at the bottom of the page was, “Stab an old dame for the fun of it. Kill for fun. That ought to stick in your mind.”

The sun moved down the sky. Heat and glare poured through the window. Sweat stuck Polly’s hair to her forehead and cheeks, glued her clothes to her skin. Flies battered against the window glass, a desperate buzzing that ran along her nerves like electricity.

The next article was headlined, “The Real Amityville Horror.”

An image of her home crawling with bloated flies flared up, so real she cried out. In true nightmare fashion, she couldn’t move; her legs would not lift her. She could no more escape that stairwell than could the flies.

She lifted out the rest of the newsprint and set it down beside her, unread. Beneath were scraps of pages, halves, or thirds, or quarters-not torn but cut clean with a razorblade or scissors. None had number sequences. Or if they had, they were cut off. A handful contained only a line or two of text.

“… the cat was dead, our old Ginger cat, and when I looked, her guts were all over my hands… I drown them… anybody tries to stop you, you just shoot them… I went from room to room and they were all full of blood; I started to laugh… When the other guys heard what I’d done, they looked… If I ever get a chance to do it again… fucked from the start… I had a knife in my hand, and I was chasing… mass murder. I can see myself doing that… biting chunks of flesh out… murders. Sure… ”

The scraps ran on in that vein unceasingly. Their deep-rooted sickness twined in through Polly’s eyes to her mind and she hated that she was a member of a race capable of such cruelty.

Further down, some pages were whole. Judging by paper type and ink color-or in some cases pencil-they were written on different days, maybe in different years. Sentence construction and uneven letter size suggested a young writer.

A young Marshall Marchand.

“Monster” and “child” were not antithetical to Polly. Lord of the Flies. The Bad Seed.

She picked up what looked to be the earliest writing, the oldest paper, the penciled letters awkward: “John List. Killed wife, mother, and three kids. 1971. Sure. I can see killing like this. This List guy had God on his side. That makes it work for him. He wants out of this family thing. He’s pussy-whipped, and his mother’s a nag, and he doesn’t have the balls to leave… ”

The next was in faded ballpoint:

“They just did what they wanted. Took what they wanted. Then died in a blaze of glory. That looks pretty good from where I sit.”

And again ink:

“Shooting the family starts to look pretty good. Sane even. Until you get to the kids. Maybe he figures they aren’t quite people; with eight of them they wouldn’t seem like an endangered species exactly, just a housecleaning issue.”

There was more but Polly put the papers and articles back into the carton and replaced the lid. Pandora repenting too late.

The writing was sick-making, violent, boastful, gloating, heartless, the profile of a man without a soul, a ghoul who gloried in causing harm. They were horrific. But Polly was not as shattered as she thought she should be. Having read critically countless thousands of passages, she couldn’t but see the contradictions in this-she sought a word-collection? Grouping? Opus?

The voice in the writing had been directed at the reader-no, at an internal judge. Perhaps they had been written during a period of severe abuse and meant to be read by an abuser or a therapist or aloud in a group therapy situation.

The span of time over which they were written suggested an outside influence, someone who required the pieces. The earlier words smacked of the braggadocio of a vicious killer preening, comparing himself to his godforsaken heroes, but they were childish in style and content. The comments written in subsequent years were oddly detached, as if jotted by an actor preparing to play a role, making notes, a character study of evil.

Or by a monster seeking to find where, in a monstrous universe, he fit. Seeking…

“Seeking to kill little kids,” she interrupted her thought aloud. “Wake up and smell the corpses, Pollyanna,” she snapped.

This wasn’t a Frankenstein monster of literature to be parsed and analyzed; this was her husband boasting that he “thought he was the record holder,” her beloved Mr. Marchand asking, “Why little kids? Because they’re easy?” The man who came to bed with her each night, wondering why he hadn’t sexually tortured seven children.

Tears began, then burned away. Sobs started, then froze in her throat. Her hands came up to cover her face, then fell helplessly onto her thighs. Anger flashed. By its lurid light she could see the fear at the back of her mind.

Like drops of quicksilver held on the palm, emotions slid away when she tried to touch them.

“This is real,” Polly said, and her voice was as tiny and sweet as Emma’s.

But not as innocent.

The absurdly delicate and graceful gold wristwatch Marshall had given her suggested it was close on two o’clock. The watch was beautiful and, like a true femme fatale, did not need to be exactly on time. The girls would be back in ninety minutes. Gracie was old enough that Polly could leave the two of them unattended for a little while, but she did not want them left alone.

What if Marshall came home?

She nearly gagged on the thought. Sweat was sticky on her skin. Flies lit on her arms and buzzed close to her eyes. Her legs were stiff. Her back ached as she forced herself up from the narrow step as if she’d been hunkered there a day instead of an hour. Still unwilling to allow the carton into the house, she left it in the utility area at the top of the stairs with the dryer lint and dirty laundry.

She showered, dressed in fresh clothes, and applied lipstick. In the kitchen, she scribbled a note for Marshall. “The girls and I will be staying with Martha.” That done, she called Gracie’s cell phone. “Honeybunch, can you get Mrs. Fortunas to take you and Emma to Aunt Martha’s instead of home? No, no, baby. Everything’s alright. I’ll explain later. Thank you, sugar.”

She gathered up the carton and headed down the basement stairs.

Danny was waiting at the bottom step.

“I thought that might be you,” he said with a smile.

The box in Polly’s hands grew as heavy as if she carried a decapitated head.

“What’ve you got there?” he asked mildly.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. The startled look on his face reminded her that the box contained only bits of paper, that she was a respectable woman passing through her own cellar.

He held out his hands for the file carton. “Do you need any help with that?” he asked politely.

The box jerked.

Danny laughed. “Did you get Gracie that kitten after all?”

“Kitten?” Polly said stupidly. Then it came to her, the kitten Gracie wanted for her birthday. “No kitten,” she said. “Just some papers Marshall wanted me to bring by the office.”

Reflexively, she glanced at the folded-back tarpaulin where she had taken the box from the pile. Danny followed her glance and she saw a flicker of emotion in his face, a rigidity that moved from his lips to his cheeks; a smile aborted or a sour thought too close to the surface.

He knows, Polly thought. The telltale heart. Edgar Allen Poe was a genius.

“I’m going out again in a minute,” Danny said. “I’d be glad to drop them by and save you a trip.” Again he reached for the carton. For a second, Polly wondered if he were toying with her.

29

The first bottle was empty; the second was headed in that direction. Emma and Gracie had long since been tucked into bed. Polly and Martha sat in the living room of Martha’s tiny turn-of-the-century house. Each detail of the place was exquisitely Martha. Fifty-three of her eighty-four years had been spent in this house. Bit by bit, it and the garden had been made over in her image: eclectic, smart, witty, and conveying a deep sense of contentment.

“I still think these sound like dreams,” Martha said. Her voice was cracked and high, like that of a boy whose voice is just changing. “I mean, listen; these are dream images.” Martha picked up several of the strips of paper piled beside her lounger and leaned into the circle of light from the table lamp.

“Think dreams: ‘I went from room to room and they were full of blood.’ You don’t say that about seeing bloody people. These are pictures from the subconscious: ‘full of blood.’” She read another. “‘I had chopped this little girl in half, but there wasn’t any blood on my hands or my clothes.’… I think Marshall was writing down his dreams.”

Polly had come with the intention of telling Martha the papers were from one of her graduate students about whom she was worried. They’d not gotten the cork out of the first cabernet before she told her the truth. The only detail she had omitted was that wretched tarot reader who, like Marat, lay dead in the bath. Martha would insist on calling the police. As a child, Polly had been infused with the sense the police were useless; the New Orleans PD after Katrina had done nothing to dispel that idea. When she had the facts, when she would only be ruining the lives of the guilty and not the innocent, then she would call the cops.

“This one’s classic,” Martha said. “‘The cat was dead, our old Ginger cat, and when I looked, her guts were all over my hands.’

“‘When I looked,’ it says. If you have cat guts running though your fingers, you know it. You don’t look and be surprised. This is a dream.” She shook the strips for emphasis.

Polly agreed with her but she had been fiercely arguing against the dream theory because she so desperately wanted it to be true.

“You may be right,” Polly admitted.

“I am right. Here’s another perfect example: ‘I kept hacking at this huge cop, and nothing was happening. He was taking the hits and smiling like I was hitting him with a feather, and I kept yelling… ’ Dream! Tell me that’s not a dream.”

“How about the rest of the pages and the newspaper clippings? They are not dreams,” Polly said. She sipped her red wine and held it in her mouth for a moment before swallowing.

Martha thumped her recliner down from its relaxed position and stared at the papers scattered all over the rug. When she was alight with ideas, with her bright colors and extra pounds, she put Polly in mind of a disco ball.

Scowling at the questionable materials, Martha pursed her lips. “This boy was abused. Major abuse. Somewhere along the line, he did something-or maybe just wanted to-and he decided he was a monster and not fit to live. From what we’ve been left to see… ”

Martha was still talking, but Polly’s mind had taken flight. “Yes,” she said loudly, interrupting the other woman’s flow. “Yes. Listen to what you’ve said. That’s it. You said, ‘What we’ve been left to see.’ This, the bits, the pieces, no names or dates to distract or inform, to check, this was made for us-me, I’d guess-to find and see. We weren’t allowed to see the whole. It’s been snipped, and trimmed, and tailored.

“Why do you tailor anything?” Polly demanded.

“To make it fit,” Martha answered.

“Yes. These pages were edited to tell a story. If the writer had simply dumped them in a box, why not dump it all? I cannot think what could have been left out that would be more damaging than what was left in. Therefore, things that were removed, were removed not to paint a prettier picture… ”

“But to paint a darker picture,” Martha finished.

“Yes!” Polly laughed her little-girl-gone-wicked laugh. “Oh, my, yes.”

They sat staring at one another as a cat might stare in the mirror, smiles filtering through schools of thought. Martha took a sip of her wine. Polly looked at the papers strewn over the floor. By Martha’s witnessing what she had found, discussing and studying them, the sinister magic Polly had granted the pages was dispelled.

Polly had not happened upon a can of worms. A can of wormlike objects had been placed for her to find; it made all the difference in the world.

“It makes no difference,” Martha said.

“It does,” Polly cried, and, realizing she sounded childish, she obeyed when Martha gestured for silence.

“It doesn’t.” Martha waved her hand over the mess. “Even if these have been arranged to make Marshall look as bad as possible, Marshall still did write this stuff. It’s his handwriting in the margins of the articles. Who else but he would edit it and put it where you’d see it? Why? Does he want to get caught, found out? Does he need you to see him in as bad a light as he sees himself? Regardless of his reasons, this is too volatile to gloss over. Marshall is in trouble. That means you, Gracie, Emma, even Danny are in trouble.

Against Martha’s good counsel and with her promise to look after the girls, Polly didn’t stay the night but left a little after twelve-thirty a.m. Driving down Carrolton Avenue, feeling the effects of the wine and the fact that the dead of night in New Orleans was deader than it had been pre-Katrina, she had no idea why she’d left.

Did she plan to slide into bed next to Marshall, curl up on his shoulder, her right thigh thrown across his legs, as she had done nearly every night since they had been married, and simply ignore the murders real, imagined, literary, and historical?

“What did you do today, my love?”

“Nothing much. Got groceries. By the way, darling, did you happen to kill anyone before you went to the office?”

Laughter frothed up, surprising Polly.

“I do so love that man,” she whispered. Through her mind tramped pictures of herself in the guise of countless battered women, torn and bleeding, teeth knocked loose, standing in front of tribunals of family and police, bleating, “But I love him!”

This was different.

Maybe they were all different.

Marshall had left the gate open for her. Since three feet of water and a magnolia tree had happened to it, it hadn’t worked properly. Still, she didn’t pull in behind the building. The parking area in the back garden was beneath the bedroom windows of both units. She did not want to awaken anyone yet. For a few minutes, she sat in the car, not knowing whether to stay or go, where to go if she went, what to say if she stayed.

Unsure of what she was doing-what she would do-she let herself quietly in the side door of the basement and locked it behind her. Cities were never seriously dark. The streetlights did not penetrate the frosted windows more than a few feet. Their glow served only to deepen the shadows. On a moonless night, the woods around Prentiss, Mississippi, had been as dark as the bottom of a mine. There had been plenty of nights Polly had run to that darkness because it would hide her until morning, when monsters turned back into people for twelve hours.

After the heat of the outdoors, the cellar felt cool. Feeling half a ghost, Polly glided to the back of the space on Danny’s side where dirt replaced concrete, where the boxes were piled, and sat down in the old wicker chair. Blanketed by night and reassured by aloneness, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. In the comforting darkness she had intended to formulate a plan, make a timeline, give herself in some way at least the illusion of control. Wine and weariness overcame her and she drifted seamlessly from waking to sleeping.

A sound brought her back, as alert and clear-headed as if she’d never dozed. The one functioning fluorescent on the far side of the cellar had been turned on. Through the upright two-by-fours and the fringe of rakes, shovels, picks, and other tools hanging from nails along the center beam, she saw her husband. Had he chosen to look, he could have seen her as well, but she didn’t think he would. He believed himself to be alone.

The ghost feeling strengthened and, with it, came a sense of power. Undoubtedly, the sensation that kept cat burglars burgling cats. Marshall had brought something down from the apartment. Walking toward her in his parallel universe, he took the object to the battered workbench. It looked like a broom or perhaps a new fluorescent bulb to replace the one that had burned out. Then he laid it on the bench and she saw it for what it was: an axe.

Her husband had had an axe in their apartment, in their home, and now, in the middle of the night when he thought she was away, he was bringing it down to the cellar. Her scalp crawled, hairs stiffening, skin shrinking around the roots.

This was the boy who bragged of killing toddlers and cats all grown up.

Polly watched with the burgeoning terror of a woman being pushed inexorably toward the lip of a high sheer drop as Marshall removed the lid from a can of paint thinner, soaked a rag, and carefully wiped the head of the axe clean. When he was done, he threw the rag to the floor and tossed a match on it. Sudden bright flame lit up Polly and her chair as surely as if she were in a spotlight center stage. Marshall never looked up. The flash of fire was gone almost as quickly as it had come, leaving the air smelling of chemicals and burnt cotton. With the slow methodical movement of a sleepwalker, he stomped out what was left of the cinders, fetched the push broom, swept the ashes into a dustpan, and emptied them into the trash.

Gacy and his crawlspace full of the corpses of rotting children rose in front of Polly, as real as if she’d been there and not merely seen it on television. She could smell the decaying flesh.

With precise, careful movements, Marshall hung the axe on the central beam, then crossed to the rear stairs. He didn’t climb them but sat on the bottom step, elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, and wept. Silent as the ghost she’d become, Polly rose to her feet, drifted across the concrete, out Danny’s back door, and into the garden. Soundlessly she slipped through the gate and got in her car.

Whether or not Marshall noticed, she did not know. She couldn’t bear to look back.

30

1:04 a.m.

Polly had become one of the city’s vampires, slinking about in the night, thinking of blood. That had to be what stained the axe Marshall had so melodramatically carried into the basement. Why else clean the blade with turpentine, then burn the cleaning cloth?

The Woman in Red’s blood? Had she been killed because she had warned Polly? Because he had shared Polly’s history with her? Or had he shared her history with the reader so she would warn her? Or did he do it for reasons only psychotics understand and never succeed in communicating to the sane?

She leaned her head against the Volvo’s leather headrest and closed her eyes. Not seeing was worse than seeing. Eyes closed, the pictures in her mind took on heightened sharpness. In what seemed like a moment-the time since that horrible pathetic woman had foretold Marshall ’s murder at her hands-the delightful life of a middle-aged English professor, in love for the first time, had become the stuff of B movies.

“Typecasting,” Polly murmured. Her mother had been fourteen and living in a trailer when Polly came into the world. Trailer trash.

“Why, my dears, I come from the Trash of Prentiss, Mississippi,” she said to an imaginary social elite. “My mother was trailer trash and my daddy, why, he was from white trash.”

Polly had taken what gifts she’d been given-from her mother the ability to endure, from her grandmother the ability to work, and, undoubtedly from some traveling Fuller Brush man, a good mind-and used them to get off that trash heap where life was cheap and dirty, broken washing machines lived in the front yard and old cars were put out to pasture in the weeds under the kitchen window.

Tonight, she felt as if, snakelike, time had coiled around on itself and she was once again a little girl caught up in a life comprised of cigarette butts, crumpled beer cans, and rotting rubber tires. Perhaps she was born into trailer trash for this very night-the gods’ way of preparing her for “that which must be overcome.”

She fastened her seatbelt and turned the Volvo’s ignition key.

She did not park on La Salle in front of the rundown fourplex but around the corner on a side street that was less trafficked and darker. As she locked her car, she questioned the wisdom of the transparent subterfuge.

What would she do if the car was stolen or broken into? Call the police? A life of crime was not as easy as one might think.

The door to the stairwell hung open, inviting her into absolute blackness, the maw of a leviathan with particularly unappetizing breath. Tom cats, either the four-legged or the two-legged variety, had been marking their territory with pungent regularity.

“‘The more it reeks, the less likely muggers and murderers are lurking within,’ said Pollyanna brightly,” Polly whispered.

Moving quickly in hopes of reaching the top of the stairs before she had to breathe, she entered the inky recess. On the narrow landing outside the door to the tarot reader’s apartment, she stopped. The climb was short but her heart was pounding as if she’d jogged to the top of the Empire State Building.

A push and the door opened. Feeling slightly foolish and terribly brave, Polly eeled in, closed the door behind her, and switched on the light. There was little danger it would give her presence away. The windows were covered with yellowed blinds and draped with everything from towels and sheets to a flowered bed skirt. The place was more lair than home, in the sense not that Red was an animal but that this was where she hid from the world. Quelling the knowledge that, in the bathroom, the body of a slain woman lay cocooned in plastic, Polly surveyed the bizarre landscape. She was put in mind of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend-the dust man, picking through mountain ranges of London ’s garbage year after year, looking for a lost treasure. Somewhere in the Woman in Red’s mountains of trash she would find answers to the questions she dared not ask her husband.

Lest it be swallowed up in the morass, she set her handbag on an overturned basket by the door and started in on the nearest heap like an archaeologist digging through the refuse of a lost civilization.

Within an hour she had moved three yards into the room. Where there had been hopeless disarray, there remained hopeless disarray, but none of it had gone unexamined. Stooping, crawling, sifting, Polly looked at each item-be it a dirty coffee mug or a slip of paper-then tossed it behind her. Because she didn’t know what she sought, she couldn’t afford to overlook anything.

Fatigue quickly wore out any sense of disquiet she suffered from sharing the apartment with the-one might assume-unquiet ghost of the murdered woman. Without consciously choosing to, Polly began talking with the Woman in Red, discussing her discoveries as she came upon them: “You like Arlo amp; Janice; I’m surprised you didn’t have a cat. Do you have a cat hidden in this mess? Here kitty, kitty. Red! Sorry, sugar, but I have just ruined one of your lipsticks. It’s all over the bottom of my shoe. I don’t suppose the cleaning lady will notice my tracks. My lord, girl, what were you going to do with all these purses? There is not enough money left in New Orleans to fill the wallets. You never used them did you? Look, this one still has the tag. You poor dear. It must have felt good to buy yourself a treat and a dream. A bargain at nine-ninety-nine. Lighters, and lighters, and matchbooks! It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested for arson. AARP! And a subscription! There must be forty magazines here. Sugar, I would not be caught dead with one of these in the house. Sorry, darling, you were caught dead. I read AARP secretly at the doctor’s office, like a little boy peeking at a Playboy magazine under Dad’s mattress. My dear you are braver and less vain than I.”

By three a.m., Polly had worked her way to the wall between the main room and the bedroom and bath. Her eyelids grated against her sclera, and her throat was raw from dust.

The corpse lying in the tub weighed more heavily on her mind now. So long deluged in the residue of the dead woman’s life, she had come to feel compassion for her and, finally, a kind of affection.

Sorting through her rag-tag belongings Polly learned that the Woman in Red loved Nancy Drew, Ethan Hawke, and a pro wrestler named the Mondo King. She loved shoes and scarves. A cigar box lined with blue velvet held treasured trinkets-from a lover, Polly presumed. The items in the box represented the only order in the apartment. A boy’s high school ring; a silver heart-not real silver, but silvery metal-on a tarnished chain, the kind won at fairs or bought in souvenir shops, with a V engraved on it in fancy script; three rosebuds, shriveled until they were more brown than yellow, long pins through the tape-wrapped stems; a pair of bead earrings; and a button were displayed in careful rows as if Red looked at them often, or once had. For Polly, this box was the saddest of a dumpsterful of sad items. Red’s inamorato had given so little of himself his gifts could be kept in a six-by-eight box, the whole not worth the cost of a pack of cigarettes.

Though the apartment was glutted with things, the cigar box was the only thing she found that was truly personal.

Polly was not given to the accumulation of worldly goods, but, had anyone gone through her house, they would have seen pictures of children and friends, letters from students, invitations accepted and declined, calendars marked with upcoming events, hand-drawn birthday cards, inscribed books, awards, diplomas, notes on bulletin boards-a short history of Polly Marchand in three dimensions. In Red’s plethora of objects nothing that spoke of her heart had surfaced, only evidence of compulsion, addiction, and depression. But for the cigar box, there was no indication that anyone had touched her life-or that she had touched the life of another.

“Keeps to herself,” Emily, the tarot reader, had said.

Filling the emptiness, Polly thought, looking at the mess of goods with which Red had surrounded herself.

Beneath the bed, where the Woman in Red had made her last stand, still using the furniture, still turning on the light, reading her magazines and smoking her cigarettes, Polly found the second personal item: a photo album embossed with oversized leatherette daisies in the psychedelic colors of the sixties, the kind a teenaged girl might have been given. In keeping with her usual style, Red had not put her memorabilia under the plastic page covers but jammed it in every which way.

Sitting tailor-fashion on the floor-whatever effluvia was there would surely be less toxic than that on the dingy bedsheets-Polly put the album in her lap and turned the garish cover. Between the first page and the cardboard were snapshots. They’d been taken by an old Polaroid instamatic and the colors had faded. Several were stuck together from being mashed against one another so long. There was a photograph of a man and woman standing on the steps of a brick house. A bicycle was overturned by the bottom step. A pretty little girl of eight or nine sat beside it smiling for the camera. Two other pictures of the family group featured the mom, the little girl, and a shy-looking teenager. The face had been scratched off the pictures of the older girl.

“That’s you, isn’t it?” Polly said to the ghost who kept her company. “You poor thing. Terrible to erase yourself like that. I would dearly love to wring the necks of whoever made you hate yourself.”

Polly set the pictures aside and turned the page. Again, photographs had been shoved in but not arranged. These appeared to be the “art” shots every young girl feels compelled to take when given her first camera. One shot had been taken through what looked to be a knothole. Three were of the house, the camera held at funky angles. The rest were long shots of a boy, the angle suggesting they’d been taken from an upstairs window. The indifference of the subject to the camera suggested they’d been taken in stealth. The distance was so great Polly couldn’t tell if the boy was happy, sad, handsome, or plain. He was white and in his teens; he could be any boy anywhere. In the faded Polaroids he mowed grass, fixed the tire of a bike, went in and came out of a two-story brick house. The photographer had taken twenty-four shots of him, a single roll of film.

Polly wondered if this unsuspecting model and the high school ring in the cigar box were related. Clearly, the Woman in Red had suffered a passion for him at one time, but Polly couldn’t see this boy giving his ring to the shy girl who’d scratched out her face.

Maybe she stole it.

“I’m sorry, sugar. That was uncharitable. I know you did not steal that boy’s ring,” she apologized to her invisible companion whose corporal self continued to rot in the tub in the next room.

Polly set these snapshots with the others. When she turned the next page of the album, yellowed newspaper came out in a crumpled wad.

“What is it with old newspaper clippings tonight? I swear I have not looked at this much newsprint since Gracie went through her parakeet phase,” Polly said, smoothing them out on her thigh. The newsprint would stain the linen, but after the first hour, she had decided to get the slacks cleaned and donate them to Goodwill. Between then and now, she’d decided to burn them instead.

“There must be forty articles!” Polly exclaimed. “I am not going to read them all, sugar. I don’t care how long you’ve been collecting them.”

“Raines,” she read aloud.

In the file box in the basement there had been a mention of the Raines trial.

“Damn.”

Without warning, the lights went out. Darkness struck like a blow. Shuttered, blinded and draped, midnight in the apartment was absolute. Disoriented, Polly grunted, a tired helpless sound comprised of exhaustion and surprise.

Darkness and silence-the air conditioner was no longer running.

“The power has gone out,” she said into the stillness.

Then she heard someone moving in the living room.

Polly had been immersed in the tarot reader’s sordid universe for so long her first thought was of the ghost of the Woman in Red. “Is it you?” she whispered before she could stop herself. A sharp intake of breath answered her. Ghosts had no need to breathe.

Noise from the other room died with her words. The man-surely a man-had stopped moving. Polly stopped breathing to listen. She hadn’t heard him come in. This was no opportunistic thief; he had been here before. Only someone with experience could negotiate from landing to living room in silence and without light.

Polly thought the day’s adventures would have drained her adrenal glands, but her heart pounded with such force blood rushing past her ears drowned all other sounds. In the utter, mind-breaking darkness she felt her senses reach out, ears straining, eyes widening, nostrils flaring, every system seeking information she might use to survive.

There was no question in her mind that survival was the issue. The Woman in Red’s killer was in the apartment. Violence permeated the air, a negative charge that raised the hairs on her arms. Raised in violence, Polly had never forgotten the edgy vibration in the void that preceded it.

Between one breath and the next, she understood what was meant by the cliché of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes. She had imagined it would be like a slide show on fast-forward, images of the good times one after another.

It was not like that. The whole of her life, who she was, what she had done-everything exploded at the same moment. A supernova of memory: people she’d fought against, those whom she had fought for, those whom she loved, and hated, and lost, and found. The life she had been handed and the life that she had made. Her girls at every age. The dirt of her childhood and the dirt of her garden. Evils she had run from and those she had embraced. The husband she’d left and the husband she loved. Axes and exes, birthday parties and pets, flat tires and spelling bees, labor, groceries, Emily Dickenson, shoes that pinched, tonsillitis. All of it was there.

Then it was gone. Polly slammed back into total darkness of mind and body. But not spirit. The images ignited a fury for life. She would not end up as another bit of trash on the floor of a garbage house. By the age of four, Polly was accustomed to escaping drunken men and mad women. On bad nights, she would come awake thinking she’d heard raging footsteps above her hiding place beneath the trailer.

She’d been so small then, she could wriggle through cat doors and wood piles, lie flat in high grass. Here, she had only darkness and silence. If the man in the other room had a flashlight, she was a dead woman. Seeing was to his advantage, and she wondered why he’d turned off the power.

He didn’t want to be recognized.

Because she knew him.

For a snick of time, the thought that it was Marshall robbed her of her desire to remain among the living. But her life was too rich to destroy in a snick.

“You will kill him,” she heard Red hiss. “You will kill your husband.”

Gracie and Emma, holding hands and laughing.

So be it, Polly thought.

Moving smoothly, each hand placed, each foot shifted with care and in silence, Polly stood up from the floor. Her limbs were not stiff, her back not sore. Adrenaline had seen to that.

“Unh!” came from the living room. Like her, the man was trying to move without sound.

He’d turned off the lights because he knew the paths through the house. But, over the hours, Polly had rearranged the garbage. Suddenly, she remembered how she had reconfigured the map of the mountains of junk, envisioning not just a vague image of where things were but a complete catalog of everything she had touched, where she had tossed it and how hard.

Total recall.

An English professor’s equivalent to lifting a tractor off a child, she thought and wondered why her brain still loved whimsy, why she was not paralyzed with terror.

Maybe because now she had something-someone-real to fight. At that thought her fierceness lost some of its punch. Physical strength was not an attribute she cultivated. Her fights had been of the intellectual variety. She’d gotten old enough to have an intellect by hiding and escaping.

These thoughts exploded in the same gestalt manner her life story had-seen and grasped in an instant. The man in the next room gave up on silence and blundered toward the bedroom. A lamp fell. With perfect detail, Polly saw where she had pushed it behind her on the path, the shade crooked, the wire wrapped around its base. Next, he would step on empty bourbon bottles.

He yelped and fell heavily. Polly took two steps back and melted into the closet. The soft wall of clothes, hanging and falling, heaped and sliding, molded to her back. The fabric beneath her feet absorbed the sound of her passage. The polyester wall pressed around her, snaked over her head, curled around her arms and hands, then enveloped her completely.

A scratching sound and a light flared from beyond the doorway.

The man had found one of the hundreds of books of matches Red had scattered among the magazines and cigarette butts. Polly pulled a scarf over her face, let it drop over her eyes. Whether it was so she would not be seen or so she could put off the shock of seeing the killer, she wasn’t sure. Through the thin fabric she could make out only shapes and light and dark.

The match expired. There was a sound of slithering papers and a muffled curse.

The AARP magazines.

Polly had tossed them over her shoulder one at a time after shaking each, in the event a note or picture had been thrust between the pages. They made a glossy slick where the path neared the doorway between the living and bed rooms.

Startlingly red light cut through the sheer fabric over her eyes and moved like a star into the bedroom’s firmament. It bobbed and danced, then, with a squawk, was shaken out.

The killer did not speak. No “I know you’re here,” or “Where are you?” or “It will do you no good to try and escape”-all good killer things to say. He did not speak even to curse when the matches burned his fingers or as he fell over one of Polly’s inadvertent traps.

He didn’t want her to recognize his voice.

Instinctually, Polly knew it was not because he intended to leave her alive. It was because he did not wish her to know him for what he was.

Another match was struck. This one came at her face like a fireball.

He’d seen her. He was going to set the closet on fire.

Before she could move, the match flamed out and welcome darkness veiled her. Footsteps moved away, shuffling as he waded through the ankle-deep castoffs on the bedroom floor. Through gauze, Polly watched a tall figure shrink as he squatted with his back to her. Three more matches were struck as he studied the picture album by the bed.

The situation was not going to improve for Polly. Soon, she would be found. He knew she’d been here, was here. He was probably the one who’d lured her here with the card, followed her when she returned after leaving the cellar.

Screw your courage to the sticking place, she told herself and, sucking in a lungful of air, yelling in her mind as she had once yelled before leaping into icy creeks, Here goes nuthin’! she exploded from the closet trailing clothes and screaming like a banshee. Her face masked by the scarf, blouses, skirts, and shoes scattering before her, she charged the crouching man. She plowed into him, shoving and stumbling. He went over; the match went out. The yards of fabric that had been so welcome when she hid tangled around her ankles and she crashed against the bed stand.

A hand clamped iron-hard on her left thigh.

Polly wrenched free and felt her way like a blind woman through the doorway to the living room, Red’s laundry like ghostly hands trying to drag her back. A softness coiled around her feet and she fell to her knees. Fingers raked her ankle, then wrapped around it, digging hard into her Achilles tendon. Pain dragged a cry from her.

Her attacker grunted with exertion.

And pleasure.

Scrabbling on sliding magazines, Polly was losing ground. The man’s fingers were wire cables, his strength enough to drag her backwards. Far stronger than she, he could have hammered her kidneys with balled fists; he could have thrown himself upon her and snapped her neck or slammed her head into the floor. He did none of these things; slowly, as if he savored the process, he was pulling her into himself, swallowing her as a snake would swallow a mouse. Garbage piled up under Polly’s chin, drowning her. Scrabbling on the glossy magazines, her hands found no purchase. When Gracie was a baby, too little to walk, she would crawl across the satin bedspread. Polly would catch her tiny, pink feet, pull her back into her arms, and kiss her, then away she would crawl again, laughing. Not Emma. Emma would roll over and kick out in anger.

Polly rolled onto her back, twisting her captured foot painfully. Using the foot that was free, she kicked with the desperation of the trapped. Animal sounds, grunts and shrieks and roars, poured from her. The killer held on, his faced pressed against her leg. She could feel the wet heat of his breath through her trousers. His mouth was working up behind her knee to her inner thigh, as if he would chew into her. Polly struck out again and again and felt her foot glance off his back, his shoulders. Finally her heel struck bone, smashing part of his head or face.

Her captured leg broke from his hands. She kicked again, then scooted backwards like a crab. Before she got to the door she must have turned and stood, but she remembered none of it. By luck or instinct, her hand found her purse on the overturned basket. Grabbing it, she hurtled down the steps and out into the street. Maybe she was chased; maybe she wasn’t. Her escape made so much racket, she couldn’t tell.

Outside, streetlights seemed preternaturally bright and endlessly reassuring. She ran toward her car.

Hands shaking so badly she could scarcely get the key into the ignition, she started the car and drove across Jackson Avenue, then into a smaller street. At each corner, she turned. As she crossed Louisiana Avenue, she watched the rearview mirror. After all the evasive maneuvers, she realized she was praying the murderer had followed, praying she would see a black SUV or a sleek sedan tailing her.

Anything but a cherry red, mint-condition, 1949 pickup truck.

Charles Whitman. Texas Clock Tower. I can see myself doing that. Not right now (no gun, ha ha). Charlie is this marine, right? So, he likes guns and has them. Maybe he’s got this wife that needs stuff and maybe she’s even nice and all but she NEEDS stuff and she’s always at him. And maybe at school he’s got these teachers yammering at him to get stuff. Maybe old Charlie got to thinking everybody was eating him, biting chunks of his flesh out, and he was running out of flesh. Pretty soon he gets to feeling the whole world is made of biters, so he gets his rifle out and decides to take a few biters with him when he goes. Yeah, I could see doing that.

31

Marshall had not cried in so long his body did not know how. Sobs sawed out in anguished groans. Hot and niggardly tears crept from the corners of his eyes. His shoulders and arms jerked as if he fought to free himself from the clutches of sharp-nailed fingers.

The fit lasted only minutes. Tears were not cleansing; there was no relief, only an ache in his gut where muscles had clenched in a vain attempt to vomit out the unvomitable.

Breathe, you psycho fuck, he ordered himself and drew in warm air, thick as night, exhaled noisily, and again took a lungful of the static air. A semblance of sanity returned with the oxygen. He looked up at the basement’s center beam.

The axe hung where he’d put it not five minutes before. It had not migrated up the three flights of stairs to secrete itself under the bed like an ogre in a children’s story. It had not flown out of the darkness like a sentient thing, a bat spiraling upward in the night to prey on the innocent. That was a comfort of sorts.

The cellar was dark enough the newly cleaned metal gleamed only in Marshall ’s mind’s eye. Still he reached up and flicked off the overhead lights. True or not, TV crime shows had him convinced that scrubbing with turpentine would not be enough. A crime scene investigator would spray the axe with a magic substance and it would glow blue where blood had seeped into the wood, clotted in the crevices between handle and head.

There is no crime scene, he told himself.

A key grated in the outside door. Polly had come home.

“No!” he cried as the door swung inward.

Danny screamed, high, wild.

“Sorry, man. It’s just me, Marshall.”

“Damn it!” Danny yelled.

“Sorry,” Marshall said.

“The door’s unlocked in the middle of the night. What the hell… What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Had Marshall not known his brother never took any drug but aspirin, and that sparingly, he would have thought he was high on something with an edge. “I live here,” Marshall said. “Take it easy. Sorry I startled you.”

Danny closed the door, shutting out most of the light. For a second, Marshall felt threatened. Instinctively, he stood up.

Threat vanished-that or he had imagined it.

“Sorry myself, brother,” Danny said. “I shouldn’t have gone off like that. Scared me is all. Door’s not locked, you yelling from the dark. I jumped so high, I’m surprised I didn’t bash my brains out on the ceiling.” Danny turned the lights back on and looked at Marshall.

“What are you doing in the basement in the dark anyway? Where’s Polly? The kids? You don’t look so good, Marsh.”

“Polly and the girls are staying at Martha’s,” Marshall said wearily and, the effort of standing suddenly too great, sat on the step again.

Danny sat next to him. The closeness was comforting. His brother glanced toward the center beam that bisected the cellar.

“It’s there. I just put it there.”

“I wasn’t looking for the axe,” Danny said. The lie was kind but transparent.

“It wasn’t there last night,” Marshall said. “It was upstairs. Under the bed for Christ’s sake. Like before.”

“And you don’t… ”

“No. I don’t remember a thing. I’m a fucking werewolf. At night I turn into a predator and wander the streets thirsting for blood. Goddamn.” He rubbed his face, as if he could scrub the image from his mind.

“You’re too hard on yourself, Marsh. Nobody’s been hurt.”

“There was blood on the axe, Danny.”

Danny said nothing. Marshall didn’t appreciate it. He needed the reassurance of excuses made up by somebody other than himself.

“You’re sure it was blood?” Danny said finally.

“Pretty sure. There was a lot of it, smeared over the blade, the butt, down the handle.”

“Like before.”

“Yeah. I brought it back down, cleaned it with paint thinner, then burned the rag. A criminal mind, no doubt.”

“Maybe it wasn’t human blood,” Danny offered.

“That makes it better? Sneaking around the neighborhood hacking dogs to death? There’s no way out, Danny. Psychotherapy is crap, and the psycho pharmaceutical companies haven’t come up with a drug for the likes of me. I can’t keep screwing around with half-assed theories. It’s too dangerous. Polly, Gracie, Emma… ”

After a minute, Danny asked, “What does that leave?”

“Suicide.” Marshall laughed.

“Don’t say that!” The fear in Danny’s voice was sharp. “Ever. You’re with me for the long haul brother. You and me. You don’t get to cut out early.” He put his arm around Marshall ’s shoulders. “We’ll get through this. I will see to it that we get through this. Have you been taking the Valium before bed? One of the worst things you can do is let yourself get overtired.”

“Pretty much. They knock me for a loop.”

“They’re fairly mild. You’re just so keyed up, it feels like they knock you out. Your body needs to rest. Wait here.”

Danny stood and looked down. “Will you promise… ”

“I’m not going to off myself with the table saw while you run upstairs,” Marshall said. Danny smiled crookedly.

The sound of his brother’s footsteps climbed into the air behind his head where the stairs corkscrewed up. Marshall loved this building. The rooms were full of light. There’d been so many windows and doors-front, back, balcony, and cellar doors-they’d made them all open with a single key so they wouldn’t be carrying key rings the size of janitors’.

Danny’s steps descended again, the thip, thip, thip of soft-soled shoes spiraling back down. For some reason it made Marshall think of Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.

“Here.” Danny poured half a dozen small white pills into Marshall ’s palm.

“What is it?”

“Valium. The same old thing in a new bottle. The drug reps give me so many samples, I could relax half the Third World. I can run back up and get the literature if you want.”

“Never mind. Thanks.”

“Take two-three won’t hurt you. Get some sleep.”

“Sure,” Marshall said. Danny squeezed his shoulder.

“Go to bed. That’s what I’m going to do. Good night, brother.” Danny’s footsteps corkscrewed upward. Marshall heard his kitchen door click shut.

He stared at the tablets.

You get, you share.

The thought made him smile.

Even in the bad times, there were good times. By virtue of their rarity, they were experienced more keenly, remembered more fondly. Maybe that was why men remembered their wars with such relish. Maybe that’s why he’d never had the tattoo removed.

He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and looked at the old marks. Crude green slashes, once sharp but now blurred and faded with age, formed the numbers one and three and the fraction one-half. A classic prison tat. He’d been anesthetized with cheap bourbon one of the “girls” had gotten from a guard in trade for a blow job. The tattoo artist had been as drunk as the rest of them. Marshall remembered the sting, and the blood, and the laughter.

“Thirteen and a half,” Draco had said. “One judge, twelve jurors, half a chance.”

Marshall pushed the sleeve back down and looked again at the pills. He’d sworn off illegal drugs a long time ago. He didn’t trust doctors and he hated “mental health professionals” of any stripe. Now he was a prescription junkie, hunkered over in a basement with a fistful of unidentified pills, joking about suicide.

How the hell had that happened?

Tippity.

After he’d nearly frozen Elaine’s dog, the nightmares had come back-not as bad as when he was a kid but bad enough-and Danny had given him something to help him sleep. Danny got them as samples that came in small brown envelopes.

Marshall had taken them for a year or so after the Tippity debacle, then quit. When he married Polly, Danny worried he’d go into whatever the hell it was he went into when “emotionally charged”-Danny’s term for love-and suggested he start again. “Keep the monsters at bay,” Danny’d said.

Though Marshall hated to admit it, after so long alone, he didn’t sleep well with someone else in the bed. And he’d been more scared of the monsters than he’d wanted to admit. So he took the pills.

“Same old thing in a new package,” Danny’d said.

Same old Butcher Boy of Rochester in a new package?

32

Thirteen and a half.

The tattoo brought back memories Marshall hadn’t allowed out of his subconscious for twenty-five years at least. Not even the good memories; for Marshall, it had never been possible to pick and choose. The flood-gates were open or they weren’t. Tonight had opened them with such suddenness, the images carried him like a leaf on a tide rushing back. The past rose around him, as the waters had risen when the levees broke, and he watched with the same sense of helpless, frightened wonder.

Draco. Dr. Kowalski. That stupid Swede, Helman or Herman. Dr. Olson. Phil. Phil Maris, his math teacher, the guy who taught him to build in his mind, the guy he’d dropped acid with. They guy who’d abandoned him then saved him.

Marshall was not merely remembering; people from his past were with him. He could smell the perennial cigarette stink of Draco’s hair. Phil smiled, and Marshall was a proud teenager. Then Kowalski leaned back in his chair.

Marshall snapped out of the living memory and into his cellar.

God, he had hated Kowalski. Most of Ward C hated Kowalski. Dozens of punk criminals, including one mass murderer and two knife wielders, and yet nobody had killed the psychiatrist. What a waste of talent. After the acid trip gone awry he’d never seen the bastard again. The joke in the ward was that since he’d tried to kill Kowalski, that proved that he was innocent.

Tried was the key word. Draco started it, saying if he couldn’t off that spineless fuck, he was obviously a washout as a stone-cold killer, and somebody else must have done his family.

He had never seen Phil Maris again either. The morning he got out of the infirmary, his brain still scummed with LSD, the warden announced that Phil had taken a better job in St. Cloud. It was midterm; Phil hadn’t said anything about any job, and he hadn’t said good-bye to anybody.

The “better job” was as much bullshit as Kowalski’s “better job” had been.

For a while he looked for letters, waited on visitors’ day, but there’d been no contact. The warden refused to give him Phil’s new address so he could write. He’d tried to talk to Rich about it, but Rich had taken a dislike to the algebra teacher.

When he asked the staff about Phil they got cagey, like people used to get when a girl got pregnant in high school. “She transferred,” they’d say, or “she’s visiting her aunt in another state.” Then they’d look at each other in that certain way.

Phil had fucked up somehow and gotten thrown out. Not fired; if that had been the case, there wouldn’t have been the slitty-eyed smirks and knowing looks.

A year or so later, he’d heard that Phil really was teaching high school in St. Cloud, so maybe it wasn’t total bullshit.

After the initial weirdness of Phil’s disappearance wore off, he’d let it drop. In juvie, weird was a way of life. Questioning it was not only a waste of time but could get a kid in trouble. Looking back, Marshall wondered why the staff had done the “little pitchers have big ears” routine after Phil left. If he’d been canned for dropping acid, they’d have said so, used it as an object lesson against the evils of drugs.

And Dylan hadn’t been a “little pitcher.” At fifteen, he was five-ten, one hundred sixty pounds, and a convicted murderer. What could be so bad they wouldn’t want to sully his underage ears with it? If they thought they were protecting his innocence, they’d been three corpses too late.

Then out of the blue, two years later, Phil gets him out of Drummond. He didn’t see Phil and Phil never contacted him. It had been done behind the scenes. Since Dylan hadn’t been into looking gift horses in the mouth at that juncture, he’d let it slide. Marshall had let it slide as well. Working hard to put “Dylan, boy monster” behind him, he’d been relieved to move out of Minnesota, change his name.

Be a “real live boy” for a change.

Marshall laughed. The sound rang hollow in the hot damp of the cellar.

Dylan Raines was never going to be a real live boy. One day, the poor little bugger was going to remember the murders, and Marshall’s house of cards, complete with a cardboard marriage and borrowed family, was going to come crashing down.

With a rush of yearning startling in its intensity, Marshall wanted to see Phil again, show him how he’d turned out, and thank him for teaching him to build with his mind. He wanted to do it before the house fell. The need was so strong, it lifted him half off the step, as if he was going to run to the phone or the train station and look up his old teacher.

Surely, with the electronic ears and eyes everywhere, trails left by each purchase, every plane ticket, telephone calls, he could track him down. Phil Maris wasn’t that much older. He was only…

“Nearly seventy,” Marshall said aloud. He sank back down onto the step. The man might be dead; might not remember a murderous child who’d loved him forty years ago.

Without Phil, and his brain puzzles, and the garden they’d started together that last night, Dylan would have stayed Butcher Boy.

“Thank you,” Marshall said to the dark ceiling. “Wherever you ended up. If you hadn’t gotten me out, I’d undoubtedly have more tattoos and fewer teeth.”

The day of his release from Drummond unfolded in Marshall ’s mind. The man from the department of corrections, Mr. Leonard, had turned out to be alright. He’d helped with college, moving, and, though it went against his stolid Midwestern way of life, even the name change Danny had wanted.

Overweight, late forties back then, Mr. Leonard was probably dead by now. Marshall missed him as well. Dylan missed him not at all.

Maybe because Mr. Leonard hadn’t liked Phil. At the time, Dylan made a half-hearted effort to get Phil’s phone number so he could express what passed for gratitude in those days. Mr. Leonard refused. He said, “You’ve got no need to go contacting him. He owes you this much and more.” Dylan didn’t waste time trying to figure it out. Soul-searching-his or anybody else’s-was a pastime he never dared mess with. He was free and shaking the Minnesota snow from his boots.

Decades later, Marshall was wondering why Mr. Leonard disliked Phil so much. Leonard had seemed like a good guy, straightforward. Dylan’s release might have been won by Phil, but it was orchestrated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections. It mattered to Leonard. Why would he hate the man who had been instrumental in making it happen? And what on earth could Phil Maris owe Dylan for?

Dylan believed, while his brain was scrambled, he’d said something about them dropping acid together and that’s what got Phil booted out of Drummond. Nobody ever said anything about it; so, after a while, Dylan had relaxed on that count. Besides, a lot of the guards did a hell of a lot worse than drop acid with their little charges and they never got reported. They just disappeared.

Child molestation.

“Holy shit,” Marshall murmured.

Phil wasn’t fired for dropping acid. He was fired because he’d dropped his pants. Marshall felt the betrayal as if it were yesterday, and he was still eleven years old. Phil was doing the boys. He started to cry again, rusting machinery grinding painfully. Abruptly, he stopped. Anger flared too hot for tears. Lightning-fast he smashed his fist into the wall between the studs.

“Crap,” he yelled. “That has got to be crap.” Phil never touched Marshall -Dylan. He didn’t do anything out of line, not once, not a look, not a smirk, nothing for four years. Phil never messed with any of the other guys either, not that Marshall knew of. And he would know. Everybody would know. The algebra teacher didn’t get talked about, and in lockup, there was nothing much to do but talk. Guards never snickered or sneered when he came by. There was nothing.

Phil wasn’t buggering his students.

“Why do you care now, for Christ’s sake?” Marshall asked himself. But he did care. A lifetime later, and he cared a lot. Phil was a hero in a world where there were too few heroes and more than enough villains to go around. He’d loved Phil. He’d told him so after the acid trip that had landed him in the infirmary.

No, he’d told Danny. Was that why Phil had gotten thrown out of juvie? Because a doped up kid said he loved him, and somebody figured it was more than just spiritual?

Marshall shook his head and then lowered it into his hands, his elbows braced on his knees to take the great weight of his thoughts. “Damn it.”

His life was coming apart, his wife was leaving him, and this was the time he’d chosen to lurk in the basement worrying about Phil Maris, who was most likely dead, or retired, or had rejoined the Peace Corps and gone to some disease-ridden hole to help more boys.

Pebbles pressed into his cheek. The pills. Danny’s pills. Something to help you sleep.

Marshall reached up and flipped on the stairwell light. His brother had said they were Valium. Marshall threw a couple of them into his mouth to swallow dry but a strangeness made him spit them back into his palm.

There was a wrongness about them. A wrongness about a lot of things. His on-again, off-again memory that worked fine between murders and attempted murders of small dogs; an axe that he didn’t remember using forty years ago but suddenly took to carrying up and downstairs in his sleep; Phil getting canned the day after Kowalski’s acid experiment; Mr. Leonard saying, “He owes you.”

Marshall desperately needed put the pieces together, but what he had weren’t solid enough to be referred to as pieces. Drifts of fog. Whispers in the dark. A long time ago Marshall had learned never to seek out the dark corners of his mind, never to listen to unauthorized murmurs. At eleven, he’d taken his dad’s old wood-chopping axe and butchered his mother, father, and his little sister, Lena. Then he killed Ginger, the family cat. All those years that quack Kowalski had been trying to get him to remember, Dylan had been trying to make sure that he didn’t. Not remembering was the only reason he didn’t have to be fed with a spoon or peeled off the ceiling every morning.

Dylan didn’t want to remember, and Marshall refused to look at those years. Both man and boy knew remembering would be the end of it. Nobody sane could stay sane having that knowledge in their bones.

This was the first time since the night Dr. K. and Phil had been thrown out of Drummond that he had thought about the bad old days. Or about how the bad old days had come along into the good old days, robbing him of Elaine and, now, of Polly, Emma, and Gracie, just as he had robbed himself, Rich, and the world of his mother, and dad, and little Lena.

Polly and her goddamn tarot cards.

A wrongness there as well. Marshall might be an insane mass murderer, but he wasn’t crazy enough to think a raddled old woman, subsisting on tourist donations, was privy to the secrets of the universe. Or his wife’s mind.

It was a trick. A con’s trick. It had to be. Somehow the reader had gotten hold of memories Polly thought were a secret. She must have told someone.

“No!” Marshall said abruptly.

She had told someone. She’d told him.

33

The habit of doing as his brother told him was strong, and Marshall took himself upstairs. He stopped beside the bed, where he’d taken to standing in recent days, doing his Superman routine, trying to look through the mattress with his X-ray vision to see if he had unwittingly secreted an edged weapon beneath. Tonight, he wasn’t looking for the axe. He was fixated on the pills Danny had given him.

Any other night, he would have swallowed a couple without much thought, looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Tonight, he found he had to know what the pills were. Exactly what they were. What they did. Who made them. What the side effects were.

So much was out of whack. Not so much that it showed up readily, not so much that people dialed 911 or checked into Betty Ford, but wrong-a note played sharp, a ping in the engine. When he got this feeling on a job site, he’d stare and pace, sometimes sleep at the construction site, waiting for the dishonest color or anachronistic pattern to reveal itself.

His wife and brother came and went in the dead of night like actors in a French farce.

An axe appeared and disappeared.

A scribbled note on the counter.

A tarot reading that told secrets and made threats.

There was nothing he could do about flitting axes, nothing he could say that wouldn’t frighten Polly further from him. But he could identify the medications he put down his throat night after night.

In less than a minute, Marshall descended the backstairs to his brother’s kitchen door. “Danny,” he called. “It’s me. Open up.” A light showed under the sill, but there was no response. “Hey!” He knocked and tried the knob. The door was locked.

A quick trip to the cellar for a spare key, and he let himself in. Music played softly-a sonata of some sort. Despite Danny’s efforts, Marshall managed to remain fairly ignorant in the field of performing arts.

“Dan? Danny?”

The bed was made, the towels in the bath dry and neat.

“Where the hell… ”

Danny’d said he was going to bed. Marshall pulled apart the slats in the blind and looked into the garden. His brother’s car was gone, the gate left open. Unless Danny’d left by the front door, Marshall would have seen him. Regardless of how Danny departed, Marshall should have at least heard the car leave.

He must have pushed the car out-easy enough with the gentle slope and concrete pad-and left the gate open. Why? Didn’t want to wake his brother? Danny wasn’t that considerate. Where had he gone at three in the morning-or four, or whatever the hell time it was?

To get lithium for his psychotic brother?

Psych ward. Cootie central. Marshall suppressed a shiver. It had been bad enough when he was a kid. Now, it would probably kill him. Shrugging off the thought as he had shrugged off legions of bat-black thoughts, he went to Danny’s office.

Marshall switched on the lamp. Magic beans, he thought, as he spilled the pills onto the smooth metal surface of the desk. Their shape was distinctive, but there was no lettering stamped on them. They might be too generic to trace. He found the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the bookcase, opened it on the desk, and searched by color, size, and shape. The pills were not generic.

They were Ambien.

“Take two, three, if you think you need it. Valium,” Danny had said.

Marshall knew little about prescription drugs-he left that to his brother-but Ambien had been in the news. One of the side effects was amnesia. If the person taking it did not go to sleep, he was likely to do any number of things that he wouldn’t remember in the morning.

Was that what he’d done? Taken the drug, played with axes, refrigerated Chihuahuas, and God knew what else, then gone back to bed and woken without any memory of it?

Why would Danny give him a drug that caused the very thing they’d both worked so hard to avoid? Why tell him the drug was a mild form of Valium?

The foundations of Marshall ’s life were as sick as New Orleans after sitting so long in poison waters. Buildings were tilted. Doors would no longer close. Windows no longer stayed open. Cracks appeared.

Wading carefully through treacherous waters, he opened his brother’s filing cabinet. With all his wealth and taste for fine things, Danny lived a monkish life. What he had was of the best quality, but he needed little and kept what he had in rigid order. Unsure of what he sought, Marshall thumbed quickly through household bills, warranties, computer manuals, and the leases for the rental properties Danny owned.

Four, Marshall knew of; he’d done the design work on two and found Danny a crew to reroof a third. The fifth lease, filed under the letter V was new to him. An apartment building in the slums of Center City. Because it was different, because it was secret, Marshall pulled the file from the drawer. One of the apartments was let to V. Werner.

Vondra Werner. Rich had sex with her when he was thirteen; that’s what he was doing while his little brother orphaned him. Vondra had been obsessed with Rich, still begging him to let her drive him to Drummond three years after he got his driver’s license.

Vondra was in New Orleans, and Danny had given her an apartment. Secretly. Marshall glanced at the contract. Secretly and rent free. Vondra Werner was Danny’s-what? Paramour? As far as Marshall knew, Danny didn’t have lovers-not women, not men. Evidently, Danny didn’t tell him everything. Not like he told Danny everything.

The rental agreement listed her profession as “Tarot Reader, Jackson Square.”

Polly’s tarot reader?

Marshall put the lease back in the file. A sense of inevitability locked on his brain. Marshall would know. Kowalski had been right; the truth was locked in his skull. He left the office for the bedroom. Danny was too private a person to keep personal items in his public spaces.

The master bedroom was the width of the building, thirty-three feet wide and twenty-two deep. The bed, raised on a shining black dais like an altar to sleep, was at the far end from the door. Exercise equipment, coupled with Danny’s taste for chrome and steel, leant the room a futuristic look. Marshall had found the bureau for the room. It was shaped like a classic Chippendale, but the entire surface was mirrored.

He opened the top drawer.

An oval box, sterling silver with tortoiseshell inlay and spindly piano-shaped legs, nestled among the tie clips and collar stays. Crying out, Marshall gathered it up gently, as if it were a living thing, and carried it over to the bed.

The box had belonged to their mother. She kept it on her dressing table. Since the police had dragged him from the house, it was the first and only relic Marshall had seen from his old life. He’d refused anything from the house. He kept no pictures, and he never asked what Danny did with the place or its furnishings. Danny had inherited a chunk of money, as well as the house, when their folks died. Marshall had never asked what the numbers were. Given he’d hacked them to death, it seemed cold to ask about the payoff.

Marshall wanted nothing from his childhood; he was afraid of the memories that would be evoked. Sitting on Danny’s bed, he was stunned at how good it felt, cradling his mother’s jewelry box. There were memories in it, he knew, but his mother’s shade would not let them cut too deeply. Polly had taught him that; mothers forgave their children. Even the monsters.

The silver box closed with a tiny catch on the left-he marveled that he remembered. He flicked the lock with a fingernail and opened it. On the brown velvet lining lay the simple gold cross his mother had worn every day of her life. She was wearing it the night she was killed. Marshall had seen it fall from her robe when she leaned down to kiss him goodnight.

Beside it, much tinier, was another cross on a chain. It wasn’t real gold, and the chain was sturdier. To Lena, it had been perfect because it was just like Momma’s. Once it had been fastened around her neck, she refused to have it taken off. It had been a wonder she never lost or broke it. Marshall smiled at the memory of his little sister, then abruptly stopped, waiting for the memory of how she died to overlay it.

The picture in his mind of a round-cheeked two-year-old, blonde hair in wispy curls, her precious gold cross pulled up on its chain and stuck in her mouth, wavered but held. “Hey, Lena,” he whispered. He’d never dared remember her, except fleetingly and as an addendum to something else.

Marshall pinched up a copper disk the size of a nickel. On the back was engraved: “Ginger Raines. 1341 Epcott.”

The cat’s tag. Ginger had a red leatherette collar, he recalled, with a tag on it. Not knowing what it was doing in his mother’s box, he put it back and lifted out their dad’s wedding ring. On the inside was inscribed, “Frank, my hero.” A private joke they hadn’t lived long enough to share with their children. Laying the ring in the center of his palm, Marshall looked at it in the unilateral light of Danny’s bed lamp. Their father had been proud of the scratches in the soft gold. “A wedding ring is for life,” he’d tell his sons. “No need to take it off. Like love, time only makes it more beautiful.” Marshall had forgotten that. He had forgotten much of his life. Eleven years. Like it was a book he read once and never thought of again.

The last item in the jewelry box was a pair of silver-toned hockey sticks, a pin Dylan’s fourth-grade team had won. Between ages seven and ten, he’d had a passion for hockey. The Fighting Marmots-a name as inexplicable as it was hard to chant-had taken first at state. He was way too cool to wear the pin, but he’d liked to look at it when Rich wasn’t around to rag him.

Never a sentimentalist-his life had not been the kind Hallmark wrote cards about-Marshall was taken aback at how much he wanted to hold on to these keepsakes.

It was foolish to believe their owners lived on through them. Foolish to believe. To feel it was a different thing.

Again he lifted out his mother’s cross, supporting it by the slender broken chain.

It must have been taken from her body before the burial and given to Rich. Marshall thought about that, as he watched the golden cross turning hypnotically.

Mr. Kroger, their dad’s partner, had made all the arrangements. Rich told him that the first time he’d visited him in Drummond. There was no funeral-Mr. Kroger had the bodies interred as soon as the autopsies were completed-but they were going to have a memorial service when the news people quit dogging everybody concerned.

Marshall tried to picture their dad’s rough-voiced partner. He’d seemed like such a big man and so old, but he couldn’t have been more than forty-five. He’d liked Dylan, and used to growl at him, and act like he ate children. It would sound sinister to tell but it wasn’t. It was fun.

The forensic pathologist must have removed the wedding ring and the necklace. Marshall couldn’t picture Mr. Kroger prying his dad’s wedding ring off. No one would pry off a man’s wedding ring before burying him next to his wife. At least no man from Minnesota. The same went for the gold crosses. The undertaker, the pathologist, the preacher, Mr. Kroger, all would have sent them to God with their bearers.

Closing his hand on the shards of his boyhood, Marshall felt the points of the cross and the hockey sticks pushing into the flesh of palm and fingers. This was all that remained of who he had been before he was Butcher Boy.

The round smoothness of his father’s wedding ring clicked against the gold of Marshall ’s own wedding band, and he wondered why his mother’s ring hadn’t been in the jewelry box as well.

With that thought, the warm and fuzzy memories blasted out of his mind.

One ring had been taken and one left on its finger. Because Dylan had his mother’s cross for a souvenir and didn’t need anything else.

Dylan had taken the jewelry from the corpses after he killed them, and Rich had kept it for him. Kept it from the cops, more likely.

Who the fuck do you think you are, Psycho Boy? The Beaver? Dennis the Menace? Some cute little boy, prone to mischief? You fucking butchered everybody.

“I was eleven years old, for God’s sake,” Marshall whispered. “I was a little boy.”

The necklaces, Lena ’s and his mother’s, would have been drowned in their blood. Marshall was shaking his head, trying to see himself digging through matted hair and brains to steal away the last glitter of their lives.

“No,” he cried out and opened his hand: the crosses, the ring, the hockey pin, the brass tag.

There was nothing there of Rich’s. Dylan’s pin was there, in the box with the things taken from that night. Dylan. Mom. Dad. Lena. Even Ginger the cat.

Rich wasn’t there. If Dylan took them, why would he keep a memento of himself and not of his brother, another of his intended victims?

34

The emergency gas can Danny carried up the narrow stairs didn’t have more than a gallon in it, and the fuel was several years old, but from what he’d seen of the rat’s nest upstairs, it should suffice.

He was fairly sure Polly had no idea who’d attacked her, but she had to suspect it was Marshall. There was enough evidence Marsh could end up in prison-grown-up prison-for the rest of his life. Kicking the door open, he picked his way through the dark rooms using the flashlight he’d taken from the trunk when he’d retrieved the gasoline. The narrow beam played across the unmade bed, the littered floor, Vondra’s scrapbook.

He wondered if Marshall was featured in it, if the trial or Rochester was mentioned. There was no time to look. He followed his light into the bathroom and directed the beam into the tub.

“God, but you’re disgusting,” he said as he stared down at the plastic-and-blood-wrapped woman. “You ever see The Blob, Vondra? You could have played the title role.” Grabbing the shower curtain with both hands, he braced himself against the side of the old claw-foot tub and heaved. The plastic tore away, and the corpse flopped back the few inches he’d managed to raise it.

Peeling away the curtain, he looked for something to grab onto that wouldn’t give. The creepy drape she wore was already half torn from the body. Holding his breath, he fished out a fat hand. Red acrylic nails clattered against the side of the tub, and he jumped.

With a grunt, he pulled the body over the rim of the tub and staggered back as the wad of limbs and curtain slapped to the floor. Distorted like those of a drowned woman, Vondra’s dead eyes peered at him through a film of plastic.

Debris was plowed aside as he dragged her to the bed and propped her against it. It would have to do; he wasn’t going to throw his back out trying to lift her onto the mattress. Sparingly, he sloshed gasoline on the bedding. There were enough cigarette packs and matches around for it to look like she’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.

Maybe the investigators would look past the obvious; maybe they wouldn’t. Since Katrina, the building had had no insurance. There would be no monetary gain to the owner. New Orleans was filled with derelict buildings. There wasn’t a lot of interest in those the insurance companies didn’t have to fork out cash for. It was a risk he’d have to take.

“A scrapbook!” he said as he struck a match from one of the thousands of matchbooks lying about. “Photos, newspaper articles. I think your killer is off the hook; I think you died of stupidity,” he said. He tossed the match, heard it fizzle out, and struck another.

Fumes. It was the fumes that lit, not the gasoline itself. Danny took a few steps back from the bed, waited a minute for the fumes to build up, then struck another match and tossed it onto the pyre. A thin, blue tongue licked out, liked what it tasted, and flowed rapidly over the cloth and paper.

“Bingo,” he said and watched the rapidly growing fire for a second or two.

He needed the place to ignite quickly and cleanly. He needed to call Polly and warn her before Marshall found her.

The fire grew more voracious and began devouring the trash, half filling the bedroom. “Four million dollars in the bank, and I’m a cleaning lady,” he said. Trailing gasoline, he left the apartment.

Away from the building, where responding fire or policemen wouldn’t see him and wonder what he was doing in a bad neighborhood so late, Danny got into his car, a swift and classic BMW convertible. For a moment he sat behind the wheel listening to the grinding of the gears in his head before he realized he was grinding his teeth. He stopped the scrape of metal thoughts and tooth enamel and took his cell phone from his pocket.

For a moment, he toyed with the idea of calling Marsh, inviting him to the party.

He deserved to be there. Had he not gotten so full of himself over this marriage and family thing, Vondra would still be alive, and Polly and her kids would be safe. Polly Deschamps, not Polly Marchand.

There were only two Marchands, brothers.

He and Dylan had found the names on a crypt in a cemetery in Metairie. They’d just arrived in New Orleans. It was early spring-the dead of winter in Minnesota. Azaleas were blazing, kept from spontaneous ignition only by the intense cool green of new grass. Aboveground burials, the stuff of movies and old black-and-white photographs, lured them in from the highway.

The place was deserted but for a groundskeeper or two. Live oaks hushed the noise from I-10. They wandered in perfect harmony along the lanes, admiring the mausoleums. It was as close to peace as Richard had ever known. It was bliss. Just the two of them, safe in the city of the dead.

A mausoleum, small but exquisite in detail and design, stood between two monoliths; beside them it looked like a dollhouse. There were only two names on the tiny door, infants who had died at birth: Marshall Dillon Marchand, born and died December 1, 1872, and Daniel Richard Marchand, born and died December 1, 1872.

Identical twins.

It had been a sign and they embraced it. From that day on, they had been the Marchand brothers of New Orleans, and they had prospered. When it was just the two of them, life worked.

That Marsh had the occasional dalliance didn’t worry Danny overmuch. It was his brother’s tendency to obsess-an addiction to a cloying sort of relationship-that was dangerous.

Elaine would never know it, but Danny had saved her life. Even her rat-sized dog had survived. The incident smashed Marsh’s notions of recreating the same sort of sick family situation they’d had as kids.

Until Polly.

Danny hoped to keep Polly, Gracie, and Emma alive, but Marsh was becoming volatile. The business with the axe should have been enough to wake him up, but he was resisting the inevitable with a tenacity he’d not shown with Elaine.

He punched in his sister-in-law’s cell phone number.

“Polly, it’s Danny,” he said when she answered. “Where are you?”

She was at Fontainebleau and Broad.

“Don’t go home,” he told her. “ Marshall ’s gone berserk. I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the police, but I want to talk with you first. Maybe between the two of us we can get him to calm down. Can you meet me… ” Danny rapidly scanned the map of the city that he carried in his head. The cemetery where he and Dylan had become identical twins-the Marchand brothers-would be a fitting place but it would be closed at this hour.

Marsh said the kids were with Martha. If Danny remembered correctly, Dr. Martha Durham lived up near City Park somewhere. “Meet me in City Park,” he said. “There’s a big live oak in front of the Christian Boys’ School. Meet me there.”

“My God, Danny… ” she said, then no more, her words trailing away like a forgotten dream.

“Can you do it? We can meet someplace else if you’d like.”

“No. It’s… City Park… I can do it.” She sounded exhausted and scared.

No wonder, Danny thought. It was odd that she didn’t mention being assaulted.

Probably she didn’t want to accuse her beloved Mr. Marchand.

“I may be a few minutes,” he said. “Lock your car doors and wait for me. If you see Marsh’s truck, get out of there. Quickly. It’ll be okay,” he promised. “We’ll get through this.”

Danny hit “end” on the cell phone, punched in 411, and asked for the number of Martha Durham.

Then he asked for the address.

35

Danny kept the blinds closed regardless of the time of day. Marshall had gone to great pains to make the old sash windows functional, as he did with every building he restored, but he needn’t have bothered with Danny’s unit. His brother believed the out-of-doors should be kept out of doors.

For reasons he was unsure of-except that darkness covered more sins-he switched the lights off before he sat on Danny’s bed. He no longer wanted to see the relics of the lives in his hand but held them tightly; they gave him courage. For the first time in his life he tried, consciously and wholeheartedly, to remember the night of the killings. The night he became Butcher Boy and, along with his family, his childhood was slaughtered.

Mack the Giant had ripped him from sleep-or the dead sleep of unconsciousness. He’d been groggy from the concussion and the medicine his mom had given him. His head felt as if would break open and spill his brains out if he moved. The cop had jerked him hard. Marshall remembered the pain and the fear. He’d thought they were all going to be murdered.

The guy, the huge cop, had dragged him down the hall and forced him to look at Lena. Then he knew they were all going to be killed, that the carnage had already started. He remembered fighting hard as he could, to get away from the man in the policeman’s costume. Dylan thought it was a costume. Real police didn’t come and kill people for no reason.

Marshall tried to go beyond what he could remember, to see the time before the police had come: himself alone, crazy, a boy, pulling the gold chain from around his baby sister’s neck.

There wouldn’t have been any pulling. Her neck was severed lengthwise, a blow that had split her nearly in two from her crown to below her tiny bird-boned shoulders. The chain would have been cut. He tried to picture himself, that boy, Dylan, setting the axe down and fishing the gold cross out of the gore.

The only boy he could see was the terrified child fighting to get away from the man he thought had killed his sister. He couldn’t remember being Butcher Boy.

“Psycho fuck.” Mack had called him that.

Traumatic amnesia. Psychotic break.

When he’d seen little Lena, Marshall remembered Mack’s hand closing harder on the back of his neck. In the darkness of Danny’s room, he felt it happening again. The cop stepped over Lena, jerking him along behind. Terrified his feet would touch his sister’s blood, he’d grabbed the cop’s leg. Mack backhanded him.

Later, at the trial, the cop said he thought Dylan was going for his gun.

His mother had fallen in the doorway of the master bedroom. She was face down, her long brown hair thrown forward. The amount of blood and its bright, comic book color shocked him.

To get the cross from around her neck he would have had to fumble though the sopping mess, dig out the chain, and yank until it broke.

Trying to picture Dylan-himself-doing that, all he saw were the butterflies, how beautiful they’d been above Kowalski’s office, how they’d died.

The kiss, the last good memory.

Dylan hadn’t seen his father. At least not that Marshall remembered. So much of his life had been haunted by that phrase, “not that he remembered.” He’d come to accept that the origins of Butcher Boy were the only thing worth remembering and worth forgetting. The rest of the memories of his young life had been locked behind that paradox.

Once the monster had been laid over that little kid, Dylan, nobody ever thought about him again. Marshall hadn’t thought of him again. Butcher Boy in Drummond had not thought of him. In every way that mattered, Dylan had been murdered that night as surely as his mom, dad, and Lena were.

“God, I miss you.” Marshall heard himself cry the words. “I loved you.” Saying the words felt strange. He didn’t know if what he tasted in the back of his throat was the foulest form of hypocrisy or freedom. Before Drummond, maybe as early as the trial, he had forbidden himself to feel love for his family, to feel anything. The jewelry had brought it all back.

“I loved you,” he said again. Forty years of accumulated emotion hit him, and he began to dissolve, ice breaking away, glacial silences turning to liquid and pouring through the barren scoured places.

“Momma and Daddy, I loved you. Your boy Dylan loved you.”

Dylan, the real, live boy, the boy before that night, came back to life, and Marshall saw him, was him. Freckled in summer, hair blond from the sun.

Laughing.

It surprised him to remember how much he had laughed when he was a kid. How much fun it had been being a kid in Minnesota in the sixties. Maybe the last gasp of the Norman Rockwell times before drugs and twenty-four-hour news and school shootings changed small-town America.

He had friends; there’d been a gang of kids, their lives centered on sports: Little League in summer, hockey in winter. Between seasons, there were forts made from haystacks and riding the elevators when they could sneak into the downtown buildings and get away with it.

Riding bikes.

Marshall laughed aloud.

They had ridden thousands of miles. They rode all summer to each others’ houses, and the river, and the lake. They rode in the winter when the ice pulled the wheels out from under them. Boys on bikes were free.

Ricky, and David, and Charlie, and Al-God but they’d had fun.

Little boys who loved their moms and dads, their friends, their bicycles, John Wayne, and the Green Lantern, little boys like that surely didn’t turn psycho overnight.

Rich, though he wasn’t much older, wouldn’t have much to do with them except to give them a bad time.

A rotten time.

Rich had reinvented himself after Dylan’s trial. Marshall had forgotten that too. Dylan had been so glad somebody still loved him he’d have been willing to overlook just about anything. Rich had been his lifeline in Drummond.

That brother-the Drummond brother-had not always existed, Marshall realized. As Butcher Boy had hidden Dylan, Richard-the new improved Drummond Richard-had hidden Rich.

“A rotten time” was an understatement.

Rich had tortured the hell out of them. He was so good at it he almost never got caught. Half the time, Ricky, Charlie-none of them-knew he was doing it until it was too late, and they were screwed.

Rich had a hole where there should have been snips and snails and puppy dog tails. He didn’t care about things the way other kids did. He didn’t cry when he was hurt. When someone else got hurt, he’d laugh or, more commonly, study them like a scientist with a rat. If there was an accident, he’d call for help a little late or not at all. He’d know the cat was locked in the garage, or that the gate was open and Lena could wander out into the street, and he wouldn’t tell anyone.

Charlie’s mom didn’t like him playing with Rich, and Ricky’s wouldn’t let him stay for sleepovers if Rich was going to be there. They didn’t even want their kids in the same house with him.

How could he have forgotten that? How could he have forgotten eleven years of his life?

Because Rich became the big brother Dylan needed. Rich became the best part of Dylan’s confused, insane world. He came to see him, went to bat for him at Drummond. Dylan- Marshall -had forgotten his brother had ever been any other way. Maybe the loss of his family changed Rich on some fundamental level.

Three murders and Rich is a nice guy?

A damned thin silver lining.

Marshall remembered that Rich-the pre-Drummond Rich-could be funny, even fun, but when the littler kids hung out with him, things had a way of going sour.

Other than the usual punches in the arm or noogies, Rich didn’t hurt them. It was just that, when Rich was around, they got hurt. Charlie was nearly killed when Rich dared him to dive off the railroad bridge when the water was low. Charlie was Rich’s easiest patsy because he was always out to prove what a tough guy he was.

Nine, and we’re tough guys.

Ricky had a thing about snakes, a phobia, Marshall knew now. Then it was just Ricky being a sissy. Rich waited until they were crossing a log that had fallen over a ravine, then he’d tossed Ricky a water snake he’d been carrying in his pocket.

“Catch!” Marshall could hear him yell. A gleeful, boyish prank. Except that Ricky had fallen twenty-three feet and busted his right ankle and sprained his shoulder.

Rich facilitated, Marshall realized. Clumsy kids were led on tricky climbs. Sensitive kids were told scary stories. Fat kids were stuffed, bullies egged on, shy kids humiliated, evil kids taken to new heights.

Rich was shameless. Every now and then he’d get caught in lies or petty cruelties. If the punishment was severe, he was resentful; if it was mild, he was contemptuous. He was never sorry. He’d go through the motions if it was to his benefit, but he mocked them behind his folks’ backs. He never regretted what he did.

Marshall vaguely remembered starting to sense that Rich’s behavior wasn’t quite normal, but then his parents and little sister died, and he’d gone into Drummond, where Rich was the norm for big brothers, and fathers, and uncles.

Then the new Rich, Richard, appeared.

Why had his brother changed so suddenly? Had a triple murder finally made Dylan interesting enough to bother with?

When Charlie and Ricky had been hurt, it was Dylan who’d finally run for help. Rich had just watched them crying and struggling. Charlie might have drowned outright if Dylan hadn’t jumped in after him. He’d lost two toenails on a rock that time.

Was Rich-Richard-watching him in Drummond?

Rich had been one mean son of a bitch when he was little. Reality shifted, and Marshall knew, knew, he’d been a good kid, a nice kid, a real boy.

Maybe Dylan didn’t do it.

Maybe he didn’t do it.

Marshall wanted to laugh, but there was no air. He’d had that fantasy often enough. Like in The Fugitive-they’d find the one-armed man who killed his family.

“Get a grip,” he whispered to himself. “You are most assuredly losing it. Jesus. Breathe.” A thousand and more mornings, he’d opened his eyes, and the first thing he’d done was check his hands to see if they were clean of his crimes.

Little boys with clean hands didn’t wake up with DNA evidence all over them.

But back then there’d been no DNA evidence. No way to test whose blood it was.

Maybe it had only been Rich’s from the cut on his leg, none from Dad, or Mom, or Lena. “Bullshit,” Marshall said.

He’d been the only whole person left in the house. His pajamas were stained red. Rich had the cut leg and the eyewitness account; Rich had Vondra for an alibi. Dylan had the axe, Mack the Giant, the public outrage.

Slam.

Dunk.

Thirteen and a half.

36

Polly nosed the Volvo into the azaleas surrounding the pullout in City Park. Danny had told her to stay in the car with the doors locked but she couldn’t. For hours she had been embalmed in the air-conditioned exhalations of a lifetime’s cigarette smoke, the invisible effluvia of twisted dreams settling out of the stale air onto her hair and skin. She had to move and breathe.

It wasn’t long until dawn but the temperature was in the seventies. Polly drew the scented air into her lungs and rubbed the damp, like a balm, into her neck. Forgetting for a blessed moment the trials of the night, she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse and let the soothing reality of the natural world drift under the wilted fabric. Mosquitoes left her alone. Whatever had settled out of the atmosphere in the Woman in Red’s apartment made Polly unpalatable to even the greediest.

A quarter of an hour dragged by and Danny did not come. Unwilling to get back into the car, she paced. The gravel crunching beneath her feet was jarringly loud, stilling the twitters and scuffles of the small creatures who love darkness.

Her right ankle and her calves ached. Her nails were ragged and torn. The clothing that had started out so fresh was filthy. A man who might have been her husband had attacked her in the house of a dead woman. Her brother-in-law told her not to go home because her husband had gone insane.

Suddenly Polly was too tired to stand.

Fifteen yards from the Volvo lay a fallen oak. A limb as big around as the trunk of many adult trees ran in a gentle rollercoaster along the ground.

Polly sat on it, feet dangling like a child’s. Often, when she was out of doors and alone after sunset, she felt like a child. When she was a girl, darkness was her friend, her cloak of invisibility when ogres walked the Earth.

Trouble would start, and she would go out the small trap door in the back bedroom that let into a luggage compartment under the trailer house. From there, she would run across the open space-the “lawn” her mother called it, where the weeds were kept mowed some of the time-and hide in a hollow at the roots of a fallen tree. Her hiding place was framed on three sides by the rotting trunk of the hardwood.

In the Mississippi woods, there must have been fire ants and red bugs, mosquitoes and ticks, but Polly didn’t remember being bitten. She remembered feeling safe, invisible, and invulnerable. She was close enough to the trailer she could hear the shouting but it sounded far away, in some other little girl’s reality. That’s what the past twenty hours felt like. Those terrible things had happened, but they had happened to someone else a long time ago. For the moment, she was safe, invisible in the arms of a night tree.

Note by note, the Pinteresque concert of the night returned: a peeper, then ten, a night bird, the whispered timpani of claws in the undergrowth.

Time passing at its inimitable petty pace.

Hypnotized by the warmth and the living quiet, she let her thoughts float up from the deep.

Marshall had “gone berserk,” Danny said.

Berserk? Berserker rage? Chopping through walls with the axe? Crockery off the balcony? Raping and pillaging from a Viking’s longboat?

“Berserk,” Danny’d said.

Polly saw her husband cleaning a bloodstained axe. She had found a murdered woman, a woman who knew secrets Polly had shared only with him.

When Marshall sat on the step in the cellar and wept, she wanted to hold him, stand beside him regardless of what he had gotten himself into.

Love did that. Wives did that. Mothers didn’t.

Berserk.

Marshall Marchand was the antithesis of berserk. Polly could not picture him turning vicious and running amok. He was considerate in the true sense of the word. Everything he did was considered, measured beforehand.

Still waters?

Anything was possible.

Danny was the greater mystery. Gracie felt it, too. Though Gracie liked her uncle, more than once Polly had caught her watching him the way a cat might keep tabs on a strange dog in the yard. Not so Emma. Emma would crawl up on Lucifer’s lap and tug on his horns.

Her cell phone rang, and she was jerked into visibility and vulnerability. It was Marshall; his name came up on the screen. Polly pushed the green button. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“Polly, is that you? You sound funny. Where are you?”

“ Marshall?”

“Yes. I need to talk to you. Where are you? Jesus, is it a long story! Are you at Martha’s?” He laughed. Polly didn’t like the sound of it.

“ Marshall, I have had a long strange day. You are making no sense.

“Do you know anyone called ‘the Woman in Red’?” she demanded. “She lives in a garbage dump on Loyola.”

“Loyola. V. Werner. Vondra.” He sounded vague.

V. A fancy script V on a silver heart in the treasure box. V, Vondra.

“Where have you been tonight?” Polly was surprised she wasn’t shouting. She was staggeringly rational. “Have you been out? You’re calling me from your cell phone. Where are you?”

“I’ve been out. Not out. Away from the phone. Please, Polly, come home. Where are you?”

“I am about to meet with your brother. He said you had gone berserk.”

Headlights broke the peace of the night, a sports car coming up the road.

“Danny’s here.”

“Don’t talk to him. This is important. Come home. Talk to me. Don’t even meet with him. Please.”

The headlights of her brother-in-law’s car went out. Ambient glow from the streetlights lit the passenger seat.

“I have to,” she said. “He has Emma and Gracie with him.” She turned the cell phone off.

Emma was sitting on Gracie’s lap.

No seatbelts, Polly thought, as if that was the greatest danger of the night.

Dark and sleek, the car idled in the glow of the streetlight. From inside came the soft strains of cool jazz. The girls were in their pajamas. Polly stepped into the light and ran across the gravel toward where they waited.

Danny unfolded himself from the driver’s side. “You girls stay in the car,” Polly heard him say. “I’ll leave it running so you’ll have air-conditioning. Don’t worry; I’ll just be a minute.”

“Polly,” he said with evident relief. He stopped her and took her hands. She felt as if she were made of wood. His touch scarcely penetrated. “ Marshall knew where the girls were staying, so I thought it best to pick them up. I’m sorry for the cloak and dagger, but things have gotten out of hand.”

He smiled his old crooked smile, and Polly suffered a confused relief. He was sane. Or appeared to be. In a night of insanity, even the appearance of rationality was reassuring.

“What is going on?” she asked, her voice hollow in her ears.

“My God, what happened to you?”

Polly looked down at her filthy, torn clothing. A hand strayed to her hair. The ends were sticking out like straw from a haystack. “Somebody attacked me. I think… ” She couldn’t tell him what she thought. Saying it would make it real.

Danny looked at her long and hard. The faint light was behind him, and she could read nothing in his dark eyes.

“ Marshall isn’t Marshall,” he said gently.

“Your husband is not who you think he is,” the tarot reader had said.

“Our parents did not die in an automobile accident. Marshall -his real name is Dylan Raines. Mine is Richard, Richard Raines.”

The Raines trial. Butcher Boy.

“Dylan was a troubled kid. He spent seven years in a juvenile detention center in Minnesota. When he got out, I brought him down here. I changed our names so he would have a chance at a new life.”

Polly nodded. Numbness had worked from her hands up over her heart to her throat, and her head bobbed as foolishly as a doll on a dashboard.

“Are you up to talking to him, do you think?” Danny asked kindly. “I thought if we all-what do they call it?-had an intervention, we might be able to calm him down, convince him to get some help.”

Danny still held her hands. Polly pulled her fingers from his. Her arms fell lifelessly to her sides.

“What about the girls?” She was whispering. “What about the girls?” she repeated. This time her voice was too loud. Messages from her brain were not reaching her organs with speed or clarity.

“I thought they could ride with you. I’ll follow you. Are you up to this? You don’t have to. I might be able to handle it by myself,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Yes,” was the best she could manage. “Richard,” she said.

“Yes.”

“There’s a dead woman… I was in her apartment… ” Polly didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Vondra Werner,” Richard told her. “I know, Marsh told me. She was a friend of mine. Dylan- Marshall -hated her. She testified against him.”

“ Marshall attacked me?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Danny waited for her to say something, but Polly found she had nothing to say. Reality had become too bizarre for language to encompass.

“If we’re going to do this thing, we should get started,” he said kindly.

“Yes.” Her eyes returned to the car. Emma and Gracie were chattering to each other. “The girls shouldn’t be with us.”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to take them back to Martha’s. We can tuck them into my bed downstairs. Marshall won’t even know they’re there. Hide in plain sight,” he said, maybe hoping to get a smile.

“Okay,” Polly said woodenly. Exhaustion was falling heavily on the backs of her eyes. The injuries from the attack settled in to a bone-deep ache. The same ache surrounded her heart, squeezing so tightly she could feel each heartbeat.

Buckling her daughters into the back seat of the Volvo, she had to steady herself on the door. Her husband was not who she thought he was.

Red had said, “You will kill your husband.”

Was that, too, foreordained?

Keys in hand, she walked around to the driver’s side of the Volvo. Danny stopped her. “Here,” he said and took the keys from her nerveless fingers. “You look too beat to drive. We can come back and get my car another time.”

Without waiting for her to agree, he opened the driver’s door and got in. The ignition turned, and the motor hummed to life. Afraid he would drive off without her, Polly ran to the passenger door and scrambled in.

“I would have waited,” he said.

“I was perfectly alright to drive,” she replied with more hostility than she could account for.

Twisting around, she checked on Emma and Gracie. They had curled up on the wide backseat, like yin and yang, foreheads touching, knees drawn up, little feet twined together.

“The poor little things are worn out,” Polly said.

“Both asleep?”

“Dead to the world,” Polly replied, then wished she’d used a different phrase. This was not a night one should tempt the gods.

“That’s for the best,” Danny said. “I didn’t want to talk in front of them, but I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

Polly thought about that for what seemed an excessively long time. In truth, she had nothing she wanted him to answer. She needed answers, but she would ask them of Marshall. Danny did not come to this meeting with clean hands. If Marshall ’s life was a lie, so was his brother’s.

Lights shone from the third-floor bedroom. The downstairs unit was dark. “He must have fallen asleep with the lights on,” Danny said, more to himself than to Polly. The sentence jarred, but Polly wasn’t sure why. Before she could think, Danny was out of the car opening the rear door.

“You take Emma,” he said. “I’ll take Gracie. She’s getting a little heavy even for me.”

“They are not babies,” Polly said more sharply than she intended. “They are too old to be carried around like sleepy toddlers.” Why she wished to make her daughters seem more mature and independent, she didn’t know.

“Never too old to be carried,” Danny said, scooping Gracie into his arms. She was awake-Polly could tell in the way mothers can always tell-but pretending not to be in order to get a ride up the stairs. Emma was truly asleep. Her noodley form draped over Polly’s shoulder as she gathered up her bare legs. Emma was growing coltish, long-legged.

She would be taller than Gracie.

The incredible sweetness of her child, nestled into the crook of her neck, struck Polly through the numbness that had overtaken her. There was an edge to this child-love that was so sensual, right and good, a true connecting.

She should have left them with Martha, away from whatever was coming.

She had them with Martha; Danny had taken them, taken them without asking her permission, though she was a cell phone call away.

“Wait,” she cried as he started for the door into the cellar. Suddenly, she could not bear to have him carry Gracie into the black beneath the duplex. Terror that she would never see her daughter again gripped her and she yelled, “Wait, goddamn you!”

Danny stopped and looked back. “Of course I’ll wait. Are you okay?”

“Thank you,” she said as politely as she could. She didn’t answer his question. It was absurd.

Why on earth would anyone expect her to be okay?

37

Light came sudden and hard into Marshall ’s eyes. Lost in the past, he hadn’t heard anyone coming.

“Marsh!” His brother’s voice was harsh with the shock of seeing him there. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”

Old memories and hard light cleared from Marshall ’s eyes, and he saw Danny with his daughter nightgowned and draped in his arms like Faye Wray. Gracie’s eyes were open and her face blank. She was trying to figure out what the adult world was up to. With the sixth sense of a child, she knew not to demand answers in her usual, forthright manner.

Marshall ’s fingers closed over the remnants of his childhood still held in his palm.

“Get down, Gracie,” he said in a neutral tone. “Uncle Danny can’t carry such a big girl for too long.”

Polly, Emma clutched to her side, stood at Danny’s shoulder. Stainless steel lamps loomed behind them, reminiscent of a dentist-chair nightmare.

“Polly, take the girls upstairs and put them to bed,” Marshall said. It was not a command; it was a plea.

“Don’t do it, Polly,” Danny said. “God knows what he’s got upstairs. Stay with me. Otherwise, I can’t keep you safe.”

He sounded so certain, so sure of himself, for a moment Marshall was Dylan again, and Dylan believed himself capable of any horror.

Gracie struggled. Danny set her on her feet but kept her close to him, one arm locked across her chest protectively. “Polly, I think it’s time you met your husband. The girls, too. It will help them with the transition,” Danny said.

“Dylan Raines,” Marshall said to his wife. “I’m Dylan Francis Raines of Rochester, Minnesota.” The words tasted like a lie. He’d not been Dylan Raines for too many years. “And I’m Marshall Marchand, the man you married.” He was sounding schizophrenic. He could see alarm growing in Polly’s eyes. He didn’t dare look at Emma or Gracie.

“Tell her how you murdered our parents and our little sister.” Danny said this with a sadness that hummed along Marshall ’s bones.

When Danny spoke again his voice was pitched for the ears of children. “He didn’t do it to be mean but because he went into mental illness for a while. I’m not telling you this to scare you,” he said and kissed Gracie on the top of her head, “but because my brother is sick again. He’s been losing time-doing things that he forgets he did. When that happens, people get hurt. The people closest to him get hurt.”

The clear, mossy green of his wife’s eyes was icing over.

Polly believed Danny. Dylan believed Rich.

Remembrance of who he’d been as a boy, how things were, was slipping away.

Marshall opened his hand and held it out. His brother looked at the pieces from their mother’s jewelry box without recognition, and Butcher Boy slid up close beside Marshall ’s spine, a sword into its scabbard.

Danny opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. He’d realized what Marshall held. In that single, unguarded moment, Marshall read his own innocence in Rich’s face. Not in Danny’s, or even Richard’s, but Rich’s-the old face from when he was a boy, before he learned to hide the pleasure he took in torturing the younger kids, in manufacturing accidents.

Rich saw the tiny gold crosses, the wedding ring and the hockey pin and, for a heartbeat, a smug, sly smile flicked across his lips like the tongue of a snake. In that instant, he looked into Marshall ’s eyes and gloated.

“What are those?” Polly asked, breaking the moment.

“They are trophies,” Marshall answered evenly. He couldn’t take his eyes off of his brother, and he could not block the thoughts that flowed like lava, hot and inexorable, through his mind. Half a century of thoughts.

“They are trophies,” Danny repeated. “Dylan took them off the bodies of our family. I found them clutched in his hand, just like they are now. I took them so the police wouldn’t find them. Do they bring back memories, brother?”

Marshall started to stand up. The fear on his wife’s face stopped him. She could not see the pride in Danny’s stance or the satisfaction in the set of his lips.

“Don’t believe him, Polly,” Marshall said, but he had little hope. If Danny-Rich-had bothered to hide his delight in what he had done to Dylan’s life, Marshall might have believed him too.

“Polly, please take the girls upstairs. Let Danny and me talk.”

“Stay,” Danny ordered. Pressure was building behind Danny’s mask. Marshall felt it in his own skull, a sharp bite of need. Polly bristled at Danny’s tone. Marshall hoped she would rebel and leave the room with her daughters.

Danny’s arm tightened around Gracie. “Polly, did Marsh tell you what happened-almost happened-to his fiancée? He tried to kill a pet dog she had. Why do you think he didn’t want Gracie to have a kitten?”

Marshall watched his elder daughter’s face close against him. Talk of old murders had not affected her. That was too much like the movies. Killing a little animal was within her child’s grasp of consummate evil.

“He drugged the girl with doctored champagne and put her dog in the freezer to die,” Danny said.

The champagne, the peace offering from Danny. That’s how he had done it without waking them. Marshall was not even allowed the small triumph of knowing he’d figured it out. Danny had just told him.

Danny wanted him to know. Danny wanted credit.

“Hidden your light under a bushel too long, brother?” Marshall asked.

Danny smiled. It might have read true to someone who didn’t know him. To Marshall, it stank of mockery. He’d seen it when Rich lectured Charlie about water safety when they’d visited him in the hospital, when he swore to Ricky’s parents that he had no idea their son was afraid of snakes.

When he told Dylan how sorry he was that Phil Maris got booted. “Polly, why did you come back tonight? Why did you bring Emma and Gracie home?” Marshall demanded suddenly.

“Danny got the girls… ” Polly started to speak. Then her voice trailed off.

“Why did you bring my wife and daughters here tonight?” Marshall asked his brother. This time he did stand, but the way Danny’s forearm pressed against Gracie’s windpipe kept him from closing the distance between them. “You figured I was knocked out on Ambien. Why would you bring them here when I was out?”

“I was afraid for them, Dyl, afraid you intended to do what you’d done before, clean house, kill everybody but your brother.” He smiled his old crooked smile and carefully, gently placed one hand on Gracie’s hair. It could have been a caress, but Marshall knew it wasn’t.

Danny was going to snap her neck.

38

“I’ve had enough of this,” Polly hissed. “Come on girls; let’s let Uncle Danny and Marshall work things out between them.”

Marshall watched helplessly as she turned and walked toward the bedroom door. “Polly… ” he began, but what could he say? It’s not what you think it is? Better she should leave. He prayed his brother would let Gracie go.

Danny, a half smile on his face, his hand still on Gracie’s hair, looked at him over her head.

“Come on, Gracie,” Polly said. Emma tugged her mother to a halt. “Not now, honey.” Again Emma tugged, and Polly leaned down to catch a whispered confidence.

I’m scared. Daddy’s crazy. Was that what his elfin daughter was saying?

Polly lifted her head and looked at Danny standing with his back to her, Gracie in his arms, and then at Marshall standing by the bed. A world of emotion passed through her face. Marshall could read none of it. The look of determination when it was done was unmistakable.

“Danny, darlin’, I know you and Marshall have some talking to do,” her voice was petal soft and so beseeching Marshall hurt hearing it. “But would you be so kind as to help me get the girls tucked in? What with one thing and another, we would feel more secure if you didn’t leave us alone right now.” The last words were said in a voice that turned Marshall to water, a voice he doubted many men could stand against.

Danny could, but he didn’t. It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

“Sure thing. I’d rather you weren’t alone. It’s just not safe.” He winked at Marshall and backed toward the door, Gracie moving awkwardly with him. Before he turned and followed Polly out through the kitchen, he smiled at Marshall and stroked Gracie’s hair. “You wait here,” he said.

Marshall knew precisely what he meant.

Then they were gone; he heard the door to the backstairs close behind them.

He could call 911, but if the police came, sirens blazing, Danny would surely kill Polly and the girls. If he followed his brother, he would snap Gracie’s neck without a second thought. If he did nothing…

If he did nothing, it would happen all over again.

Twitches wracked his body, a seizure of conflicting orders. Shaking, he took one step, then another. From overhead, he heard a faint thump-his kitchen door shutting. Footsteps whispered on the backstairs.

Was Danny coming back, Gracie’s slender neck in the vise of arm and hand, listening to see if he followed?

Marshall moved again, softly this time, careful to make no sound on the hardwood floor. In the kitchen, he stopped and listened. Silence was not reassuring. The uneasy twitching of his hands worsened. Marshall was more frightened than he’d been since his parents were killed. He’d grown unaccustomed to physical fear. One of the perks of being a stone-cold killer was that one didn’t worry much about other predators. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but fear for his family was a solid thing, an entity, pumping so much adrenaline into his body he couldn’t stay still.

A crash sounded overhead, and he was out the kitchen door and halfway up the stairs. A noise from below, from the cellar, turned him around. Black and panting, a troll’s shape rushed upward.

“Danny,” he said, and his brother stopped. The stairwell was dark but for the light from the street coming through the garden window. It was enough to see; Danny had the axe in his hands. Faint light glistened on the planes of his cheeks and across his flat brow. It flashed dully on his teeth as he smiled. Not his matinee idol smile. This smile was detached from his humanity, a cold mockery of amusement, of the weaknesses and failings of others.

“Put it down,” Marshall said. His voice shook as badly as his hands.

“It’s necessary, brother. You made it necessary. I’m just here to clean up after you. Like always. It’s me and you, the Marchand brothers. I told you not to fuck that up. Now you’ve done it. You’ve killed them again.”

The Marchand brothers, identical twins, dead at birth. Marshall took a step down toward Danny.

“No sense in it, brother,” Danny warned him. “It’s over. It’s done. They’re already dead. Easy pickings, so soft and sweet. I just got the axe for the finishing touches, history repeating itself. Juries love that. But I won’t call the cops, not if you don’t force me to.”

All Marshall heard was, “They’re dead.” With the howl of an injured animal, he hurled himself at his brother. The blade of the axe cut into his cheek. He felt the force but not the pain. Before Danny could strike again, Marshall had the handle, his hands between his brother’s on the shaft. The stairwell was narrow and twisted; Marshall ’s shoulders smashed into the walls as they struggled. Danny’s face, still lit from the window, was as smooth and calm as if they played at cat’s cradle.

Blood poured from Marshall ’s cheek, onto the back of his hand, leaking onto the axe handle, making the wood slick. His brain burned. His body was a machine gone amok. Another cry burst from him, and he heaved upward with all his strength. Surprise registered on Danny’s face as his hands slipped from the newly slickened handle, and he began to fall backwards. Shadows took him, as he slammed onto the lower landing where the steps turned again into the cellar.

Sudden and complete silence filled the space. Then came a whisper, no more than a breath of sound.

“Dylan?”

Axe still in hand, Marshall slowly descended the stairs.

“Rich?” Time folded in on itself. Mack the Giant was but a few minutes away. Rich was crumpled at the bottom of the flight of stairs, his head propped up against the wall at the corner. Light from the window didn’t penetrate far enough that Marshall could read his face.

“Help me, Dyl.”

Marshall crouched down beside his brother, the space so tight his butt hit one wall and the head of the axe the opposite. “Are you hurt?” It wasn’t Marshall asking, it was Dylan. Marshall heard the concern in his voice and hated it.

Dylan loved his brother.

“I broke something. You made me a fucking cripple.” Danny started to laugh and the sound seared the last of Dylan from Marshall ’s soul.

Marshall rose and ran up the stairs toward his apartment, the staccato laughs following him in a poisonous swarm.

39

Marshall took the stairs three at a time and slammed into the door to his and Polly’s kitchen. Danny had locked it. Marshall swung the axe and heard the frame splinter. A kick, and he was in. Lights were on in the kitchen and dining rooms. Both were empty. He ran for the stairs and, for once, climbed them without feeling the clamp of Mack’s hand on the back of his neck, his rasping insults at every step.

The upstairs hall was empty. His office door stood ajar. The master bedroom door was shut. Adrenaline drained out of him as fast as it had shot through his veins.

Like then, like Dylan, he did not want to see what lay in the bedroom. Visions of black-and-white photographs of his dad in the double bed, his face cloven in two, crowded Marshall ’s vision, shifted, became Polly’s face. Lena appeared, her tiny body destroyed. Lena drifted, became Emma.

Sirens.

The police had arrived. Marshall was holding a bloody axe, the only one standing after the bloodbath. Danny-Rich-lay wounded at the foot of the stairs.

Like before. Just like before.

He was still standing there when two young policemen came upstairs, guns drawn.

“Put down the axe! Put down the axe! Put down the axe!” they shouted at him. Marshall turned toward them.

“Put it down,” one of them screamed and pulled the trigger.

The sharp report of gunfire released Marshall ’s fingers. As the bullet smashed into the wall six feet from his head, the axe fell from his hands.

“It’s down! It’s down! He’s dropped it, for Christ’s sake!” one cop shouted at the other. Both were kids, both looked scared.

“It’s okay,” Marshall heard himself say. “You’ll need to look in the bedroom. You can handcuff me if it will make you feel better.”

His compliance reassured them, allowed them to move from scared to angry.

“You’re damn right we’ll cuff you. You’re goddamn right,” the shooter growled as he walked crabwise up, his pistol still held on Marshall.

“Could you radio for an ambulance? My brother’s hurt, he’s on the backstairs. I think I broke his back.”

“Proud motherfucker, aren’t you?”

Son of Mack the Giant.

Cuffed and pushed face down on the hall floor, Marshall turned his head to watch them open the bedroom door. It was good to be manacled. Prison would be good, too. No, not good, Marshall thought. Not good or bad. Nothing, really. Just one long unbroken nothing. Without Polly, life was his prison.

He wished they had put him where he wouldn’t be able to see in. Because he could, he had to.

“God damn,” the cop huffed as the door refused to budge. Son of Mack pulled out his sidearm again, readying to shoot the lock like they did in police shows.

“Oh, stop, would you stop with the gun?” the other policeman said. “It’s not locked. Something’s wedged against it.”

Both of them put their shoulders into it, and the door opened a foot or so. Another shove and whatever was blocking the way toppled with a crash that reverberated through the floorboards and quivered in Marshall ’s bones. The door swung wide. The policemen stood to the sides, guns drawn, backs to the wall. Marshall could see in.

Polly was there. And Emma and Gracie. The girls were on the king-sized bed and looked no bigger than fairies. Polly, her face white as wax and hard as granite, was at the foot, standing, facing the door. She had a cell phone in one hand and a carving knife in the other.

Ready to die for her children.

But she hadn’t, and Marshall began to cry with relief. In the past weeks, he’d cried more than he had since he’d been little. These tears came easily from joy; they neither blinded him nor choked but flowed warm and comforting.

Polly and the girls were alive. The nothing he’d looked toward would always be peopled. Wherever he served his time, even if he got the death penalty, in his mind he would see them. He would never be alone. Marshall closed his eyes so he would not have to see his wife’s hatred, the fear in his children’s faces. That way he could remember only that which would allow him to live.

“Put it down. Drop the knife,” he heard a cop yell, and there was a clatter.

Marshall ’s brain shut down, and he welcomed unconsciousness.

40

It was spring, and it was raining. Marshall felt the first warm drop hit his face. He didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t want to know. Here in this place where it rained so gently was where he wanted to stay. Another reality, the one outside this cocoon, pushed at the back of his wakening mind, but he ignored it.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and knew he was about to be dragged back. “No,” he murmured. “Let me go.”

“Shh. Shh. It’s going to be okay now.” Polly’s voice gave Marshall the courage to open his eyes. She sat beside him, brushing the hair from his forehead. “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “We are all okay, and so are you.” He tried to lift his hand to touch her face but hadn’t the strength. He closed his eyes because he could no longer keep them open.

“You believed me,” Marshall said softly. After a lifetime of living Richard’s lies, he didn’t know what he believed. “Talk to me,” he whispered. “So I’ll know you are really here.”

Polly’s genteel drawl drifted through whatever drugs they’d given him. “No darlin’, I didn’t believe you. I am truly sorry, but I did not know what to believe. Emma saved us. She saw the lipstick.”

“Lipstick,” he repeated. The word made no sense, but the sound of his wife’s voice was a balm, and he wanted to hear it forever. “Tell me.” His voice was mostly air, but she heard him, and he knew she was leaning close. The smell of her hair touched him even through the stink of hospital sterility.

“Yes, lipstick. The story is too long to tell without a glass of wine and a comfortable chair. Suffice to say, I was attacked-not hurt, my love-but I didn’t know my assailant. It was at Vondra’s apartment, and there was a great deal of red lipstick lying about. Emma saw a streak of red down the back of Danny’s shirt, then I knew it was him at Vondra’s.

“Emma saw it when the five of us were in Danny’s bedroom. We were all caught in that terrible tableau.” Polly laughed. “I felt like I was on stage in the last act of Hamlet. Once I realized Danny was dangerous, I thought if I could get him to move, to let Gracie come upstairs… I thought if he didn’t think I knew… I don’t know exactly what I thought.” She finished by kissing him, lightly and sweetly.

“You are a wonder. A night like you must have had, and you still made Danny believe you.” Marshall opened his eyes again. The sight of his wife melted away the haze of drugs and horror.

“Darlin’, the day I cannot fool one more man one more time, you may put me out on an ice floe for the polar bears.”

She moved away. Marshall felt the cold come between them.

“I came across a carton of papers in the basement. They were notes and articles justifying the most awful killings.”

“You found them,” Marshall said hollowly.

“With a little help from your brother. They were in your handwriting.”

“Homework,” Marshall said, and years of poring over the butchery of the human race, of writing justifications for unjustifiable actions, threatened his fragile hope.

Polly waited.

“At least at first it was homework; then, I guess it became habit. When I was at Drummond… ”

Polly looked confused and Marshall realized with a pang how much of his life he’d kept secret from her, how much of himself he had kept secret from everyone. The need to tell her everything, every small challenge and terror and delight, share with her the boy who’d been so scared, the boy who’d seen the butterflies and held tightly to his mother’s kiss, the teenager who had so little hope he’d let the other boys ink 13½ on his forearm so he couldn’t ever forget he had but half a chance in life-less, no chance at all-hit him so hard he laughed. Without warning, the laughter turned to tears. When she knew, she might no longer love him.

“Do I need to slap you, sugar?” Polly asked solicitously.

“No,” he said as the tears morphed back into laughter at the touch of her voice on his mind. “I’m not hysterical. At least not too hysterical. Drummond was where I grew up, a juvenile detention center in Minnesota. I was sent there when I was eleven years old.

“It’s a long, long story,” Marshall said, suddenly weary of his past.

“I have read Coriolanus seven times and Bleak House twice.”

God, but he loved her.

“When I was eleven my family was killed: Mom, Dad, Lena -my baby sister-even the cat. They didn’t die in a car accident. They were murdered. I was convicted of killing them.”

“You were a little boy!” Polly exclaimed in disbelief.

“Yes. The papers dubbed me “Butcher Boy.” I was the youngest person ever convicted of murder in Minnesota.” Marshall couldn’t bear to look at his wife’s face, but he couldn’t look away either. He was waiting for the moment of horror that closed people off from Butcher Boy as surely as if they slammed an iron cell door and shot the bolt. Polly’s face showed nothing but concern, and he realized that she was as certain of the end of this story as she was of the last scene in Coriolanus. She knew he didn’t do it; she was just waiting to hear how the act played out.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know, sugar.”

“The tattoo, thirteen and a half, that you’ve asked about? I got it in Drummond. I was there for seven years. The staff psychiatrist, a bastard named Kowalski, set me to writing ‘homework assignments.’ He’d bring me the newspaper clipping of some horrific murder and insist I put myself in the killer’s head, think their thoughts, feel their disease on my brain, then tell him the reason I would have done killings like that. I guess he thought if he got me to go down that path enough times I’d remember killing my family. Maybe he only wanted me to say I did. The guy wanted to wring a best seller out of me one way or another.”

“Now there was a Butcher Boy all grown up,” Polly said with disgust. “Why did he have to torture a little boy to get his book?”

“Because I didn’t remember doing it; I didn’t remember killing my family. I’d had a cold, and Mom gave me medicine, and I slept like the dead. God,” he said as the word echoed in his brain.

“It’s okay, baby.” Polly touched his cheek and the pain of memory lessened.

“The bastard wanted to be the one who made me remember-or made me admit I remembered. So, the homework. By the time he’d gotten on this kick, I’d been in Drummond just long enough to get punky. Most of the stuff I wrote was just in-your-face rebellion. Since they’d dubbed me Butcher Boy, I’d be Butcher Boy. But those clippings were vicious, brutal things.”

“I know. I read them.”

Before Marshall recovered from that, Polly said, “I, too, have a long, long story, and I suspect Brother Danny wrote the script from start to finish. Your homework assignments were put in the cellar so I would find them.”

Marshall nodded. He knew he should ask for her story, should listen to her. Polly had been hurt so badly by his past. The need to tell overcame the need to listen, and he went on: “The more I read those damn things-those lists of people butchering people-and tried to get into the skins of the killers, the sicker I felt. I knew I’d done it. Enough people tell a kid he did a thing, and he believes he did it. The shrinks came up with half a dozen reasons I didn’t remember, and I believed them. Why wouldn’t I? I’m eleven, and they’re the authorities as far as I knew.

“So I knew I’d killed my mom, my dad, Lena -knew it but I never felt it. Do you know what I mean? I never felt like a killer, like some psycho. I still felt kind of like the kid who played ice hockey, the boy with the fishing pole. God, it was strange. I didn’t know it was strange then. It was like air and stone walls, just there. Most of my life I’ve walked around thinking I was a time bomb that was going to explode and kill everyone around me.

“Tippity-the dog I told you about-she didn’t jump in the freezer. She was taped up and thrown in. I figured I’d done it. The night was a blank, just like when I was a kid. I figured getting close to Elaine triggered it somehow.” Saying the words aloud, Marshall realized he’d not “figured” that. Danny had told him that, and Danny had brought them a bottle of champagne that had knocked two adults out. It was drugged. Danny. The drug dealer of Le Cure.

“He was doing it,” he rasped, his throat dry. “Danny was doing it. Danny was giving me drugs and moving things. My brother. My brother.” Marshall felt his face turning inside out.

Polly’s cool fingers and murmured endearments brought him back to himself.

“Just like he did it before?”

“Yes.” Marshall stared at the shadows he and Polly cast on the white wall of the hospital room. He was seeing two boys, Dylan and Richard. “He must have been born with something broken inside of him. It’s no easier for me to see him doing it than it was to see myself doing it.

“He was going to do it again. To you and the girls.” The cold in his soul was deep. “I don’t want to hate him,” he said quietly.

For a while, they sat without speaking. Marshall ’s breathing evened out. His thoughts slid from frantic to torpid. Polly held his hand.

“You asked if I believed you,” Polly said.

Marshall grew very still. He wanted, needed her to believe in him-to believe in him when he was unbelievable.

“It was not merely the lipstick on your brother’s shirt-though that had a comforting concreteness about it. It was partly that I did not believe Danny. I wish I could say I believed you, but, except to the writers of sonnets, love does not show one the way. When one has children, one cannot have faith where they are endangered. There are some mistakes a mother could not live with. Had I been twenty or even thirty, I might have been able to love blindly, unconditionally. No more. There are two conditions: Emma and Gracie.

“A part of me believed that I was not fooled in you. Part of me knows anyone can be fooled.” She ran her fingertips down his cheek. His sadness trailed after her touch. “I am sorry, my darling. I cannot even apologize for not believing in you utterly and without question; that kind of love-faith-must be learned young. My early childhood instruction was centered around how to keep little girls alive.”

Marshall let that soak in. The knowledge that she had entertained the thought he was a beast and a killer did not hurt him as much as he’d thought it would. He had not believed in himself. He’d believed in Danny.

“That’s best,” he said finally. “Civilized behavior is built on conditions. I love both your conditions.”

“They don’t seem to be too traumatized,” Polly said. “I hope to keep it that way.”

“There will be newspaper articles about this, about the old murders, about who I am, and what Richard did, and what Danny did,” Marshall warned. “The case was national news at the time. It might be hard to shield them through that.”

“Surely the rebuilding of New Orleans is sufficiently ubiquitous in the press that they will not have space for an old story,” Polly said with a smile. “We can hope most of our neighbors will be too occupied with their own dramas to read them.”

“I’ll read them,” Marshall said. “I’ll read them and try to figure out why, what makes a killer desire the kill, what made my brother take my family’s lives and, then, in every way he could, take mine. Homework. I’ve done it for so long, trying to find myself.”

“Well, my darling, you can quit looking. Gracie and Emma and I have found you.”

41

Richard Raines was sentenced to life without parole. Because his injury had left him unable to use the lower half of his body until the swelling around his spinal cord went down-if it went down-he was put in the maximum-security hospital ward of the U.S. penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana.

Twice a month, Marshall made the drive to Pollock to visit his brother.

Danny showed every indication that he enjoyed these exchanges. The allotted hour was spent telling Marshall what had been done to his life. Danny used the time to talk about how he had used and used up Vondra, set her as a watchdog on Marshall’s office, related Polly’s secrets to her, and set her up as Polly’s tarot reader; he described in detail how he’d told the warden Phil Maris was a pedophile and had raped Dylan, how he’d killed Phil, Sara, and several others. Some murders he made up just for the pleasure he felt in hurting the brother to whom he had given everything and who had abandoned him.

Marshall listened but, except for learning Phil had been killed, he was unaffected. At the telling-and retelling-of each horrific incident, he was reassured of his own innocence, his own sanity. And that of his wife. The tarot reader had been primed by Danny to wait for Polly, so the dissolution of Marshall ’s marriage could be set in motion.

Even after he no longer needed this assurance, he still made the drive. He did it because Rich had done it for Dylan, because Dylan loved his brother. And he did it because Danny was confined to a wheelchair, and Danny’s lack of control-of himself and, most sharply felt, of others-was torture for him. Marshall drove out to see Danny this way because Marshall hated Danny.

Dylan Raines’s name was cleared, but Marshall chose to keep Marchand.

It sounded better with the name Pollyanna.

Richard Raines. Killed mother, father, sister, and the family cat.

“We get to the upstairs hall, and Pat finds a light switch. You’re not going to want to print this next part, but by God this is how it was. In the middle of the rug-one of those long narrow hall rugs-was a baby, a little girl no more than two, and she had been cut in half. I about puked, and Pat looked like he was going to.

“We hear movement downstairs and think maybe it’s the killer.

Or somebody hurt. Pat goes first.

“In the back bedroom, there’s two boys. At first, we thought both of them had been murdered. The older boy nearly had his leg cut off and had bled so much he was the color of a sheet of paper. The other boy was still in his bed, but at first we didn’t even know it was a kid, you know? It just looked like a bucket of red paint poured over some blankets.

“Turns out this kid-the one in the bed-has got nothing wrong with him; he’s just sleeping like a baby. Or that’s what we thought at the time. The ambulance rolls up so there’s paramedics stomping all over everything trying to save the kid with the chopped up leg when this little bast**rd wakes up from his beauty sleep. He sees his brother being carried out more dead than alive, and he starts laughing like a hyena.”