by Nevada Barr
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 dress
es 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.