by Nevada Barr
“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 ag
ain 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 b
rick 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.