13 1/2

by Nevada Barr

  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.

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sp; 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.”