“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.