Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

“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.