Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

The next was in faded ballpoint:

“They just did what they wanted. Took what they wanted. Then died in a blaze of glory. That looks pretty good from where I sit.”

And again ink:

“Shooting the family starts to look pretty good. Sane even. Until you get to the kids. Maybe he figures they aren’t quite people; with eight of them they wouldn’t seem like an endangered species exactly, just a housecleaning issue.”

There was more but Polly put the papers and articles back into the carton and replaced the lid. Pandora repenting too late.

The writing was sick-making, violent, boastful, gloating, heartless, the profile of a man without a soul, a ghoul who gloried in causing harm. They were horrific. But Polly was not as shattered as she thought she should be. Having read critically countless thousands of passages, she couldn’t but see the contradictions in this-she sought a word-collection? Grouping? Opus?

The voice in the writing had been directed at the reader-no, at an internal judge. Perhaps they had been written during a period of severe abuse and meant to be read by an abuser or a therapist or aloud in a group therapy situation.

The span of time over which they were written suggested an outside influence, someone who required the pieces. The earlier words smacked of the braggadocio of a vicious killer preening, comparing himself to his godforsaken heroes, but they were childish in style and content. The comments written in subsequent years were oddly detached, as if jotted by an actor preparing to play a role, making notes, a character study of evil.

Or by a monster seeking to find where, in a monstrous universe, he fit. Seeking…

“Seeking to kill little kids,” she interrupted her thought aloud. “Wake up and smell the corpses, Pollyanna,” she snapped.

This wasn’t a Frankenstein monster of literature to be parsed and analyzed; this was her husband boasting that he “thought he was the record holder,” her beloved Mr. Marchand asking, “Why little kids? Because they’re easy?” The man who came to bed with her each night, wondering why he hadn’t sexually tortured seven children.

Tears began, then burned away. Sobs started, then froze in her throat. Her hands came up to cover her face, then fell helplessly onto her thighs. Anger flashed. By its lurid light she could see the fear at the back of her mind.

Like drops of quicksilver held on the palm, emotions slid away when she tried to touch them.

“This is real,” Polly said, and her voice was as tiny and sweet as Emma’s.

But not as innocent.

The absurdly delicate and graceful gold wristwatch Marshall had given her suggested it was close on two o’clock. The watch was beautiful and, like a true femme fatale, did not need to be exactly on time. The girls would be back in ninety minutes. Gracie was old enough that Polly could leave the two of them unattended for a little while, but she did not want them left alone.

What if Marshall came home?

She nearly gagged on the thought. Sweat was sticky on her skin. Flies lit on her arms and buzzed close to her eyes. Her legs were stiff. Her back ached as she forced herself up from the narrow step as if she’d been hunkered there a day instead of an hour. Still unwilling to allow the carton into the house, she left it in the utility area at the top of the stairs with the dryer lint and dirty laundry.

She showered, dressed in fresh clothes, and applied lipstick. In the kitchen, she scribbled a note for Marshall. “The girls and I will be staying with Martha.” That done, she called Gracie’s cell phone. “Honeybunch, can you get Mrs. Fortunas to take you and Emma to Aunt Martha’s instead of home? No, no, baby. Everything’s alright. I’ll explain later. Thank you, sugar.”

She gathered up the carton and headed down the basement stairs.

Danny was waiting at the bottom step.

“I thought that might be you,” he said with a smile.

The box in Polly’s hands grew as heavy as if she carried a decapitated head.

“What’ve you got there?” he asked mildly.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. The startled look on his face reminded her that the box contained only bits of paper, that she was a respectable woman passing through her own cellar.

He held out his hands for the file carton. “Do you need any help with that?” he asked politely.

The box jerked.

Danny laughed. “Did you get Gracie that kitten after all?”

“Kitten?” Polly said stupidly. Then it came to her, the kitten Gracie wanted for her birthday. “No kitten,” she said. “Just some papers Marshall wanted me to bring by the office.”

Reflexively, she glanced at the folded-back tarpaulin where she had taken the box from the pile. Danny followed her glance and she saw a flicker of emotion in his face, a rigidity that moved from his lips to his cheeks; a smile aborted or a sour thought too close to the surface.

He knows, Polly thought. The telltale heart. Edgar Allen Poe was a genius.

“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.

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.