Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

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.