Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

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.

“‘The more it reeks, the less likely muggers and murderers are lurking within,’ said Pollyanna brightly,” Polly whispered.

Moving quickly in hopes of reaching the top of the stairs before she had to breathe, she entered the inky recess. On the narrow landing outside the door to the tarot reader’s apartment, she stopped. The climb was short but her heart was pounding as if she’d jogged to the top of the Empire State Building.

A push and the door opened. Feeling slightly foolish and terribly brave, Polly eeled in, closed the door behind her, and switched on the light. There was little danger it would give her presence away. The windows were covered with yellowed blinds and draped with everything from towels and sheets to a flowered bed skirt. The place was more lair than home, in the sense not that Red was an animal but that this was where she hid from the world. Quelling the knowledge that, in the bathroom, the body of a slain woman lay cocooned in plastic, Polly surveyed the bizarre landscape. She was put in mind of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend-the dust man, picking through mountain ranges of London ’s garbage year after year, looking for a lost treasure. Somewhere in the Woman in Red’s mountains of trash she would find answers to the questions she dared not ask her husband.

Lest it be swallowed up in the morass, she set her handbag on an overturned basket by the door and started in on the nearest heap like an archaeologist digging through the refuse of a lost civilization.

Within an hour she had moved three yards into the room. Where there had been hopeless disarray, there remained hopeless disarray, but none of it had gone unexamined. Stooping, crawling, sifting, Polly looked at each item-be it a dirty coffee mug or a slip of paper-then tossed it behind her. Because she didn’t know what she sought, she couldn’t afford to overlook anything.

Fatigue quickly wore out any sense of disquiet she suffered from sharing the apartment with the-one might assume-unquiet ghost of the murdered woman. Without consciously choosing to, Polly began talking with the Woman in Red, discussing her discoveries as she came upon them: “You like Arlo amp; Janice; I’m surprised you didn’t have a cat. Do you have a cat hidden in this mess? Here kitty, kitty. Red! Sorry, sugar, but I have just ruined one of your lipsticks. It’s all over the bottom of my shoe. I don’t suppose the cleaning lady will notice my tracks. My lord, girl, what were you going to do with all these purses? There is not enough money left in New Orleans to fill the wallets. You never used them did you? Look, this one still has the tag. You poor dear. It must have felt good to buy yourself a treat and a dream. A bargain at nine-ninety-nine. Lighters, and lighters, and matchbooks! It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested for arson. AARP! And a subscription! There must be forty magazines here. Sugar, I would not be caught dead with one of these in the house. Sorry, darling, you were caught dead. I read AARP secretly at the doctor’s office, like a little boy peeking at a Playboy magazine under Dad’s mattress. My dear you are braver and less vain than I.”

By three a.m., Polly had worked her way to the wall between the main room and the bedroom and bath. Her eyelids grated against her sclera, and her throat was raw from dust.

The corpse lying in the tub weighed more heavily on her mind now. So long deluged in the residue of the dead woman’s life, she had come to feel compassion for her and, finally, a kind of affection.

Sorting through her rag-tag belongings Polly learned that the Woman in Red loved Nancy Drew, Ethan Hawke, and a pro wrestler named the Mondo King. She loved shoes and scarves. A cigar box lined with blue velvet held treasured trinkets-from a lover, Polly presumed. The items in the box represented the only order in the apartment. A boy’s high school ring; a silver heart-not real silver, but silvery metal-on a tarnished chain, the kind won at fairs or bought in souvenir shops, with a V engraved on it in fancy script; three rosebuds, shriveled until they were more brown than yellow, long pins through the tape-wrapped stems; a pair of bead earrings; and a button were displayed in careful rows as if Red looked at them often, or once had. For Polly, this box was the saddest of a dumpsterful of sad items. Red’s inamorato had given so little of himself his gifts could be kept in a six-by-eight box, the whole not worth the cost of a pack of cigarettes.

Though the apartment was glutted with things, the cigar box was the only thing she found that was truly personal.

Polly was not given to the accumulation of worldly goods, but, had anyone gone through her house, they would have seen pictures of children and friends, letters from students, invitations accepted and declined, calendars marked with upcoming events, hand-drawn birthday cards, inscribed books, awards, diplomas, notes on bulletin boards-a short history of Polly Marchand in three dimensions. In Red’s plethora of objects nothing that spoke of her heart had surfaced, only evidence of compulsion, addiction, and depression. But for the cigar box, there was no indication that anyone had touched her life-or that she had touched the life of another.