Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

“Do you know anyone called ‘the Woman in Red’?” she demanded. “She lives in a garbage dump on Loyola.”

“Loyola. V. Werner. Vondra.” He sounded vague.

V. A fancy script V on a silver heart in the treasure box. V, Vondra.

“Where have you been tonight?” Polly was surprised she wasn’t shouting. She was staggeringly rational. “Have you been out? You’re calling me from your cell phone. Where are you?”

“I’ve been out. Not out. Away from the phone. Please, Polly, come home. Where are you?”

“I am about to meet with your brother. He said you had gone berserk.”

Headlights broke the peace of the night, a sports car coming up the road.

“Danny’s here.”

“Don’t talk to him. This is important. Come home. Talk to me. Don’t even meet with him. Please.”

The headlights of her brother-in-law’s car went out. Ambient glow from the streetlights lit the passenger seat.

“I have to,” she said. “He has Emma and Gracie with him.” She turned the cell phone off.

Emma was sitting on Gracie’s lap.

No seatbelts, Polly thought, as if that was the greatest danger of the night.

Dark and sleek, the car idled in the glow of the streetlight. From inside came the soft strains of cool jazz. The girls were in their pajamas. Polly stepped into the light and ran across the gravel toward where they waited.

Danny unfolded himself from the driver’s side. “You girls stay in the car,” Polly heard him say. “I’ll leave it running so you’ll have air-conditioning. Don’t worry; I’ll just be a minute.”

“Polly,” he said with evident relief. He stopped her and took her hands. She felt as if she were made of wood. His touch scarcely penetrated. “ Marshall knew where the girls were staying, so I thought it best to pick them up. I’m sorry for the cloak and dagger, but things have gotten out of hand.”

He smiled his old crooked smile, and Polly suffered a confused relief. He was sane. Or appeared to be. In a night of insanity, even the appearance of rationality was reassuring.

“What is going on?” she asked, her voice hollow in her ears.

“My God, what happened to you?”

Polly looked down at her filthy, torn clothing. A hand strayed to her hair. The ends were sticking out like straw from a haystack. “Somebody attacked me. I think… ” She couldn’t tell him what she thought. Saying it would make it real.

Danny looked at her long and hard. The faint light was behind him, and she could read nothing in his dark eyes.

“ Marshall isn’t Marshall,” he said gently.

“Your husband is not who you think he is,” the tarot reader had said.

“Our parents did not die in an automobile accident. Marshall -his real name is Dylan Raines. Mine is Richard, Richard Raines.”

The Raines trial. Butcher Boy.

“Dylan was a troubled kid. He spent seven years in a juvenile detention center in Minnesota. When he got out, I brought him down here. I changed our names so he would have a chance at a new life.”

Polly nodded. Numbness had worked from her hands up over her heart to her throat, and her head bobbed as foolishly as a doll on a dashboard.

“Are you up to talking to him, do you think?” Danny asked kindly. “I thought if we all-what do they call it?-had an intervention, we might be able to calm him down, convince him to get some help.”

Danny still held her hands. Polly pulled her fingers from his. Her arms fell lifelessly to her sides.

“What about the girls?” She was whispering. “What about the girls?” she repeated. This time her voice was too loud. Messages from her brain were not reaching her organs with speed or clarity.

“I thought they could ride with you. I’ll follow you. Are you up to this? You don’t have to. I might be able to handle it by myself,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Yes,” was the best she could manage. “Richard,” she said.

“Yes.”

“There’s a dead woman… I was in her apartment… ” Polly didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Vondra Werner,” Richard told her. “I know, Marsh told me. She was a friend of mine. Dylan- Marshall -hated her. She testified against him.”

“ Marshall attacked me?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Danny waited for her to say something, but Polly found she had nothing to say. Reality had become too bizarre for language to encompass.

“If we’re going to do this thing, we should get started,” he said kindly.

“Yes.” Her eyes returned to the car. Emma and Gracie were chattering to each other. “The girls shouldn’t be with us.”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to take them back to Martha’s. We can tuck them into my bed downstairs. Marshall won’t even know they’re there. Hide in plain sight,” he said, maybe hoping to get a smile.

“Okay,” Polly said woodenly. Exhaustion was falling heavily on the backs of her eyes. The injuries from the attack settled in to a bone-deep ache. The same ache surrounded her heart, squeezing so tightly she could feel each heartbeat.

Buckling her daughters into the back seat of the Volvo, she had to steady herself on the door. Her husband was not who she thought he was.

Red had said, “You will kill your husband.”

Was that, too, foreordained?

Keys in hand, she walked around to the driver’s side of the Volvo. Danny stopped her. “Here,” he said and took the keys from her nerveless fingers. “You look too beat to drive. We can come back and get my car another time.”

Without waiting for her to agree, he opened the driver’s door and got in. The ignition turned, and the motor hummed to life. Afraid he would drive off without her, Polly ran to the passenger door and scrambled in.

“I would have waited,” he said.

“I was perfectly alright to drive,” she replied with more hostility than she could account for.

Twisting around, she checked on Emma and Gracie. They had curled up on the wide backseat, like yin and yang, foreheads touching, knees drawn up, little feet twined together.

“The poor little things are worn out,” Polly said.

“Both asleep?”

“Dead to the world,” Polly replied, then wished she’d used a different phrase. This was not a night one should tempt the gods.

“That’s for the best,” Danny said. “I didn’t want to talk in front of them, but I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

Polly thought about that for what seemed an excessively long time. In truth, she had nothing she wanted him to answer. She needed answers, but she would ask them of Marshall. Danny did not come to this meeting with clean hands. If Marshall ’s life was a lie, so was his brother’s.

Lights shone from the third-floor bedroom. The downstairs unit was dark. “He must have fallen asleep with the lights on,” Danny said, more to himself than to Polly. The sentence jarred, but Polly wasn’t sure why. Before she could think, Danny was out of the car opening the rear door.

“You take Emma,” he said. “I’ll take Gracie. She’s getting a little heavy even for me.”

“They are not babies,” Polly said more sharply than she intended. “They are too old to be carried around like sleepy toddlers.” Why she wished to make her daughters seem more mature and independent, she didn’t know.

“Never too old to be carried,” Danny said, scooping Gracie into his arms. She was awake-Polly could tell in the way mothers can always tell-but pretending not to be in order to get a ride up the stairs. Emma was truly asleep. Her noodley form draped over Polly’s shoulder as she gathered up her bare legs. Emma was growing coltish, long-legged.

She would be taller than Gracie.

The incredible sweetness of her child, nestled into the crook of her neck, struck Polly through the numbness that had overtaken her. There was an edge to this child-love that was so sensual, right and good, a true connecting.