13 1/2 (25 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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At one time, the area had been middle-class, lined with charming homes and apartments. Only their bones remained, their souls cobbled up into duplexes, quadraplexes, and cheap rooming houses. The residue of fast-food lunches and blasted buildings littered the gutters. Lawns were bare dirt.
Polly parked her Volvo in the shade of one of the live oaks—the last of the gentility living in this part of town—but left the ignition running for the air-conditioning. Not knowing quite what to do next, she studied the street where the Woman in Red was said to have her lair.
Abode
, Polly corrected herself. It was hard not to think of the poor, raddled woman as a beast.
The decaying buildings told her nothing. She was not sure what she had expected. Perhaps to see the woman in all her fiery glory sailing down the street or, in a Valentine-red robe and fuzzy slippers, having a cigarette on her porch. The only visible life at the moment was a small girl squatting on a broken walkway having an earnest conversation with a dog who outweighed her by at least fifteen pounds.
Little girls saw much and were seldom averse to talking about it to anyone who would listen. Reluctantly, Polly left the cool of her car. The child was tiny—four or five maybe—and small for her age. The dog was large, black, and apparently devoted. Polly didn’t guess at his age.
“Pardon me for interrupting your conversation,” she said to the two of them. “But I am in need of assistance.”
Both child and dog looked up at her.
“You lost?” asked the little girl. She stood and smoothed down the hot-pink tank top she wore over lime-green shorts with a pink frog appliquéd on the pocket. Barefoot, she padded down the walk to where Polly waited. Her little feet had to be hard as rocks. She didn’t flinch at the burn of the superheated concrete. The dog, his head as high as his mistress’s shoulder, walked beside her. The child’s face was open and trusting. The dog’s was not, and Polly was relieved. Children needed bodyguards.
“I am not, myself, lost, but thank you for asking. It is a friend of mine who is lost. She is very big and dresses all in red, even her hair and fingernails and lips. You looked like someone who notices things, and I hoped you’d seen her.”
“Yes, ma’am. She don’t like kids much. There’s a man comes to see her sometimes, but nobody else. He’s not from around here. I went over there one time, and she yelled at me to get off her porch. I wasn’t on her porch. Well, I was on her porch, but I was getting this thing, this round, throwy thing, like a flying saucer that Kaeisha had throw’d, and it had floated down there. And me and Newt was just going to get it, and she come out and yelled like we were going to steal things; but she don’t got nothing to steal anyways. She’s just a poor old white lady, Momma says, and to leave her be because she maybe got troubles we don’t know nothing about.”
“Your momma is a very smart lady,” Polly said.
“Yup.”
“Which porch did you and Newt chase the Frisbee onto?”
“Yeah, a Frisbee, that was the throwy thing. We chased it up there.”
The girl pointed back the way Polly had come. Three houses down, on the corner, was a two-story pink quadraplex, porches below and balconies above, forming a wooden shadowbox front. Nothing on the building was straight. Shingles shagged off the roof’s edges; the porch and balcony posts tilted drunkenly; the ridgeline sagged like the saddle-back of an old nag. Raw and sunburnt, pink paint peeled from eaves to foundation.
“The top one?”
“Yeah. Kaeisha’s real strong, stronger than a boy. She threw it up there, but she’s a scaredy cat and, even though she’s bigger than me, she said I should go get it because I’ve got Newt, and Newt won’t go with her. He’ll go with her, but only if I go with her; and so me and Newt got it ourselves, and we were about to throw it back down, and out comes the lady that lives there and starts yelling.
“She called me a bad name,” the little girl added, more in shame than anger.
“Her momma must not have taught her good manners like your momma taught you.”
“I guess.”
“Thank you, you’ve been most helpful,” Polly said and reached out to touch her hair. Newt bared his teeth. “Good boy,” she said.
Stairs led up a dark passage sandwiched between the two downstairs units. The stairwell was unlit and stank of lives lived out in clouds of cigarette smoke and boiled sausage.
Having climbed to a narrow landing with a door on each side, Polly paused, straightened her collar, and ran her tongue over her teeth to dislodge any unsightly foodstuffs or migrating lip color. Habits from a lifetime of benevolent seduction.
Then she rapped loudly. No one answered, but the door moved inward, and icy air poured out of the dark apartment. Blinds had been drawn and drapes pulled.
“Hello?” Polly called. “Is anybody home?” There was no answer. Probably the Woman in Red had moved out when whatever was troubling her caught up with her.
Polly pushed the door, and an unseen barrier gave way with a slithering noise. The scant light from the landing didn’t penetrate the darkness. Reaching around the doorsill, she fumbled for a light switch, found it, and flipped it up.
“Lordy!” she whispered.
It was a garbage house. Polly remembered one in Prentiss, the children taken away by county services, a photo of the parents and their living room on the front page of the local paper. Carver, the father of Emma and Gracie—and all the atonement Polly thought she would ever need to guarantee her a place in heaven—had a mother like that. He spent nearly a month literally shoveling out her house. The Woman in Red’s shotgun apartment was half the size of Polly’s ex-mother-in-law’s, but it would take more than a month to clear it.
It would take an act of God.
The heap that had fallen with the slither of many snakes when she’d forced the door was a three-foot stack of old magazines. Junk covered every square foot of the floor: newspapers, boxes, bags, books, half-empty pop bottles, dryer lint, garbage bags spilling food wrappers and toilet paper, clothes, and clothes, and clothes, pots for planters and cooking, buckets, shoes, hats, purses—dozens of purses, some still with the price tags tied to the handles—candy wrappers, television guides, overflowing ashtrays, pizza boxes. The detritus of the woman’s life was deepest in the corners, creating slopes of man-made scree from the picture rail down.
The floor was buried in two, three, and four feet of garbage. A narrow path from the front door to the adjoining room had been stomped through the hills of junk. Off this path, there were places Polly could not have walked upright. Furniture had been buried. The end of a chair arm, covered in gray, nubbled fabric aerated by cigarette burns, thrust out from a corner slope, and what looked like rabbit ears poked out of a pile of clothes.
TV aerial,
Polly thought.
Or car antenna.
The image of an automobile lost in the crud on the second floor of the old house brought laughter up in her throat. Nerves, or absurdity, or pity would not let go of the laughter and, as she crossed the wasteland of a woman’s life, she could not stop the gusts as she imagined ever more absurd things lost beneath this sea of trash.
The room at the end of the trodden path was faintly lit as if by a nightlight. Polly stepped in through a door that had not been closed since July of 1991. At least that was the date on the
Glamour
magazine on top of the waist-high pile leaning against it.
It was the bedroom. One side of the double bed was relatively clear of debris, and the path leading to the bathroom showed hardwood in places. A small television sat on a dresser in a tangle of cosmetics, scarves, hair decorations, and undergarments. Open, overfilled drawers made a colorful stairway up from the floor. The room’s only window was blocked by layers of curtaining, the sill gone to a slide of knickknacks and papers that continued unbroken to the seat of the chair beneath. A closet regurgitated cheap red clothes.
An oddity in this house of oddities was the full-length mirror on the closet door. The bottom two-thirds had been spray-painted black. The job had been done quickly; clouds of paint discolored the door behind the glass. When Polly looked at her reflection, all she could see of herself was her head. The image was surreal, threatening, as if, in some unknown future or universe, she had gone to the guillotine.
She quickly looked back to the only space that could still support life, the bed. Empty hamburger wrappers and paper cups were piled high enough to fall and begin spreading beneath, the tide rising around the woman’s last island of space.
No wonder she had reeked of despair.
Across the room was a small bath with barely enough space for a tub with a shower curtain around it, a commode, and a small sink. The bathroom looked as if it had been force-fed beauty products until it had foundered. Claustrophobia and compassion began to suffocate Polly. She had the answer, not only to the Devil card with its plea for help but to the bizarre and terrifying reading.
The woman was mad.
The weight of the horded misery pressed on her rib cage, making it hard to breathe. Whatever help this Woman in Red needed, it would be more than Polly could give. Turning to leave, she saw that the tub, too, had been filled. A great plastic sheet had been bundled into it and strapped ’round and ’round with packing tape.
Suddenly certain what she would find, Polly pulled back the shower curtain in one quick ripping motion that tore half of it from its hooks.
The cloudy plastic cocooned something very large and very red. Oddly empty of feeling, Polly stared down at the bundled dead. Why would the Woman in Red have thought she could help, could have stopped this? Polly had nothing to do with this poor thing’s life. No connection but the reading.
You will kill your husband.
At lunch with Danny Polly had told him the woman knew things that she had told no one but Marshall. Had Marshall shared them with this awful woman? A mind game? Gaslighting the new wife? Had he told this woman he was going to kill her, hence the Devil card in the mailbox?
When her house burned Marshall had called to awaken her and been there before the fire department to rescue her. And take her and her children into his home.
Like he’d wanted.
No time for her to think about it clearly, to get to know him better.
Once married, he’d become evasive, secretive, spending more time at work and with his brother than with her and the girls.
The emptiness in Polly began to fill with black ice. A sense of falling took hold of her and she knocked half a dozen oddments to the floor as she clutched the edge of the sink to remain standing.
Maybe the card had been sent so she would save this woman. More likely it had been sent so she would find the body. Why? In this hell hole of a place was there evidence hidden to frame her? Why would anyone frame an English professor for murder? To get custody of her children?
The ice began to break apart, slivers of cold knifing along her veins. Atop the body was a piece of lined, three-hole-punch binder paper crumpled into a fist-sized wad. She watched her hand float out over the sea of red-stained plastic and pick the paper up the way a mechanical arm in an arcade game might pinch up a stuffed toy.
She flattened it against the wall. In the top left corner, written in pencil, was a single sentence.
Why kids? Is killing them easier? More fun?
The handwriting looked like her husband’s.
Polly didn’t call the police. She’d not been raised to trust them and, until she knew why she had been dragged to this apartment to find what she had been meant to find, she would tell no one.
Taking the note, touching nothing else, she left the way she had come. She closed the apartment door behind her and wiped her fingerprints from the knob.
28
Polly rifled through two floors of her husband’s things and found nothing suggestive of murder, nothing of betrayal, only a man with simple needs and too many prescription drugs in his bedside table. Turning out small envelopes of collar stays and bundled business cards, she felt for the first time how little she knew of Marshall Marchand. They’d married in the fairy glamour of first love when nothing matters but the moment and the man.
If he had friends, there was no trace of them in his personal belongings. No family but Danny, no photographs of him as child.
Finally, she reached the cellar. Half a dozen boxes were stored on stacked wooden pallets. This high-water storage was set along the two-by-four studs bisecting the basement lengthwise.
One was out of alignment with the others, peeking from beneath a tarp as if it had been recently moved and hurriedly put away. Perhaps upstairs, in the sunlight instead of skittering like a cockroach around a dank basement, she might not have noticed it.
With the heightened awareness sleuthing engendered, Polly knew this was what she’d been searching for—whatever she’d been meant to find—and she eyed it with loathing. Lifting a stick from the scrap lumber bin, she used the end of it to push the tarp off of the carton then, again using the stick, flipped the cardboard lid off as if the box contained water moccasins.

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