13 1/2 (28 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

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“‘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 & 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.
“Keeps to herself,” Emily, the tarot reader, had said.
Filling the emptiness,
Polly thought, looking at the mess of goods with which Red had surrounded herself.
Beneath the bed, where the Woman in Red had made her last stand, still using the furniture, still turning on the light, reading her magazines and smoking her cigarettes, Polly found the second personal item: a photo album embossed with oversized leatherette daisies in the psychedelic colors of the sixties, the kind a teenaged girl might have been given. In keeping with her usual style, Red had not put her memorabilia under the plastic page covers but jammed it in every which way.
Sitting tailor-fashion on the floor—whatever effluvia was there would surely be less toxic than that on the dingy bedsheets—Polly put the album in her lap and turned the garish cover. Between the first page and the cardboard were snapshots. They’d been taken by an old Polaroid instamatic and the colors had faded. Several were stuck together from being mashed against one another so long. There was a photograph of a man and woman standing on the steps of a brick house. A bicycle was overturned by the bottom step. A pretty little girl of eight or nine sat beside it smiling for the camera. Two other pictures of the family group featured the mom, the little girl, and a shy-looking teenager. The face had been scratched off the pictures of the older girl.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Polly said to the ghost who kept her company. “You poor thing. Terrible to erase yourself like that. I would dearly love to wring the necks of whoever made you hate yourself.”
Polly set the pictures aside and turned the page. Again, photographs had been shoved in but not arranged. These appeared to be the “art” shots every young girl feels compelled to take when given her first camera. One shot had been taken through what looked to be a knothole. Three were of the house, the camera held at funky angles. The rest were long shots of a boy, the angle suggesting they’d been taken from an upstairs window. The indifference of the subject to the camera suggested they’d been taken in stealth. The distance was so great Polly couldn’t tell if the boy was happy, sad, handsome, or plain. He was white and in his teens; he could be any boy anywhere. In the faded Polaroids he mowed grass, fixed the tire of a bike, went in and came out of a two-story brick house. The photographer had taken twenty-four shots of him, a single roll of film.
Polly wondered if this unsuspecting model and the high school ring in the cigar box were related. Clearly, the Woman in Red had suffered a passion for him at one time, but Polly couldn’t see this boy giving his ring to the shy girl who’d scratched out her face.
Maybe she stole it.
“I’m sorry, sugar. That was uncharitable. I know you did not steal that boy’s ring,” she apologized to her invisible companion whose corporal self continued to rot in the tub in the next room.
Polly set these snapshots with the others. When she turned the next page of the album, yellowed newspaper came out in a crumpled wad.
“What is it with old newspaper clippings tonight? I swear I have not looked at this much newsprint since Gracie went through her parakeet phase,” Polly said, smoothing them out on her thigh. The newsprint would stain the linen, but after the first hour, she had decided to get the slacks cleaned and donate them to Goodwill. Between then and now, she’d decided to burn them instead.
“There must be forty articles!” Polly exclaimed. “I am not going to read them all, sugar. I don’t care how long you’ve been collecting them.”
“Raines,” she read aloud.
In the file box in the basement there had been a mention of the Raines trial.
“Damn.”
Without warning, the lights went out. Darkness struck like a blow. Shuttered, blinded and draped, midnight in the apartment was absolute. Disoriented, Polly grunted, a tired helpless sound comprised of exhaustion and surprise.
Darkness and silence—the air conditioner was no longer running.
“The power has gone out,” she said into the stillness.
Then she heard someone moving in the living room.
Polly had been immersed in the tarot reader’s sordid universe for so long her first thought was of the ghost of the Woman in Red. “Is it you?” she whispered before she could stop herself. A sharp intake of breath answered her. Ghosts had no need to breathe.
Noise from the other room died with her words. The man—surely a man—had stopped moving. Polly stopped breathing to listen. She hadn’t heard him come in. This was no opportunistic thief; he had been here before. Only someone with experience could negotiate from landing to living room in silence and without light.
Polly thought the day’s adventures would have drained her adrenal glands, but her heart pounded with such force blood rushing past her ears drowned all other sounds. In the utter, mind-breaking darkness she felt her senses reach out, ears straining, eyes widening, nostrils flaring, every system seeking information she might use to survive.
There was no question in her mind that survival was the issue. The Woman in Red’s killer was in the apartment. Violence permeated the air, a negative charge that raised the hairs on her arms. Raised in violence, Polly had never forgotten the edgy vibration in the void that preceded it.
Between one breath and the next, she understood what was meant by the cliché of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes. She had imagined it would be like a slide show on fast-forward, images of the good times one after another.
It was not like that. The whole of her life, who she was, what she had done—everything exploded at the same moment. A supernova of memory: people she’d fought against, those whom she had fought for, those whom she loved, and hated, and lost, and found. The life she had been handed and the life that she had made. Her girls at every age. The dirt of her childhood and the dirt of her garden. Evils she had run from and those she had embraced. The husband she’d left and the husband she loved. Axes and exes, birthday parties and pets, flat tires and spelling bees, labor, groceries, Emily Dickenson, shoes that pinched, tonsillitis. All of it was there.
Then it was gone. Polly slammed back into total darkness of mind and body. But not spirit. The images ignited a fury for life. She would
not
end up as another bit of trash on the floor of a garbage house. By the age of four, Polly was accustomed to escaping drunken men and mad women. On bad nights, she would come awake thinking she’d heard raging footsteps above her hiding place beneath the trailer.
She’d been so small then, she could wriggle through cat doors and wood piles, lie flat in high grass. Here, she had only darkness and silence. If the man in the other room had a flashlight, she was a dead woman. Seeing was to his advantage, and she wondered why he’d turned off the power.
He didn’t want to be recognized.
Because she knew him.
For a snick of time, the thought that it was Marshall robbed her of her desire to remain among the living. But her life was too rich to destroy in a snick.
“You will kill him,” she heard Red hiss. “You will kill your husband
.”
Gracie and Emma, holding hands and laughing.
So be it,
Polly thought.
Moving smoothly, each hand placed, each foot shifted with care and in silence, Polly stood up from the floor. Her limbs were not stiff, her back not sore. Adrenaline had seen to that.
“Unh!” came from the living room. Like her, the man was trying to move without sound.
He’d turned off the lights because he knew the paths through the house. But, over the hours, Polly had rearranged the garbage. Suddenly, she remembered how she had reconfigured the map of the mountains of junk, envisioning not just a vague image of where things were but a complete catalog of everything she had touched, where she had tossed it and how hard.
Total recall.
An English professor’s equivalent to lifting a tractor off a child,
she thought and wondered why her brain still loved whimsy, why she was not paralyzed with terror.
Maybe because now she had something—someone—real to fight
.
At that thought her fierceness lost some of its punch. Physical strength was not an attribute she cultivated. Her fights had been of the intellectual variety. She’d gotten old enough to have an intellect by hiding and escaping.

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