13 1/2

by Nevada Barr

  We could be dancing, she thought. Her hand in his, moving gracefully around the floor, candlelight turning the world to gold, and him smiling down at her, holding her as if she were the most precious thing on earth.

  When they stood in the middle of the plastic he’d spread, he looked around. “This should do it,” he said matter-of-factly. “There will be some spatter, but I think we’ve got it covered. I’ll do you with the blunt end of the axe and let you lay for a minute. If your blood isn’t circulating it will be neater.”

  He wasn’t talking to her; he was talking to himself, so there was no need for her to listen, no need at all. She concentrated on not plopping as he helped her to sit on the floor.

  Like a lady.

  “I’m giving you a present,” she said and was proud that her words were clear.

  “Yes, you are. A fine present. ’Tis a far, far better thing and so on.” He took up a towel that had somehow found its way into the living room. “Think of this as a blindfold,” he said as he dropped it over her head. “If I hit too hard, this should take care of any mess.”

  “Please, I want to see your face,” she begged, but he made no move to take the towel off.

  He wanted her to have the towel over her.

  At first, she didn’t think he was going to answer, and she waited for the blow that would end her life.

  “Okay, sure,” he said.

  He cared about her.

  She could feel him leaning close. His hands touched her head gently through the terrycloth. He folded the towel back so her face showed. The smell of his cologne brushed her senses. More than anything in life she wanted him to kiss her-not because she asked, but because she was necessary to him, because she was the Woman in Red and only she could give him whatever it was that meant so much to him, because he was the miracle around which she had formed her life.

  He stood and surveyed her. “I think it will be fine. Leave it there, though.” He fetched the axe and came back. “This isn’t something I particularly enjoy. I’m not a lunatic for God’s sake. It has to be done to make things right; there’s no passion involved to speak of.”

  He lifted the axe, turned it so the blunt end was down.

  The last thing the Woman in Red heard was, “I guess that’s the difference between art and science.”

  26

  Danny set down his menu and waved as his sister-in-law swept into the Bluebird Cafe and settled with offhand grace. Tension pulled at the skin around her eyes; she looked as if she hadn’t slept.

  But wasn’t that how brides were supposed to look? Danny doubted she had begged a meeting in order to regale him with the glories of married life. Neither spoke until the waitress, efficient as always, had taken their order, tucked the ticket between the salt and pepper shaker, and hustled away.

  Then, “Tell me,” he said.

  “I do love a direct man.” Polly’s usual twinkle was dulled, the half-hearted flirting merely habitual.

  “Very well. Marshall is… ” Polly stopped and took a sip of the coffee the waitress had unobtrusively set on the table. “He is suffering and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. We had a wonderful time on our honeymoon in Venice. The girls adore him and he them. He and I haven’t had so much as a squabble. But things changed nearly the minute we returned. Marshall started staying at work until past nine. When he does come home, he takes a valium and goes to sleep-with his back to me more often than not. He’s distracted. He isolates himself from us and he won’t talk to me about it. Absurd as this sounds, I think he is frightened of something. Has he said anything to you?”

  Danny chose not to answer. “On the phone you said something happened that made it worse.”

  As her coffee grew cold, she told Danny the bizarre tale of her tarot reading. Her description of the reader as a “shattering racket of reds” made him smile, but he did not underestimate the impact the event had on her.

  “I told Marshall about the reading. Danny, I swear that man turned to stone right then and there. It was as if, like Lott’s wife, he looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.”

  “I am not surprised he was upset… ” he began in defense of his brother.

  “Upset is not the half of it, sugar. He couldn’t eat. He could barely talk. He left the dinner table to rush upstairs. I found him standing in the upstairs bedroom staring down at the bed. He very nearly jumped out of his skin when I came in. You would think I had caught him in that bed with the entire Russian gymnastic team rather than woolgathering all alone. His face turned the color of old cigar ash, and he left. He was gone for over three hours.

  “I was so worried… ” Tears welled up in Polly’s eyes. She covered this lapse of good manners with a shake of her head and touch of her napkin.

  Danny appreciated it. “Any man might get a little sensitive if his wife told him she’d been to a tarot reader who told her that her husband was a fake, a liar, and, what’s more, she’s going to kill him. It doesn’t help matters any that you believe in that stuff,” he added pointedly.

  Over the rim of his coffee cup, he watched his brand-new sister-in-law. She had to be in her late forties-with Southern women it was hard to tell and she wasn’t telling, at least not the truth-yet she was easily the most beautiful woman in the Bluebird Cafe. Not to mention the one with the fewest tattoos.

  A lot of things about his brother’s wife appealed to him: the taper of her fingers, the manicured nails, the way she tilted her head and didn’t windmill her hands when she talked, that she walked as neat-footed as a cat. Beautiful women didn’t disturb his peace the way they did that of other men. He couldn’t imagine going through the emotional storms Marsh was weathering for a woman. Or a man, for that matter. Once, when he was too young to know, but old enough to care deeply, he’d thought he was gay. Over time, he’d realized he wasn’t. Having anyone in his life in that way would be too complicated. And dangerous. Life would have been a good deal easier if Marsh had shared that epiphany.

  Thinking of his brother, he smiled and shook his head.

  “I must say, I am having a difficult time seeing the humor in this,” Polly said, a hint of lemon in the natural honey of her voice.

  Realizing he was not responding appropriately, Danny apologized. “Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I don’t know why you open yourself up to those so-called fortune-tellers. Most have day jobs as hookers or drug dealers.”

  “You are right. I suppose I have a streak of superstition in my makeup. No, that is not totally true. I know I have a streak of superstition. Try as I might, it bothers me when black cats cross my path or the girls run under ladders. I probably shouldn’t have told Marshall about the reading but I thought he would laugh at it, and I dearly needed someone to laugh to get the taste of that awful woman out of my mouth. Sorry about the image that must conjure up while you are trying to eat your lunch; it was an exceedingly unappetizing episode.”

  “Not a problem,” he assured her. “A lot of people have a vein of the old dark magic: witches or angels, lucky bowling shirts. Mom was a court stenographer with a college education, but she’d believed in that sort of thing. Scaring the dickens out of her was a piece of cake. A little knocking, a few whispers, and she wouldn’t go to sleep until Frank got home.”

  “Your father? You call him Frank?”

  “We weren’t all that close,” Danny said dismissively. “Anyway, I was about to say that our folks died around this time of year. Psychologists say the subconscious doesn’t let go of those dates, even when the conscious mind can’t recall them. It hit us both hard, but I think Marsh got the worst of it. Mom made a pet of him. He was that kind of Leave It to Beaver kid.” He stifled the impulse to look at his watch or reach for the bill.

  Discussing his brother with Polly was putting him on edge. She spoke of Marsh as if wife and brother were equals. Women took on an irritating sense of proprietorship when they married, an unquestioned belief that with the ring on their left hand, came a profound understanding of the m
an who’d put it there. A few weeks of marriage was not on a par with half a century of blood.

  Polly might have marched into Marsh’s id like the Germans into Warsaw, but she didn’t know him like his own brother did. Danny was finding it grating to have to pretend she did.

  “What did you make of the tarot reading?” he asked to change the subject. “Aside from the effect it had on Marsh, it must have jolted you considerably.”

  “Considerably,” Polly agreed. “When I first came to New Orleans, for a brief time, I lived in that subculture. They are not without honor. There are customs and taboos, as there are in any culture. Those who are serious about their trade-or as serious as one can be when one’s clients are wearing feathers and silly hats-would never tell anyone they are sick or dying. It’s an unwritten creed.” Polly lifted her coffee cup and took a sip.

  “This creed was undoubtedly unwritten in stone because readers predicting great evils got their heads taken off by irate customers,” she said looking as mischievous as Emma. “Which is what I should have done when this floozy, a-flap with scarves, told me I was going to kill my husband.”

  “It’s hogwash.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The waitress brought their food. A moment passed. Danny ate two French fries.

  The Bluebird did them up fine, but then he’d never had a bad meal in New Orleans -maybe one or two in the weeks after the flood waters abated, but he’d been so glad to be out and fed, he’d not been critical.

  “Pure balderdash,” he said. “Absolute poppycock. So why let it bother you?”

  Polly took a deep breath and gazed into space above and to the right. Danny’d read somewhere that people gazed in one direction to remember and another when they were trying to think of a lie. He couldn’t remember which was which.

  “I thought that reader was a mad woman,” Polly said finally. “I wondered what side of the world she’d gotten out of bed on that inspired her to do something that mean. The wretched thing was clearly unbalanced.”

  She stopped speaking. Danny let the silence sit.

  “That awful woman knew things about my life that I have not shared with anyone but Marshall,” Polly admitted after a few moments. “There is no logical way this great red harpy could have known. Strange as it may be, she had to have seen them in the cards.” Her hand, the one with the two-point-five carat diamond, twitched. It was her nature to touch people. To her credit, early on she had picked up on the fact that Danny didn’t like to be touched and honored his idiosyncrasy.

  “That would be unsettling,” he said with no trace of humor or sarcasm. “It would be hard not to take it seriously.”

  “Thank you,” Polly said.

  “Some of these people are clever,” he said. “Professionals make a living doing mentalist shows in Vegas. You’re sure you told no one but Marsh of these events from your past?”

  “Believe me, I am sure.”

  “Are you sure Marsh told no one?”

  “Of course.”

  In the way she firmed her lips and delicately flared her nostrils, Danny saw the dawning of suspicion. He watched her shake its icy tentacles from her mind with a toss of her head.

  “You are right, of course,” Polly said. “Could they genuinely see the future, they’d not be on the square but making their fortunes at the track.” She took another sip of coffee, made a moue of distaste-it would have grown as cold as Danny’s-and said carefully, “What concerns me is that this absurd woman’s words somehow damaged Marshall. Since I told him, Mr. Marchand, my Mr. Marchand,” she added in polite acknowledgement of Danny’s existence, “walks this earth like he’s haunting it rather than living on it.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Danny promised. He’d planned on talking with Marsh about the bogus reading anyway. Marsh was beginning to fray a little at the edges.

  “That would be wonderful.” Relief and hope made her voice lush. “ Marshall loves you very much. You are good for him.”

  “And he for me,” Danny said curtly. It irked him that she would attempt to define a relationship she knew nothing about.

  He took the check the waitress left. “I’d better get to work or they’ll rob me blind. Today, it’s meetings and on-the-ground checks.”

  “It’s so romantic havin’ a brother-in-law who’s a drug dealer,” Polly drawled and waved as he crossed toward the doors opening out onto Prytania Street.

  A drug dealer. Danny was amused. In the eighties, when money grew on trees, he had invested in a pharmacy. With the one-size-fits-all mentality of Walgreen’s, Rite Aid, CVS, and Wal-Mart, moneymen believed the individual pharmacy had gone the way of the dodo and good service.

  He’d restructured the business into what was being hailed a “boutique pharmacy.” Designed along the lines of an old apothecary shop- Marsh’s idea, Marsh’s design-his four-link chain of stores carried the usual pharmaceuticals as well as traditional folk herbs and medicines. Drugs, even legal drugs, were exceedingly profitable, but what brought the high-end clientele into Le Cure was quick, knowledgeable, and very personal service.

  Danny had not intended to do site visits today, but his meeting with Polly reminded him there were more reasons for being a drug dealer than money. If he didn’t get Marsh relief before he became too tightly wound, his brother could snap.

  That wasn’t something his wife and children would want to see.

  Scott Peterson. Wife and unborn baby. 2005. Why this one I don’t know. I haven’t written about this for a long time. Maybe because I can identify with Peterson. Not with what he did, but with his living a secret life, a life of lies, knowing what people liked about him was a lie. The truth was shameful. He was nothing without those lies. They were him. He’d told the lies so long, he may have felt that being exposed, having his fiction struck down, was tantamount to killing him. The “him” he’d constructed, the persona in which he was a man to be reckoned with, was going to be killed. In his twisted world he acted in self-defense. He started with a new woman who knew nothing about him and destroyed the woman he believed would rip away the Scott Peterson he wanted to be and expose the pathetic little man hiding beneath.

  That Peterson did such a bad job of it is the best I can say of him. I believe the slaying of his wife and unborn child destroyed him from within, and because of that, he bungled it, was captured, and sentenced to death. I would hope my fiction would not demand such a price should it be threatened.

  27

  Harsh sun highlighted fine lines in Polly’s face, invisible even two weeks before-the velvet glove of autumn over the iron fist of summer. Glare forced her to narrow her eyes and the heat pressed down. She should have worn a hat.

  Any southern woman with an ounce of good Christian vanity should wear a hat, she thought absently.

  Tilting her head back so tears would not spill over her lower lids, she pushed back on the bench deeper into shade of Jackson Square ’s live oaks and let the disquiet blossom into a frisson of true fear.

  The things that terrorize are those you don’t see coming.

  The unexpected. “That which we must embrace,” the tarot reader had said. Or endure. The sixth card in the Celtic Cross, that which is to come.

  “That which we cannot find,” Polly murmured aloud.

  “You talkin’ to me?”

  A young, African American man had joined her on the bench. Sandwich held suspended halfway to his mouth, he looked at her with concern. The tears, though unshed, must have shown. Polly was sorry for that. Not that tears weren’t a perfectly good expression of emotion-or means to an end-but to lose control was unseemly. And usually ineffective.

  “I have been trying to find one of the tarot readers,” she said. “A generously constructed woman: red hair, red dress, red nails, red lipstick.”

  “Sounds like the fire truck,” the man noted and took a bite.

  “Ye-ess,” Polly said, making two syllables of the word. “A siren at any rate. She certainly got one’s attention.”


  “I pretty much know the regulars.” The sandwich had gone in three bites. He wadded up the paper and tossed it expertly into the trash barrel several yards away. Polly made no comment. He was sufficiently pleased with himself, she needn’t add a thing. “Haven’t seen her in a while.” He stood to go. “Try the readers. They’d know better than me.”

  Though she had promised herself she wouldn’t, Polly opened her handbag and took out a white unsealed envelope. She pulled out a card, pinching it fastidiously between the tip of her index finger and thumb, lest its inherent filth come off on her hands. The envelope wasn’t there to protect the card from the elements, but the elements from the card. Or the inside of her bag, at any rate.

  Slightly smaller than a standard postcard, it was not of a size the post office would usually deliver, but this was New Orleans and, despite Katrina, the city’s tradition of aiding and abetting human idiosyncrasies survived.

  Polly did not doubt where it came from. It was from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, worn and darkened by handling with unclean hands, the edges frayed from use. Had Polly access to criminal forensic laboratories she would have bet the red seeress’s DNA would be all over it. It was the ugliest of the cards, suggesting the true evil that inhabited the world. The Devil was a squat, potbellied satyr with ears that grew into hairy points and a skull sprouting rams’ horns. The wings of a bat sprung from his shoulders; the talons of a bird of prey took the place of hooves. Chained at his feet were the naked figures of a man and a woman.

  Symbolic rather than literal, the Devil had many meanings: bondage, addiction, greed, obsession, lies, betrayal. Unlike other cards in the tarot, none of the meanings were auspicious. Only the Devil’s placement in the layout could ameliorate his dark presence.

  Polly’s card had had a special placement. She’d found it in her mailbox. On the back of it, printed across the faded, dirty, white-and-blue checks, was the Marchand address and a stamp. On the face, scrawled across the Devil’s genitals in what looked like red nail lacquer, were the words, “Help me.”