13 1/2 (31 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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“No!” Marshall said abruptly.
She had told someone. She’d told him.
33
The habit of doing as his brother told him was strong, and Marshall took himself upstairs. He stopped beside the bed, where he’d taken to standing in recent days, doing his Superman routine, trying to look through the mattress with his X-ray vision to see if he had unwittingly secreted an edged weapon beneath. Tonight, he wasn’t looking for the axe. He was fixated on the pills Danny had given him.
Any other night, he would have swallowed a couple without much thought, looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Tonight, he found he had to know what the pills were. Exactly what they were. What they did. Who made them. What the side effects were.
So much was out of whack. Not so much that it showed up readily, not so much that people dialed 911 or checked into Betty Ford, but wrong—a note played sharp, a ping in the engine. When he got this feeling on a job site, he’d stare and pace, sometimes sleep at the construction site, waiting for the dishonest color or anachronistic pattern to reveal itself.
His wife and brother came and went in the dead of night like actors in a French farce.
An axe appeared and disappeared.
A scribbled note on the counter.
A tarot reading that told secrets and made threats.
There was nothing he could do about flitting axes, nothing he could say that wouldn’t frighten Polly further from him. But he could identify the medications he put down his throat night after night.
In less than a minute, Marshall descended the backstairs to his brother’s kitchen door. “Danny,” he called. “It’s me. Open up.” A light showed under the sill, but there was no response. “Hey!” He knocked and tried the knob. The door was locked.
A quick trip to the cellar for a spare key, and he let himself in. Music played softly—a sonata of some sort. Despite Danny’s efforts, Marshall managed to remain fairly ignorant in the field of performing arts.
“Dan? Danny?”
The bed was made, the towels in the bath dry and neat.
“Where the hell . . . ”
Danny’d said he was going to bed. Marshall pulled apart the slats in the blind and looked into the garden. His brother’s car was gone, the gate left open. Unless Danny’d left by the front door, Marshall would have seen him. Regardless of how Danny departed, Marshall should have at least heard the car leave.
He must have pushed the car out—easy enough with the gentle slope and concrete pad—and left the gate open. Why? Didn’t want to wake his brother? Danny wasn’t that considerate. Where had he gone at three in the morning—or four, or whatever the hell time it was?
To get lithium for his psychotic brother?
Psych ward. Cootie central.
Marshall suppressed a shiver. It had been bad enough when he was a kid. Now, it would probably kill him. Shrugging off the thought as he had shrugged off legions of bat-black thoughts, he went to Danny’s office.
Marshall switched on the lamp.
Magic beans,
he thought, as he spilled the pills onto the smooth metal surface of the desk. Their shape was distinctive, but there was no lettering stamped on them. They might be too generic to trace. He found the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
in the bookcase, opened it on the desk, and searched by color, size, and shape. The pills were not generic.
They were Ambien.
“Take two, three, if you think you need it. Valium,” Danny had said
.
Marshall knew little about prescription drugs—he left that to his brother—but Ambien had been in the news. One of the side effects was amnesia. If the person taking it did not go to sleep, he was likely to do any number of things that he wouldn’t remember in the morning.
Was that what he’d done? Taken the drug, played with axes, refrigerated Chihuahuas, and God knew what else, then gone back to bed and woken without any memory of it?
Why would Danny give him a drug that caused the very thing they’d both worked so hard to avoid? Why tell him the drug was a mild form of Valium?
The foundations of Marshall’s life were as sick as New Orleans after sitting so long in poison waters. Buildings were tilted. Doors would no longer close. Windows no longer stayed open. Cracks appeared.
Wading carefully through treacherous waters, he opened his brother’s filing cabinet. With all his wealth and taste for fine things, Danny lived a monkish life. What he had was of the best quality, but he needed little and kept what he had in rigid order. Unsure of what he sought, Marshall thumbed quickly through household bills, warranties, computer manuals, and the leases for the rental properties Danny owned.
Four, Marshall knew of; he’d done the design work on two and found Danny a crew to reroof a third. The fifth lease, filed under the letter
V
was new to him. An apartment building in the slums of Center City. Because it was different, because it was secret, Marshall pulled the file from the drawer. One of the apartments was let to V. Werner.
Vondra Werner. Rich had sex with her when he was thirteen; that’s what he was doing while his little brother orphaned him. Vondra had been obsessed with Rich, still begging him to let her drive him to Drummond three years after he got his driver’s license.
Vondra was in New Orleans, and Danny had given her an apartment. Secretly. Marshall glanced at the contract. Secretly and rent free. Vondra Werner was Danny’s—what? Paramour? As far as Marshall knew, Danny didn’t have lovers—not women, not men. Evidently, Danny didn’t tell him everything. Not like he told Danny everything.
The rental agreement listed her profession as “Tarot Reader, Jackson Square.”
Polly’s tarot reader?
Marshall put the lease back in the file. A sense of inevitability locked on his brain. Marshall would know. Kowalski had been right; the truth was locked in his skull. He left the office for the bedroom. Danny was too private a person to keep personal items in his public spaces.
The master bedroom was the width of the building, thirty-three feet wide and twenty-two deep. The bed, raised on a shining black dais like an altar to sleep, was at the far end from the door. Exercise equipment, coupled with Danny’s taste for chrome and steel, leant the room a futuristic look. Marshall had found the bureau for the room. It was shaped like a classic Chippendale, but the entire surface was mirrored.
He opened the top drawer.
An oval box, sterling silver with tortoiseshell inlay and spindly piano-shaped legs, nestled among the tie clips and collar stays. Crying out, Marshall gathered it up gently, as if it were a living thing, and carried it over to the bed.
The box had belonged to their mother. She kept it on her dressing table. Since the police had dragged him from the house, it was the first and only relic Marshall had seen from his old life. He’d refused anything from the house. He kept no pictures, and he never asked what Danny did with the place or its furnishings. Danny had inherited a chunk of money, as well as the house, when their folks died. Marshall had never asked what the numbers were. Given he’d hacked them to death, it seemed cold to ask about the payoff.
Marshall wanted nothing from his childhood; he was afraid of the memories that would be evoked. Sitting on Danny’s bed, he was stunned at how good it felt, cradling his mother’s jewelry box. There were memories in it, he knew, but his mother’s shade would not let them cut too deeply. Polly had taught him that; mothers forgave their children. Even the monsters.
The silver box closed with a tiny catch on the left—he marveled that he remembered. He flicked the lock with a fingernail and opened it. On the brown velvet lining lay the simple gold cross his mother had worn every day of her life. She was wearing it the night she was killed. Marshall had seen it fall from her robe when she leaned down to kiss him goodnight.
Beside it, much tinier, was another cross on a chain. It wasn’t real gold, and the chain was sturdier. To Lena, it had been perfect because it was just like Momma’s. Once it had been fastened around her neck, she refused to have it taken off. It had been a wonder she never lost or broke it. Marshall smiled at the memory of his little sister, then abruptly stopped, waiting for the memory of how she died to overlay it.
The picture in his mind of a round-cheeked two-year-old, blonde hair in wispy curls, her precious gold cross pulled up on its chain and stuck in her mouth, wavered but held. “Hey, Lena,” he whispered. He’d never dared remember her, except fleetingly and as an addendum to something else.
Marshall pinched up a copper disk the size of a nickel. On the back was engraved: “Ginger Raines. 1341 Epcott.”
The cat’s tag. Ginger had a red leatherette collar, he recalled, with a tag on it. Not knowing what it was doing in his mother’s box, he put it back and lifted out their dad’s wedding ring. On the inside was inscribed, “Frank, my hero.” A private joke they hadn’t lived long enough to share with their children. Laying the ring in the center of his palm, Marshall looked at it in the unilateral light of Danny’s bed lamp. Their father had been proud of the scratches in the soft gold. “A wedding ring is for life,” he’d tell his sons. “No need to take it off. Like love, time only makes it more beautiful.” Marshall had forgotten that. He had forgotten much of his life. Eleven years. Like it was a book he read once and never thought of again.
The last item in the jewelry box was a pair of silver-toned hockey sticks, a pin Dylan’s fourth-grade team had won. Between ages seven and ten, he’d had a passion for hockey. The Fighting Marmots—a name as inexplicable as it was hard to chant—had taken first at state. He was way too cool to wear the pin, but he’d liked to look at it when Rich wasn’t around to rag him.
Never a sentimentalist—his life had not been the kind Hallmark wrote cards about—Marshall was taken aback at how much he wanted to hold on to these keepsakes.
It was foolish to believe their owners lived on through them. Foolish to believe. To feel it was a different thing.
Again he lifted out his mother’s cross, supporting it by the slender broken chain.
It must have been taken from her body before the burial and given to Rich. Marshall thought about that, as he watched the golden cross turning hypnotically.
Mr. Kroger, their dad’s partner, had made all the arrangements. Rich told him that the first time he’d visited him in Drummond. There was no funeral—Mr. Kroger had the bodies interred as soon as the autopsies were completed—but they were going to have a memorial service when the news people quit dogging everybody concerned.
Marshall tried to picture their dad’s rough-voiced partner. He’d seemed like such a big man and so old, but he couldn’t have been more than forty-five. He’d liked Dylan, and used to growl at him, and act like he ate children. It would sound sinister to tell but it wasn’t. It was fun.
The forensic pathologist must have removed the wedding ring and the necklace. Marshall couldn’t picture Mr. Kroger prying his dad’s wedding ring off. No one would pry off a man’s wedding ring before burying him next to his wife. At least no man from Minnesota. The same went for the gold crosses. The undertaker, the pathologist, the preacher, Mr. Kroger, all would have sent them to God with their bearers.
Closing his hand on the shards of his boyhood, Marshall felt the points of the cross and the hockey sticks pushing into the flesh of palm and fingers. This was all that remained of who he had been before he was Butcher Boy.
The round smoothness of his father’s wedding ring clicked against the gold of Marshall’s own wedding band, and he wondered why his mother’s ring hadn’t been in the jewelry box as well.
With that thought, the warm and fuzzy memories blasted out of his mind.
One ring had been taken and one left on its finger. Because Dylan had his mother’s cross for a souvenir and didn’t need anything else.
Dylan had taken the jewelry from the corpses after he killed them, and Rich had kept it for him. Kept it from the cops, more likely.
Who the fuck do you think you are, Psycho Boy? The Beaver? Dennis the Menace? Some cute little boy, prone to mischief? You fucking butchered everybody.
“I was eleven years old, for God’s sake,” Marshall whispered. “I was a little boy.”
The necklaces, Lena’s and his mother’s, would have been drowned in their blood. Marshall was shaking his head, trying to see himself digging through matted hair and brains to steal away the last glitter of their lives.
“No,” he cried out and opened his hand: the crosses, the ring, the hockey pin, the brass tag.
There was nothing there of Rich’s. Dylan’s pin was there, in the box with the things taken from that night. Dylan. Mom. Dad. Lena. Even Ginger the cat.
Rich wasn’t there. If Dylan took them, why would he keep a memento of himself and not of his brother, another of his intended victims?
34
The emergency gas can Danny carried up the narrow stairs didn’t have more than a gallon in it, and the fuel was several years old, but from what he’d seen of the rat’s nest upstairs, it should suffice.

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