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.
When she saw it was free of snakes and three-quarters full of papers thrown in willy-nilly the anxiety didn’t lessen. Wishing she could walk away and accepting that she couldn’t, she gave up her stick, carried the papers to better light by one of the windows, and looked at the uppermost page: handwritten, no date, no name. She read the first line.
“I spend most of the time wondering if it feels good to kill people. A rush like good weed or what? And little kids, are they more fun? Killing them feel different?” Nearly the same words on the page in Red’s sepulcher. Had that been copied from this? Or a theme revisited?
Polly retrieved the page found at the tarot reader’s from her pocket and laid the pieces of paper side by side. The writing was not identical but that proved nothing either way. One’s own signature differs from signing to signing.
Polly flipped to the next. “I had the dream again last night. Blood all over me so fresh it’s warm, and me, laughing like a lunatic.”
And the next.
“Why an axe? Because you get more splatter? The only noise is screaming? It’s macho?”
“I think about killing all the time-I mean all the time. Day and night. I guess once wasn’t enough. Not like I’m jonesing to do it again, just thinking about it.”
The pages were not numbered and were in no apparent order. Some of the paper was college ruled, some wide ruled; some was graph paper. The random journaling of a deranged mind.
A deranged mind expressing itself in her husband’s handwriting.
Nausea took root in her, a poisonous plant with fast-growing vines, so harsh and voracious it doubled her over. Vomit burned the top of her throat. Her heart pounded bruisingly against her ribs. She made it to an old, cushionless wicker chair, collapsed, and hung her head between her knees.
Blanking her mind, Polly reined in the organs of her body bent on flying out of her mouth. Breathing in and breathing out, she slowed her heart. Self-preservation had always been strong in her, but never had it been as strong as after Gracie was born. Alone, Polly could fail; she could be severely injured; she could even accept dying. With two of the most precious little girls in the world depending on her, she looked both ways before she crossed streets and took her vitamins.
Emma and Gracie would not be back from the zoo until three-thirty. Marshall seldom got home before nine. Upstairs, she was guaranteed privacy and air-conditioning, but the idea of carting a box filled with sickness into the space where her daughters played was anathema. In life, there were poisons for which there was no antidote, filth no amount of Clorox could clean up. Mothers did not keep these things under the sink where children could get into them.
Polly compromised by bringing the box to the rear stairs where there was enough light to read. Sitting on the first tiny landing beneath the window where the narrow stairwell made its first twist, the file carton between her feet, she stared through the dirty glass into the backyard. Flowers were in full autumn glory. The garden’s lushness, shadow filled with color, usually soothed her. Now, she saw only steamy fecund overgrowth, dead flies on the windowsill, a spider waiting in its web to suck the life out of her neighbors.
With a repressed shudder, she turned her attention back to the carton and lifted a pile of newspaper and magazine clippings and computer printouts onto her lap.
“The Boston Boy Fiend,” “Bad Seed Kills Toddlers,” “Murder for Kicks,” “Jury Unconvinced in Phillips’ Case,” “Raines Indicted for Family Slaughter,” “BTK Killer Confesses,” “Speck ‘at Home’ in Prison.”
The stories chronicled children killing children, children killing parents or neighbors, wives killing husbands, mothers killing their babies, brothers killing sisters, Bundy and Speck and Gacy and Dahmer killing everybody.
“The Boston Boy Fiend” was a mimeograph-something she’d not seen for years-of an article written in 1874. “The Boston Boy Fiend has struck again, and the great tragedy is that this little girl did not have to die. After this beast in boy’s clothing confessed and was convicted of killing four-year-old Horace Mullen and sexually torturing seven others, he was released early by a reform school board that chose to ignore the court’s warnings. He has now been convicted of the brutal death of a ten-year-old neighbor girl.”
In fading blue ink, next to “sexually torturing seven… ” was scribbled in Marshall ’s idiosyncratic hand, “Why didn’t I do this?” and “Incest or pedophilia, take your pick.”
Nausea, temporarily quiescent, raged back. Eyes closed, Polly rode it out until the danger of vomiting or running screaming from the house abated, then pushed on.
“Bad Seed Kills Toddlers.” Another mimeograph. “1968 England ” was penciled at the top of the page. “Eleven-year-old Mary Flora Bell, ‘Fanny’ of ‘Fanny and Faggot,’ as they styled themselves, was today convicted of two counts of manslaughter for the slayings of two toddlers, one gone missing and believed to have perished of an accident three months previously, and the second, found four weeks later, dead of strangulation, the body mutilated.”
“Two toddlers” was underlined. In the margin Marshall had written, “Two? Shoot, and I thought I was the record holder.” Then, “Why little kids? Because they’re so easy?”
“Murder for Kicks” was clipped from a newspaper. No date, but the paper had discolored with age. “According to the testimony, Cindy Collins, age fifteen, and Shirley Wolf, age fourteen, were trying doors in their apartment building. They’d planned to get keys and steal a car, they said. An elderly woman let them in. Shirley Wolf confessed to pulling the woman’s head back by the hair and stabbing her to death. An autopsy report said the victim had been stabbed twenty-eight times. Both Wolf and Collins told the court that they thought the murder was “a kick.”
Scrawled at the bottom of the page was, “Stab an old dame for the fun of it. Kill for fun. That ought to stick in your mind.”
The sun moved down the sky. Heat and glare poured through the window. Sweat stuck Polly’s hair to her forehead and cheeks, glued her clothes to her skin. Flies battered against the window glass, a desperate buzzing that ran along her nerves like electricity.
The next article was headlined, “The Real Amityville Horror.”
An image of her home crawling with bloated flies flared up, so real she cried out. In true nightmare fashion, she couldn’t move; her legs would not lift her. She could no more escape that stairwell than could the flies.
She lifted out the rest of the newsprint and set it down beside her, unread. Beneath were scraps of pages, halves, or thirds, or quarters-not torn but cut clean with a razorblade or scissors. None had number sequences. Or if they had, they were cut off. A handful contained only a line or two of text.