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.

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.

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.