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.

“… the cat was dead, our old Ginger cat, and when I looked, her guts were all over my hands… I drown them… anybody tries to stop you, you just shoot them… I went from room to room and they were all full of blood; I started to laugh… When the other guys heard what I’d done, they looked… If I ever get a chance to do it again… fucked from the start… I had a knife in my hand, and I was chasing… mass murder. I can see myself doing that… biting chunks of flesh out… murders. Sure… ”

The scraps ran on in that vein unceasingly. Their deep-rooted sickness twined in through Polly’s eyes to her mind and she hated that she was a member of a race capable of such cruelty.

Further down, some pages were whole. Judging by paper type and ink color-or in some cases pencil-they were written on different days, maybe in different years. Sentence construction and uneven letter size suggested a young writer.

A young Marshall Marchand.

“Monster” and “child” were not antithetical to Polly. Lord of the Flies. The Bad Seed.

She picked up what looked to be the earliest writing, the oldest paper, the penciled letters awkward: “John List. Killed wife, mother, and three kids. 1971. Sure. I can see killing like this. This List guy had God on his side. That makes it work for him. He wants out of this family thing. He’s pussy-whipped, and his mother’s a nag, and he doesn’t have the balls to leave… ”

The next was in faded ballpoint:

“They just did what they wanted. Took what they wanted. Then died in a blaze of glory. That looks pretty good from where I sit.”

And again ink:

“Shooting the family starts to look pretty good. Sane even. Until you get to the kids. Maybe he figures they aren’t quite people; with eight of them they wouldn’t seem like an endangered species exactly, just a housecleaning issue.”

There was more but Polly put the papers and articles back into the carton and replaced the lid. Pandora repenting too late.

The writing was sick-making, violent, boastful, gloating, heartless, the profile of a man without a soul, a ghoul who gloried in causing harm. They were horrific. But Polly was not as shattered as she thought she should be. Having read critically countless thousands of passages, she couldn’t but see the contradictions in this-she sought a word-collection? Grouping? Opus?

The voice in the writing had been directed at the reader-no, at an internal judge. Perhaps they had been written during a period of severe abuse and meant to be read by an abuser or a therapist or aloud in a group therapy situation.

The span of time over which they were written suggested an outside influence, someone who required the pieces. The earlier words smacked of the braggadocio of a vicious killer preening, comparing himself to his godforsaken heroes, but they were childish in style and content. The comments written in subsequent years were oddly detached, as if jotted by an actor preparing to play a role, making notes, a character study of evil.

Or by a monster seeking to find where, in a monstrous universe, he fit. Seeking…

“Seeking to kill little kids,” she interrupted her thought aloud. “Wake up and smell the corpses, Pollyanna,” she snapped.

This wasn’t a Frankenstein monster of literature to be parsed and analyzed; this was her husband boasting that he “thought he was the record holder,” her beloved Mr. Marchand asking, “Why little kids? Because they’re easy?” The man who came to bed with her each night, wondering why he hadn’t sexually tortured seven children.

Tears began, then burned away. Sobs started, then froze in her throat. Her hands came up to cover her face, then fell helplessly onto her thighs. Anger flashed. By its lurid light she could see the fear at the back of her mind.

Like drops of quicksilver held on the palm, emotions slid away when she tried to touch them.

“This is real,” Polly said, and her voice was as tiny and sweet as Emma’s.

But not as innocent.

The absurdly delicate and graceful gold wristwatch Marshall had given her suggested it was close on two o’clock. The watch was beautiful and, like a true femme fatale, did not need to be exactly on time. The girls would be back in ninety minutes. Gracie was old enough that Polly could leave the two of them unattended for a little while, but she did not want them left alone.