What if Marshall came home?

She nearly gagged on the thought. Sweat was sticky on her skin. Flies lit on her arms and buzzed close to her eyes. Her legs were stiff. Her back ached as she forced herself up from the narrow step as if she’d been hunkered there a day instead of an hour. Still unwilling to allow the carton into the house, she left it in the utility area at the top of the stairs with the dryer lint and dirty laundry.

She showered, dressed in fresh clothes, and applied lipstick. In the kitchen, she scribbled a note for Marshall. “The girls and I will be staying with Martha.” That done, she called Gracie’s cell phone. “Honeybunch, can you get Mrs. Fortunas to take you and Emma to Aunt Martha’s instead of home? No, no, baby. Everything’s alright. I’ll explain later. Thank you, sugar.”

She gathered up the carton and headed down the basement stairs.

Danny was waiting at the bottom step.

“I thought that might be you,” he said with a smile.

The box in Polly’s hands grew as heavy as if she carried a decapitated head.

“What’ve you got there?” he asked mildly.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. The startled look on his face reminded her that the box contained only bits of paper, that she was a respectable woman passing through her own cellar.

He held out his hands for the file carton. “Do you need any help with that?” he asked politely.

The box jerked.

Danny laughed. “Did you get Gracie that kitten after all?”

“Kitten?” Polly said stupidly. Then it came to her, the kitten Gracie wanted for her birthday. “No kitten,” she said. “Just some papers Marshall wanted me to bring by the office.”

Reflexively, she glanced at the folded-back tarpaulin where she had taken the box from the pile. Danny followed her glance and she saw a flicker of emotion in his face, a rigidity that moved from his lips to his cheeks; a smile aborted or a sour thought too close to the surface.

He knows, Polly thought. The telltale heart. Edgar Allen Poe was a genius.

“I’m going out again in a minute,” Danny said. “I’d be glad to drop them by and save you a trip.” Again he reached for the carton. For a second, Polly wondered if he were toying with her.

The first bottle was empty; the second was headed in that direction. Emma and Gracie had long since been tucked into bed. Polly and Martha sat in the living room of Martha’s tiny turn-of-the-century house. Each detail of the place was exquisitely Martha. Fifty-three of her eighty-four years had been spent in this house. Bit by bit, it and the garden had been made over in her image: eclectic, smart, witty, and conveying a deep sense of contentment.

“I still think these sound like dreams,” Martha said. Her voice was cracked and high, like that of a boy whose voice is just changing. “I mean, listen; these are dream images.” Martha picked up several of the strips of paper piled beside her lounger and leaned into the circle of light from the table lamp.

“Think dreams: ‘I went from room to room and they were full of blood.’ You don’t say that about seeing bloody people. These are pictures from the subconscious: ‘full of blood.’” She read another. “‘I had chopped this little girl in half, but there wasn’t any blood on my hands or my clothes.’… I think Marshall was writing down his dreams.”

Polly had come with the intention of telling Martha the papers were from one of her graduate students about whom she was worried. They’d not gotten the cork out of the first cabernet before she told her the truth. The only detail she had omitted was that wretched tarot reader who, like Marat, lay dead in the bath. Martha would insist on calling the police. As a child, Polly had been infused with the sense the police were useless; the New Orleans PD after Katrina had done nothing to dispel that idea. When she had the facts, when she would only be ruining the lives of the guilty and not the innocent, then she would call the cops.

“This one’s classic,” Martha said. “‘The cat was dead, our old Ginger cat, and when I looked, her guts were all over my hands.’

“‘When I looked,’ it says. If you have cat guts running though your fingers, you know it. You don’t look and be surprised. This is a dream.” She shook the strips for emphasis.

Polly agreed with her but she had been fiercely arguing against the dream theory because she so desperately wanted it to be true.

“You may be right,” Polly admitted.

“I am right. Here’s another perfect example: ‘I kept hacking at this huge cop, and nothing was happening. He was taking the hits and smiling like I was hitting him with a feather, and I kept yelling… ’ Dream! Tell me that’s not a dream.”

“How about the rest of the pages and the newspaper clippings? They are not dreams,” Polly said. She sipped her red wine and held it in her mouth for a moment before swallowing.

Martha thumped her recliner down from its relaxed position and stared at the papers scattered all over the rug. When she was alight with ideas, with her bright colors and extra pounds, she put Polly in mind of a disco ball.

Scowling at the questionable materials, Martha pursed her lips. “This boy was abused. Major abuse. Somewhere along the line, he did something-or maybe just wanted to-and he decided he was a monster and not fit to live. From what we’ve been left to see… ”

Martha was still talking, but Polly’s mind had taken flight. “Yes,” she said loudly, interrupting the other woman’s flow. “Yes. Listen to what you’ve said. That’s it. You said, ‘What we’ve been left to see.’ This, the bits, the pieces, no names or dates to distract or inform, to check, this was made for us-me, I’d guess-to find and see. We weren’t allowed to see the whole. It’s been snipped, and trimmed, and tailored.

“Why do you tailor anything?” Polly demanded.

“To make it fit,” Martha answered.

“Yes. These pages were edited to tell a story. If the writer had simply dumped them in a box, why not dump it all? I cannot think what could have been left out that would be more damaging than what was left in. Therefore, things that were removed, were removed not to paint a prettier picture… ”

“But to paint a darker picture,” Martha finished.

“Yes!” Polly laughed her little-girl-gone-wicked laugh. “Oh, my, yes.”

They sat staring at one another as a cat might stare in the mirror, smiles filtering through schools of thought. Martha took a sip of her wine. Polly looked at the papers strewn over the floor. By Martha’s witnessing what she had found, discussing and studying them, the sinister magic Polly had granted the pages was dispelled.

Polly had not happened upon a can of worms. A can of wormlike objects had been placed for her to find; it made all the difference in the world.

“It makes no difference,” Martha said.

“It does,” Polly cried, and, realizing she sounded childish, she obeyed when Martha gestured for silence.

“It doesn’t.” Martha waved her hand over the mess. “Even if these have been arranged to make Marshall look as bad as possible, Marshall still did write this stuff. It’s his handwriting in the margins of the articles. Who else but he would edit it and put it where you’d see it? Why? Does he want to get caught, found out? Does he need you to see him in as bad a light as he sees himself? Regardless of his reasons, this is too volatile to gloss over. Marshall is in trouble. That means you, Gracie, Emma, even Danny are in trouble.

Against Martha’s good counsel and with her promise to look after the girls, Polly didn’t stay the night but left a little after twelve-thirty a.m. Driving down Carrolton Avenue, feeling the effects of the wine and the fact that the dead of night in New Orleans was deader than it had been pre-Katrina, she had no idea why she’d left.

Did she plan to slide into bed next to Marshall, curl up on his shoulder, her right thigh thrown across his legs, as she had done nearly every night since they had been married, and simply ignore the murders real, imagined, literary, and historical?