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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. “Da
A quick trip to the cellar for a spare key, and he let himself in. Music played softly-a sonata of some sort. Despite Da
“Dan? Da
The bed was made, the towels in the bath dry and neat.
“Where the hell… ”
Da
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? Da
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 Da
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,” Da
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 Da
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, Da
Four, Marshall knew of; he’d done the design work on two and found Da
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 Da
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. Da
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 Da
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 Da
Marshall wanted nothing from his childhood; he was afraid of the memories that would be evoked. Sitting on Da
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 Da