13 1/2

The place was deserted but for a groundskeeper or two. Live oaks hushed the noise from I-10. They wandered in perfect harmony along the lanes, admiring the mausoleums. It was as close to peace as Richard had ever known. It was bliss. Just the two of them, safe in the city of the dead.

A mausoleum, small but exquisite in detail and design, stood between two monoliths; beside them it looked like a dollhouse. There were only two names on the tiny door, infants who had died at birth: Marshall Dillon Marchand, born and died December 1, 1872, and Daniel Richard Marchand, born and died December 1, 1872.

Identical twins.

It had been a sign and they embraced it. From that day on, they had been the Marchand brothers of New Orleans, and they had prospered. When it was just the two of them, life worked.

That Marsh had the occasional dalliance didn’t worry Da

Elaine would never know it, but Da

Until Polly.

Da

He punched in his sister-in-law’s cell phone number.

“Polly, it’s Da

She was at Fontainebleau and Broad.

“Don’t go home,” he told her. “ Marshall ’s gone berserk. I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the police, but I want to talk with you first. Maybe between the two of us we can get him to calm down. Can you meet me… ” Da

Marsh said the kids were with Martha. If Da

“My God, Da

“Can you do it? We can meet someplace else if you’d like.”

“No. It’s… City Park… I can do it.” She sounded exhausted and scared.

No wonder, Da

Probably she didn’t want to accuse her beloved Mr. Marchand.

“I may be a few minutes,” he said. “Lock your car doors and wait for me. If you see Marsh’s truck, get out of there. Quickly. It’ll be okay,” he promised. “We’ll get through this.”

Da

Then he asked for the address.

35

Da

For reasons he was unsure of-except that darkness covered more sins-he switched the lights off before he sat on Da

Mack the Giant had ripped him from sleep-or the dead sleep of unconsciousness. He’d been groggy from the concussion and the medicine his mom had given him. His head felt as if would break open and spill his brains out if he moved. The cop had jerked him hard. Marshall remembered the pain and the fear. He’d thought they were all going to be murdered.

The guy, the huge cop, had dragged him down the hall and forced him to look at Lena. Then he knew they were all going to be killed, that the carnage had already started. He remembered fighting hard as he could, to get away from the man in the policeman’s costume. Dylan thought it was a costume. Real police didn’t come and kill people for no reason.

Marshall tried to go beyond what he could remember, to see the time before the police had come: himself alone, crazy, a boy, pulling the gold chain from around his baby sister’s neck.

There wouldn’t have been any pulling. Her neck was severed lengthwise, a blow that had split her nearly in two from her crown to below her tiny bird-boned shoulders. The chain would have been cut. He tried to picture himself, that boy, Dylan, setting the axe down and fishing the gold cross out of the gore.

The only boy he could see was the terrified child fighting to get away from the man he thought had killed his sister. He couldn’t remember being Butcher Boy.

“Psycho fuck.” Mack had called him that.

Traumatic amnesia. Psychotic break.

When he’d seen little Lena, Marshall remembered Mack’s hand closing harder on the back of his neck. In the darkness of Da

Later, at the trial, the cop said he thought Dylan was going for his gun.

His mother had fallen in the doorway of the master bedroom. She was face down, her long brown hair thrown forward. The amount of blood and its bright, comic book color shocked him.

To get the cross from around her neck he would have had to fumble though the sopping mess, dig out the chain, and yank until it broke.

Trying to picture Dylan-himself-doing that, all he saw were the butterflies, how beautiful they’d been above Kowalski’s office, how they’d died.

The kiss, the last good memory.

Dylan hadn’t seen his father. At least not that Marshall remembered. So much of his life had been haunted by that phrase, “not that he remembered.” He’d come to accept that the origins of Butcher Boy were the only thing worth remembering and worth forgetting. The rest of the memories of his young life had been locked behind that paradox.

Once the monster had been laid over that little kid, Dylan, nobody ever thought about him again. Marshall hadn’t thought of him again. Butcher Boy in Drummond had not thought of him. In every way that mattered, Dylan had been murdered that night as surely as his mom, dad, and Lena were.

“God, I miss you.” Marshall heard himself cry the words. “I loved you.” Saying the words felt strange. He didn’t know if what he tasted in the back of his throat was the foulest form of hypocrisy or freedom. Before Drummond, maybe as early as the trial, he had forbidden himself to feel love for his family, to feel anything. The jewelry had brought it all back.

“I loved you,” he said again. Forty years of accumulated emotion hit him, and he began to dissolve, ice breaking away, glacial silences turning to liquid and pouring through the barren scoured places.

“Momma and Daddy, I loved you. Your boy Dylan loved you.”

Dylan, the real, live boy, the boy before that night, came back to life, and Marshall saw him, was him. Freckled in summer, hair blond from the sun.

Laughing.

It surprised him to remember how much he had laughed when he was a kid. How much fun it had been being a kid in Mi

He had friends; there’d been a gang of kids, their lives centered on sports: Little League in summer, hockey in winter. Between seasons, there were forts made from haystacks and riding the elevators when they could sneak into the downtown buildings and get away with it.