“It’s hogwash.”
“Yes, it is.”
The waitress brought their food. A moment passed. Danny ate two French fries.
The Bluebird did them up fine, but then he’d never had a bad meal in New Orleans -maybe one or two in the weeks after the flood waters abated, but he’d been so glad to be out and fed, he’d not been critical.
“Pure balderdash,” he said. “Absolute poppycock. So why let it bother you?”
Polly took a deep breath and gazed into space above and to the right. Danny’d read somewhere that people gazed in one direction to remember and another when they were trying to think of a lie. He couldn’t remember which was which.
“I thought that reader was a mad woman,” Polly said finally. “I wondered what side of the world she’d gotten out of bed on that inspired her to do something that mean. The wretched thing was clearly unbalanced.”
She stopped speaking. Danny let the silence sit.
“That awful woman knew things about my life that I have not shared with anyone but Marshall,” Polly admitted after a few moments. “There is no logical way this great red harpy could have known. Strange as it may be, she had to have seen them in the cards.” Her hand, the one with the two-point-five carat diamond, twitched. It was her nature to touch people. To her credit, early on she had picked up on the fact that Danny didn’t like to be touched and honored his idiosyncrasy.
“That would be unsettling,” he said with no trace of humor or sarcasm. “It would be hard not to take it seriously.”
“Thank you,” Polly said.
“Some of these people are clever,” he said. “Professionals make a living doing mentalist shows in Vegas. You’re sure you told no one but Marsh of these events from your past?”
“Believe me, I am sure.”
“Are you sure Marsh told no one?”
“Of course.”
In the way she firmed her lips and delicately flared her nostrils, Danny saw the dawning of suspicion. He watched her shake its icy tentacles from her mind with a toss of her head.
“You are right, of course,” Polly said. “Could they genuinely see the future, they’d not be on the square but making their fortunes at the track.” She took another sip of coffee, made a moue of distaste-it would have grown as cold as Danny’s-and said carefully, “What concerns me is that this absurd woman’s words somehow damaged Marshall. Since I told him, Mr. Marchand, my Mr. Marchand,” she added in polite acknowledgement of Danny’s existence, “walks this earth like he’s haunting it rather than living on it.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Danny promised. He’d planned on talking with Marsh about the bogus reading anyway. Marsh was beginning to fray a little at the edges.
“That would be wonderful.” Relief and hope made her voice lush. “ Marshall loves you very much. You are good for him.”
“And he for me,” Danny said curtly. It irked him that she would attempt to define a relationship she knew nothing about.
He took the check the waitress left. “I’d better get to work or they’ll rob me blind. Today, it’s meetings and on-the-ground checks.”
“It’s so romantic havin’ a brother-in-law who’s a drug dealer,” Polly drawled and waved as he crossed toward the doors opening out onto Prytania Street.
A drug dealer. Danny was amused. In the eighties, when money grew on trees, he had invested in a pharmacy. With the one-size-fits-all mentality of Walgreen’s, Rite Aid, CVS, and Wal-Mart, moneymen believed the individual pharmacy had gone the way of the dodo and good service.
He’d restructured the business into what was being hailed a “boutique pharmacy.” Designed along the lines of an old apothecary shop- Marsh’s idea, Marsh’s design-his four-link chain of stores carried the usual pharmaceuticals as well as traditional folk herbs and medicines. Drugs, even legal drugs, were exceedingly profitable, but what brought the high-end clientele into Le Cure was quick, knowledgeable, and very personal service.
Danny had not intended to do site visits today, but his meeting with Polly reminded him there were more reasons for being a drug dealer than money. If he didn’t get Marsh relief before he became too tightly wound, his brother could snap.
That wasn’t something his wife and children would want to see.
Scott Peterson. Wife and unborn baby. 2005. Why this one I don’t know. I haven’t written about this for a long time. Maybe because I can identify with Peterson. Not with what he did, but with his living a secret life, a life of lies, knowing what people liked about him was a lie. The truth was shameful. He was nothing without those lies. They were him. He’d told the lies so long, he may have felt that being exposed, having his fiction struck down, was tantamount to killing him. The “him” he’d constructed, the persona in which he was a man to be reckoned with, was going to be killed. In his twisted world he acted in self-defense. He started with a new woman who knew nothing about him and destroyed the woman he believed would rip away the Scott Peterson he wanted to be and expose the pathetic little man hiding beneath.
That Peterson did such a bad job of it is the best I can say of him. I believe the slaying of his wife and unborn child destroyed him from within, and because of that, he bungled it, was captured, and sentenced to death. I would hope my fiction would not demand such a price should it be threatened.
27
Harsh sun highlighted fine lines in Polly’s face, invisible even two weeks before-the velvet glove of autumn over the iron fist of summer. Glare forced her to narrow her eyes and the heat pressed down. She should have worn a hat.
Any southern woman with an ounce of good Christian vanity should wear a hat, she thought absently.
Tilting her head back so tears would not spill over her lower lids, she pushed back on the bench deeper into shade of Jackson Square ’s live oaks and let the disquiet blossom into a frisson of true fear.
The things that terrorize are those you don’t see coming.
The unexpected. “That which we must embrace,” the tarot reader had said. Or endure. The sixth card in the Celtic Cross, that which is to come.
“That which we cannot find,” Polly murmured aloud.
“You talkin’ to me?”
A young, African American man had joined her on the bench. Sandwich held suspended halfway to his mouth, he looked at her with concern. The tears, though unshed, must have shown. Polly was sorry for that. Not that tears weren’t a perfectly good expression of emotion-or means to an end-but to lose control was unseemly. And usually ineffective.