A push and the door opened. Feeling slightly foolish and terribly brave, Polly eeled in, closed the door behind her, and switched on the light. There was little danger it would give her presence away. The windows were covered with yellowed blinds and draped with everything from towels and sheets to a flowered bed skirt. The place was more lair than home, in the sense not that Red was an animal but that this was where she hid from the world. Quelling the knowledge that, in the bathroom, the body of a slain woman lay cocooned in plastic, Polly surveyed the bizarre landscape. She was put in mind of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend-the dust man, picking through mountain ranges of London ’s garbage year after year, looking for a lost treasure. Somewhere in the Woman in Red’s mountains of trash she would find answers to the questions she dared not ask her husband.
Lest it be swallowed up in the morass, she set her handbag on an overturned basket by the door and started in on the nearest heap like an archaeologist digging through the refuse of a lost civilization.
Within an hour she had moved three yards into the room. Where there had been hopeless disarray, there remained hopeless disarray, but none of it had gone unexamined. Stooping, crawling, sifting, Polly looked at each item-be it a dirty coffee mug or a slip of paper-then tossed it behind her. Because she didn’t know what she sought, she couldn’t afford to overlook anything.
Fatigue quickly wore out any sense of disquiet she suffered from sharing the apartment with the-one might assume-unquiet ghost of the murdered woman. Without consciously choosing to, Polly began talking with the Woman in Red, discussing her discoveries as she came upon them: “You like Arlo amp; Janice; I’m surprised you didn’t have a cat. Do you have a cat hidden in this mess? Here kitty, kitty. Red! Sorry, sugar, but I have just ruined one of your lipsticks. It’s all over the bottom of my shoe. I don’t suppose the cleaning lady will notice my tracks. My lord, girl, what were you going to do with all these purses? There is not enough money left in New Orleans to fill the wallets. You never used them did you? Look, this one still has the tag. You poor dear. It must have felt good to buy yourself a treat and a dream. A bargain at nine-ninety-nine. Lighters, and lighters, and matchbooks! It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested for arson. AARP! And a subscription! There must be forty magazines here. Sugar, I would not be caught dead with one of these in the house. Sorry, darling, you were caught dead. I read AARP secretly at the doctor’s office, like a little boy peeking at a Playboy magazine under Dad’s mattress. My dear you are braver and less vain than I.”
By three a.m., Polly had worked her way to the wall between the main room and the bedroom and bath. Her eyelids grated against her sclera, and her throat was raw from dust.
The corpse lying in the tub weighed more heavily on her mind now. So long deluged in the residue of the dead woman’s life, she had come to feel compassion for her and, finally, a kind of affection.
Sorting through her rag-tag belongings Polly learned that the Woman in Red loved Nancy Drew, Ethan Hawke, and a pro wrestler named the Mondo King. She loved shoes and scarves. A cigar box lined with blue velvet held treasured trinkets-from a lover, Polly presumed. The items in the box represented the only order in the apartment. A boy’s high school ring; a silver heart-not real silver, but silvery metal-on a tarnished chain, the kind won at fairs or bought in souvenir shops, with a V engraved on it in fancy script; three rosebuds, shriveled until they were more brown than yellow, long pins through the tape-wrapped stems; a pair of bead earrings; and a button were displayed in careful rows as if Red looked at them often, or once had. For Polly, this box was the saddest of a dumpsterful of sad items. Red’s inamorato had given so little of himself his gifts could be kept in a six-by-eight box, the whole not worth the cost of a pack of cigarettes.
Though the apartment was glutted with things, the cigar box was the only thing she found that was truly personal.
Polly was not given to the accumulation of worldly goods, but, had anyone gone through her house, they would have seen pictures of children and friends, letters from students, invitations accepted and declined, calendars marked with upcoming events, hand-drawn birthday cards, inscribed books, awards, diplomas, notes on bulletin boards-a short history of Polly Marchand in three dimensions. In Red’s plethora of objects nothing that spoke of her heart had surfaced, only evidence of compulsion, addiction, and depression. But for the cigar box, there was no indication that anyone had touched her life-or that she had touched the life of another.
“Keeps to herself,” Emily, the tarot reader, had said.
Filling the emptiness, Polly thought, looking at the mess of goods with which Red had surrounded herself.
Beneath the bed, where the Woman in Red had made her last stand, still using the furniture, still turning on the light, reading her magazines and smoking her cigarettes, Polly found the second personal item: a photo album embossed with oversized leatherette daisies in the psychedelic colors of the sixties, the kind a teenaged girl might have been given. In keeping with her usual style, Red had not put her memorabilia under the plastic page covers but jammed it in every which way.
Sitting tailor-fashion on the floor-whatever effluvia was there would surely be less toxic than that on the dingy bedsheets-Polly put the album in her lap and turned the garish cover. Between the first page and the cardboard were snapshots. They’d been taken by an old Polaroid instamatic and the colors had faded. Several were stuck together from being mashed against one another so long. There was a photograph of a man and woman standing on the steps of a brick house. A bicycle was overturned by the bottom step. A pretty little girl of eight or nine sat beside it smiling for the camera. Two other pictures of the family group featured the mom, the little girl, and a shy-looking teenager. The face had been scratched off the pictures of the older girl.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Polly said to the ghost who kept her company. “You poor thing. Terrible to erase yourself like that. I would dearly love to wring the necks of whoever made you hate yourself.”
Polly set the pictures aside and turned the page. Again, photographs had been shoved in but not arranged. These appeared to be the “art” shots every young girl feels compelled to take when given her first camera. One shot had been taken through what looked to be a knothole. Three were of the house, the camera held at funky angles. The rest were long shots of a boy, the angle suggesting they’d been taken from an upstairs window. The indifference of the subject to the camera suggested they’d been taken in stealth. The distance was so great Polly couldn’t tell if the boy was happy, sad, handsome, or plain. He was white and in his teens; he could be any boy anywhere. In the faded Polaroids he mowed grass, fixed the tire of a bike, went in and came out of a two-story brick house. The photographer had taken twenty-four shots of him, a single roll of film.
Polly wondered if this unsuspecting model and the high school ring in the cigar box were related. Clearly, the Woman in Red had suffered a passion for him at one time, but Polly couldn’t see this boy giving his ring to the shy girl who’d scratched out her face.