“Dan? Danny?”
The bed was made, the towels in the bath dry and neat.
“Where the hell… ”
Danny’d said he was going to bed. Marshall pulled apart the slats in the blind and looked into the garden. His brother’s car was gone, the gate left open. Unless Danny’d left by the front door, Marshall would have seen him. Regardless of how Danny departed, Marshall should have at least heard the car leave.
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? Danny wasn’t that considerate. Where had he gone at three in the morning-or four, or whatever the hell time it was?
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 Danny’s office.
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,” Danny had said.
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 Danny give him a drug that caused the very thing they’d both worked so hard to avoid? Why tell him the drug was a mild form of Valium?
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, Danny lived a monkish life. What he had was of the best quality, but he needed little and kept what he had in rigid order. Unsure of what he sought, Marshall thumbed quickly through household bills, warranties, computer manuals, and the leases for the rental properties Danny owned.
Four, Marshall knew of; he’d done the design work on two and found Danny a crew to reroof a third. The fifth lease, filed under the letter V was new to him. An apartment building in the slums of Center City. Because it was different, because it was secret, Marshall pulled the file from the drawer. One of the apartments was let to V. Werner.
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 Danny had given her an apartment. Secretly. Marshall glanced at the contract. Secretly and rent free. Vondra Werner was Danny’s-what? Paramour? As far as Marshall knew, Danny didn’t have lovers-not women, not men. Evidently, Danny didn’t tell him everything. Not like he told Danny everything.
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. Danny was too private a person to keep personal items in his public spaces.
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 Danny’s taste for chrome and steel, leant the room a futuristic look. Marshall had found the bureau for the room. It was shaped like a classic Chippendale, but the entire surface was mirrored.
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 Danny did with the place or its furnishings. Danny had inherited a chunk of money, as well as the house, when their folks died. Marshall had never asked what the numbers were. Given he’d hacked them to death, it seemed cold to ask about the payoff.
Marshall wanted nothing from his childhood; he was afraid of the memories that would be evoked. Sitting on Danny’s bed, he was stunned at how good it felt, cradling his mother’s jewelry box. There were memories in it, he knew, but his mother’s shade would not let them cut too deeply. Polly had taught him that; mothers forgave their children. Even the monsters.
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 Danny’s bed lamp. Their father had been proud of the scratches in the soft gold. “A wedding ring is for life,” he’d tell his sons. “No need to take it off. Like love, time only makes it more beautiful.” Marshall had forgotten that. He had forgotten much of his life. Eleven years. Like it was a book he read once and never thought of again.