Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and knew he was about to be dragged back. “No,” he murmured. “Let me go.”
“Shh. Shh. It’s going to be okay now.” Polly’s voice gave Marshall the courage to open his eyes. She sat beside him, brushing the hair from his forehead. “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “We are all okay, and so are you.” He tried to lift his hand to touch her face but hadn’t the strength. He closed his eyes because he could no longer keep them open.
“You believed me,” Marshall said softly. After a lifetime of living Richard’s lies, he didn’t know what he believed. “Talk to me,” he whispered. “So I’ll know you are really here.”
Polly’s genteel drawl drifted through whatever drugs they’d given him. “No darlin’, I didn’t believe you. I am truly sorry, but I did not know what to believe. Emma saved us. She saw the lipstick.”
“Lipstick,” he repeated. The word made no sense, but the sound of his wife’s voice was a balm, and he wanted to hear it forever. “Tell me.” His voice was mostly air, but she heard him, and he knew she was leaning close. The smell of her hair touched him even through the stink of hospital sterility.
“Yes, lipstick. The story is too long to tell without a glass of wine and a comfortable chair. Suffice to say, I was attacked-not hurt, my love-but I didn’t know my assailant. It was at Vondra’s apartment, and there was a great deal of red lipstick lying about. Emma saw a streak of red down the back of Danny’s shirt, then I knew it was him at Vondra’s.
“Emma saw it when the five of us were in Danny’s bedroom. We were all caught in that terrible tableau.” Polly laughed. “I felt like I was on stage in the last act of Hamlet. Once I realized Danny was dangerous, I thought if I could get him to move, to let Gracie come upstairs… I thought if he didn’t think I knew… I don’t know exactly what I thought.” She finished by kissing him, lightly and sweetly.
“You are a wonder. A night like you must have had, and you still made Danny believe you.” Marshall opened his eyes again. The sight of his wife melted away the haze of drugs and horror.
“Darlin’, the day I cannot fool one more man one more time, you may put me out on an ice floe for the polar bears.”
She moved away. Marshall felt the cold come between them.
“I came across a carton of papers in the basement. They were notes and articles justifying the most awful killings.”
“You found them,” Marshall said hollowly.
“With a little help from your brother. They were in your handwriting.”
“Homework,” Marshall said, and years of poring over the butchery of the human race, of writing justifications for unjustifiable actions, threatened his fragile hope.
Polly waited.
“At least at first it was homework; then, I guess it became habit. When I was at Drummond… ”
Polly looked confused and Marshall realized with a pang how much of his life he’d kept secret from her, how much of himself he had kept secret from everyone. The need to tell her everything, every small challenge and terror and delight, share with her the boy who’d been so scared, the boy who’d seen the butterflies and held tightly to his mother’s kiss, the teenager who had so little hope he’d let the other boys ink 13½ on his forearm so he couldn’t ever forget he had but half a chance in life-less, no chance at all-hit him so hard he laughed. Without warning, the laughter turned to tears. When she knew, she might no longer love him.
“Do I need to slap you, sugar?” Polly asked solicitously.
“No,” he said as the tears morphed back into laughter at the touch of her voice on his mind. “I’m not hysterical. At least not too hysterical. Drummond was where I grew up, a juvenile detention center in Minnesota. I was sent there when I was eleven years old.
“It’s a long, long story,” Marshall said, suddenly weary of his past.
“I have read Coriolanus seven times and Bleak House twice.”
God, but he loved her.
“When I was eleven my family was killed: Mom, Dad, Lena -my baby sister-even the cat. They didn’t die in a car accident. They were murdered. I was convicted of killing them.”
“You were a little boy!” Polly exclaimed in disbelief.
“Yes. The papers dubbed me “Butcher Boy.” I was the youngest person ever convicted of murder in Minnesota.” Marshall couldn’t bear to look at his wife’s face, but he couldn’t look away either. He was waiting for the moment of horror that closed people off from Butcher Boy as surely as if they slammed an iron cell door and shot the bolt. Polly’s face showed nothing but concern, and he realized that she was as certain of the end of this story as she was of the last scene in Coriolanus. She knew he didn’t do it; she was just waiting to hear how the act played out.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know, sugar.”
“The tattoo, thirteen and a half, that you’ve asked about? I got it in Drummond. I was there for seven years. The staff psychiatrist, a bastard named Kowalski, set me to writing ‘homework assignments.’ He’d bring me the newspaper clipping of some horrific murder and insist I put myself in the killer’s head, think their thoughts, feel their disease on my brain, then tell him the reason I would have done killings like that. I guess he thought if he got me to go down that path enough times I’d remember killing my family. Maybe he only wanted me to say I did. The guy wanted to wring a best seller out of me one way or another.”
“Now there was a Butcher Boy all grown up,” Polly said with disgust. “Why did he have to torture a little boy to get his book?”
“Because I didn’t remember doing it; I didn’t remember killing my family. I’d had a cold, and Mom gave me medicine, and I slept like the dead. God,” he said as the word echoed in his brain.
“It’s okay, baby.” Polly touched his cheek and the pain of memory lessened.
“The bastard wanted to be the one who made me remember-or made me admit I remembered. So, the homework. By the time he’d gotten on this kick, I’d been in Drummond just long enough to get punky. Most of the stuff I wrote was just in-your-face rebellion. Since they’d dubbed me Butcher Boy, I’d be Butcher Boy. But those clippings were vicious, brutal things.”
“I know. I read them.”
Before Marshall recovered from that, Polly said, “I, too, have a long, long story, and I suspect Brother Danny wrote the script from start to finish. Your homework assignments were put in the cellar so I would find them.”
Marshall nodded. He knew he should ask for her story, should listen to her. Polly had been hurt so badly by his past. The need to tell overcame the need to listen, and he went on: “The more I read those damn things-those lists of people butchering people-and tried to get into the skins of the killers, the sicker I felt. I knew I’d done it. Enough people tell a kid he did a thing, and he believes he did it. The shrinks came up with half a dozen reasons I didn’t remember, and I believed them. Why wouldn’t I? I’m eleven, and they’re the authorities as far as I knew.