"Iffy? Impermanent?" These were words which had occurred to her on her walk home ... along with the fact that, despite Robbie Lefferts's enthusiasm, she didn't really know if she could do this job yet, and wouldn't--not for sure--until next Monday morning.
Anna nodded. "They aren't the words I would have chosen myself--I don't know what words would be, exactly--but they'll do. The point is, if you leave the Whitestone, I can't absolutely guarantee I could get you back in, especially on short notice. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority."
"Of course. I understand that."
"I'd do what I could, naturally, but--"
"If the job Mr. Lefferts offered me doesn't pan out, I'll look for work waitressing," Rosie said quietly. "My back is much better now, and I think I could do it. Thanks to Dawn, I can probably get a late-shift job in a Seven-Eleven or a Piggly-Wiggly, if it comes to that." Dawn was Dawn Verecker, who gave rudimentary clerking lessons on a cash register that was kept in one of the back rooms. Rosie had been an attentive student.
Anna was still looking at Rosie keenly. "But you don't think it will come to that, do you?"
"No." She directed another glance down at her picture. "I think it will work out. In the meantime, I owe you so much ..."
"You know what to do about that, don't you?"
"Pass it on."
Anna nodded. "That's right. If you should see a version of yourself walking down the street someday--a woman who looks lost and afraid of her own shadow--just pass it on."
"Can I ask you something, Anna?"
"Anything at all."
"You said your parents founded Daughters and Sisters. Why? And why do you carry it on? Or pass it on, if you like that better?"
Anna opened one of her desk drawers, rummaged, and brought out a thick paperback book. She tossed it across the desk to Rosie, who picked it up, stared at it, and experienced a moment of recall so vivid it was like one of the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes suffered. In that instant she did not just remember the wetness on the insides of her thighs, a sensation like small, sinister kisses, but seemed to re-experience it. She could see Norman's shadow as he stood in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She could see his shadow-fingers pulling restlessly at a shadow-cord. She could hear him telling the person on the other end that of course it was an emergency, his wife was pregnant. And then she saw him come back into the room and start picking up the pieces of the paperback he had torn out of her hands before beginning to hit her. The same redhead was on the cover of the book Anna had tossed her. This time she was dressed in a ballgown and caught up in the arms of a handsome gypsy who had flashing eyes and--apparently--a pair of rolled-up socks in the front of his breeches.
This is the trouble, Norman had said. How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?
"Rose?" It was Anna, sounding concerned. She also sounded very far away, like the voices you sometimes heard in dreams. "Rose, are you all right?"
She looked up from the book (Misery's Lover, the title proclaimed in that same red foil, and, below it, Paul Sheldon's Most Torrid Novel!) and forced a smile. "Yes, I'm fine. This looks hot."
"Bodice-rippers are one of my secret vices," Anna said. "Better than chocolate because they don't make you fat and the men in them are better than real men because they don't call you at four in the morning, drunk and whining for a second chance. But they're trash, and do you know why?"
Rosie shook her head.
"Because the whole round world is explained in them. There are reasons for everything. They may be as farfetched as the stories in the supermarket tabloids and they may run counter to everything a halfway intelligent person understands about how people behave in real life, but they're there, by God. In a book like Misery's Lover, Anna Stevenson would undoubtedly run Daughters and Sisters because she had been an abused woman herself... or because her mother had been. But I was never abused, and so far as I know, my mother never was, either. I was often ignored by my husband--we've been divorced for twenty years, in case Pam or Gert hasn't told you--but never abused. In life, Rosie, people sometimes do things, both bad and good, just-because. Do you believe that?"
Rosie nodded her head slowly. She was thinking of all the times Norman had hit her, hurt her, made her cry ... and then one night, for no reason at all, he might bring her half a dozen roses and take her out to dinner. If she asked why, what the occasion was, he usually just shrugged and said he "felt like treating her." Just-because, in other words. Mommy, why do I have to go to bed at eight even in the summertime, when the sky is still light outside? Just-because. Daddy, why did Grandpa have to die? Just-because. Norman undoubtedly thought these occasional treats and whirlwind dates made up for a lot, that they must offset what he probably thought of as his "bad temper." He would never know (and never understand even if she told him) that they terrified her even more than his anger and his bouts of rage. Those, at least, she knew how to deal with.
"I hate the idea that everything we do gets done because of the things people have done to us," Anna said moodily. "It takes everything out of our hands, it doesn't account in the least for the occasional saints and devils we glimpse among us, and most important of all, it doesn't ring true to my heart. It's good in books like Paul Sheldon's, though. It's comforting. Lets you believe, at least for a little while, that God is sane and nothing bad will happen to the people that you like in the story. May I have my book back? I'm going to finish it tonight. With lots of hot tea. Gallons."
Rosie smiled, and Anna smiled back.
"You'll come for the picnic, won't you, Rosie? It's going to be at Ettinger's Pier. We'll need all the help we can get. We always do."
"Oh, you bet," Rosie said. "Unless Mr. Lefferts decides I'm a prodigy and wants me to work on Saturdays, that is."
"I doubt that." Anna got up and came around the desk; Rosie also stood. And now that their talk was almost over, the most elementary question of all occurred to her.
"When can I move in, Anna?"
"Tomorrow, if you want." Anna bent and picked up the picture. She looked thoughtfully at the words charcoaled on the backing, then turned it around.
"You said it was odd," Rosie said. "Why?"
Anna tapped the glass fronting with one nail. "Because the woman is at the center, and yet her back is turned. That seems an extremely peculiar approach to this sort of painting, which has been otherwise quite conventionally executed." Now she glanced over at Rosie, and when she went on, her tone was a bit apologetic. "The building at the bottom of the hill is out of perspective, by the way."
"Yes. The man who sold me the picture mentioned that. Mr. Lefferts said it was probably done on purpose. Or some of the elements would be lost."
"I suppose that's true." She looked at it for several moments longer. "It does have something, doesn't it? A fraught quality."
"I don't understand what you mean."
Anna laughed. "Neither do I... except that there's something about it that makes me think of my romance novels. Strong men, lusty women, gushing hormones. Fraught's the only word I can think of that comes close to describing what I mean. A calm-before-the-storm thing. Probably it's just the sky." She turned the frame around again and restudied the words charcoaled on the backing. "Is this what caught your eye to start with? Your own name?"
"Nope," Rosie said, "by the time I saw Rose Madder on the back, I already knew I wanted the painting." She smiled. "It was just a coincidence, I guess--the kind that isn't allowed in the romance novels you like."
"I see." But Anna didn't look as if she did, quite. She ran the ball of her thumb across the printed letters. They smudged easily.
"Yes," Rose said. Suddenly, for no reason at all, she felt very uneasy. It was as if, somewhere off in that other timezone where evening had already begun, a man was thinking of her. "After all, Rose is a fairly common name--not like Evangeline or Petronella."
"I suppose you're right." Anna handed t
he picture over to her. "But it's funny about the charcoal it's written in, just the same."
"Funny how?"
"Charcoal smudges so easily. If it isn't protected--and the words on the backing of your picture haven't been--it turns into nothing but a smear in no time. The words Rose Madder must have been printed on the backing recently. But why? The picture itself doesn't look recent; it must be at least forty years old, and it might be eighty or a hundred. There's something else odd about it, too."
"What?"
"No artist's signature," Anna said.
IV
THE MANTA RAY
1
Norman left his hometown on Sunday, the day before Rosie was scheduled to start her new job ... the job she was still not entirely sure she could do. He left on the 11:05 Continental Express bus. This wasn't a matter of economy; it was a matter--a vital matter--of slipping back inside Rose's head. Norman was still not able to admit how badly her totally unexpected flight had rocked him. He tried to tell himself he was upset because of the bank card--only that and nothing more--but his heart knew better. It was about how he'd never had a clue. Not so much as a premonition.
There had been a long time in their marriage when he had known her every waking thought and most of her dreams. The fact that that had changed was driving him nuts. His biggest fear--unacknowledged but not entirely hidden from the deeper run of his thoughts--was that she had been planning her escape for weeks, months, possibly even a year. If he had known the truth of how and why she had left (if he had known about the single drop of blood, in other words), he would perhaps have been comforted. Or perhaps he would have been more unsettled than ever.
Regardless, he realized that his first impulse--to take off his husband's hat and put on his detective's hat--had been a bad idea. In the wake of Oliver Robbins's phone-call, he had realized that he needed to take off both of his hats and put on one of hers. He would have to think like her, and riding the bus she had ridden was a way of starting to do that.
He climbed up the bus steps with his overnight bag in his hand and stood by the driver's seat, looking down the aisle.
"You want to move it, buddy?" a man asked from behind him.
"You want to find out how getting your nose broken feels?" Norman replied without missing a beat. The guy behind him didn't have anything to say to that.
He took a moment or two longer, deciding which seat (she) he wanted, then made his way down the aisle to it. She wouldn't have gone all the way to the back of the bus; his fastidious Rose would never have taken a seat near the toilet cubicle unless all the other seats were full, and Norman's good friend Oliver Robbins (from whom he had bought his ticket, just as she had) had assured him that the 11:05 was hardly ever full. Nor would she want to sit over the wheels (too bumpy) or too close to the front (too conspicuous). Nope, just about halfway down would suit her, and on the left side of the bus, because she was left-handed, and people who thought they were choosing at random were in many cases simply going in the direction of their dominant hands.
In his years as a cop, Norman had come to believe that telepathy was perfectly possible, but it was hard work... impossible work, if you were wearing the wrong hat. You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn't a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking. And when you finally had that, you could take a shortcut--you could go racing across the curve of your quarry's thoughts and some night, when he or she least expected it, there you'd be, stepping out from behind the door... or lying under the bed with a knife in your hand, ready to ram it upward through the mattress the moment the springs squeaked and the poor sap (sapette, in this case) lay down.
"When you least expect it, " Norman murmured as he sat in what he hoped had been her seat. He liked the sound of it and so he said it again as the bus backed out of its slot, ready to head west: "When you least expect it. "
It was a long trip, but he rather enjoyed it. Twice he got off to use the toilet at rest-stops when he didn't really need to go because he knew she would have needed to go, and she wouldn't have wanted to use the bus toilet. Rose was fastidious but Rose also had weak kidneys. Probably a little genetic gift from her late mother, who had always looked to Norman like the sort of bitch who couldn't trot past a lilac bush without a pause to squat and piddle.
At the second of these rest-stops he saw half a dozen people clustered around a butt-can at one corner of the building. He watched longingly for a moment, then went past them and inside. He was dying for a smoke, but Rose wouldn't have been; she didn't have the habit. Instead he paused to handle a number of fuzzy stuffed animals because Rose liked crap like that, and then purichased a paperback mystery from the rack by the door because she sometimes read that shit. He had told her a billion times that real police work was nothing like the crap in those books, and she always agreed with him--if he said, it, it must be true--but she went on reading them just the same. He wouldn't have been too surprised to learn that Rosie had turned this same rack, had picked a book from it ... and then put it reluctantly back again, not wanting to spend five dollars on three hours' entertainment when she had so little money and so many unanswered questions.
He ate a salad, forcing himself to read the book as he did, and then went back to his seat on the bus. In a little while they were off again, Norman sitting still with his book in his lap, watching the fields open out more and more as the East gave up its hold. He turned his watch back when the driver announced it was time to do so, not because he gave a shit about timezones (he was on his own clock for the next thirty days or so) but because that was what Rose would have done. He picked the book up, read about a vicar finding a body in a garden, and put it down again, bored. Yet that was only on the surface. Deeper down, he wasn't bored at all. Deeper down he felt strangely like Goldilocks in the old kids' story. He was sitting in Baby Bear's little housie. Before long, if all went well, he would be hiding underneath Baby Bear's little beddie.
"When you least expect it, " he said. "When you least expect it. "
He got off the bus in the early hours of the following morning and stood just inside the door from the loading-gate, surveying the echoing, high-ceilinged terminal, trying to put aside his cop's assessment of the pimps and the whores, the buttboys and the beggars, trying to see it as she must have seen it, getting off this same bus and walking into this same terminal and seeing it at this same hour, when human nature is always at low tide.
He stood there and let this echoing world flood in on him: its look and smell and taste and feel.
Who am I? he asked himself.
Rose Daniels, he answered.
How do I feel?
Small. Lost. And terrified. That's the bottom line, right there. I'm utterly terrified.
For a moment he was overwhelmed by an awful idea: what if, in her fear and panic, Rose had approached the wrong person? It was certainly possible; for a certain type of bad guy, places like this were feeding-pools. What if that wrong person had led her off into the dark, then robbed and murdered her? It was no good telling himself it was unlikely; he was a cop and knew it wasn't. If a crackhead saw that stupid gumball-machine ring of hers, for instance--
He took several deep breaths, regrouping, refocusing the part of his mind that was trying to be Rose. What else was there to do? If she'd been murdered, she'd been murdered. There was nothing he could do about it, so it was best not to think of it ... and besides, he couldn't bear the thought that she might have escaped him that way, that some coked-up boogie might have taken what belonged to Norman Daniels.
Never mind, he told himself. Never mind, just do your job. And right now your job is to walk like Rosie, talk like Rosie, think like Rosie.
He moved slowly out into the terminal, holding his wallet in one hand (it was his substitute for her purse), looking at the people who rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string
-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As he watched, a man sprinted toward a woman and a little boy who had just gotten off Norman's bus. The man kissed the woman, then seized the little boy and tossed him high into the air. The little boy shrieked with fear and delight.
I'm scared--everything's new, everything's different, and I'm scared to death, Norman told himself. Is there anything I feel sure about? Anything I feel I can trust? Anything at all?
He walked across the wide tile floor, but slowly, slowly, listening to his feet echo and trying to look at everything through Rose's eyes, trying to feel everything through her skin. A quick peek at the glassy-eyed kids (with some it was just three-in-the-morning tiredness; with some it was Nebraska Red) in the video alcove, then back into the terminal itself. She looks at the bank of pay phones, but who is she going to call? She has no friends, she has no family--not even the providential old aunt in the Texas Panhandle or the mountains of Tennessee. She looks at the doors to the street, perhaps thinking of leaving, of finding a room for the night, a door to put between her and the whole wide confusing indifferent dangerous world--she has money enough for a room, thanks to his ATM card--but does she do it?
Norman stopped by the foot of the escalator, frowning, changing the shape of the question: Do I do it?
No, he decided, I don't. I don't want to check into a motel at three-thirty and be kicked out at noon, for one thing; it's bad value for my money. I can stay up a little longer, run on my nerves a little longer, if I have to. But there's something else keeping me here, as well: I'm in a strange city, and dawn is still at least two hours away. I've seen a lot of TV crime-shows, I've read a lot of paperback mysteries, and I'm married to a cop. I know what can happen to a woman who goes out into the darkness by herself, and I think I'll wait for sunrise.