Rose Madder

V. CRICKETS

Late that Wednesday afternoon, Rosie almost floated into the Hot Pot. She ordered a cup of tea and a pastry and sat by the window, slowly eating and drinking as she watched the endless river of pedestrians outside-most of them office-workers at this hour, headed home for the day. The Hot Pot was actually out of her way now that she was no longer working at the Whitestone, but she’d come here unhesitatingly just the same, perhaps because she had had so many pleasant after-work cups of coffee here with Pam, perhaps because she wasn’t much of an explorer-not yet, at least-and this was a place she knew and trusted. She had finished reading The Manta Ray around two o’clock, and had been reaching under the table for her bag when Rhoda Simons had clicked through on the speaker. “do you want a little break before we start the next one, Rosie?” she had asked, and there it was, as simple as that. She had hoped she would get the other three Bell/Racine novels, had believed she would, but the relief of actually knowing could not be matched. Nor was that all. When they’d broken at four, already two chapters into a lurid little slash-and-stalk thriller called Kill All My Tomorrows, Rhoda had asked Rosie if she would mind stepping down to the ladies” bathroom with her for a few minutes.

“I know it sounds weird,” she said, “but I’m dying for a smoke and it’s the only place in the whole damned building I dare to sneak one. Modern life’s a bitch, Rosie.” In the bathroom, Rhoda had lit a Capri and perched on the sink-ledge between the two basins with an ease that bespoke long familiarity. She crossed her legs, hooked her right foot behind her left calf, and looked at Rosie speculatively.

“Love your hair,” she said. Rosie touched it self-consciously. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing she’d had done in a beauty-shop the previous evening, fifty dollars she could not afford… and had been unable not to spend.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Robbie’s going to offer you a contract, you know.” Rosie frowned and shook her head.

“No-I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“He may look like Mr Pennybags on the Monopoly Community Chest cards, but Robbie’s been in the audio-book biz since 1975, and he knows how good you are. He knows better than you do. You think you owe him a lot, don’t you?'

'I know I do,” Rosie replied stiffly. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going; it made her think of those Shakespearian plays where people stabbed their friends in the back and then reeled off long, sanctimonious soliloquies explaining how unavoidable it had been. “don’t let your gratitude get in the way of your self-interest,” Rhoda said, tapping cigarette ash neatly into the basin and chasing it with a squirt of cold water.

“I don’t know the story of your life and I don’t particularly want to know it, but I know you did The Manta Ray in just a hundred and four takes, which is fucking phenomenal, and I know you sound like the young Elizabeth Taylor. I also know-because it’s just about taped to your forehead-that you’re on your own and not used to it. You’re so tabula rasa it’s scary. Do you know what that means?” Rosie wasn’t entirely sure-something about being naive, she thought-but she wasn’t going to let on to Rhoda.

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. And don’t get me wrong, for Christ’s sake-I’m not trying to cut in on Robbie, or cut my own piece out of your cake. I’m rooting for you. So’s Rob, and so’s Curtis. It’s just that Rob’s also rooting for his wallet. Audio-books is still a brand-new field. If this were the movie business, we’d be halfway through the Age of the Silents. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” “sort of.”

“When Robbie listens to you reading The Manta Ray, he’s thinking of an audio version of Mary Pickford. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Even the way he met you adds to that. There’s a legend about Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore. Well, Robbie’s already making a legend in his own mind about how he discovered you in his friend Steiner’s pawnshop, looking at antique postcards.”

“Is that what he told you I was doing?” she asked, feeling a surge of warmth for Robbie Lefferts that was almost love.

“Uh-huh, but where he found you and what you were doing there doesn’t really matter. The fact is that you’re good, Rosie, you’re really, really talented. It’s almost as if you were born to this job. Rob discovered you, but that doesn’t give him a right to your pipes for the rest of your life. Don’t let him own you.”

“He’d never want to do that,” Rosie said. She was frightened and excited at the same time, and also a little angry at Rhoda for being so cynical, but all of these feelings had been suppressed beneath a bright layer of joy and relief: she was going to be all right for a little longer. And if Robbie really did offer her a contract, she might be all right for even longer than that. It was all very well for Rhoda Simons to preach caution; Rhoda wasn’t living in a single room three blocks from an area of town where you didn’t park your car at the curb if you wanted to keep your radio and your hubcaps; Rhoda had an accountant husband, a house in the suburbs, and a 1994 silver Nissan. Rhoda had a VISA and an American Express card. Better yet, Rhoda had a Blue Cross card, and savings she could draw on if she got sick and couldn’t work. For people who had those things, Rosie imagined, advising caution in business affairs was probably as natural as breathing.

“Maybe not,” Rhoda said, “but you could be a small goldmine, Rosie, and sometimes people change when they discover goldmines. Even nice people like Robbie Lefferts.” Now, drinking her tea and looking out the window of the Hot Pot, Rosie remembered Rhoda dousing her cigarette under the cold tap, dropping it in the trash, and then coming over to her.

“I know you’re in a situation where job security is very important to you, and I’m not saying Robbie’s a bad man-I’ve been working with him off and on since 1982 and I know he’s not-but I’m telling you to keep an eye on the birds in the bush while you’re making sure the one in your hand doesn’t fly away. Do you follow me?”

“Not entirely, no.”

“Agree to do six books to start with, no more. Eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, right here at Tape Engine. A thousand a week.” Rosie goggled at her, feeling as if someone had stuck a vacuum-cleaner hose down her throat and sucked the air out of her lungs.

“A thousand dollars a week, are you crazy?”

“Ask Curt Hamilton if he thinks I’m crazy,” Rhoda said calmly. “remember, it’s not just the voice, it’s the takes. You did The Manta Ray in a hundred and four. No one else I work with could have done it in less than two hundred. You have great voice management, but the absolutely incredible thing is your breath control. If you don’t sing, how in God’s name did you get such great control?” A nightmarish image had occurred to Rosie then: sitting in the corner with her kidneys swelling and throbbing like bloated bags filled with hot water, sitting there with her apron held in her hands, praying to God she wouldn’t have to fill it because it hurt to throw up, it made her kidneys feel as if they were being stabbed with long, splintery sticks. Sitting there, breathing in long, flat inhales and slow, soft exhales because that was what worked best, trying to make the runaway beat of her heart match the calmer rhythm of her respiration, sitting there and listening to Norman making himself a sandwich in the kitchen and singing “daniel” or

“Take a Letter, Maria” in his surprisingly good barroom tenor.

“I don’t know,” she had told Rhoda, “I didn’t even know what breath control was until I met you. I guess it’s just a gift.”

“Well, count your blessings, keed,” Rhoda said.

“We better get back; Curt’ll think we’re practicing weird female rituals in here.” Robbie had called from his office downtown to congratulate her on finishing The Manta Ray-just as she was getting ready to leave for the day, this had been-and although he hadn’t specifically mentioned a contract, he had asked if she would have lunch with him on Friday to discuss what he called “a business arrangement.” Rosie had agreed and hung up, feeling bemused. She remembered thinking that Rhoda’s description of him was perfect; Robbie Lefferts did look like the little man on the Monopoly cards. When she put down the telephone in Curtis’s private office-a cluttery little closet with hundreds of business cards stuck to the cork walls on pushpins-and went back out into the studio to collect her bag, Rhoda was gone, presumably for a final smoke in the ladies”. Curt was marking boxes of reel-to-reel tape. He looked up and gave her a grin.

“Great work today, Rosie.”

“Thanks.”

“Rhoda says Robbie’s going to offer you a contract.”

“That’s what she says,” Rosie agreed.

“And I actually think she might be right. Knock on wood.”

“Well, you ought to remember one thing while you’re dickering,” Curtis said, putting the tape boxes on a high shelf where dozens of similar boxes were ranged like thin white books.

“If you made five hundred bucks for The Mania Ray, Robbie’s already ahead of the game… because you saved maybe seven hundred in studio time. Get it?” She’d gotten it, all right, and now she sat here in the Hot Pot with the future looking unexpectedly bright. She had friends, a place to live, a job, and the promise of more work when she had finished with Christina Bell. A contract that might mean as much as a thousand dollars a week, more money than Norman made. It was crazy, but it was true. Might be true, she amended. Oh, and one other thing. She had a date for Saturday… all of Saturday, if you counted in the Indigo Girls concert that night. Rosie’s face, usually so solemn, broke into a brilliant smile, and she felt a totally inappropriate desire to hug herself. She took the last bite of her pastry and looked out the window again, wondering if all these things could possibly be happening to her, if there could actually be a real life where real people walked out of their prisons, turned right… and walked into heaven.

Half a block away, DON’T WALK went out and WALK came on. Pam Haverford, now changed out of her white chambermaid’s uniform and into a pair of trim red slacks, crossed the street with two dozen other people. She had worked an extra hour tonight and had no reason on earth to think Rosie would be in the Hot Pot… but she did think it, just the same. Call it woman’s intuition, if you wanted. She glanced briefly at the big lug crossing beside her, who she thought she had seen at the Whitestone newsstand a few minutes ago. He might have qualified as someone interesting if not for the look in his eyes… which was no look at all. He glanced briefly at her as they stepped up on the far curb, and the lack of expression in those eyes-the feeling of some absence behind them-actually chilled her.

Inside the Hot Pot, Rosie abruptly decided she wanted a second cup of tea. She had no earthly reason to think Pam might drop in-it was a full hour past their usual time-but she did, just the same. Maybe it was woman’s intuition. She got up and turned toward the counter.

The little bitch beside him was sort of cute, Norman thought, tight red slacks, nice little ass. He dropped back a couple of steps-the better to enjoy the view, my dear-but almost as soon as he did, she turned into a little restaurant. Norman glanced in the window as he went by, but saw nothing interesting, just a bunch of old bags eating gooey shit and slopping up coffee and tea, plus a few waiters rushing around in that mincing, faggy way they had. The old ladies must like it, Norman thought. Fag-walking like that must pay off in tips. It had to; why else would grown men walk that way? They couldn’t all be fags… could they? His gaze into the Hot Pot-brief and disinterested-touched on one lady considerably younger than the blue-rinsed, pants-suited types sitting at most of the tables. She was walking away from the window and toward the cafeteria-style serving counter at the far end of the tearoom (at least he supposed that was what you called places like this). He took a quick look at her ass, simply because that was where his eyes always went fast when it was a woman younger than forty, judged it not too bad but nothing to write home to Mother about. Rose’s ass used to look like that, he thought. Back in the days before she let herself go and it got as big as a goddam footstool, that is. The woman he glimpsed through the window also had great hair, much better than her fanny, actually, but her hair didn’t make him think of Rosie. Rosie was what Norman’s mother had always called a “brownette,” and she rarely took any pains with her hair (given its lackluster mousehide color, Norman didn’t blame her). Pulling it back in a ponytail and securing it with a rubber band was her usual way of wearing it; if they were going out to dinner or a movie, she might thread it through one of those elastic scrunch things they sold in the drugstore. The woman upon whom Norman’s gaze touched briefly when he looked into the Hot Pot was not a brownette but a slim-hipped blonde, and her hair was not in a ponytail or a scrunch. It hung down to the middle of her back in a carefully made plait.

Perhaps the best thing to happen all day, even better than Rhoda’s stunning news that she might be worth a thousand dollars a week to Robbie Lefferts, was the look on Pam Haverford’s face when Rosie turned away from the Hot Pot cash register with her fresh cup of tea. At first Pam’s eyes slid over her with absolutely no recognition at all… and then they snapped back, widening as they did so. Pam started to grin and then actually shrieked, probably pushing at least half a dozen pacemakers in the ferny little room dangerously close to overload.

“Rosie? Is that you? Oh… my… God!”

“It’s me,” Rosie said, laughing and blushing. She was aware that people were turning to look at them, and discovered-wonder of wonders-that she did not exactly mind. They took their tea to their old table by the window, and Rosie even allowed Pam to talk her into another pastry, although she had lost fifteen pounds since coming to the city and had no intention of putting it back on if she could help it. Pam kept telling her that she couldn’t beleeve it, simply couldn’t beleeve it, a remark Rosie might have been tempted to chalk up to flattery, except for the way Pam’s eyes kept moving from her face to her hair, as if she was trying to get the truth of it straight in her mind.

“It makes you look five years younger,” she said.

“Hell, Rosie, it makes you look like jailbait!”

“For fifty dollars, it ought to make me look like Marilyn Monroe,” Rosie replied, smiling… but since her talk with Rhoda, she felt a lot easier in her mind about the amount she’d spent on her hair.

“Where did you-” Pam began, then stopped.

“It’s the picture you bought, isn’t it? You had your hair done the same as the woman in the picture.” Rosie thought she would blush at this, but no blush came. She simply nodded.

“I loved that style, so I thought I’d try it.” She hesitated, then added:

“As for changing the color, I still can’t believe I did it. It’s the first time in my whole life that I’ve changed the color of my hair.”

“The first-! I don’t believe it!”

“It’s true.” Pam leaned across the table, and when she spoke it was in a throaty, conspiratorial whisper:

“It’s happened, hasn’t it?”

“What are you talking about? What’s happened?”

“You’ve met someone interesting? Rosie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again without the slightest idea of what she intended to say. It turned out to be nothing; what came out instead of words was laughter. She laughed until she cried, and before she was done, Pam had joined in.

Rosie didn’t need her key to open the street door at 897 Trenton Street-that one was left unlocked until eight or so on weeknights-but she needed the small one to open her mailbox (R. MCCLENDON taped to the front of it, boldly asserting that she belonged here, yes she did), which was empty except for a Wal-Mart circular. As she started up the stairs to the second floor, she shook out another key. This one opened the door to her room, and except for the building super, she had the only one. Like the mailbox, it was hers. Her feet were tired-she had walked the entire three miles from downtown, feeling too restless and too happy to sit on a bus, also wanting more time than a bus would give her to think and dream. She was hungry in spite of two Hot Pot pastries, but her stomach’s low growling added to rather than detracted from her happiness. Had she ever in her life felt such gladness? She thought not. It had spilled over from her mind into her entire body, and although her feet were tired, they still felt light. And her kidneys didn’t hurt a bit, in spite of the long walk. Now, letting herself into her room (and remembering to lock the door behind her this time), Rosie began to giggle again. Pam and her someone interestings. She had been forced to admit a few things-she was, after all, planning to bring Bill to the Indigo Girls concert on Saturday night and the women from D amp; S would meet him then-but when she protested that she hadn’t colored her hair and plaited it simply on Bill’s account (this felt true to her, actually), she got only comically rolling eyeballs and a burlesque wink from Pam. It was irritating… but also rather sweet. She opened the window, letting in the mild late-spring air and the sounds of the park, then crossed to her small kitchen table where a paperback lay beside the flowers Bill had brought her on Monday night. The flowers were fading now, but she didn’t think she could bring herself to throw them out. Not, at least, until after Saturday. Last night she had dreamed of him, had dreamed of riding behind him on his motorcycle. He kept driving faster and faster, and at some point a terrible, wonderful word had occurred to her. A magic word. She couldn’t remember exactly what it had been now, something nonsensical like deffle or feffle, but in the dream it had seemed like a beautiful word… powerful, too. Don’t say it unless you really, really mean it, she remembered thinking as they flashed along some country highway with hills on the left and the lake winking blue and gold sunflashes through the firs on their right. Up ahead was an overgrown hill, and she knew that there was a ruined temple on the far side of it. Don’t say it unless you mean to commit yourself, body and soul. She had said the word; it came out of her mouth like a bolt of electricity. The wheels of Bill’s Harley had left the road-for just a moment she had seen the front one, still spinning but now six inches above the pavement-and she had seen their shadow not beside them but somehow beneath them. Bill had twisted the hand-throttle and suddenly they were bolting up toward the bright blue sky, emerging from the lane the road made in the trees like a submarine coming to the surface of the ocean, and she had awakened in her bed with the covers balled up all around her, shivering and yet gasping in the hold of some deep heat which seemed hidden in the center of her, unseen but powerful, like the sun in eclipse. She doubted very much if they would fly like that no matter how many magic words she tried, but she thought she would keep the flowers awhile longer, anyway. Perhaps even press a couple of them between the pages of this very book. She had bought the book in Elaine’s Dreams, the place where she had gotten her hair done. The title was Simple but Elegant: Ten Hairstyles You Can Do at Home.

“These are good,” Elaine had told her.

“Of course you should always get your hair done by a professional, that’s my view, but if you can’t afford it every week, timewise or moneywise, and the thought of actually dialing the 800 number and ordering the Topsy Tail makes you feel like shooting yourself, this is a decent compromise. Just for Jesus” sake promise me that if some guy invites you to a country club dance in Westwood, you’ll come see me first.” Rosie sat down and turned to Style No. 3, the Classic Plait… which, the opening paragraph informed her, was also known as the Classic French Braid. She went through the black-and-white photographs which showed a woman first separating and then plaiting her hair, and when she reached the end, she began to work her way backward, undoing the plait. Unmaking in the evening turned out to be a lot simpler than making it in the morning; it had taken her forty-five minutes and one good round of cursing to get it looking more or less the way it had when she’d left Elaine’s Dreams the night before. It had been worth it, however; Pam’s unabashed shriek of amazement in the Hot Pot was worth all of that and more. As she finished her work, her mind turned to Bill Steiner (it had never been very far away from him), and she wondered if he would like her hair plaited. If he would like her hair blonde. Or if he would, in fact, notice either of these changes at all. She wondered if she would be unhappy if he didn’t notice, then sighed and wrinkled her nose. Of course she would be. On the other hand, what if he not only noticed but reacted as Pam had (minus the squeal, of course)? He might even sweep her into his arms, as they said in the romance novels… She was reaching for her bag, wanting the comb inside, and beginning to slide into a harmless little fantasy of Saturday morning-of Bill tying the end of the plait with a piece of velvet ribbon, in fact (why he would happen to have a piece of velvet ribbon on his person could go completely unexplained; that was the nice thing about kitchen table daydreams)-when her thoughts were interrupted by a small sound from the far side of the room. Reep. Reep-reep. A cricket. The sound wasn’t coming through the open window from Bryant Park, either. It was a lot closer than that. Reep-reep. Reep-reep. She swept her eyes along the skirting board and saw something jump. She got up, opened the cupboard to the left of the sink, and took down a glass mixing bowl. She walked across the room, pausing to pluck the Wal-Mart circular from the seat of the chair in the living-room area. Then she knelt by the insect, which had made its way almost into the unadorned south corner where she supposed she would put her TV, if she actually got around to buying one before moving out of here. After today, moving to a bigger place-and soon-seemed like more than just a daydream. It was a cricket. How it had gotten up here to the second floor was a bit of a mystery, but it was definitely a cricket. Then the answer occurred to her, and it included the reason why she’d heard it when she was falling asleep. The cricket must have come up with Bill, probably in the cuff of his pants. A little extra present to go along with the flowers. You didn’t hear just one cricket the other night, Practical-Sensible spoke up suddenly. That particular voice hadn’t gotten much use lately. It sounded rusty and a little hoarse. You heard a whole fieldful of crickets. Or a whole parkful. Bullshit, she replied comfortably as she lowered the bowl over the insect and then slid the advertising circular under the lip, poking the bug with the corner of it until he hopped, letting her slide the paper entirely over the inverted mouth of the bowl. My mind just turned one cricket into a chorus, that’s all. I was going to sleep, remember. I was probably half in a dream already. She picked the bowl up and turned it over, holding the circular over the top so the cricket couldn’t escape before she was ready for it to. It jumped energetically up and down meanwhile, its armored back ticking off a picture of the new John Grisham novel, which could be purchased at Wal-Mart for only sixteen dollars, plus tax. Humming.

“When You Wish Upon a Star,” Rosie took the cricket over to the open window, removed the circular, and held the bowl out into space. Insects could fall from much greater heights than this and walk away unhurt (hop away, her mind amended) when they landed. She was sure she had read that somewhere, or perhaps seen it on some TV nature program.

“Go on, Jiminy,” she said.

“Be a good boy and hop. See the park over there? Tall grass, plenty of dew to drink, lots of girl crick-” She broke off. The bug hadn’t come upstairs in Bill’s cuffs, because he’d been wearing jeans on Monday night, when he’d taken her out to dinner. She questioned her memory on that, wanting to be sure, and the same information came back quickly, and with no shade of doubt. Oxford shirt and Levi’s with no cuffs. She remembered being comforted by his clothes; they were insurance that he wasn’t going to try taking her to some fancy place where she would be stared at. Blue jeans, no cuffs. So where had Jiminy come from? What did it matter? If the cricket hadn’t come upstairs in one of Bill’s pantscuffs, it had probably come up in someone else’s, that was all, hopping out on the second-floor landing when it got a little restless-hey, t'anks for the ride, bud. Then it had simply slipped under her door, and what of that? She could think of less pleasant uninvited guests. As if to express agreement with this, the cricket suddenly sprang out of the bowl and took the plunge.

“Have a nice day,” Rosie said. ’stop by anytime. Really.'

As she brought the bowl back inside, a minor gust of wind blew the Wal-Mart circular out from beneath her thumb and sent it seesawing lazily to the floor. She bent over to pick it up, then froze with her outstretched fingers still an inch away from it. Two more crickets, both dead, lay against the skirting board, one on its side and the other on its back with its little legs sticking up. One cricket she could understand and accept, but three? In a second-floor room? How, exactly, did you explain that? Now Rosie saw something else, something lying in the crack between two boards close to the dead crickets. She knelt, fished it out of the crack, and held it up to her eyes. It was a clover flower. A tiny pink clover flower. She looked down at the crack from which she had plucked it; she looked again at the pair of dead crickets; then she let her eyes climb slowly up the cream-colored wall… to her picture, hanging there by the window. To Rose Madder (it was as good a name as any) standing on her hill, with the newly discovered pony cropping grass behind her. Conscious of her heartbeat-a big slow muffled drum in her ears-Rosie leaned forward toward the picture, toward the pony’s muzzle, watching the image dissolve into layered shades of old paint, beginning to see the brush-strokes. Below the muzzle were the forest-green and olive-green hues of the grass, which appeared to have been done in quick, layered downstrokes of the artist’s brush. Dotted among them were small pink blobs. Clover. Rose looked at the tiny pink flower in the palm of her hand, then held it out to the painting. The color matched exactly. Suddenly, and with no forethought at all, she raised her hand to the level of her lips and puffed the tiny flower toward the picture. She half-expected (no, it was more than that, actually; for a moment she was utterly positive) the tiny pink ball would float through the surface of the painting and enter that world which had been created by some unknown artist sixty, eighty, perhaps even a hundred years ago. It didn’t happen, of course. The pink flower struck the glass covering the painting (unusual for an oil to be covered with glass, Robbie had said on the day she met him), bounced off, and fluttered to the floor like a tiny shred of balled-up tissue-paper. Maybe the painting was magic, but the glass covering it clearly wasn’t. Then how did the crickets get out? You do think that’s what happened, don’t you? That the crickets and the clover flower somehow got out of the painting? God help her, that was what she thought. She had an idea that when she was out of this room and with other people, the notion would seem ridiculous or fade away completely, but for now that was what she thought: the crickets had hopped out of the grass under the feet of the blonde woman in the rose madder chiton. They had somehow hopped from the world of Rose Madder and into that of Rosie McClendon. How? Did they just sort of ooze through the glass? No, of course not. That was stupid, but-She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and lifted the painting off its hook. She took it into the kitchen area, set it on the counter, and then turned it around. The charcoaled words on the paper backing were more blurred than ever; she wouldn’t have known for sure that they said ROSE MADDER if she hadn’t seen them earlier. Hesitantly, feeling afraid now (or perhaps she’d been afraid all along and was just beginning to realize it), she touched the backing. It crackled when she poked it. Crackled too much. And when she poked at it lower down, where the brown paper disappeared into the frame, she felt something… some things… She swallowed, and the back of her throat was so dry it hurt. She opened one of the counter drawers with a hand that didn’t feel like her own, picked up a paring knife, and brought its blade slowly toward the brown paper backing. Don’t do it! Practical-Sensible shrieked. Don’t do it, Rosie, you don’t know what might come out of there! She held the tip of the knife poised against the brown paper for a moment, then laid it aside for the time being. She lifted the picture and looked at the bottom of the frame, noting with some distant part of her mind that her hands were shaking very badly now. What she saw running through the wood-a crack at least a quarter-inch across at its widest point-didn’t really surprise her. She set the picture back down on the counter, holding it up with her right hand and using her left-her smart hand-to bring the tip of the paring knife against the paper backing again. Don’t, Rosie. Practical-Sensible wasn’t shrieking this time; she was moaning. Please don’t do this, please leave well enough alone. Except that was ridiculous advice, when you thought about it; if she had followed it the first time Ms P-S had given it, she would still be living with Norman. Or dying with him. She used the knife to slit the backing, down low where she felt those bulges. Half a dozen crickets tumbled out onto the counter, four of them dead, one twitching feebly, the sixth frisky enough to hop off down the counter before tumbling into the sink. Along with the crickets came a few more pink clover-puffs, a few grass-cuttings… and part of a brown dead leaf. Rosie picked this last up and looked at it curiously. It was an oak-leaf. She was almost sure of it. Working carefully (and ignoring the voice of Practical-Sensible), Rosie used the paring knife to cut all the way around the paper backing. When she removed it, more rustic treasures fell out: ants (most dead but three or four still able to crawl), the plump corpse of a honeybee, several daisy-petals of the sort you were supposed to pluck from the central flower while chanting he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not… and a few filmy white hairs. She held these up to the light, gripping the turned-around painting tighter with her right hand as a shudder went up her back like big feet climbing a set of stairs. If she took these hairs to a veterinarian and asked him to look at them under a microscope, Rosie knew what he’d tell her: they were horse-hairs. Or, more accurately, they were hairs from a small, shaggy pony. A pony that was currently cropping grass in another world. I’m losing my mind, she thought calmly, and that wasn’t the voice of Practical-Sensible; that was her own voice, the one which spoke for the central, integrated core of her thoughts and her self. It wasn’t hysterical or goosey; it spoke rationally, calmly, and with a touch of wonder. It was, she suspected, the same tone in which her mind would acknowledge the inevitability of death, in the days or weeks when its approach could no longer be denied. Except she didn’t really believe she was losing her mind, not the way she would be forced to believe in the finality of, say, cancer, once it had progressed to a certain stage. She had opened the back of her picture and a bunch of grass, hair, and insects-some still alive-had fallen out. Was that so impossible to believe? She had read a story in the newspaper a few years back about a woman who had discovered a small fortune in perfectly good stock certificates hidden in the backing of an old family portrait; compared to that, a few bugs seemed mundane. But still alive, Rosie? And what about the clover, still fresh, and the grass, still green? The leaf was dead, but you know what you’re thinking about that-She was thinking that it had blown through dead. It was summer in the picture, but you found dead leaves in the grass even in June. So I repeat: I’m losing my mind. Except the stuff was here, scattered all over her kitchen counter, a litter of bugs and grass. Stuff. Not dreams or hallucinations but real stuff. And there was something else, the one thing she did not really want to approach head-on. This picture had talked to her. No, not out loud, but from the first moment she’d seen it, it had spoken to her, just the same. It had her name on the back-a version of it, anyway-and yesterday she had spent much more than she could afford to make her hair look like the hair of the woman in the picture. Moving with sudden decisiveness, she inserted the flat of the paring knife’s blade under the top part of the frame and levered upward. She would have stopped immediately if she’d sensed strong resistance-this was the only paring knife she had, and she didn’t want to snap the blade off-but the nails holding the frame together gave easily. She pulled off the top, now using her free hand to keep the glass front from falling to the counter and shattering, and laid it aside. Another dead cricket clicked to the counter. A moment later she held the bare canvas in her hands. It was about thirty inches long and eighteen inches high, with the frame and the matting removed. Gently, Rose ran her finger across the long-dried oil paints, feeling layers of minutely different heights, feeling even the fine-combed tracks left by the artist’s brush. It was an interesting, slightly eerie sensation, but there was nothing supernatural about it; her finger did not slip through the surface and into that other world. The phone, which she had bought and plugged into the wall-jack yesterday, rang for the first time. The volume was turned up all the way, and its sudden, shrill warble made Rosie jump and voice her own cry. Her hand tensed, and her outstretched finger almost poked through the painted canvas. She laid the picture down on the kitchen table and hurried to the phone, hoping it was Bill. If it was, she thought she might invite him over-invite him to take a good look at her painting. And show him the assorted detritus that had fallen out of it. The stuff.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Rosie?” Not Bill. A woman.

“It’s Anna Stevenson.”

“Oh, Anna! Hello! How are you?” From the sink came a persistent reep-reep.

“I’m not doing too well,” Anna said.

“Not too well at all. Something very unpleasant has happened, and I need to tell you about it. It may not have anything to do with you-I hope with all my heart it doesn’t-but it might.” Rosie sat down, frightened now in a way she hadn’t been even when she had felt the shapes of dead insects hiding behind the backing of her picture.

“What, Anna? What’s wrong?” Rosie listened with growing horror as Anna told her. When she had finished, she asked if Rosie wanted to come over to Daughters and Sisters, perhaps spend the night.

“I don’t know,” Rosie said numbly.

“I’ll have to think. I… Anna, I have to call someone else now. I’ll get back to you.” She hung up before Anna could reply, dialed 411, asked for a number, got it, dialed it.

“Liberty City,” an older man’s voice said.

“Yes, may I speak to Mr Steiner?”

“This is Mr Steiner,” the slightly hoarse voice replied, sounding amused. Rosie was confused for a moment, then remembered that he was in business with his dad.

“Bill,” she said. Her throat was dry and painful again.

“Bill, I mean… is he there?”

“Hold on, miss.” A rustle and a clunk as the phone was laid down, and, distant:

“Billy! It’s a lady forya!” Rosie closed her eyes. Very distantly, she heard the cricket in the sink: Reep-reep. A long, unbearable pause. A tear slipped out from beneath the lashes of her left eye and started down her cheek. It was followed by one from her right, and a snatch of some old country song drifted through her mind:

“Well, the race is on and here comes Pride up the backstretch… Heartache is goin” to the inside…” She wiped them away. So many tears she had wiped away in this life of hers. If the Hindus were right about reincarnation, she hated to think what she must have been in her last one. The telephone was picked up.

“Hello?” A voice she now heard in her dreams.

“Hello, Bill.” It wasn’t her normal speaking voice, not even a whisper, not really. It was more like the husk of a whisper.

“I can’t hear you,” he said.

“Can you speak up, ma’am?” She didn’t want to speak up; she wanted to hang up. She couldn’t, though. Because if Anna was right, Bill could be in trouble, too-very bad trouble. If, that was, he was perceived by a certain someone as being a little too close to her. She cleared her throat and tried again.

“Bill? It’s Rosie.”

“Rosie!” he cried, sounding delighted.

“Hey, how are you?” His unaffected, undisguised delight only made it worse; all of a sudden it felt as if someone were twisting a knife in her guts.

“I can’t go out with you on Saturday,” she said, speaking rapidly. The tears were coming faster now, oozing from beneath her eyelids like some nasty hot grease.

“I can’t go out with you at all. I was crazy to think I could.”

“Of course you can! Jesus, Rosie! What are you talking about?” The panic in his voice-not the anger she had half-expected, but real panic-was bad, but somehow the bewilderment was worse. She couldn’t stand it. “don’t call me and don’t come over,” she told him, and suddenly she could see Norman with horrible clarity, standing across from her building in the pouring rain with the collar of his overcoat turned up and a streetlight faintly illuminating the lower half of his face-standing there like one of the hellish, brutal villains in a novel by

“Richard Racine.”

“Rosie, I don’t understand-”

“I know, and that’s actually for the best,” she said. Her voice was wavering, starting to break apart.

“Just stay away from me, Bill.” She hung the telephone up quickly, stared at it a moment, then voiced a loud, agonized cry. She turned the phone out of her lap with the backs of her hands. The handset flew to the end of its cord and lay on the floor, its open-line hum sounding strangely like the hum of the crickets which had sent her off to sleep on Monday night. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the sound, felt that if she had to listen to it for even another thirty seconds, it would split her head in two. She got up, went to the wall, squatted, and pulled the phone-jack. When she tried to get up again, her trembling legs would not support her. She sat on the floor, covered her face with her hands, and let the tears have their way with her. There was really no choice. Anna had kept saying over and over again that she wasn’t sure, that Rosie couldn’t be sure, either, whatever she might suspect. But Rosie was sure. It was Norman. Norman was here, Norman had lost whatever remained of his sanity, Norman had killed Anna’s ex-husband, Peter Slowik, and Norman was looking for her.

Five blocks beyond the Hot Pot, where he had come within four seconds of meeting his wife’s eyes through the plate-glass window, Norman turned into a discount store called No More Than 5.

“Everything in the Store Priced Under $5.00!” the store’s motto read. It was printed below a wretchedly executed drawing of Abraham Lincoln. There was a broad grin on Lincoln’s bearded face, he was dropping a wink, and to Norman Daniels he looked quite a bit like a man he had once arrested for strangling his wife and all four of his children. In this store, which was literally within shouting distance of Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn, Norman bought all the disguise he intended to wear today: a pair of sunglasses and a cap with CHISOX printed above the bill. As a man with just over ten years” experience as a detective inspector, Norman had come to believe that disguises only belonged in three places: spy movies, Sherlock Holmes stories, and Halloween parties. They were especially useless in the daytime, when the. only thing makeup looked like was makeup and the only thing a disguise looked like was a disguise. And the gals in Daughters and Sisters, the New Age whorehouse where his pal Peter Slowik had finally admitted sending his rambling Rose, were apt to be particularly sensitive to predators slinking around their waterhole. For gals like these, paranoia was a lot more than a way of life; it was full state-of-the-art. The cap and dark glasses would serve his purpose; all he had planned for this early evening was what Gordon Satterwaite, his first detective partner, would have called “a little rekky.” Gordon had also been fond of grabbing his young associate and telling him it was time to do a little of what he called “the old gumshoe.” Gordon had been a fat, smelly, tobacco-chewing slob with brown teeth, and Norman had despised him almost from the first moment he had seen him. Gordon had been a cop for twenty-six years and an inspector for nineteen, but he had no feel for the work. Norman did. He didn’t like it, and he hated the jizzbags he had to talk to (and sometimes even associate with, if the job was undercover), but he had a feel for it, and that feel had been invaluable over the years. It had helped bring him through the case which had resulted in his promotion, the case which had turned him-however briefly-into a media golden boy. In that investigation, as in most that involved organized crime, there came a point where the path the investigators had been following disappeared into a bewildering maze of diverging paths, and the straight way was lost. The difference in the drug case was that Norman Daniels was-for the first time in his career-in charge, and when logic failed, he did without hesitation what most cops could not or would not do: he had switched over to intuition and then trusted his entire future to what it told him, plunging forward aggressively and fearlessly. To Norman there was no such thing as “a little rekky'; to Norman there was only trolling. When you were stumped, you went somewhere that had a bearing on the case, you looked at it with your mind perfectly open, not junked up with a lot of worthless ideas and half-baked suppositions, and when you did that you were like a guy sitting in a slow-moving boat, casting your line out and reeling it in, casting out and reeling in, waiting for something to grab hold. Sometimes nothing did. Sometimes you got nothing but a submerged tree-limb or an old rubber boot or the kind offish not even a hungry raccoon would eat. Sometimes, though, you hooked a tasty one. He put on the hat and the sunglasses, then turned left onto Harrison Street, now on his way to Durham Avenue. It was easily a three-mile hike to the neighborhood where Daughters and Sisters was located, but Norman didn’t mind; he could use the walk to empty out his head. By the time he reached 251, he would be like a blank sheet of photographic paper, ready to receive whatever images and ideas might come, without trying to change them so they would fit his own preconceptions. If you didn’t have any preconceptions, you couldn’t do that. His overpriced map was in his back pocket, but he only stopped to consult it once. He had been in the city less than a week, but he already had its geography much more clearly fixed in his mind than Rosie did, and again, this was not so much training as it was a gift. When he had awakened yesterday morning with his hands and shoulders and groin aching, with his jaws too sore to open his mouth more than halfway (the first attempt at a wakeup yawn as he swung his feet out of bed had been agony), he had done so with the dismaying realization that what he had done to Peter Slowik-aka Thumperstein, aka The Amazing Urban Jew boy-had probably been a mistake. Just how bad a mistake was hard to say, because a lot of what had happened at Slowik’s house was only a blur to him, but it had been a mistake, all right; by the time he had reached the hotel newsstand, he’d decided there was no probably about it. Probably was for the dinks of the world, anyway-this had been an unspoken but fiercely held tenet of his life’s code ever since his early teens, when his mother had left and his father had really started to crank up the beatings. He had bought a paper at the newsstand and leafed through it rapidly in the elevator as he went back up to his room. There was nothing in it about Peter Slowik, but Norman had found that only a minor relief. Thumper’s body might not have been discovered in time for the news to make the early editions; might, in fact, still be lying where Norman had left it (where he thought he had left it, he amended; it was all pretty hazy), crammed in behind the basement water-heater. But guys like Thumper, guys who did lots of public service work and had lots of bleeding-heart friends, didn’t go undiscovered for long. Someone would get worried, other someones would come around looking for him at his cozy little rabbit-hole on Beaudry Place, and eventually some someone would make an exceptionally unpleasant discovery behind the water-heater. And sure enough, what had not been in the paper yesterday morning was there today, on page one of the Metro section: CITY SOCIAL WORKER SLAIN IN HOME. According to the piece, Travelers Aid had been only one of Thumper’s after-hours activities… and he hadn’t exactly been poor, either. According to the paper, his family-of which Thump had been the last-had been worth a pretty good chunk of change. The fact that he had been working in a bus station at three in the morning, sending runaway wives to the whores at Daughters and Sisters, only proved to Norman that the man was either short a few screws or sexually bent. Anyway, he had been your typical do-gooding shitbug, trundling here and there, too busy trying to save the world most days to change his underpants. Travelers Aid, Salvation Army, Dial HELP, Bosnian Relief, Russian Relief (you d have thought a jewboy like Thump would have had at least enough sense to skip that one, but nope), and two or three “women’s causes” as well. The paper didn’t identify these last, but Norman already knew one of them: Daughters and Sisters, also known as Lesbo Babes in Toyland. There was going to be a memorial service for Thumper on Saturday, except the paper called it a “remembrance circle.” Dear bleeding Jesus. He also knew that Slowik’s death could have had to do with any of the causes the man worked for… or none of them. The cops would be checking into his personal life as well (always assuming a walking Room to Rent like Thumper had a personal life), and they would not neglect the possibility that it had been the ever more popular “motiveless crime,” committed by some psycho who maybe just happened to walk in. A guy looking for a bite, you could say. None of these things, however, were going to matter much to the whores at Daughters and Sisters; Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. He’d had a fair amount of experience with women’s halfway houses and shelters in the course of his job, more as the years went by and the people Norman thought of as New Age Fern-Sniffers really started to have an effect on the way people thought and behaved. According to the New Age Fern-Sniffers, everyone came from a dysfunctional family, everyone was sublimating the child inside, and everyone had to watch out for all the mean, nasty people out there who had the nerve to try going through life without whining and crying and running off to some Twelve-Step program every night. The Fern-Sniffers were assholes, but some of them-and the women in places like this Daughters and Sisters were often prime examples-could be extremely cautious assholes. Cautious? Shit. They gave an entirely new dimension to the term bunker mentality. Norman had spent most of yesterday in the library, and he had found out a number of interesting things about Daughters and Sisters. The most hilarious was that the woman who ran the place, Anna Stevenson, had been Mrs Thumper until 1973, when she had apparently divorced him and taken her maiden name back. It seemed like a wild coincidence only if you were unfamiliar with the mating rites and rituals of the Fern Folks. They ran in pairs, but were hardly ever able to run in harness, not for the long haul. One always ended up wanting to gee while the other wanted to haw. They were unable to see the simple truth: politically correct marriages didn’t work. Thumper’s ex-wife didn’t run her place along the lines of most battered-women shelters, where the motto was “only women know, only women tell.” In a Sunday-supplement article about the place which had been published a little over a year ago, the Stevenson woman (Norman was struck by how much she looked like that cunt Maude on the old TV show) had dismissed that idea as “not only sexist, but stupid as well.” A woman named Gert Kinshaw was also quoted on this subject.

“Men aren’t our enemies unless they prove they’re our enemies,” she said.

“But if they hit, we hit back.” There was a picture of her, a big old nigger bitch who reminded Norman vaguely of that Chicago football player William “refrigerator” Perry.

“You ever try to hit me, sweetheart, I’ll use you for a trampoline,” he had murmured. But that stuff, interesting as it might be, was really beside the point. There might be men as well as women in this city who knew where the place was and were allowed to make referrals, and it might be run by just one New Age Fern-Sniffer instead of a committee of them, but in one respect he was sure they would be exactly the same as their more traditional counterparts: the death of Peter Slowik would have them on red alert. They wouldn’t make the assumptions the cops would make; unless and until proved otherwise, they would assume Slowik’s murder had to do with them… specifically with one of the referrals Slowik had made during the last six or eight months of his life. Rosie’s name might already have surfaced in that respect. So why did you do it? he asked himself. Why in God’s name did you do it? There were other ways of getting to where you are now, and you know what they are. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake, of course you do! So why did you put their wind up? That fat slob in the newspaper article, Dirty Gertie What’s-Her-Face, is probably standing in the parlor window of the goddam place, using binoculars to examine every swinging dick who goes by. If she hasn’t dropped dead of a Twinkie-assisted stroke by now, that is. So why did you do it? Why? The answer was there, but he turned away from it before it could do more than begin to surface in his conscious mind; turned away because the implications were too grim to look at. He had done Thumper for the same reason he had strangled the redheaded whore in the fawn-colored hotpants-because something had crawled up from the bottom of his mind and made him do it. That thing was there more and more now, and he wouldn’t think of it. It was better not to. Safer. Meantime, here he was; Pussy Palace dead ahead. Norman crossed to the even-numbered side of Durham Avenue at a leisurely amble, knowing that any watchers would feel less threatened by a guy on the far side of the street. The specific watcher he kept imagining was the darkie tubbo whose picture had been in the paper, a giant economy-sized bag of works with a pair of hi-resolution field glasses in one hand and a melting clump of Mallow Cremes in the other. He slowed down a little more, but not much-red alert, he reminded himself, they’ll be on red alert. It was a big white frame house, not quite Victorian, one of those turn-of-the-century dowagers that’s three full stones of ugly. It looked narrow from the front, but Norman had grown up in a house not so different from this and was willing to bet it went almost all the way back to the street on the far side of the block. And with a whore-whore here and a whore-whore there, Norman thought, being careful not to change his walk from its current slow amble, and being careful to swallow the house not in one long stare but in small sips. Here a whore, there a whore, everywhere a whore-whore. Yes indeed. Everywhere a whore-whore. He felt the familiar rage begin to pulse at his temples now, and with it came a familiar image, the one which stood for all the things he could not express: the bank card. The green bank card she had dared to steal. The image of that card was always close now, and it had come to stand for all the terrors and compulsions of his life-the forces he raged against, the faces (his mother’s, for instance, so white and doughy and somehow sly) that sometimes slipped into his mind while he was lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, the voices that came in his dreams. His father’s, for instance.

“Come on over here, Normie. I’ve got something to tell you, and I want to tell you up close.” Sometimes that meant a blow. Sometimes, if you were lucky and he was drunk, it meant a hand creeping in between your legs. But that didn’t matter now; only the house across the street mattered. He wouldn’t get another look this good at it, and if he wasted these precious seconds thinking about the past, who was the monkey then? He was directly opposite the place. Nice lawn, narrow but deep. Pretty flowerbeds, flushed with spring blooms, flanked the long front porch. There were metal posts dressed in ivy standing in the center of each bed. The ivy had been pruned away from the black plastic cylinders at the tops of the posts, though, and Norman knew why: there were TV cameras inside those dark pods, giving overlapping views up and down the street. If anyone was looking at the monitors inside right now, they would be seeing a little black-and-white man in a baseball hat and sunglasses moving from screen to screen, walking hunched and slightly bent-kneed so that his six-feet-three would look quite a bit shorter to the casual observer. There was another camera mounted over a front door for which there would be no keyhole; keys were too easy to duplicate, tumblers too easy to tickle, if you were handy with a set of picks. No, there would be a keycard slot, a numerical keypad console, or maybe both. And more cameras in the back yard, of course. As he walked past the house, Norman risked one final look into the side yard. Here was a vegetable garden, and two whores in shorts sliding long sticks-tomato-stakes, he supposed-into the ground. One looked like a taco-bender: olive skin and long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Dynamite body, looked about twenty-five. The other was younger, maybe not even out of her teens yet, one of these punky-grungy scumbuckets with her hair dyed two different colors. There was a bandage covering her left ear. She was wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, and Norman could see a tattoo on her left bicep. His eyes weren’t quite good enough to make out what it was, but he had been a cop long enough to know it was probably either the name of a rock group or a badly executed drawing of a marijuana plant. Norman saw himself suddenly rushing across the street, ignoring the cameras; saw himself grabbing Little Miss Hot Snatch with the rock-star hair; saw himself sliding one of his big hands around her thin neck and running it up until it was stopped by the shelf of her jaw.

“Rose Daniels,” he would say to the other one, the taco-bender with the dark hair and the dynamite bod.

“Get her out here right now or I’ll snap this spermbucket’s neck like a chicken-bone.” That would be great, but he was almost positive Rosie was no longer here. His library research told him that almost three thousand women had availed themselves of the services offered by Daughters and Sisters since Leo and Jessica Stevenson had opened the place in 1974, and the average length of stay was four weeks. They moved them out into the community at a pretty good pace, breeders and disease spreaders, pretty mosquitoes. Probably gave them dildos instead of diplomas when they graduated. No, Rose was almost surely gone, working at some menial job her lesbo pals had found her and going home at night to a scurgy room they’d also found her. The bitches across the street would know where she was, though-the Stevenson woman would have her address in her files, and probably the ones over there in the garden had already been up to her little roachtrap for tea and Girl Scout cookies. Those who hadn’t would have been told all about it by those who had, too, because that was the way women were made. You had to kill them to shut them up. The younger of the gardeners, the one with the rock-star hair, startled him horribly by raising her head, seeing him… and waving. For one awful moment he was sure she was laughing at him, that they were all laughing, that they were lined up at the windows inside Castle Lesbo and laughing at him, at Inspector Norman Daniels, who had been able to bust half a dozen coke-barons but couldn’t keep his own wife from stealing his motherfucking ATM card. His hands snapped into fists. Get hold of yourself! the Norman Daniels version of Practical-Sensible screamed inside him. She probably waves at everybody! She probably waves at stray dogs! It’s what twats like her do! Yes. Yes, of course it was. Norman unrolled his hands, raised one of them, and chopped the air in a brief return wave. He even managed a little smile, which reawoke the ache of muscles and tendon-even of bone-at the back of his mouth. Then, as Little Miss Hot Snatch turned back to her gardening, the smile faded and he hurried on with his heart thumping. He tried to return his thoughts to his current problem-how he was going to isolate one of those bitches (the Head Bitch, preferably; that way he wouldn’t have to risk coming up with one who didn’t know what he needed to find out) and get her to talk-but his ability to work rationally at this problem seemed to be gone, at least for the time being. He raised his hands to the sides of his face and massaged the hinges of his jaws. He had hurt himself this way before, but never this badly-what had he done to Thumper? The paper hadn’t said, but this ache in his jaws-and in his teeth, it was in his teeth, too-suggested that it had been plenty. I’m in trouble if they catch me, he told himself. They’ll have photographs of the marks I left on him. They’ll have samples of my saliva and… well… any other fluids I might have left. They have a whole array of exotic tests these days, they test everything, and I don’t even know if I’m a secretor. Yes, true, but they weren’t going to catch him. He was registered at the Whitestone as Alvin Dodd from New Haven, and if he was pressed, he could even produce a driver’s license-a photo driver’s license-that would back that up. If the cops here called the cops back home, they would be told that Norman Daniels was a thousand miles from the midwest, camping in Utah’s Zion National Park and taking a well-deserved vacation. They might even tell the cops here not to be stupid, that Norman Daniels was a bona fide golden boy. Surely they wouldn’t pass on the story of Wendy Yarrow… would they? No, probably they wouldn’t. But sooner or later-The thing was, he no longer cared about later. These days he only cared about sooner. About finding Rose and having a serious discussion with her. About giving her a present. His bank card, in fact. And it would never be recovered from another trash barrel or from some greasy little fag’s wallet, either. He was going to make sure she never lost it or threw it away again. He was going to put it in a safe place. And if he could see only darkness beyond the… the insertion of that final gift… well, maybe that was a blessing. Now that his mind had returned to the bank card it dwelled there, as it almost always did these days, in his sleep as well as when he was awake. It was as if that piece of plastic had become a weird green river (the Merchant’s instead of the Mississippi) and the run of his thoughts was a stream which flowed into it. All thoughts ran downhill now, eventually losing their identity as they merged into the green current of his obsession. The enormous, unanswerable question surfaced again: How could she have dared? How could she have possibly dared to take it? That she should have left, run away from him, that he supposed he could understand, even if he could not condone it, and even if he knew that she would have to die just for fooling him so completely, for hiding the treachery in her stinking woman’s heart so well. But that she should have dared to take his bank card, to take what was his, like the kid who had snuck up the beanstalk and stolen the sleeping giant’s golden hen… Without realizing what he was doing, Norman put the first finger of his left hand into his mouth and began to bite down on it. There was pain-quite a lot of it-but this time he didn’t feel it; he was deep in his own thoughts. There was a thick pad of callus high up on the first fingers of both hands, because this biting in moments of stress was an old, old habit of his, one that went back to childhood. At first the callus held, but as he continued to think about the bank card, as its green began to deepen in his mind until it had become the near-black of a fir-tree seen at dusk (a color quite unlike the card’s actual lime color), it gave way and blood began to flow down his hand and over his lips. He dug his teeth into his finger, relishing the pain, grinding at the flesh, tasting his blood, so salty and so thick, like the taste of Thumper’s blood when he had bitten through the cord at the base of his-

“Mommy? Why’s that man doing that to his hand?”

“Never mind, come on.” That brought him around. He looked sluggishly over his shoulder, like a man waking from a nap which has been short but deep, and saw a young woman and a little boy of perhaps three walking away from him-she was moving the kid along so fast he was almost running, and when the woman took her own look back, Norman saw she was terrified. What, exactly, had he been doing? He looked down at his finger and saw deep, bleeding crescents on either side of it. One of these days he was apt to bite the damned thing right off, bite it off and swallow it. Not that it would be the first time he’d bitten something off. Or swallowed it, either. That was a bad street to go down, though. He took the handkerchief out of his back pocket and wrapped it around his bleeding finger. Then he raised his head and looked around. He was surprised to see it was well on the way to being dark; there were lights on in some of the houses. How far had he come? Where, exactly, was he? He squinted at the street-sign on the corner of the next intersection and read the words Dearborn Avenue. On his right was a little mom-and-pop store with a bike rack in front and a sign reading OVEN-FRESH ROLLS in the window. Norman’s stomach growled. He realized that he was really hungry for the first time since getting off the Continental Express bus and eating cold cereal in the terminal cafeteria, eating it because it was what she would have eaten. A few rolls were suddenly just what he wanted, the only thing in the world he wanted… but not just rolls. He wanted oven-fresh rolls, like the kind his mother used to make. She was a fat slob who never stopped yelling, but she could cook, all right. No doubt about that. And she had been her own best customer. They better be fresh, Norman thought as he mounted the steps. Inside, he could see an old man pottering around behind the counter. They better be fresh, pal, or God help you. He was reaching for the doorhandle when one of the posters in the window caught his eye. It was bright yellow, and although he had no way of knowing that Rosie had placed this particular flier herself, he felt something stir inside him even before he saw the words Daughters and Sisters. He bent forward to read it, eyes suddenly very small and very intent, his heart picking up speed in his chest.

COME OUT AND PLAY WITH US AT BEAUTIFUL ETTINGER’s PIER AS WE CELEBRATE CLEAR SKIES AND WARM DAYS WITH THE 9TH ANNUAL DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS “SWING INTO SUMMER” PICNIC AND CONCERT SATURDAY, JUNE 4^th BOOTHS*CRAFTS*GAMES OF CHANCE* GAMES OF SKILL*RAP DJ FOR THE KIDDIES!!!PLUS!!!

THE INDIGO GIRLS, LIVE AND IN CONCERT, 8 P.M.

SINGLE PARENTS, THERE WILL BE CHILD-MINDING!

“COME ONE, COME ALL!”

ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS, WHO REMIND YOU THAT VIOLENCE AGAINST ONE WOMAN IS A CRIME AGAINST ALL WOMEN

Saturday the fourth. This Saturday. And would she be there, his rambling Rose? Of course she would be, she and all her new lesbo friends. Cunts of a feather flocked together. Norman traced the fifth line up from the bottom of the poster with the finger he had bitten. Bright poppies of blood were already soaking through the handkerchief wrapped around it. Come one, come all. That was what it said, and Norman thought he just might take them up on it.

Thursday morning, almost eleven-thirty. Rosie took a sip of Evian, rolled it around in her mouth, swallowed, and picked up the sides again. “she was coming, all right; this time his ears weren’t just playing tricks on him. Peterson could hear the staccato rap of her high heels moving up the hallway. He could imagine her with her bag already open, rummaging in there for her key, worrying about the devil who might be coming along behind when she should have been worried about the one lying in wait. He checked quickly to make sure he still had his knife, then pulled the nylon stroking down over his head. As her key rattled in the lock, Peterson pulled the knife out and-”

“Cut-cut-cut!” Rhoda cried impatiently through the speakers. Rosie looked up and through the glass wall. She didn’t like the way Curt Hamilton was just sitting there by his DAT deck and looking at her with his earphones resting on his collarbones, but what alarmed her was the fact that Rhoda was smoking one of her slim cigarettes right in the control room, ignoring the NO PUFFIN sign on the wall. Rhoda looked like she was having a terrible morning, but she wasn’t the only one.

“Rhoda? Did I do something wrong?”

“Not if you wear nylon strokings, I guess,” Rhoda said, and tapped ash into a styrofoam cup sitting on the control panel in front of her.

“I’ve had a few guys stroke mine over the years, now that I think about it, but mostly I call them nylon stockings.” For a moment Rosie didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, then she mentally replayed the last few sentences she’d read and groaned.

“Jeepers, Rhoda, I’m sorry.” Curt slipped his cans back over his ears and pushed a button.

“Kill All My Tomorrows, take seventy-thr-” Rhoda put a hand on his arm and said something which filled Rosie’s stomach with icewater: “don’t bother.” Then she glanced through the window, saw Rosie’s stricken face, and offered her a smile which was wan but game.

“All’s cool, Rosie, I’m just calling lunch half an hour early, that’s all. Come on out.” Rosie got up too fast, bumping her left thigh a good one on the bottom of the table and almost overturning the plastic bottle of Evian water. She hurried out of the booth. Rhoda and Curt were standing just outside, and for a moment Rosie was sure-no, she knew-that they had been talking about her. If you really believe that, Rosie, you probably ought to go see a doctor, Practical-Sensible spoke up sharply. The kind that shows you inkblots and asks about your potty training. Rosie usually had very little use for that voice, but this time she welcomed it.

“I can do better,” she told Rhoda.

“And I will, this afternoon. Honest to God.” Was that true? The hell of it was, she just didn’t know. She had tried all morning to submerge herself in Kill All My Tomorrows as she had in The Manta Ray, but with small success. She would begin to slip into that world where Alma St George was being pursued by her psychotic admirer, Peterson, and then be hauled out of it by one of the voices from last night: Anna’s, telling her that her ex-husband, the man who had sent her to Daughters and Sisters, had been murdered, or Bill’s, sounding panicky and bewildered as he asked her what was wrong, or, worst of all, her own, telling him to stay away. To just stay away. Curt patted her on the shoulder.

“You’re having a bad voice day,” he said.

“It’s like a bad hair day, only worse. We see a lot of it here in the Audio Chamber of Horrors, don’t we, Rho?”

“You bet,” Rhoda said, but her eyes never paused in their inspection of Rosie’s face, and Rosie had a pretty good idea of what Rhoda was seeing. She’d gotten only two or three hours” worth of sleep last night, and she didn’t have the sort of high-powered cosmetics that would hide that kind of damage. And wouldn’t know how to use them if I did, she thought. She’d had a few of the basic makeup items in high school (the time of life, ironically, when she had needed such helps the least), but since marrying Norman she’d gotten along with nothing but a little powder and two or three lipsticks in the most natural shades. If I’d wanted to look at a hooker I would have married one, Norman had told her once. She thought it was probably her eyes that Rhoda was studying the most carefully: the red lids, the bloodshot whites, the dark circles underneath. After she’d turned out the light she had cried helplessly for over an hour, but she hadn’t cried herself to sleep-that would actually have been a blessing. The tears had dried up and she had simply lain there in the darkness, trying not to think and thinking anyway. As midnight passed and slowly receded, a really terrible idea had come to her: that she had been wrong to call Bill, that she had been wrong to deny herself his comfort-and possibly his protection-when she most desperately needed it. Protection? she thought. Oh boy, that’s a laugh. I know you like him, sweetie, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s face it: Norman would eat him for lunch. Except she had no way of knowing that Norman was in town-that was what Anna had kept emphasizing over and over again. Peter Slowik had espoused a number of causes, not all of them popular. Something else might have gotten him in trouble… gotten him killed. Except Rosie knew. Her heart knew. It was Norman. Still that voice had continued to whisper as the long hours passed. Did her heart know? Or was the part of her that was not Practical and Sensible but only Shaky and Terrified just hiding behind that idea? Had it perhaps seized on Anna’s call as an excuse to choke off her friendship with Bill before it could develop any further? She didn’t know, but she did know the thought she might not see him anymore made her feel miserable… and frightened, as well, as if she had lost some vital piece of operating equipment. It was impossible for one person to become dependent on another so quickly, of course, but as one o’clock came and went, and two (and three), the idea began to seem less and less ridiculous. If such instant dependency was impossible, why did she feel so panicky and oddly drained at the thought of never seeing him again? When she finally had fallen asleep, she’d dreamed of riding on his motorcycle again; of wearing the rose madder gown and squeezing him with her bare thighs. When the alarm had wakened her-much too soon after she finally fell asleep-she had been breathing hard and was hot all over, as if with a fever.

“Rosie, are you all right?” Rhoda asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Just…” She glanced at Curtis, then back at Rhoda. She shrugged and hoisted the corners of her mouth in a lame little smile.

“It’s just, you know, a bad time of the month for me.”

“Uh-huh,” Rhoda said. She didn’t look convinced.

“Well, come on down to the caff with us. We’ll drown our sorrows in tuna salad and strawberry milkshakes.”

“You bet,” Curt said.

“My treat.” Rosie’s smile was a trifle more genuine this time, but she shook her head.

“I’m going to pass. What I want is a good walk, with my face right into the wind. Blow some of the dust out.”

“If you don’t eat, you’ll probably faint dead away around three o’clock,” Rhoda said.

“I’ll grab a salad. Promise.” Rosie was already heading for the creaky old elevator.

“Anything more than that and I ruin half a dozen perfectly good takes by burping, anyway.”

“It wouldn’t make much difference today,” Rhoda said.

“Twelve-fifteen, okay?”

“You bet,” she said, but as the elevator lumbered down the four floors to the lobby, Rhoda’s last comment kept clanging in her head: It wouldn’t make much difference today. What if she wasn’t any better this afternoon? What if they went from take seventy-three to take eighty to take a-hundred-and-who-knew-how-many? What if, when she met with Mr Lefferts tomorrow, he decided to give her her notice instead of a contract? What then? She felt a sudden surge of hatred for Norman. It hit her between the eyes like some dull, heavy object-a doorstop, perhaps, or the blunt end of an old, rusty hatchet. Even if Norman hadn’t killed Mr Slowik, even if Norman was still back in that other timezone, he was still following her, just like Peterson was following poor scared Alma St George. He was following her inside her head. The elevator settled and the doors opened. Rosie stepped out into the lobby, and the man standing by the building directory turned toward her, his face looking both hopeful and tentative. It was an expression that made him look younger than ever… a teenager, almost.

“Hi, Rosie,” Bill said.

She felt a sudden and amazingly strong urge to run, to do it before he could see the way he had staggered her, and then his eyes fixed on hers, caught them, and running away was no longer an option. She had forgotten about the fascinating green undertints in those eyes, like sunrays caught in shallow water. Instead of running for the lobby doors, she walked slowly toward him, feeling simultaneously afraid and happy. Yet what she felt most of all was an overwhelming sense of relief.

“I told you to stay away from me.” She could hear the tremble in her voice. He reached for her hand. She felt sure she should not let him have it, but she couldn’t stop it from happening… nor her captured hand from turning in his grip so it could close on his long fingers.

“I know you did,” he said simply, “but Rosie, I can’t.” That frightened her, and she dropped his hand. She studied his face uncertainly. Nothing like this had ever happened to her, nothing, and she had no idea of how to react or behave. He opened his arms, and perhaps it was simply a gesture meant to underline and emphasize his helplessness, but it was all the gesture her tired, hopeful heart needed; it brushed aside the prissy ditherings of her mind and took charge. Rosie found herself stepping like a sleepwalker into the opening his arms made, and when they closed around her, she pressed her face against his shoulder and closed her eyes. And as his hands touched her hair, which she had left unplaited and loose upon her shoulders this morning, she had a strange and marvellous feeling: it was as if she had just woken up. As if she had been asleep, not just now, as she entered the circle of his arms, not just this morning since the alarm had blared her out of her motorcycle dream, but for years and years, like Snow White after the apple. But now she was awake again, wide awake, and looking around with eyes that were just beginning to see.

“I’m glad you came,” she said.

They walked slowly east along Lake Drive, facing into a strong, warm wind. When he put his arm around her, she gave him a small smile. They were three miles west of the lake at this point, but Rosie felt she could walk all the way there if he would just keep his arm around her like that. All the way to the lake, and maybe all the way across it as well, stepping calmly from one wave-top to the next.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked her.

“Oh, nothing,” she said.

“Just feel like smiling, I guess.”

“You’re really glad I came?”

“Yes. I didn’t sleep much last night. I kept thinking I’d made a mistake. I guess I did make a mistake, but… Bill?”

“I’m here.”

“I did it because I feel more for you than I thought I’d ever feel for any man again in my whole life, and it’s all happened so fast… I must be crazy to be telling you this.” He squeezed her briefly closer.

“You’re not crazy.”

“I called you and told you to stay away because something’s happening-may be happening-and I didn’t want you to be hurt. Not for anything. And I still don’t.”

“It’s Norman, isn’t it? As in Bates. He’s come looking for you after all.”

“My heart says he has,” Rosie said, speaking very carefully, “and my nerves say he has, but I’m not sure I trust my heart-it’s been scared for so long-and my nerves… my nerves are just shot.” She glanced at her watch, then at the hotdog stand on the corner just ahead. There were benches on a small grassy strip nearby, and secretaries eating their lunches.

“Would you buy a lady a foot-long with sauerkraut?” she asked. Suddenly a case of afternoon burps seemed like the least important thing in the world.

“I haven’t had one of those since I was a kid.”

“I think it could be arranged.”

“We can sit on one of those benches and I’ll tell you about Norman, as in Bates. Then you can decide if you want to be around me or not. If you decide you don’t want to be, I’ll understand-”

“Rosie, I won’t-” “don’t say that. Not until I’ve told you about him. And you’d better eat before I start, or you’re apt to lose your appetite.”

Five minutes later he came over to the bench where she was sitting. He was carefully balancing a tray on which there were two foot-long dogs and two paper cups of lemonade. She took a dog and a cup, set her drink on the bench beside her, then looked at him gravely.

“You probably ought to stop buying me meals. I’m starting to feel like the waif on the UNICEF posters.”

“I like buying you meals,” he said.

“You’re too thin, Rosie.” That’s not what Norman says, she thought, but it was hardly the right remark, under the circumstances. She wasn’t sure what was, and found herself thinking of the half-witty repartee the characters spouted on TV shows like Melrose Place. She could certainly use a little of that bright chatter now. Silly me, I forgot to bring my screenwriter with me, she thought. Instead of talking, she looked down at her krautdog and began poking the bun, her forehead creased and her mouth intent, as if this were some arcane pre-ingestion ritual which had been handed down in her family, mother to daughter, over the generations. “so tell me about Norman, Rosie.”

“All right. Just let me think how to start.” She took a bite of her dog, relishing the sting of the sauerkraut against her tongue, then sipped her lemonade. It occurred to her that Bill mightn’t want to know her anymore when she had finished, that he would feel nothing but horror and disgust for a woman who could live with a creature like Norman for all those years, but it was too late to start worrying about things like that. She opened her mouth and began to speak. Her voice sounded steady enough, and that had a calming effect on her. She began by telling him about a fifteen-year-old girl who’d felt extraordinarily pretty with a pink ribbon tied in her hair, and how this girl had gone to a varsity basketball game one night only because her Future Homemakers meeting had been cancelled at the last minute and she had two hours to kill before her father came and picked her up. Or maybe, she said, she’d just wanted people to see how pretty she looked, wearing that ribbon, and the school library was empty. A boy in a letter-jacket had sat down beside her in the bleachers, a big boy with broad shoulders, a senior who would have been out there, running up and down the court with the rest of them, if he hadn’t been kicked off the team in December for fighting. She went on, listening to her mouth spill out things she had been positive she would take untold with her to her grave. Not about the tennis racket, that one she would take untold to her grave, but about how Norman had bitten her on their honeymoon and how she had tried to persuade herself it was a lovebite, and about the Norman-assisted miscarriage, and about the crucial differences between face-hitting and back-hitting. “so I have to pee a lot,” she said, smiling nervously down at her own hands, “but that’s getting better.” She told him about the times, early in their marriage, when he had burned her toes or the tips of her fingers with his cigarette lighter; hilariously enough, that particular torment had ceased when Norman quit smoking. She told him about the night Norman had come home from work, sat silently in front of the TV during the news, holding his dinner on his lap but not eating it; how he had put his plate aside when Dan Rather had finished and how he had begun poking her with the tip of a pencil that had been lying on the table at one end of the couch. He poked hard enough to hurt and leave little black dots like moles on her skin, but not quite hard enough to draw blood. She told Bill there were other times when Norman had hurt her worse, but that he had never scared her more. Mostly it was his silence. When she talked to him, tried to find out what was wrong, he wouldn’t reply. He only kept walking after her as she retreated (she hadn’t wanted to run; that would very likely have been like dropping a sulphur match into a barrel of gunpowder), not answering her questions and ignoring her outstretched, splay-fingered hands. He kept poking her arms and her shoulders and her upper chest-she had been wearing one of those shell tops with a mildly scooped neck-with the pencil and making a little plosive noise under his breath every time the pencil’s blunt point dug into her skin: Poo! Poo! Poo! At last she had been huddled in the corner with her knees up against her breasts and her hands laced over the back of her head and he had been kneeling in front of her, his face serious, almost studious, and he kept poking her with the pencil and making that noise. She told Bill that by then she was sure he was going to kill her, that she was going to be the only woman in the history of the world to be stabbed to death with a Mongol No. 2 pencil… and what she remembered telling herself over and over again was that she mustn’t scream because the neighbors would hear and she didn’t want to be found this way. Not still alive, at least. It was too shameful. Then, just as she was nearing the point where she knew she was going to begin screaming in spite of herself, Norman had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. He was in there a long time and she had thought about running then-just running out the door and into the anywhere-but it had been night, and he had been in the house. If he had come out and found her gone, she said, he would have chased her and caught her and killed her, she knew it.

“He would have snapped my neck like the wishbone in a chicken,” she told Bill without looking up. She had promised herself that she would leave, though; she would do it the very next time he hurt her. But after that night he hadn’t laid a hand on her for a long time. Five months, maybe. And when he did go after her again, at first it hadn’t been so bad and she had told herself that if she could stand up to being poked over and over again with a pencil, she could put up with a few punches. She had gone on thinking that until 1985, when things had suddenly escalated. She told him how scary Norman had been that year, because of the trouble with Wendy Yarrow.

“That was the year you had your miscarriage, wasn’t it?” Bill asked.

“Yes,” she told her hands.

“He broke one of my ribs, too. Or maybe it was a couple. I don’t really remember anymore, isn’t that awful?” He didn’t reply, so she hurried on, telling him that the worst parts (other than the miscarriage, of course) were the long, scary silences when he would simply look at her, breathing so loudly through his nose that he sounded like an animal getting ready to charge. Things had gotten a little better, she said, after her miscarriage. She told him about how she had started to slip a few cogs at the end, how time sometimes got away from her when she was in her rocker and how sometimes, when she was setting the table for supper and listening for the sound of Norman’s car pulling into the driveway, she’d realize she’d taken eight or even nine showers in the course of the day. Usually with the bathroom lights off.

“I liked to shower in the dark,” she said, still not daring to look up from her hands.

“It was like a wet closet.” She finished by telling him about Anna’s call, which Anna had made in a hurry for one important reason. She had learned a detail which hadn’t been in the newspaper story, a detail the police were holding back to help them weed out any false confessions or bad tips they might receive. Peter Slowik had been bitten over three dozen times, and at least one part of his anatomy was missing. The police believed that the killer had taken it with him… one way or another. Anna knew from Therapy Circle that Rosie McClendon, whose first significant contact in this city had been with her ex-husband, had been married to a biter. There might be no connection, Anna had been quick to add. But… on the other hand…

“A biter,” Bill said quietly. It sounded almost as if he were talking to himself.

“Is that what they call men like him? Is that the term?”

“I guess it is,” Rosie said. And then, maybe because she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her (would think she had been “fibulating,” in Normanspeak), she slid her shoulder briefly out of the pink Tape Engine tee-shirt she was wearing and showed him the old white ring of scar there, like the remnant of a shark-bite. That had been the first one, her honeymoon present. Then she turned up her left forearm, showing him another one. This time it wasn’t a bite it made her think of; for some reason it made her think of smooth white faces almost hidden in lush green undergrowth.

“This one bled quite a bit, then got infected,” she told him. She spoke in the tone of someone relaying routine information-that Gramma had called earlier, perhaps, or that the mailman had left a package.

“I didn’t go to the doctor, though. Norman brought home a big bottle of antibiotic tablets. I took them and got better. He knows all sorts of people he can get things from. He calls people like that “daddy’s little helpers.” That’s sort of funny when you think of it, isn’t it?” She was still talking mostly to her hands, which were clasped in her lap, but she finally dared a quick look up at him, to gauge his reaction to the things she had been saying. What she saw stunned her.

“What?” he asked hoarsely.

“What, Rosie?”

“You’re crying,” she said, and now her own voice wavered. Bill looked surprised.

“No, I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am.” She reached out with one finger, drew a gentle semicircle below his eye with it, and then held the tip up for him to see. He examined it closely, biting his lower lip.

“You didn’t eat much, either.” Half of his dog was still on his plate, with mustardy sauerkraut spilling out of the bun. Bill pitched the paper plate into the trash barrel beside the bench, then looked back at her, absently wiping at the wetness on his cheeks. Rosie felt a bleak certainty steal over her. Now he would ask why she had stayed with Norman and while she wouldn’t get up off the park bench and leave (any more than she had ever left the house on Westmoreland Street until April), it would put the first barrier between them, because it was a question she couldn’t answer. She didn’t know why she had stayed with him, any more than she knew why, in the end, it had taken just a single drop of blood to transform her entire life. She only knew that the shower had been the best place in the house, dark and wet and full of steam, and that sometimes half an hour in Pooh’s Chair felt like five minutes, and that why wasn’t a question that had any meaning when you were living in hell. Hell was motiveless. The women in Therapy Circle had understood that; no one had asked her why she stayed. They knew. From their own experiences, they knew. She had an idea that some of them might even know about the tennis racket… or things even worse than the tennis racket. But when Bill finally asked a question, it was so different from the one she had expected that for a moment she could only flounder.

“What are the chances he might have killed the woman who was making all the trouble for him back in

“85? That Wendy Yarrow?” She was shocked, but it wasn’t the kind of shock one feels when asked an unthinkable question; she was shocked in the manner of one who sees a known face in some fabulously unlikely locale. The question he had spoken aloud was one which had circled, unarticulated and thus not quite formed, at the back of her mind for years.

“Rosie? I asked you what you thought the chances were-”

“I think they might have been… well, pretty good, actually.”

“It was convenient for him when she died like that, wasn’t it? Saved him from watching the whole thing get hung out in civil court.”

“Yes.”

“If she had been bitten, do you think the newspapers would have printed it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.” She looked at her watch and got quickly to her feet.

“Oh, boy, I have to go, and right now. Rhoda wanted to start in again at twelve-fifteen and it’s ten past already.” They started back side by side. She found herself wishing he would put his arm around her again, and just as part of her mind was telling her not to be greedy and another part (Practical-Sensible) was telling her not to ask for trouble, he did just that. I think I’m falling in love with him. It was the lack of amazement in that thought which prompted the next one: No, Rosie, I think that’s actually yesterday’s headline. I think it’s already happened.

“What did Anna say about the police?” he asked her. “does she want you to go someplace and make a report?” She stiffened within the circle of his arm, her throat drying out as adrenaline tipped into her system. All it took was that single word. The p-word. Cops are brothers. Norman had told her this over and over. Law enforcement is a family and cops are brothers. Rosie didn’t know how true it was, how far they would go to stick up for each other-or cover up for each other-but she knew that the cops Norman brought home from time to time seemed eerily like Norman himself, and she knew he had never said a word against any of them, even his first partner on detectives, a crafty, grafty old pig named Gordon Satterwaite, whom Norman had loathed. And of course there was Harley Bissington, whose hobby-at least when in attendance at Casa Daniels-had been undressing Rosie with his eyes. Harley had gotten some kind of skin-cancer and taken early retirement three years ago, but he had been Norman’s partner back in 1985, when the Richie Bender/Wendy Yarrow thing had gone down. And if it had gone down the way Rosie suspected it had, then Harley had stuck up for Norman. Stuck up for him big-time. And not just because he’d been in on it himself, either. He’d done it because law enforcement was a family and cops were brothers. Cops saw the world in a different way from the nine-to-fivers ('the Kmart shoppers,” in Normanspeak); cops saw it with its skin off and its nerves sizzling. It made all of them different, it made some of them a lot different-and then there was Norman.

“I’m not going anywhere near the police,” Rosie said, speaking rapidly.

“Anna said I don’t have to and nobody can make me. The police are his friends. His brothers. They stick up for each other, they-”

“Take it easy,” he said, sounding a little alarmed.

“It’s okay, just take it easy.”

“I can’t take it easy! I mean, you don’t know. That’s really why I called you and said I couldn’t see you, because you don’t know how it is… how he is… and how it works between him and all the rest of them. If I went to the police here, they’d check with the police there. And if one of them… someone who works with him, who’s been on stakeouts with him at three in the morning, who’s trusted his life to him…” It was Harley she was thinking of, Harley who couldn’t stop looking at her breasts and always had to check on where the hem of her skirt finished up when she sat down.

“Rosie, you don’t have to-”

“Yes I do!” she said with a fierceness that was entirely unlike her.

“If a cop like that knew how to get in touch with Norman, he would. He’d say I’d been talking about him. If I gave them my address-and they make you do that when you file a complaint-he’d give him that, too.”

“I’m sure that no cop would-”

“Have you ever had them in your house, playing poker or watching Debbie Does Dallas?

“Well… no. No, but…”

“I have. I’ve heard what they talk about, and I know how they look at the rest of the world. They see it that way, as the rest of the world. Even the best of them do. There’s them… and there’s the Kmart shoppers. That’s all.” He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure what, then closed it again. The idea that Norman might find out the address of her room on Trenton Street as the result of some cops” jungle telegraph had a sort of persuasiveness to it, but this was not the main reason he kept quiet. The look on her face-the look of a woman who has made a hateful and unwilling regression back to an unhappier time-suggested that he could say nothing which would convince her, anyway. She was scared of the cops, that was all, and he was old enough to know that not all bogies can be slain by mere logic.

“Besides, Anna said I didn’t have to. Anna said if it was Norman, they’d be seeing him first, not me.” Bill thought it over and decided it made sense.

“What will she do about it?” “she’s already started. She faxed a women’s group back home-where I came from, anyway-and told them what might be happening here. She asked them if they could send her any information about Norman, and they faxed back a whole bunch of stuff just an hour later, including a picture.” Bill raised his eyebrows.

“Fast work, especially after business hours.”

“My husband is now a hero back home,” she said dully.

“Probably hasn’t had to pay for a drink in a month. He was in charge of the team that broke up a big drug-ring. His picture was on the front page of the paper two or three days running.” Bill whistled. Maybe she wasn’t so paranoid, after all.

“The woman who took Anna’s request went a step further,” Rosie continued. “she called the Police Department and asked if she could speak to him. She spun a big story about how her group wanted to give him a Women’s Commendation Award.” He considered this, then burst out laughing. Rosie smiled wanly.

“The duty sergeant checked his computer and said that Lieutenant Daniels was on vacation. Somewhere out west, he thought.”

“But he could be vacationing here,” Bill said thoughtfully.

“Yes. And if someone gets hurt, it’ll be all my f-” He put his hands on her shoulders and swung her around. Her eyes flew wide, and he saw the beginning of a cringe. It was a look that hurt his heart in a new, strange way. He suddenly remembered a story he had heard at the Zion American Center, where he had gone to religious-study classes and USY until he was nine. Something about how, back in the days of the prophets, people had sometimes been stoned to death. At the time he had thought it the most fabulously cruel form of punishment ever invented, much worse than the firing squad or the electric chair, a form of execution which could never be justified. Now, seeing what Norman Daniels had done to this lovely woman with her fragile, vulnerable face, he wondered. “don’t say fault,” he told her.

“You didn’t make Norman.” She blinked, as if this were a thought which had never occurred to her before.

“How in God’s name could he have found this guy Slowik in the first place?”

“By being me,” she said. Bill looked at her. She nodded.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s not. He can really do that. I’ve seen him do it. It’s probably how he busted that drug-ring back home.”

“Hunch? Intuition?”

“More. It’s almost like telepathy. He calls it trolling.” Bill shook his head.

“We’re talking about a seriously strange guy, aren’t we?” That surprised her into a little laugh.

“Oh boy, you don’t have any idea! Anyway, the women at D and S have all seen his picture, and they’ll be taking special precautions, especially at the picnic on Saturday. Some of them will be carrying Mace… the ones who might actually remember to use it in a jackpot situation, Anna says. And that was all sounding good to me, but then she said

“Don’t worry, Rosie, we’ve been through scares like this before” and that turned it around again. Because when a man gets killed-a nice man like the one that rescued me in that horrible bus station-it’s not just a scare.” Her voice was rising, picking up speed again. He took her hand and stroked it.

“I know, Rosie,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice.

“I know it’s not.” “she thinks she knows what she’s doing-Anna, I mean-that she’s been through this before just because she’s called the cops on some drunk man who threw a brick through one of the windows or hung around and spit on his wife when she came out to pick up the morning paper. But she’s never been through anything like Norman, and she doesn’t know it, and that’s what scares me.” She paused, working to get control of herself, then smiled up at him.

“Anyway, she says I don’t have to be involved at all, at least not at this point.”

“I’m glad.” The Corn Building was just ahead now.

“You didn’t say anything about my hair.” She looked up again, a quick, shy glance this time. “does that mean you didn’t notice it or you don’t like it?” He glanced at it and grinned.

“I did notice and I do like it, but I had this other thing on my mind-being afraid I might never see you again, I mean.”

“I’m sorry you were so upset.” She was, but she was also glad he had been upset. Had she ever felt even remotely like this when she and Norman had been courting? She couldn’t remember. She had a clear memory of him feeling her up under a blanket at a stock-car race one night, but for the moment, at least, everything else was lost in a haze.

“You got the idea from the woman in the painting, didn’t you? The one you bought the day I met you.”

“Maybe,” she said cautiously. Did he think that was strange, and was that maybe the real reason he hadn’t said anything about her hair? But he surprised her again, perhaps this time even more than when he had asked about Wendy Yarrow.

“When most women change their hair color, what they look like is women who’ve changed their hair color,” he said.

“Most times men pretend they don’t know that, but they do. But you… it’s like the way your hair looked when you came into the shop was a dye-job and this is the way it really is. Probably that sounds like the most outrageous con you’ve ever heard, but it’s the truth… and blondes usually look the least realistic. You ought to braid it like the woman in the picture, too, though. It’d make you look like a Viking princess. Sexy as hell.” That word hit a big red button inside her, kicking off sensations that were both powerfully attractive and terribly alarming. I don’t like sex, she thought. I have never liked sex, but-Rhoda and Curt were walking toward them from the other direction. The four of them met in front of the Corn Building’s elderly revolving doors. Rhoda’s eyes scanned Bill up and down with bright curiosity.

“Bill, these are the people I work with,” Rosie said. Instead of subsiding, the heat continued to rise in her cheeks.

“Rhoda Simons and Curtis Hamilton. Rhoda, Curt, this is-” For one brief, abysmally black second she found herself completely unable to remember the name of this man who already meant so much to her. Then, thankfully, it came.

“Bill Steiner,” she finished.

“Goodtameetcha,” Curt said, and shook Bill’s hand. He glanced toward the building, clearly ready to slide his head back between the earphones.

“Any friend of Rosie’s, as the saying goes,” Rhoda said, and held out her own hand. The slim bracelets on her wrist jangled mutedly.

“My pleasure,” Bill said, and turned back to Rosie.

“Are we still on for Saturday?” She thought furiously, then nodded.

“I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty. Remember to dress warm.”

“I will.” She could feel the blush spreading all the way down her body now, turning her nipples hard and even making her fingers tingle. The way he was looking at her hit that hot-button again, but this time it was more attractive than scary. She was suddenly struck by an urge-comical but amazingly strong, nevertheless-to put her arms around him… and her legs… and then simply climb him like a tree.

“Well, I’ll see you, then,” Bill said. He bent forward and pecked the corner of her mouth.

“Rhoda, Curtis, it was nice to meet you.” He turned and walked off, whistling.

“I’ll say this for you, Rosie, your taste is excellent,” Rhoda said.

“Those eyes!”

“We’re just friends,” Rosie said awkwardly.

“I met him…” She trailed off. Suddenly explaining how she had met him seemed complicated, not to mention embarrassing. She shrugged, laughed nervously.

“Well, you know.”

“Yes, I do,” Rhoda said, watching Bill’s progress up the street. Then she turned back to Rosie and laughed delightedly.

“I do know. Within this old wreck of femininity there beats the heart of a true romantic. One who hopes you and Mr Steiner will be very good friends. Meantime, are you ready to go back at it?”

“Yes,” Rosie said.

“Are we going to see an improvement over this morning, now that you’ve got your… other business more or less in order?”

“I’m sure there will be a big improvement,” Rosie said, and there was.