Rose Madder

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

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 ass**les, but some of them-and the women in places like this Daughters and Sisters were often prime examples-could be extremely cautious ass**les. 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 dy***ite 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 4th 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.

8

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.