Rose Madder (28 page)

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 now 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 fingers 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,” Bill 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.

F
ive 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 & 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.