Rose Madder (30 page)

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
TETTINGER'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.

T
hursday 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 purse 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 stockings, 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.