Rose Madder (32 page)

“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 honestly. “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 of 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 cop's 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.”