Rose Madder

“After all, Rose is a fairly common name-not like Evangeline or Petronella.”

“I suppose you’re right.” A

“But it’s fu

“Fu

“Charcoal smudges so easily. If it isn’t protected-and the words on the backing of your picture haven’t been-it turns into nothing but a smear in no time. The words Rose Madder must have been printed on the backing recently. But why? The picture itself doesn’t look recent; it must be at least forty years old, and it might be eighty or a hundred. There’s something else odd about it, too.”

“What?”

“No artist’s signature,” A

IV. THE MANTA RAY

Norman left his hometown on Sunday, the day before Rosie was scheduled to start her new job… the job she was still not entirely sure she could do. He left on the 11:05 Continental Express bus. This wasn’t a matter of economy; it was a matter-a vital matter-of slipping back inside Rose’s head. Norman was still not able to admit how badly her totally unexpected flight had rocked him. He tried to tell himself he was upset because of the bank card-only that and nothing more-but his heart knew better. It was about how he’d never had a clue. Not so much as a premonition. There had been a long time in their marriage when he had known her every waking thought and most of her dreams. The fact that that had changed was driving him nuts. His biggest fear-unacknowledged but not entirely hidden from the deeper run of his thoughts-was that she had been pla

“You want to move it, buddy?” a man asked from behind him.

“You want to find out how getting your nose broken feels?” Norman replied without missing a beat. The guy behind him didn’t have anything to say to that. He took a moment or two longer, deciding which seat (she) he wanted, then made his way down the aisle to it. She wouldn’t have gone all the way to the back of the bus; his fastidious Rose would never have taken a seat near the toilet cubicle unless all the other seats were full, and Norman’s good friend Oliver Robbins (from whom he had bought his ticket, just as she had) had assured him that the 11:05 was hardly ever full. Nor would she want to sit over the wheels (too bumpy) or too close to the front (too conspicuous). Nope, just about halfway down would suit her, and on the left side of the bus, because she was left-handed, and people who thought they were choosing at random were in many cases simply going in the direction of their dominant hands. In his years as a cop, Norman had come to believe that telepathy was perfectly possible, but it was hard work… impossible work, if you were wearing the wrong hat. You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn’t a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking. And when you finally had that, you could take a shortcut-you could go racing across the curve of your quarry’s thoughts and some night, when he or she least expected it, there you’d be, stepping out from behind the door… or lying under the bed with a knife in your hand, ready to ram it upward through the mattress the moment the springs squeaked and the poor sap (sapette, in this case) lay down.

“When you least expect it,” Norman murmured as he sat in what he hoped had been her seat. He liked the sound of it and so he said it again as the bus backed out of its slot, ready to head west:

“When you least expect it.” It was a long trip, but he rather enjoyed it. Twice he got off to use the toilet at rest-stops when he didn’t really need to go because he knew she would have needed to go, and she wouldn’t have wanted to use the bus toilet. Rose was fastidious but Rose also had weak kidneys. Probably a little genetic gift from her late mother, who had always looked to Norman like the sort of bitch who couldn’t trot past a lilac bush without a pause to squat and piddle. At the second of these rest-stops he saw half a dozen people clustered around a butt-can at one corner of the building. He watched longingly for a moment, then went past them and inside. He was dying for a smoke, but Rose wouldn’t have been; she didn’t have the habit. Instead he paused to handle a number of fuzzy stuffed animals because Rose liked crap like that, and then purchased a paperback mystery from the rack by the door because she sometimes read that shit. He had told her a billion times that real police work was nothing like the crap in those books, and she always agreed with him-if he said it, it must be true-but she went on reading them just the same. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to learn that Rosie had turned this same rack, had picked a book from it… and then put it reluctantly back again, not wanting to spend five dollars on three hours” entertainment when she had so little money and so many unanswered questions. He ate a salad, forcing himself to read the book as he did, and then went back to his seat on the bus. In a little while they were off again, Norman sitting still with his book in his lap, watching the fields open out more and more as the East gave up its hold. He turned his watch back when the driver a

“When you least expect it,” he said.

“When you least expect it.” He got off the bus in the early hours of the following morning and stood just inside the door from the loading-gate, surveying the echoing, high-ceilinged terminal, trying to put aside his cop’s assessment of the pimps and the whores, the buttboys and the beggars, trying to see it as she must have seen it, getting off this same bus and walking into this same terminal and seeing it at this same hour, when human nature is always at low tide. He stood there and let this echoing world flood in on him: its look and smell and taste and feel. Who am I? he asked himself. Rose Daniels, he answered. How do I feel? Small. Lost. And terrified. That’s the bottom line, right there. I’m utterly terrified. For a moment he was overwhelmed by an awful idea: what if, in her fear and panic, Rose had approached the wrong person? It was certainly possible; for a certain type of bad guy, places like this were feeding-pools. What if that wrong person had led her off into the dark, then robbed and murdered her? It was no good telling himself it was unlikely; he was a cop and knew it wasn’t. If a crackhead saw that stupid gumball-machine ring of hers, for instance-He took several deep breaths, regrouping, refocusing the part of his mind that was trying to be Rose. What else was there to do? If she’d been murdered, she’d been murdered. There was nothing he could do about it, so it was best not to think of it… and besides, he couldn’t bear the thought that she might have escaped him that way, that some coked-up boogie might have taken what belonged to Norman Daniels. Never mind, he told himself. Never mind, just do your job. And right now your job is to walk like Rosie, talk like Rosie, think like Rosie. He moved slowly out into the terminal, holding his wallet in one hand (it was his substitute for her bag), looking at the people who rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As he watched, a man sprinted toward a woman and a little boy who had just gotten off Norman’s bus. The man kissed the woman, then seized the little boy and tossed him high into the air. The little boy shrieked with fear and delight. I’m scared-everything’s new, everything’s different, and I’m scared to death, Norman told himself. Is there anything I feel sure about? Anything I feel I can trust? Anything at all? He walked across the wide tile floor, but slowly, slowly, listening to his feet echo and trying to look at everything through Rose’s eyes, trying to feel everything through her skin. A quick peek at the glassy-eyed kids (with some it was just three-in-the-morning tiredness; with some it was Nebraska Red) in the video alcove, then back into the terminal itself. She looks at the bank of pay phones, but who is she going to call? She has no friends, she has no family-not even the providential old aunt in the Texas Panhandle or the mountains of Te