Rose Madder

III. PROVIDENCE

When Rosie and Pam Haverford came down in the service elevator after work on the following Wednesday, Pam looked pale and unwell.

“It’s my period,” she said when Rosie expressed concern.

“I’m having cramps like a bastard.”

“Do you want to stop for a coffee?” Pam thought about it, then shook her head.

“You go on without me. All I want to do right now is go back to D and S and find an empty bedroom before everyone shows up from work and starts yakking. Gobble some Midol and sleep for a couple of hours. If I do that, maybe I’ll feel like a human being again.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rosie said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out. Pam shook her head.

“No you don’t,” she said, and her face lit in a brief smile.

“I can make it on my own just fine, and you’re old enough to have a cup of coffee without a chaperone. Who knows-you might even meet someone interesting.”

Rosie sighed. To Pam, someone interesting always meant a man, usually the kind with muscles that stood out under their form-fitting tee-shirts like geological landmarks, and as far as Rosie was concerned, she could do without that kind of man for the rest of her life. Besides, she was married. She glanced down at her wedding band and diamond engagement ring inside it as they stepped out onto the street. How much that glance had to do with what happened a short time later was something of which she was never sure, but it did place the engagement ring, which in the ordinary course of things she hardly ever thought of at all, somewhere toward the front of her mind. It was a little over a carat, by far the most expensive thing her husband had ever given her, and until that day the idea that it belonged to her, and she could dispose of it if she wanted to (and in any way she wanted to), had never crossed her mind. Rosie waited at the bus stop around the corner from the hotel with Pam in spite of Pam’s protestations that it was totally unnecessary. She really didn’t like the way Pam looked, with all the color gone from her cheeks and dark smudges under her eyes and little pain-lines running down from the corners of her mouth. Besides, it felt good to be looking out for someone else, instead of the other way around. She actually came quite close to getting on the bus with Pam just to make sure she got back all right, but in the end, the call of fresh hot coffee (and maybe a piece of pie) was just too strong. She stood on the curb and waved at Pam when Pam sat down beside one of the bus windows. Pam waved back as the bus pulled away. Rosie stood where she was for a moment, then turned and started walking down Hitchens Boulevard toward the Hot Pot. Her mind turned, naturally enough, back to her first walk in this city. She couldn’t recall very much of those hours-what she remembered most was being afraid and disoriented-but at least two figures stood out like rocks in a billowing mist: the pregnant woman and the man with the David Crosby moustache. Him, particularly. Leaning in the tavern doorway with a beer-stein in his hand and looking at her. Talking (hey baby hey baby) to her. Or at her. These recollections possessed her mind wholly for a little while, as only our worst recollections can-memories of times when we have felt lost and helpless, utterly unable to exert any control over our own lives-and she walked past the Hot Pot without even seeing it, her heedless eyes blank and full of dismay. She was still thinking about the man in the tavern doorway, thinking about how much he had frightened her and how much he had reminded her of Norman. It wasn’t anything in his face; mostly it had been a matter of posture. The way he’d stood there, as if every muscle was ready to flex and leap, and it would take only a single glance of acknowledgment from her to set him off- A hand seized her upper arm and Rosie nearly shrieked. She looked around, expecting either Norman or the man with the dark red moustache. Instead she saw a young fellow in a conservative summer-weight suit.

“Sorry if I startled you,” he said, “but for a second there I was sure you were going to step right out into the traffic.”

She looked around and saw that she was standing on the corner of Hitchens and Watertower Drive, one of the busiest intersections in the city and at least three full blocks past the Hot Pot, maybe four. Traffic raced by like a metal river. It suddenly occurred to her that the young man beside her might have saved her life.

“Th-Thank you. A lot.”

“Not a problem,” he said, and on the far side of Watertower, WALK flashed out in white letters. The young man gave Rosie a final curious glance and then stepped off the curb and into the crosswalk with the rest of the pedestrians and was borne away. Rosie stayed where she was, feeling the momentary dislocation and deep relief of someone who wakes from a really bad dream. And that’s exactly what I was having, she thought. I was awake and walking down the street, but I was still having a bad dream. Or a flashback. She looked down and saw she was holding her bag clamped tightly against her midsection in both hands, as she had held it during that long, bewildering tramp in search of Durham Avenue five weeks ago. She slipped the strap over her shoulder, turned around, and began retracing her steps. The city’s fashionable shopping section started beyond Watertower Drive; the area she was now passing through as she left Watertower behind consisted of much smaller shops. Many of them looked a little seedy, a trifle desperate around the edges. Rosie walked slowly, looking in the windows of secondhand clothing stores trying to pass themselves off as grunge boutiques, shoe stores with signs reading BUY AMERICAN and CLEARANCE SALE in the windows, a discount place called No More Than 5, its window heaped with dollbabies made in Mexico or Manila, a leathergoods place called Motorcycle Mama, and a store called Avec Plaisir with a startling array of goods-dildos, handcuffs, and crotchless underwear-displayed on black velvet. She looked in here for quite awhile, marvelling at this stuff which had been put out for anyone passing to see, and at last crossed the street. Half a block farther up she could see the Hot Pot, but she had decided to forgo the coffee and pie, after all; she would simply catch the bus and go on back to D amp; S. Enough adventures for one day. Except that wasn’t what happened. On the far corner of the intersection she had just crossed was a nondescript storefront with a neon sign in the window reading PAWNS LOANS FINE JEWELRY BOUGHT AND SOLD. It was the last service which caught Rosie’s attention. She looked down at her engagement ring again, and remembered something Norman had told her not long before they were married-If you wear that on the street, wear it with the stone turned in toward your palm, Rose. That’s a helluva big rock and you’re just a little girl. She had asked him once (this was before he had begun teaching her that it was safer not to ask questions) how much it had cost. He had answered with a headshake and a small indulgent smile-the smile of a parent whose child wants to know why the sky is blue or how much snow there is at the North Pole. Never mind, he said. Content yourself with knowing it was either the rock or a new Buick. I decided on the rock. Because I love you, Rose. Now, standing here on this streetcorner, she could still remember how that had made her feel-afraid, because you had to be afraid of a man capable of such extravagance, a man who could choose a ring over a new car, but a little breathless and sexy, too. Because it was romantic. He had bought her a diamond so big that it wasn’t safe to flash it on the street. A diamond as big as the Ritz. Because I love you, Rose. And perhaps he had… but that had been fourteen years ago, and the girl he’d loved had possessed clear eyes and high breasts and a flat stomach and long, strong thighs. There had been no blood in that girl’s urine when she went to the bathroom. Rosie stood on the corner near the storefront with the neon in the window and looked down at her diamond engagement ring. She waited to see what she would feel-an echo of fear or perhaps even romance-and when she felt nothing at all, she turned toward the pawnshop’s door. She would be leaving Daughters and Sisters soon, and if there was someone inside this place who would give her a reasonable sum of money for her ring, she could leave clean, owing nothing for her room and board, and maybe even with a few hundred dollars left over. Or maybe I just want to be rid of it, she thought. Maybe I don’t want to spend even another day carting around the Buick he never bought. The sign on the door read LIBERTY CITY LOAN amp; PAWN. That struck her as momentarily strange-she had heard several nicknames for this city, but all of them had to do either with the lake or the weather. Then she dismissed the thought, opened the door, and went inside.

She had expected it to be dark, and it was dark, but it was also unexpectedly golden inside the Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn. The sun was low in the sky now, shining straight down Hitchens, and it fell through the pawnshop’s west-facing windows in long, warm beams. One of them turned a hanging saxophone into an instrument which looked as if it were made of fire. That’s not accidental, either, Rosie thought. Someone hung that sax there on purpose. Someone smart. Probably true, but she still felt a little enchanted. Even the smell of the place added to that sense of enchantment-a smell of dust and age and secrets. Very faintly, off to her left, she could hear many clocks ticking softly. She walked slowly up the center aisle, past ranks of acoustic guitars strung up by their necks on one side and glass cases filled with appliances and stereo equipment on the other. There seemed to be a great many of those oversized, multi-function sound-systems that were called “boomboxes” on the TV shows. At the far end of this aisle was a long counter with another neon sign bent in an arc overhead. GOLD SILVER FINE JEWELRY, it said in blue. Then, below it, in red: WE BUY WE SELL WE TRADE. Yes, but do you crawl on your belly like a reptile? Rosie thought with a small ghost of a smile, and approached the counter. A man was sitting on a stool behind it. There was a jeweller’s loupe in his eye. He was using it to look at something which lay on a pad in front of him. When she got a little closer, Rosie saw that the item under examination was a pocket-watch with its back off. The man behind the counter was poking into it with a steel probe so thin she could barely see it. He was young, she thought, maybe not even thirty yet. His hair was long, almost to his shoulders, and he was wearing a blue silk vest over a plain white undershirt. She thought the combination unconventional but rather dashing. There was movement off to her left. She turned in that direction and saw an older gentleman squatting on the floor and going through piles of paperbacks stacked under a sign reading THE GOOD OLD STUFF. His topcoat was spread out around him in a fan, and his briefcase-black, old-fashioned, and starting to come unsprung at the seams-stood patiently beside him, like a faithful dog.

“Help you, ma’am?” She returned her attention to the man behind the counter, who had removed the loupe and was now looking at her with a friendly grin. His eyes were hazel with a greenish undertint, very pretty, and she wondered briefly if Pam might classify him as someone interesting. She guessed not. Not enough tectonic plates sliding around under the shirt.

“Maybe you can,” she said. She slipped off her wedding ring and her engagement ring, then put the plain gold band into her pocket. It felt strange not to be wearing it, but she supposed she could get used to that. A woman capable of walking out of her own house for good without even a change of underwear could probably get used to quite a lot. She laid the diamond down on the velvet pad beside the old watch the jeweller had been working on.

“How much would you say that’s worth?” she asked him. Then, as an afterthought, she added:

“And how much could you give me for it?” He slipped the ring over the end of his thumb, then held it up into the dusty sunbeam slanting in over his shoulder through the third of the west-facing windows. The stone sent back sparks of multicolored fire into her eyes, and for just a moment she felt a pang of regret. Then the jeweller gave her a quick look, just a glance, really, but it was long enough for her to see something in his hazel eyes she didn’t immediately understand-a look that seemed to say Are you joking?

“What?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Just a mo.” He screwed the loupe back into his eye and took a good long look at the stone in her engagement ring. When he looked up the second time, his eyes were surer and easier to read. Impossible not to read, really. Suddenly Rosie knew everything, but she felt no surprise, no anger, and no real regret. The best she could do was a weary sort of embarrassment: why had she never realized before? How could she have been such a chump? You weren’t, that deep voice answered her. You really weren’t, Rosie. If you hadn’t known on some level that the ring was a fake-known it almost from the start-you would have come into a place like this a lot sooner. Did you ever really believe, once you got past your twenty-second birthday, that is, that Norman Daniels would have given you a ring worth not just hundreds but thousands of dollars? Did you really? No, she supposed not. She’d never been worth it to him, for one thing. For another, a man who had three locks on the front door, three on the back, motion-sensor lights in the yard, and a touch-alarm on his new Sentra automobile would never have let his wife do the marketing with a diamond as big as the Ritz on her finger.

“It’s a fake, isn’t it?” she asked the jeweller.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a perfectly real zirconia, but it’s certainly not a diamond, if that’s what you mean.”

“Of course it’s what I mean,” she said.

“What else would I mean?”

“Are you okay?” the jeweller asked. He looked genuinely concerned, and she had an idea, now that she was seeing him up close, that he was closer to twenty-five than thirty.

“Hell,” she said, “I don’t know. Probably.” She took a Kleenex out of her purse, though, just in case of a tearful outburst-these days she never knew when one was coming. Or maybe a good laughing jag; she’d had several of those, as well. It would be nice if she could avoid both extremes, at least for the time being. Nice to leave this place with at least a few shreds of dignity.

“I hope so,” he said, “because you’re in good company. Believe me, you are. You’d be surprised how many ladies, ladies just like you-”

“Oh, stop,” she told him.

“When I need something uplifting, I’ll buy a support bra.” She had never in her life said anything remotely like that to a man-it was downright suggestive-but she had never felt like this in her whole life… as if she were spacewalking, or running giddily across a tightrope with no net beneath. And wasn’t it perfect, in a way? Wasn’t it the only fitting epilogue to her marriage? I decided on the rock, she heard him say in her mind; his voice had been shaking with sentiment, his gray eyes actually a little moist. Because I love you, Rose. For a moment the laughing jag was very close. She held it at arm’s length by sheer force of will.

“Is it worth anything?” she asked.

“Anything at all? Or is it just something he got out of a gum-machine somewhere?” He didn’t bother with the loupe this time, just held the ring up into the sunbeam again.

“Actually, it is worth a bit,” he said, sounding relieved to be able to pass on a little good news.

“The stone’s a ten-buck item, but the setting… that might have gone as much as two hundred bucks, retail.

“Course, I couldn’t give you that,” he added hurriedly.

“My dad’d read me the riot act. Wouldn’t he, Robbie?”

“Your dad always reads you the riot act,” said the old man squatting by the paperbacks.

“That’s what kids are for.” He didn’t look up. The jeweller glanced at him, glanced back at Rosie, and stuck a finger into his half-open mouth, miming a retch. Rosie hadn’t seen that one since high school, and it made her smile. The man in the vest smiled back.

“I could give you fifty for it,” he said.

“Interested?”

“No, thanks.” She picked up the ring, looked at it thoughtfully, then wrapped it in the unused Kleenex she was holding.

“You check any of the other shops along here,” he said.

“If anyone says they’ll give you more, I’ll match the best offer. That’s dad’s policy, and it’s a good one.” She dropped the Kleenex into her purse and snapped it shut.

“Thanks, but I guess not,” she said.

“I’ll hang onto it.” She was aware that the man who’d been checking out the paperbacks-the one the jeweller had called Robbie-was now looking at her, and with an odd expression of concentration on his face, but Rosie decided she didn’t care. Let him look. It was a free country.

“The man who gave me that ring said it was worth as much as a brand-new car,” she said. “do you believe that?”

“Yes.” He replied with no hesitation, and she remembered his telling her she was in good company, that lots of ladies came in here and learned unpleasant truths about their treasures. She guessed this man, although still young, must already have heard a great many variations on the same basic theme.

“I suppose you do,” she said.

“Well then, you should understand why I want to keep the ring. If I ever start getting woozy about someone else-or even think I am-I can dig it out and look at it while I wait for the fever to pass.”

She was thinking of Pam Haverford, who had long, twisting scars on both forearms. In the summer of ’92 her husband had thrown her through a storm door while he was drunk. Pam had raised her arms to protect her face as she went through the glass, and the result had been sixty stitches in one arm and a hundred and five in the other. Yet she still almost melted with happiness if a construction worker or housepainter whistled at her legs when she walked by, and what did you call that? Endurance or stupidity? Resilience or amnesia? Rose had come to think of it as Haverford’s Syndrome, and only hoped that she herself could avoid it.

“Whatever you say, ma’am,” the jeweller replied.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though. Myself, I think it’s why pawnshops have such a bad rep. We almost always get the job of telling people that things aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Nobody likes that.”

“No,” she agreed.

“Nobody likes that, Mr-”

“Steiner,” he said.

“Bill Steiner. My dad’s Abe Steiner. Here’s our card.” He held one out, but she shook her head, smiling.

“I’d have no use for it. Have a nice day, Mr Steiner.” She started back toward the door, this time taking the third aisle because the elderly gentleman had advanced a few steps toward her with his briefcase in one hand and a few of the old paperbacks in the other. She wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her, but she was very sure that she didn’t want to talk to him. All she wanted right now was to make a quick exit from Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn; to climb aboard a bus and get busy forgetting she had ever been here. She was only vaguely aware that she was passing through an area of the pawnshop where clusters of small statuary and pictures, both framed and unframed, had been gathered together on the dusty shelves. Her head was up, but she was looking at nothing; she was not in the mood to appreciate art, fine or otherwise. So her sudden, almost skidding stop was all the more remarkable. It was as if she never saw the picture at all, at least on that first occasion. It was as if the picture saw her.

Its powerful attraction was without precedent in her life, but this did not strike Rosie as extraordinary-she had been living an unprecedented life for over a month now. Nor did that attraction strike her (at first, anyway) as abnormal. The reason for this was simple: after fourteen years of marriage to Norman Daniels, years when she had been all but cut off from the rest of the world, she had no tools for judging the normal from the abnormal. Her yardstick for measuring how the world behaved in given situations mostly consisted of TV dramas and the occasional movie he had taken her to (Norman Daniels would go see anything starring Glint Eastwood). Within the framework provided by those media, her reaction to the picture seemed almost normal. In the movies and on TV, people were always getting swept off their feet. And really, none of that mattered. What did was how the picture called to her, making her forget what she had just found out about her ring, making her forget that she wanted to get away from the pawnshop, making her forget how glad her sore feet were going to be when she saw the Blue Line bus pulling up in front of the Hot Pot, making her forget everything. She only thought: Look at that! Isn’t that the most wonderful picture! It was an oil painting in a wooden frame, about three feet long and two feet high, leaning against a stopped clock on the left end and a small naked cherub on the right end. There were pictures all around it (an old tinted photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral, a watercolor of fruit in a bowl, gondolas at dawn on the Grand Canal, a hunting print which showed a pack of the unspeakable chasing a pair of the uneatable across a misty English moor), but she hardly gave them a glance. It was the picture of the woman on the hill she was interested in, and only that. In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops, and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world, for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us-the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be. Her emotional reaction was so sudden, so hot, and so completely without connection to her real, practical life that at first her mind simply floundered, with no idea at all of how to cope with this unexpected burst of fireworks. For that moment or two she was like a transmission that has suddenly popped out of gear and into neutral-although the engine was revving like crazy, nothing was happening. Then the clutch engaged and the transmission slipped smoothly back into place. It’s what I want for my new place, that’s why I’m excited, she thought. It’s exactly what I want to make it mine. She seized on this thought eagerly and gratefully. It would only be a single room, true enough, but she had been promised it would be a large room, with a little kitchen alcove and an attached bathroom. In any case it would be the first place in her whole life that was hers and hers alone. That made it important, and that made the things she chose for it important, too… and the first would be the most important of all, because it would set the tone for everything that followed. Yes. No matter how nice it might be, the room would be a place where dozens of single, low-income people had lived before her and more dozens would live after her. But it was going to be an important place, all the same. These last five weeks had been an interim period, a hiatus between the old life and the new. When she moved into the room she had been promised, her new life-her single life-would really begin… and this picture, one Norman had never seen and passed judgement on, one that was just hers, could be the symbol of that new life. This was how her mind-sane, reasonable, and quite unprepared to admit or even recognize anything which smacked of the supernatural or paranormal-simultaneously explained, rationalized, and justified her sudden spike reaction to the picture of the woman on the hill.

It was the only painting in the aisle that was covered with glass (Rosie had an idea that oil paintings usually weren’t glassed in, maybe because they had to breathe, or something), and there was a small yellow sticker in the lower lefthand corner. $75 OR? it said. She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and took hold of the frame’s sides. She lifted the picture carefully off the shelf and carried it back up the aisle. The old man with the battered briefcase was still there, and still watching her, but Rosie hardly saw him. She went directly to the counter and put the picture carefully down in front of Bill Steiner.

“Found something you fancy?” he asked her.

“Yes.” She tapped the price-sticker in the corner of the frame. “seventy-five dollars or question-mark, it says. You told me you could give me fifty for my engagement ring. Would you be willing to trade, even-Steven? My ring for this picture?” Steiner walked down his side of the counter, flipped up the pass-through at the end, and came around to Rosie’s side. He looked at the picture as carefully as he had looked at her ring… but this time he looked with a certain amusement.

“I don’t remember this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Must be something the old man picked up. He’s the art-lover of the family; I’m just a glorified Mr Fixit.” ’does that mean you can’t-” “dicker? Bite your tongue! I’ll dicker until the cows come home, if you let me. But this time I don’t have to. I’m happy to do it your way-even swapsies. Then I don’t have to watch you walk out of here with your face practically dragging on the floor.” And here was another first; before she knew what she was doing, Rosie had wrapped her arms around Bill Steiner’s neck and given him a brief, enthusiastic hug.

“Thank you!” she cried.

“Thanks so much!” Steiner laughed.

“Oh boy, you’re welcome,” he said.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been hugged by a customer in these hallowed halls. See any other pictures you really want, lady?” The old fellow in the topcoat-the one Steiner had called Robbie-walked over to look at the picture.

“Considering what most pawnshop patrons are like, that’s probably a blessing,” he said. Bill Steiner nodded.

“You have a point.” She barely heard them. She was rooting through her bag, hunting for the twist of Kleenex with the ring in it. Finding it took her longer than it needed to, because her eyes kept wandering back to the picture on the counter. Her picture. For the first time she thought of the room she would be going to with real impatience. Her own place, not just one camp-bed among many. Her own place, and her own picture to hang on the wall. It’s the first thing I’ll do, she thought as her fingers closed over the bundle of tissue. The very first. She unwrapped the ring and held it out to Steiner, but he ignored it for the time being; he was studying the picture.

“It’s an original oil, not a print,” he said, “and I don’t think it’s very good. Probably that’s why it’s covered with glass-somebody’s idea of dolling it up. What’s that building at the bottom of the hill supposed to be? A burned-out plantation-house?”

“I believe it’s supposed to be the ruins of a temple,” the old guy with the mangy briefcase said quietly.

“A Greek temple, perhaps. Although it’s difficult to say, isn’t it?” It was difficult to say, because the building in question was buried almost to the roof in underbrush. Vines were growing up the five columns in front. A sixth lay in segments. Near the fallen pillar was a fallen statue, so overgrown that all that could be glimpsed above the green was a smooth white stone face looking up at the thunderheads with which the painter had enthusiastically filled the sky.

“Yeah,” Steiner said.

“Anyway, it looks to me like the building’s out of perspective-it’s too big for where it is.” The old man nodded.

“But it’s a necessary cheat. Otherwise nothing would show but the roof. As for the fallen pillar and statue, forget them-they wouldn’t be visible at all.” She didn’t care about the background; all of her attention was fixed upon the painting’s central figure. At the top of the hill, turned to look down at the ruins of the temple so anyone viewing the picture could only see her back, was a woman. Her hair was blonde, and hung down her back in a plait. Around one of her shapely upper arms-the right-was a broad circle of gold. Her left hand was raised, and although you couldn’t see for sure, it looked as if she was shading her eyes. It was odd, given the thundery, sunless sky, but that was what she appeared to be doing, just the same. She was wearing a short dress-a toga, Rosie supposed-which left one creamy shoulder bare. The garment’s color was a vibrant red-purple. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, she was wearing on her feet; the grass that she was standing in came almost up to her knees, where the toga ended.

“What do you call it?” Steiner asked. He was speaking to Robbie.

“Classical? Neo-classical?”

“I call it bad art,” Robbie said with a grin, “but at the same time I think I understand why this woman wants it. It has an emotional quality to it that’s quite striking. The elements may be classical-the sort of thing one might see in old steel engravings-but the feel is gothic. And then there’s the fact that the principal figure has her back turned. I find that very odd. On the whole… well, one can’t say this young lady has chosen the best picture in the joint, but I’m sure she’s chosen the most peculiar one.” Rosie was still barely hearing them. She kept finding new things in the picture to engage her attention. The dark violet cord around the woman’s waist, for instance, which matched her robe’s trim, and the barest hint of a left breast, revealed by the raised arm. The two men were only nattering. It was a wonderful picture. She felt she could look at it for hours on end, and when she had her new place, she would probably do just that.

“No title, no signature,” Steiner said.

“Unless-”

He turned the picture around. Printed in soft, slightly blurred charcoal strokes on the paper backing were the words ROSE MADDER.

“Well,” he said doubtfully, “here’s the artist’s name. I guess. Funny name, though. Maybe it’s a pseudonym.” Robbie shook his head, opened his mouth to speak, then saw that the woman who had chosen the picture also knew better.

“It’s the name of the picture,” she said, and then added, for some reason she could never have explained, “Rose is my name.” Steiner looked at her, completely bewildered.

“Never mind, that’s just a coincidence.” But was it? she wondered. Was it really?

“Look.” She gently turned the picture around again. She tapped the glass over the toga the woman in the foreground was wearing.

“That color-that purply-red-is called rose madder.” “she’s right,” Robbie said.

“Either the artist-or more likely the last person to own the picture, since charcoal rubs away fairly rapidly-has named the painting after the color of the woman’s chiton.”

“Please,” Rose said to Steiner, “could we do our business? I’m anxious to be on my way. I’m late as it is.” Steiner started to ask once more if she was sure, but he saw that she was. He saw something else, as well-she had a fine-drawn look about her, one that suggested she’d had a difficult go of it just lately. It was the face of a woman who might regard honest interest and concern as teasing, or possibly as an effort to alter the terms of the deal in his own favor. He simply nodded.

“The ring for the picture, straight trade. And we both go away happy.”

“Yes,” Rosie said, and gave him a smile of dazzling brilliance. It was the first real smile she had given anyone in fourteen years, and in the moment of its fullness, his heart opened to her.

“And we both go away happy.” She stood outside for a moment, blinking stupidly at the cars rushing past, feeling the way she had as a small child after leaving the movies with her father-dazed, caught with half of her brain in the world of real things and half of it still in the world of make-believe. But the picture was real enough; she only had to look down at the parcel she held under her left arm if she doubted that. The door opened behind her, and the elderly man came out. Now she even felt good about him, and she gave him the sort of smile people reserve for those with whom they have shared strange or marvellous experiences.

“Madam,” he said, “would you consider doing me a small favor?” Her smile was replaced with a look of caution.

“It depends on what it is, but I’m not in the habit of doing favors for strangers.” That, of course, was an understatement. She wasn’t even used to talking to strangers. He looked almost embarrassed, and this had a reassuring effect on her.

“Yes, well, I suppose it’ll sound odd, but it might benefit both of us. My name is Lefferts, by the way. Rob Lefferts.”

“Rosie McClendon,” she said. She thought about holding out her hand and rejected the idea. Probably she shouldn’t even have given him her name.

“I really don’t think I have time to do any favors, Mr Lefferts-I’m running a little late, and-”

“Please.” He put down his weary briefcase, reached into the small brown bag he was holding in his other hand, and brought out one of the old paperbacks he’d found inside the pawnshop. On the cover was a stylized picture of a man in a black-and-white-striped prison outfit stepping into what might have been a cave or the mouth of a tunnel.

“All I want is for you to read the first paragraph of this book. Out loud.”

“Here?” She looked around.

“Right here on the street? In heaven’s name, why?” He only repeated

“Please,” and she took the book, thinking that if she did as he asked, she might be able to get away from him without any further foolishness. That would be fine, because she was starting to think he was a little nuts. Maybe not dangerous, but nuts, all the same. And if he did turn out to be dangerous, she wanted to find out while the Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn-and Bill Steiner-was still within dashing distance. The name of the book was Dark Passage, the author David Goodis. As she paged past the copyright notice, Rosie decided it wasn’t surprising she’d never heard of him (although the tide of the novel rang a faint bell); Dark Passage had been published in 1946, sixteen years before she was born. She looked up at Rob Lefferts. He nodded eagerly at her, almost vibrating with anticipation… and hope? How could that be? But it certainly looked like hope. Feeling a little excited herself now (like calls to like, her mother had often said), Rosie began to read. The first paragraph was short, at least.

“It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life. But there was too much on the other side and on his side of it there was practically nothing. The jury decided he was guilty. The judge handed him a life sentence and he was taken to San Quentin.” She looked up, closed the book, held it out to him.

“Okay?” He was smiling, clearly delighted.

“Very much okay, Ms McClendon. Now wait… just one more… humor me…”

He went paging rapidly through the book, then handed it back to her.

“Just the dialogue, please. The scene is between Parry and a cab-driver. From

“Well, it’s funny.” Do you see it?” She saw, and this time she didn’t demur. She had decided Lefferts wasn’t dangerous, and that maybe he wasn’t crazy, either. Also, she still felt that queer sense of excitement, as if something really interesting was going to happen… or was happening already. Yes, sure, you bet, the voice inside told her happily. The picture, Rosie-remember? Sure, of course. The picture. Just thinking of it lifted her heart and made her feel lucky.

“This is very peculiar,” she said, but she was smiling. She couldn’t help herself. He nodded, and she had an idea that he would have nodded in exacdy the same way if she’d told him her name was Madame Bovary.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure it seems that way, but… do you see where I want you to start?”

“Uh-huh.” She scanned the dialogue quickly, trying to get a sense of who these people were from what they were saying. The cab-driver was easy; she quickly formed a mental picture of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners reruns they showed on Channel 18 in the afternoons. Parry was a little harder-generic hero, she supposed, comes in a white can. Oh, well; it was no big deal either way. She cleared her throat and began, quickly forgetting that she was standing on a busy streetcorner with a wrapped painting under her arm, unaware of the curious glances she and Lefferts were drawing.

“"Well, it’s funny,” the driver said.

“From faces I can tell what people think. I can tell what they do. Sometimes I can even tell who they are… you, for instance.”

“"All right, me. What about me?”

“'You’re a guy with troubles.”

“I don’t have a trouble in the world,” Parry said.

“"Don’t tell me, brother,” the driver said.

“I know. I know people. I’ll tell you something else. Your trouble is women.”

“"Strike one. I’m happily married."” Suddenly, just like that, she had a voice for Parry: he was James Woods, nervous and high-strung, but with a brittle sense of humor. This delighted her and she went on, warming to the story now, seeing a scene from a movie that had never been made inside her head-Jackie Gleason and James Woods sparring in a cab that was racing through the streets of some anonymous city after dark.

“"Call it a two-base hit. You’re not married. But you used to be, and it wasn’t happy.”

“"Oh, I get it. You were there. You were hiding in the closet all the time.”

“The driver said, “I’ll tell you about her. She wasn’t easy to get along with. She wanted things. The more she got, the more she wanted. And she always got what she wanted. That’s the picture."” Rosie had reached the bottom of the page. Feeling a strange chill up her back, she silently handed the book back to Lefferts, who now looked happy enough to hug himself.

“Your voice is absolutely wonderful!” he told her.

“Low but not drony, melodious and very clear, with no definable accent-I knew all that at once, but voice alone means very little. You can read, though! You can actually read!”

“Of course I can read,” Rosie said. She didn’t know whether to be amused or exasperated. “do I look like I was raised by wolves?”

“No, of course not, but often even very good readers aren’t able to read aloud-even if they don’t actually stumble over the words, they have very little in the way of expression. And dialogue is much tougher than narration… the acid test, one might say. But I heard two different people. I actually heard them!”

“Yes, so did I. Mr Lefferts, I really have to go now. I-”

He reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder as she started to turn away. A woman with a bit more experience of the world would have known an audition, even one on a streetcorner, for what it was and consequently would not have been entirely surprised by what Lefferts said next. Rosie, however, was stunned to temporary silence when he cleared his throat and offered her a job.

At the moment Rob Lefferts was listening to his fugitive wife read on a streetcorner, Norman Daniels was sitting in his small office cubicle on the fourth floor of police headquarters with his feet up on his desk and his hands laced behind his head. It was the first time in years that it had been possible for him to put his feet up; under ordinary circumstances, his desk was heaped high with forms, fast-food wrappers, half-written reports, departmental circulars, memos, and other assorted trash. Norman was not the sort of man who picks up after himself without thinking about it (in just five weeks the house which Rosie kept pin-neat across all the years had come to look quite a bit like Miami after Hurricane Andrew), and usually his office reflected this, but now it looked positively austere. He had spent most of the day cleaning it out, taking three large plastic garbage bags full of swill down to the waste-disposal site in the basement, not wanting to leave the job to the nigger women who came in to clean between midnight and six on weekday mornings. What was left to niggers didn’t get done-this was a lesson Norman’s father had taught him, and it was a true lesson. There was one basic fact which the politicians and the do-gooders either could not or would not understand: niggers didn’t understand work. It was their African temperament. Norman ran his gaze slowly across the top of his desk, upon which nothing now rested but his feet and his phone, then shifted his eyes to the wall on his right. For years this had been papered with want-sheets, hot-sheets, lab results, and takeout menus-not to mention his calendar with pending court-dates noted in red-but now it was completely bare. He finished his visual tour by noting the stack of cardboard liquor cartons by the door. As he did so, he reflected how unpredictable life was. He had a temper, and he would have been the first to admit it. That his temper had a way of getting him in trouble and keeping him in trouble was also something he would have freely admitted. And if, a year ago, he had been granted a vision of his office as it was today, he would have drawn a simple conclusion from it: his temper had finally gotten him into a jam he couldn’t wiggle out of, and he had been canned. Either he had finally piled up enough reprimands in his jacket to warrant dismissal under departmental rules, or he had been caught really hurting someone, as he supposed he had really hurt the little spick, Ramon Sanders. The idea that it mattered if a queerboy like Ramon got hurt a little was ridiculous, of course-Saint Anthony he was not-but you had to abide by the rules of the game… or at least not be caught breaking them. It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn’t understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it. But he was not being canned. He was moving, that was all. Moving from this shitty little cubicle which had been home since the first year of the Bush Presidency. Moving into a real office, where the walls went all the way up to the ceiling and came all the way down to the floor. Not canned; promoted. It made him think of a Chuck Berry song, one that went C'est la vie, it goes to show you never can tell. The bust had happened, the big one, and things couldn’t have gone better for him if he’d written the script himself. An almost unbelievable transmutation had taken place: his ass had turned to gold, at least around here. It had been a city-wide crack ring, the sort of combine you never get whole and complete… except this time he had. Everything had fallen into place; it had been like rolling a dozen straight sevens at a crap-table in Atlantic City and doubling your money every time. His team had ended up arresting over twenty people, half a dozen of them really big bugs, and the busts were righteous-not so much as a whiff of entrapment. The D.A. was probably reaching heights of orgasm unmatched since cornholing his cocker spaniel back in junior high school. Norman, who had once believed he might end up being prosecuted by that geeky little fuck if he couldn’t manage to put a checkrein on his temper, had become the D.A.’s fair-haired boy. Chuck Berry had been right: you never could tell.

“The Coolerator was jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale,” Norman sang, and smiled. It was a cheerful smile, one that made most people want to smile back at him, but it would have chilled Rosie’s skin and made her frantically wish to be invisible. She thought of it as Norman’s biting smile. A very good spring on top, a very good spring indeed, but underneath it had been a very bad spring. A totally shitty spring, to be exact, and Rose was the reason why. He had expected to settle her hash long before now, but he hadn’t. Somehow Rose was still out there. Still out there somewhere. He had gone to Portside on the very same day he had interrogated his good friend Ramon in the park across from the station. He had gone with a picture of Rose, but it hadn’t been much help. When he mentioned the sunglasses and the bright red scarf (valuable details he had found in the transcript of Ramon Sanders’s original interrogation), one of Continental’s two daytime ticket-sellers had hollered Bingo. The only problem was that the ticket-seller couldn’t remember what her destination had been, and there was no way to check the records, because there were no records. She had paid cash for her ticket and checked no baggage. Continental’s schedule had offered three possibilities, but Norman thought the third-a bus which had departed on the southern route at 1:45p.m.-was unlikely. She wouldn’t have wanted to hang around that long. That left two other choices: a city two hundred and fifty miles away and another, larger city in the heart of the midwest. He had then made what he was slowly coming to believe had been a mistake, one which had cost him at least two weeks; he had assumed that she wouldn’t want to go too far from home, from the area where she’d grown up-not a scared little mouse like her. But now- Norman’s palms were covered with a faint lacework of semicircular white scars. They had been made by his fingernails, but their real source was deep inside his head, an oven which had been running at broil for most of his life.

“You better be scared,” he murmured.

“And if you’re not now, I guarantee you will be soon.” Yes. He had to have her. Without Rose, everything that had happened this spring-the glamor bust, the good press, the reporters who had stunned him by asking respectful questions for a change, even the promotion-meant nothing. The women he had slept with since Rose had left meant nothing, either. What mattered was she had left him. What mattered more was he hadn’t had the slightest clue she meant to do it. And what mattered most was she had taken his bank card. She had only used it once, and for a paltry three hundred and fifty dollars, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she had taken what was his, she had forgotten who was the meanest motherfucker in the jungle, and for that she would have to pay. The price would be high, too. High. He’d strangled one of the women he’d been with since Rose had left. Choked her, then dumped her behind a grain-storage tower on the west side of the lake. Was he supposed to blame that one on his temper, too? He didn’t know, how was that for nuts? For right out to lunch? All he knew was he had picked the woman out of the strolling meat-market down on Fremont Street, a little brunette honey in fawn-colored hotpants with these big Daisy Mae tits poking out the front of her halter. He didn’t really see how much she looked like Rose (or so he told himself now, and so he perhaps really believed) until he was shagging her in the back of his current duty-car, an anonymous four-year-old Chevy. What had happened was she turned her head and the lights around the top of the nearest grain storage tower had shone on her face for a moment, shone on it in a certain way, and in that moment the whore was Rose, the bitch who had walked out on him without even leaving a note, without leaving so much as one fucking word, and before he knew what he was doing he had the halter wrapped around the whore’s neck and the whore’s tongue was sticking out of her mouth and the whore’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets like glass marbles. And the worst thing about it was that once she was dead, the whore hadn’t looked like Rose at all. Well, he hadn’t panicked… but then, why would he? It hadn’t been the first time, after all. Had Rose known that? Sensed that? Was that why she had run? Because she was afraid he might- “don’t be an asshole,” he muttered, and closed his eyes. A bad idea. What he saw was what he all too often saw in his dreams lately: the green ATM card from Merchant’s Bank, grown to an enormous size and floating in the blackness like a currency-colored dirigible. He opened his eyes again in a hurry. His hands hurt. He unrolled his fingers and observed the welling cuts in his palms with no surprise. He was accustomed to the stigmata of his temper, and he knew how to deal with it: by reestablishing control. That meant thinking and planning, and those things began with review. He had called the police in the closer of the two cities, had identified himself, and then had identified Rose as the prime suspect in a big-money bank-card scam (the card was the worst thing of all, and it never really left his mind anymore. He gave her name as Rose McClendon, feeling sure she would have gone back to her maiden name. If it turned out she hadn’t, he would simply pass off as coincidence the fact that the suspect and the investigating officer shared the same name. It had been known to happen. And it was Daniels they were talking about, not Trzewski or Beauschatz. He had also faxed the cops side-by-side pictures of Rose. One was a photo of her sitting on the back steps, taken by Roy Foster, a cop friend of his, last August. It wasn’t very good-it showed how much lard she’d put on since hitting the big three-oh, for one thing-but it was black and white and showed her facial features with reasonable clarity. The other was a police artist’s conception (Al Kelly, one talented sonofabitch, had done it on his own time, at Norman’s request) of the same woman, only with a scarf over her head. The cops in that other city, the closer city, had asked all the right questions and gone to all the right places-the homeless shelters, the transient hotels, the halfway houses where you could sometimes get a look at the current guest-list, if you knew who and how to ask-with no result. Norman himself had made as many calls as he’d had time for, hunting with ever-increasing frustration for some sort of paper trail. He even paid for a faxed list of the city’s newest driver’s license applicants, with no result. The idea that she might escape him entirely, escape her just punishment for what she had done (especially for daring to take the bank card), still hadn’t crossed his mind, but he now reluctantly came to the conclusion that she could have gone to that other city after all, that she could have been so afraid of him that two hundred and fifty miles just wasn’t far enough. Not that eight hundred miles would be, a fact she would soon learn. In the meantime, he had been sitting here long enough. It was time to find a dolly or a janitor’s cart and start moving his crap into his new office two floors up. He swung his feet off the desk, and as he did, the telephone rang. He picked it up.

“Is this Inspector Daniels?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Yes it is,” he replied, thinking (with no great pleasure) Detective Inspector First Grade Daniels, as a matter of fact.

“Oliver Robbins here.” Robbins. Robbins. The name was familiar, but-”From Continental Express? I sold a bus ticket to a woman you’re looking for.” Daniels sat up straighter in his seat.

“Yes, Mr Robbins, I remember you very well.”

“I saw you on television,” Robbins said.

“It’s wonderful that you caught those people. That crack is awful stuff. We see people using it in the bus station all the time, you know.”

“Yes,” Daniels said, allowing no trace of impatience to show in his voice.

“I’m sure you do.”

“Will those people actually go to jail?”

“I think most of them will. How can I help you today?”

“Actually I’m hoping that I can help you,” Robbins said. “do you remember telling me to call you if I remembered anything else? About the woman in the dark glasses and red scarf, I mean.”

“Yes,” Norman said. His voice was still calm and friendly, but the hand not holding the phone had rolled into a tight fist again, and the nails were digging, digging.

“Well, I didn’t think I would, but something came to me this morning while I was in the shower. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I’m sure I’m right. She really did say it that way.” “say what what way?” he asked. His voice was still reasonable, calm-pleasant, even-but now blood was brightly visible in the creases of his closed fist. Norman opened one of the drawers of his empty desk and hung the fist over it. A little baptism on behalf of the next man to use this shitty little closet.

“You see, she didn’t tell me where she wanted to go; I told her. That’s probably why I couldn’t remember when you asked me, Inspector Daniels, although my head for that sort of thing is usually quite good.”

“I’m not getting you.”

“People buying tickets usually give you their destination,” Robbins said.

“

“Give me a round trip to Nashville,” or

“One way to Lansing, please.” Follow me?”

“Yes.”

“This woman didn’t do it that way. She didn’t say the name of the place; she said the time she wanted to go. That’s what I remembered this morning in the shower. She said, “I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?” As if the place she was going didn’t matter, as if it only mattered that-”

“-that she go as quick as she could and get as far away as she could!” Norman exclaimed.

“Yes! Yes, of course! Thanks, Mr Robbins!”

“I’m glad I could help.” Robbins sounded a bit taken aback by the burst of emotion from the other end of the line.

“This woman, you guys must really want her.”

“We do,” Norman said. He was once more smiling the smile which had always chilled Rosie’s skin and made her want to back up against a wall to protect her kidneys.

“You bet we do. That eleven-oh-five bus, Mr Robbins-where does it go?” Robbins told him, then asked:

“Was she part of the crack-ring? The woman you’re looking for?”

“No, it’s a credit-card scam,” Norman said, and Robbins started to reply to that-he was apparently ready to settle into a comfy little chat-but Norman dropped the phone back into the cradle, cutting him off in mid-rap. He put his feet up on the desk again. Finding a dolly and moving his crap could wait. He leaned back in the desk chair and looked at the ceiling.

“A credit-card scam, you bet,” he said.

“But you know what they say about the long arm of the law.” He reached out with his left hand and opened his fist, exposing the blood-smeared palm. He flexed the fingers, which were also bloody.

“Long arm of the law, bitch,” he said, and suddenly began to laugh.

“Long fucking arm of the law, coming for you. You best believe it.” He kept flexing his fingers, watching small drops of blood patter down to the surface of his desk, not caring, laughing, feeling fine. Things were back on track again.

When she got back to D amp; S, Rosie found Pam sitting in a folding chair in the basement rec room. She had a paperback in her lap, but she was watching Gert Kinshaw and a skinny little thing who had come in about ten days before-Cynthia something. Cynthia had a gaudy punk hairdo-half green, half orange-and looked as if she might weigh all of ninety pounds. There was a bulky bandage over her left ear, which her boyfriend had tried, with a fair amount of success, to tear off. She was wearing a tank-top with Peter Tosh at the center of a swirling blue-green psychedelic sunburst. NOT GONNA GIVE IT UP! the shirt proclaimed. Every time she moved, the oversized armholes of the shirt disclosed her teacup-sized breasts and small strawberry-colored nipples. She was panting and her face streamed with sweat, but she looked almost daffily pleased to be where she was and who she was. Gert Kinshaw was as different from Cynthia as dark from day. Rosie had never gotten it completely clear in her mind if Gert was a counsellor, a long-time resident of D amp; S, or just a friend of the court, so to speak. She showed up, stayed a few days, and then disappeared again. She often sat in the circle during therapy sessions (these ran twice a day at D amp; S, with attendance at four a week a mandatory condition for residents), but Rosie had never heard her say anything. She was tall, six feet one at least, and big-her shoulders were wide and soft and dark brown, her breasts the size of melons, and her belly a large, pendulous pod that pooched out her size XXXL tee-shirts and hung over the sweatpants she always wore. Her hair was a jumble of frizzy braids (it was very kinky). She looked so much like one of those women you saw sitting in the laundromat, eating Twinkies and reading the latest issue of the National Enquirer, that it was easy to miss the hard flex of her biceps, the toned look of her thighs under the old gray sweatpants, and the way her big ass did not jiggle when she walked. The only time Rosie ever heard her talk much was during these rec-room seminars. Gert taught the fine art of self-defense to any and all D amp; S residents who wanted to learn. Rosie had taken a few lessons herself, and still tried to practice what Gert called Six Great Ways to Fuck Up an Asshole at least once a day. She wasn’t very good at them, and couldn’t imagine actually trying them on a real man-the guy with the David Crosby moustache leaning in the doorway of The Wee Nip, for instance-but she liked Gert. She particularly liked the way Gert’s broad dark face changed when she was teaching, breaking out of its customary claylike immobility and taking on animation and intelligence. Becoming pretty, in fact. Rosie had once asked her what, exactly, she was teaching-was it tae kwon do, or jujitsu, or karate? Some other discipline, perhaps? Gert had just shrugged.

“A little of this and a little of that,” she had said.

“Leftovers.” Now the Ping-Pong table had been moved aside and the middle of the rec-room floor had been covered with gray mats. Eight or nine folding chairs had been set up along one pine-panelled wall, between the ancient stereo and the prehistoric color TV, where everything looked either pale green or pale pink. The only chair currently occupied was the one Pam was sitting on. With her book in her lap, her hair tied back with a piece of blue yarn, and her knees primly together, she looked like a wallflower at a high-school dance. Rosie sat down next to her, propping her wrapped picture against her shins. Gert, easily two hundred and seventy pounds, and Cynthia, who probably could have tipped the scales over a hundred only by wearing Georgia Giants and a fully loaded backpack, circled each other. Cynthia was panting and smiling hugely. Gert was calm and silent, slightly bent at her nonwaist, her arms held out in front of her. Rosie looked at them, both amused and uneasy. It was like watching a squirrel, or maybe a chipmunk, stalk a bear.

“I was getting worried about you,” Pam said.

“The thought of a search-party had crossed my mind, actually.”

“I had the most amazing afternoon. How “bout you, though? How you feeling?”

“Better. In my opinion, Midol is the answer to all the world’s problems. Never mind that, what happened to you? You’re glowing!” “really?” “really. So give. How come?”

“Well, let’s see,” Rosie said. She began to tick things off on her fingers.

“I found out my engagement ring was a fake, I swapped it for a picture-I’m going to hang it in my new place when I get it-I got offered a job…”

She paused-a calculating pause-and then added, “… And I met someone interesting.” Pam looked at her with round eyes.

“You’re making it up!”

“Nope. Swear to God. Don’t get your water hot, though, he’s sixty-five if he’s a day.” She was speaking of Robbie Lefferts, but the image her mind briefly presented to her was Bill Steiner, he of the blue silk vest and interesting eyes. But that was ridiculous. At this point in her life she needed love-interest like she needed lip-cancer. And besides, hadn’t she decided that Steiner had to be at least seven years younger than she? Just a baby, really.

“He’s the one who offered me the job. His name is Robbie Lefferts. But never mind him right now-want to see my new picture?”

“Aw, come on an do it!” Gert said from the middle of the room. She sounded both amiable and irritated.

“This ain’t the school dance, sugar.” The last word came out sugah. Cynthia rushed her, the tail of her oversized tank-top flapping. Gert turned sideways, took the slender girl with the tu-tone hair by the forearms, and flipped her. Cynthia went over with her heels in the air and landed on her back.

“Wheeee!” she said, and bounced back to her feet like a rubber ball.

“No, I don’t want to see your picture,” Pam said.

“Not unless it’s of the guy. Is he really sixty-five? I doubt it!”

“Maybe older,” Rosie said.

“There was another one, though. He was the one who told me that the diamond in my engagement ring was only a zirconia. Then he traded me for the picture.” She paused.

“He wasn’t sixty-five.”

“What did he look like?”

“Hazel eyes,” Rosie said, and bent over her picture.

“No more until you tell me what you think of this.”

“Rosie, don’t be a booger!” Rosie grinned-she had almost forgotten the pleasures of a little harmless teasing-and continued to strip off the wrapping paper with which Bill Steiner had carefully covered the first meaningful purchase of her new life.

“Okay,” Gert told Cynthia, who was once more circling her. Gert bounced slowly up and down on her large brown feet. Her breasts rose and subsided like ocean waves beneath the white tee-shirt she was wearing.

“You see how it’s done, now do it. Remember, you can’t flip me-a pipsqueak like you’d wind up in traction, trying to flip a truck like me-but you can help me to flip myself. You ready?” “ready-ready-Teddy,” Cynthia said. Her grin widened, revealing tiny wicked white teeth. To Rosie they looked like the teeth of some small but dangerous animal: a mongoose, perhaps.

“Gertrude Kinshaw, come on down!” Gert rushed. Cynthia seized her meaty forearms, turned a flat, boyish hip into the swell of Gert’s flank with a confidence Rosie knew she herself would never be able to match… and suddenly Gert was airborne, flipping over in midair, a hallucination in a white shirt and gray sweatpants. The shirt slid up to reveal the largest bra Rosie had ever seen; the beige Lycra cups looked like World War I artillery shells. When Gert hit the mats, the room shuddered.

“Yesss!” Cynthia screamed, dancing nimbly around and shaking her clasped hands over her head.

“Big mama goes down! Yessss! YESSSS! Down for the count! Down for the fucking cou-”

Smiling-a rare expression that turned her face into something rather gruesome-Gert picked Cynthia up, held her over her head for a moment with her treelike legs spread, and then began to spin her like an airplane propeller.

“Ouggghhh, I’m gonna puke!” Cynthia screamed, but she was laughing, too. She went around in a speedy blur of green-orange hair and psychedelic tank-top.

“Ouggghhh, I’m gonna EEEEJECT!”

“Gert, that’s enough,” a voice said quietly. It was Anna Stevenson, standing at the foot of the stairs. She was once again dressed in black and white (Rosie had seen her in other combinations, but not many), this time tapered black pants and a white silk blouse with long sleeves and a high neck. Rosie envied her elegance. She always envied Anna’s elegance. Looking slightly ashamed of herself, Gert set Cynthia gently back on her feet.

“I’m okay, Anna,” Cynthia said. She wobbled four zigzag steps across the mat, stumbled, sat down, and began to giggle.

“I see you are,” Anna said dryly.

“I flipped Gert,” she said.

“You should have seen it. I think it was the thrill of my life. Honestly.”

“I’m sure it was, but Gert would tell you she flipped herself,” Anna said.

“You just helped her do what her body wanted to do already.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Cynthia said. She got cautiously to her feet, then promptly plumped back down on her fanny (what there was of it) and giggled some more.

“God, it’s like someone put the whole room on a record-player.” Anna came across the room to where Rosie and Pam were sitting.

“What have you got there?” she asked Rosie.

“A picture. I bought it this afternoon. It’s for my new place, when I get it. My room.” And then, a little fearfully, she added:

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know-let’s get it into the light.” Anna picked the picture up by the sides of the frame, carried it across the room, and set it on the Ping-Pong table. The five women gathered around it in a semicircle. No, Rosie saw, glancing around, now they were seven. Robin St James and Consuelo Delgado had come downstairs and joined them-they were standing behind Cynthia, looking over her narrow, bird-boned shoulders. Rosie waited for someone to break the silence-she was betting on Cynthia-and when nobody did and it began to spin out, she started feeling nervous.

“Well?” she asked at last.

“What do you think? Somebody say something.”

“It’s an odd picture,” Anna said.

“Yeah,” Cynthia agreed.

“Weird. I think I seen one like it before, though.” Anna was looking at Rosie.

“Why did you buy it, Rosie?” Rosie shrugged, feeling more nervous than ever.

“I don’t know that I can explain, really. It was like it called to me.” Anna surprised her-and eased her considerably-by smiling and nodding.

“Yes. That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures-it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads. But this particular painting… is it beautiful to you, Rosie?” Rosie looked at it, trying to see it as she had in the Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn, when its silent tongue had spoken to her with such force that she had been stopped cold, all other thoughts driven from her mind. She looked at the blonde woman in the rose madder toga (or chiton-that was what Mr Lefferts had called it) standing in the high grass at the top of the hill, again noting the plait which hung straight down the middle of her back and the gold armlet above her right elbow. Then she let her gaze move to the ruined temple and the tumbled (god) statue at the foot of the hill. The things the woman in the toga was looking at.

How do you know that’s what she’s looking at? How can you know? You can’t see her face! That was true, of course… but what else was there to look at?

“No,” Rosie said.

“I didn’t buy it because it was beautiful to me. I bought it because it seemed powerful to me. The way it stopped me in my tracks was powerful. Does a picture have to be beautiful to be good, do you think?”

“Nope,” Consuelo said.

“Think about Jackson Pollock. His stuff wasn’t about beauty, it was about energy. Or Diane Arbus, how about her?”

“Who’s she?” Cynthia asked.

“A photographer who got famous taking pictures of women with beards and dwarves smoking cigarettes.”

“Oh.” Cynthia thought this over, and her face suddenly brightened with recollection.

“I saw this picture once, at a catered party back when I was cocktailing. In an art gallery, this was. It was by some guy named Applethorpe, Robert Applethorpe, and you want to know what it was? One guy gobbling another guy’s crank! Seriously! And it wasn’t any fake job like in a skin magazine, either. I mean that guy was making an effort, he was taking care of business and working overtime. You wouldn’t think a guy could get that much of the old broomhandle down his-”

“Mapplethorpe,” Anna said dryly.

“Huh?”

“Mapplethorpe, not Applethorpe.”

“Oh yeah. I guess that’s right.”

“He’s dead now.”

“Oh yeah?” Cynthia asked.

“What got him?”

“AIDS.” Anna was still looking at Rosie’s picture and spoke absently.

“Known as broomhandle disease in some quarters.”

“You said you saw a picture like Rosie’s before,” Gert rumbled.

“Where was that, squirt? Same art gallery?”

“No.” While discussing the Mapplethorpe, Cynthia had only looked interested; now color pinked her cheeks and the corners of her mouth dimpled in a defensive little smile.

“And it wasn’t, you know, really the same, but…”

“Go on, tell,” Rosie said.

“Well, my dad was a Methodist minister back in Bakersfield,” Cynthia said.

“This is Bakersfield, California, where I came from. We lived in the parsonage, and there were all these old pictures in the little meeting-rooms downstairs. Some were Presidents, and some were flowers, and some were dogs. They didn’t matter. They were just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn’t look too bare.” Rosie nodded, thinking of the pictures which had surrounded hers on those dusty pawnshop shelves-gondolas in Venice, fruit in bowls, dogs and foxes. Just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn’t look too bare. Mouths without tongues.

“But there was this one… it was called…”

She frowned, trying to remember.

“I think it was called De Soto Looks West. It showed this explorer in tin pants and a saucepan hat standing on top of a cliff with these Indians around him. And he was lookin over all these miles of woods toward a great big river. The Mississippi, I guess. But see… the thing was…”

She looked at them uncertainly. Her cheeks were pinker than ever and her smile was gone. The bulky bandage over her ear seemed very white, very much there, like some sort of peculiar accessory which had been grafted onto the side of her head, and Rosie found time to wonder-not for the first time since she had come to D amp; S-why so many men were so unkind. What was wrong with them? Was it something that had been left out, or something nasty which had been unaccountably built in, like a bad circuit in a computer?

“Go on, Cynthia,” Anna said.

“We won’t laugh. Will we?” The women shook their heads. Cynthia stuck her hands behind her back like a little girl who has been called upon to recite in front of the entire class.

“Well,” she said, speaking in a much smaller voice than her usual one, “it was like the river was moving, that was the thing that fascinated me. The picture was in the room where my father had his Thursday-night Bible school classes, and I’d go in there and sometimes I’d sit in front of that picture for an hour or more, looking at it like it was television. I was watching the river move… or waiting to see if it would move. Now I can’t remember which, but I was only nine or ten. One thing I do remember is thinking that if it was moving, a raft or a boat or an Indian canoe would go by sooner or later and then I’d know for sure. Except one day I went in and the picture was gone. Poof. I think my mother must have looked in and seen me just sitting there in front of it, you know, and-”

“She got worried and took it away,” Robin said.

“Yeah, probably threw it in the trash,” Cynthia said.

“I was just a kid. But your picture reminds me of it, Rosie.” Pam peered at it closely.

“Yep,” she said, “no wonder. I can see the woman breathing.” They all laughed then, and Rosie laughed with them.

“No, it’s not that,” Cynthia said.

“It’s just… it looks a little old-fashioned, you know… like a schoolroom picture… and it’s pale. Except for the clouds and her dress, the colors are pale. In my De Soto picture everything was pale except for the river. The river was bright silver. It looked more there than the rest of the picture.” Gert turned to Rosie.

“Tell us about your job. I heard you say you got a job.”

“Tell us everything,” Pam said.

“Yes,” Anna said.

“Tell us everything, and then I wonder if you could step into my office for a few minutes.”

“Is it… is it what I’ve been waiting for?” Anna smiled.

“As a matter of fact, I think it is.”

“It’s an optimum room, one of the best on our list, and I hope you’ll be as delighted as I am,” Anna said. There was a stack of fliers perched precariously on the corner of her desk, announcing the forthcoming Daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert, an event which was part fundraiser, part community relations, and part celebration. Anna took one, turned it over, and sketched quickly.

“Kitchen here, hide-a-bed here, and a little living-room area here. This is the bathroom. It’s hardly big enough to turn around in, and in order to sit on the commode you’ll practically have to put your feet in the shower, but it’s yours.”

“Yes,” Rosie murmured.

“Mine.” A feeling that she hadn’t had in weeks-that all this was a wonderful dream and at any moment she would wake up beside Norman again-was creeping over her.

“The view is nice-it’s not Lake Drive, of course, but Bryant Park is very pretty, especially in the summer. Second floor. The neighborhood got a little ragged in the eighties, but it’s pulling itself together again now.”

“It’s as if you’ve stayed there yourself,” Rosie said. Anna shrugged-a slender, pretty gesture-and drew the hall in front of the room, then a flight of stairs. She sketched with the no-frills economy of a draftsman. She spoke without looking up.

“I’ve been there on a good many occasions,” she said, “but of course that’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No.”

“A little of me goes out with every woman when she leaves. I suppose that sounds corny, but I don’t care. It’s true, and that’s all that really matters. So what do you think?” Rosie hugged her impulsively, and instantly regretted it when she felt Anna stiffen. I shouldn’t have done it, she thought as she let go. I knew better. And she had. Anna Stevenson was kind, there was no doubt about that in Rosie’s mind-maybe even saintly-but there was that strange arrogance, and there was this, too: Anna didn’t like people in her space. Anna especially didn’t like to be touched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing back. “don’t be silly,” Anna said brusquely.

“What do you think?”

“I love it,” Rosie said. Anna smiled and the small awkwardness was behind them. She drew an X on the wall of the living-room area, near a tiny rectangle which represented the room’s only window.

“Your new picture… I’ll bet you decide it belongs right here.”

“I’ll bet I do, too.” Anna put the pencil down.

“I’m delighted to be able to help you, Rosie, and I’m so glad you came to us. Here, you’re leaking.” It was the Kleenex again, but Rosie doubted it was the same box Anna had offered her during their first interview in this room; she had an idea that a lot of Kleenex got used in here. She took one and wiped her eyes.

“You saved my life, you know,” she said hoarsely.

“You saved my life and I’ll never, ever forget it.”

“Flattering but inaccurate,” Anna said in her dry, calm voice.

“I saved your life no more than Cynthia flipped Gert downstairs in the rec room. You saved your own life when you took a chance and walked out on the man who was hurting you.”

“Just the same, thank you. Just for being here.”

“You’re very welcome,” Anna said, and for the only time during her stay at D amp; S, Rosie saw tears standing in Anna Stevenson’s eyes. She handed the box of Kleenex back across the desk with a little smile.

“Here,” she said.

“Looks like you’ve sprung a leak yourself Anna laughed, took a Kleenex, used it, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

“I hate to cry. It’s my deepest, darkest secret. Every now and then I think I’m done with it, that I must be done with it, and then I do it again. It’s sort of the way I feel about men.” For another brief moment, Rosie found herself thinking about Bill Steiner and his hazel eyes. Anna took the pencil again and scratched something below the rough floor-plan she’d drawn. Then she handed the sheet to Rosie. It was an address she’d jotted down: 897 Trenton Street.

“That’s where you live,” Anna said.

“It’s most of the way across the city from here, but you can use the buses now, can’t you?” Smiling-and still crying a little-Rosie nodded.

“You may give that address to some of the friends you’ve made here, and eventually to friends you make beyond here, but right now nobody knows but the two of us.” What she was saying felt like a set-piece to Rosie-a goodbye speech.

“People who show up at your place will not have found out how to get there at this place. It’s just how we do things at D and S. After twenty years of working with abused women, I’m convinced it’s the only way to do things.” Pam had explained all this to Rosie; so had Consuelo Delgado and Robin St James. These explanations had taken place during Big Fun Hour, which was what the residents called evening chores at D amp; S, but Rosie hadn’t really needed them; it only took three or four therapy sessions in the front room for a person of reasonable intelligence to learn most cf what she needed to know about the protocols of the house. There was Anna’s List, and there were also Anna’s Rules.

“How worried are you about him?” Anna asked. Rosie’s attention had wandered a little; now it snapped back in a hurry. At first she wasn’t even sure who Anna was talking about.

“Your husband-how worried are you? I know that in your first two or three weeks here, you expressed fears that he would come after you… that he’d “track you down,” in your words. How do you feel about that now?” Rosie considered the question carefully. First of all, fear was an inadequate word to express her feelings about Norman during her first week or two at D amp; S; even terror didn’t completely serve, because the core of her feelings concerning him were lapped about-and to some degree altered-by other emotions: shame at having failed in her marriage, homesickness for a few possessions she had cared deeply about (Pooh’s Chair, for instance), a sensation of euphoric freedom which seemed to renew itself at some point each day, and a relief so cold it was somehow horrible; the sort of relief a wire-walker might feel after tottering at the furthest edge of balance while crossing a deep canyon… and then recovering. Fear had been the keychord, though; there was no doubt about that. During those first two weeks at D amp; S she’d had the same dream over and over: she was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the porch when a brand-new red Sentra pulled up to the curb in front. The driver’s door opened and Norman got out. He was wearing a black tee-shirt with a map of South Vietnam on it. Sometimes the words beneath the map said HOME IS WHERE THE HEART is; sometimes they said HOMELESS amp; HAVE AIDS. His pants were splattered with blood. Tiny bones-finger-bones, they looked like-dangled from his earlobes. In one hand he held some sort of mask which was splattered with blood and dark clots of meat. She tried to get up from the chair she was in and couldn’t; it was as if she were paralyzed. She could only sit and watch him come slowly up the walk toward her with his bone earrings bobbing. Could only sit there as he told her he wanted to talk to her up close. He smiled and she saw his teeth were also covered with blood.

“Rosie?” Anna asked softly.

“Are you here?”

“Yes,” she said, speaking in a little breathless rush.

“I’m here, and yes, I’m still afraid of him.” That’s not exactly surprising, you know. On some level I suppose you’ll always be afraid of him. But you’ll be ail right as long as you remember that you’re going to have longer and longer periods when you’re not afraid of anything… and when you don’t even think of him. But that isn’t exactly what I asked, either. I asked if you’re still afraid that he’ll come after you.” Yes, she was still afraid. No, not as afraid. She had heard a lot of his business-related telephone conversations over the last fourteen years, and she’d heard him and his colleagues discuss a lot of cases, sometimes in the rec room downstairs, sometimes out on the patio. They barely noticed her when she brought them warm-ups for their coffee or fresh bottles of beer. It was almost always Norman who led these discussions, his voice quick and impatient as he leaned over the table with a beer bottle half-buried in one big fist, hurrying the others along, overriding their doubts, refusing to entertain their speculations. On rare occasions he had even discussed cases with her. He wasn’t interested in her ideas, of course, but she was a handy wall against which to bounce his own. He was quick, a man who wanted results yesterday, and he had a tendency to lose interest in cases once they were three weeks old. He called them what Gert had called her self-defense moves: leftovers. Was she a leftover to him now? How much she wanted to believe that. How hard she had tried. And yet, she couldn’t… quite… do it.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“A part of me thinks that if he was going to show up, he would have already. But there’s another part that thinks he’s probably still looking. And he’s not a truck-driver or a plumber; he’s a cop. He knows how to look for people.” Anna nodded.

“Yes, I know. That makes him especially dangerous, and that means you’ll have to be especially careful. It’s also important for you to remember you’re not alone. The days when you were are over for you, Rosie. Will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And if he does show up, what will you do?” “slam the door in his face and lock it.”

“And then?”

“Call 911.”

“With no hesitation?”

“None at all,” she said, and that was the truth, but she would be afraid. Why? Because Norman was a cop and they would be cops, the people she called. Because she knew Norman had a way of getting his way-he was an alpha-dog. Because of what Norman had told her, again and again and again: that all cops were brothers.

“And after you called 911? What would you do then?”

“I’d call you.” Anna nodded.

“You’re going to be fine. Absolutely fine.”

“I know.” She spoke with confidence, but part of her still wondered… would always wonder, she supposed, unless he showed up and took the matter out of the realm of speculation. If that happened, would all of this life she had lived over the last month and a half-D amp; S, the Whitestone Hotel, Anna, her new friends-fade like a dream on waking the moment she opened her door to an evening knock and found Norman standing there? Was that possible? Rosie’s eyes shifted to her picture, leaning against the wall beside the door to the office, and knew it was not. The picture was facing inward so only the backing showed, but she found she could see it anyway; already the image of the woman on the hill with the thundery sky above and the half-buried temple below was crystal clear in her mind, not the least dreamlike. She didn’t think anything could turn her picture into a dream. And with luck, these questions of mine will never have to be answered, she thought, and smiled a little.

“What about the rent, Anna? How much?”

“Three hundred and twenty dollars a month. Will you be all right for at least two months?”

“Yes.” Anna knew that, of course; if Rosie hadn’t had enough runway to assure her of a safe take-off, they would not have been having this discussion.

“That seems very reasonable. As far as the room-rent goes, I’ll be fine to start with.”

“To start with,” Anna repeated. She steepled her fingers under her chin and directed a keen look across the cluttered desk at Rosie.

“Which brings me to the subject of your new job. It sounds absolutely wonderful, and yet at the same time it sounds…”

“Iffy? Impermanent?” These were words which had occurred to her on her walk home… along with the fact that, despite Robbie Lefferts’s enthusiasm, she didn’t really know if she could do this job yet, and wouldn’t-not for sure-until next Monday morning. Anna nodded.

“They aren’t the words I would have chosen myself-I don’t know what words would be, exactly-but they’ll do. The point is, if you leave the Whitestone, I can’t absolutely guarantee I could get you back in, especially on short notice. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority.”

“Of course. I understand that.”

“I’d do what I could, naturally, but-”

“If the job Mr Lefferts offered me doesn’t pan out, I’ll look for work waitressing,” Rosie said quietly.

“My back is much better now, and I think I could do it. Thanks to Dawn, I can probably get a late-shift job in a Seven-Eleven or a Piggly-Wiggly, if it comes to that.” Dawn was Dawn Verecker, who gave rudimentary clerking lessons on a cash register that was kept in one of the back rooms. Rosie had been an attentive student. Anna was still looking at Rosie keenly.

“But you don’t think it will come to that, do you?”

“No.” She directed another glance down at her picture.

“I think it will work out. In the meantime, I owe you so much…”

“You know what to do about that, don’t you?”

“Pass it on.” Anna nodded.

“That’s right. If you should see a version of yourself walking down the street someday-a woman who looks lost and afraid of her own shadow-just pass it on.”

“Can I ask you something, Anna?”

“Anything at all.”

“You said your parents founded Daughters and Sisters. Why? And why do you carry it on? Or pass it on, if you like that better?” Anna opened one of her desk drawers, rummaged, and brought out a thick paperback book. She tossed it across the desk to Rosie, who picked it up, stared at it, and experienced a moment of recall so vivid it was like one of the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes suffered. In that instant she did not just remember the wetness on the insides of her thighs, a sensation like small, sinister kisses, but seemed to re-experience it. She could see Norman’s shadow as he stood in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She could see his shadow-fingers pulling restlessly at a shadow-cord. She could hear him telling the person on the other end that of course it was an emergency, his wife was pregnant. And then she saw him come back into the room and start picking up the pieces of the paperback he had torn out of her hands before beginning to hit her. The same redhead was on the cover of the book Anna had tossed her. This time she was dressed in a ballgown and caught up in the arms of a handsome gypsy who had flashing eyes and-apparently-a pair of rolled-up socks in the front of his breeches. This is the trouble, Norman had said. How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?

“Rose?” It was Anna, sounding concerned. She also sounded very far away, like the voices you sometimes heard in dreams.

“Rose, are you all right?” She looked up from the book (Misery’s Lover, the title proclaimed in that same red foil, and, below it, Paul Sheldon’s Most Torrid Novel!) and forced a smile.

“Yes, I’m fine. This looks hot.”

“Bodice-rippers are one of my secret vices,” Anna said.

“Better than chocolate because they don’t make you fat and the men in them are better than real men because they don’t call you at four in the morning, drunk and whining for a second chance. But they’re trash, and do you know why?”

Rosie shook her head.

“Because the whole round world is explained in them. There are reasons for everything. They may be as farfetched as the stories in the supermarket tabloids and they may run counter to everything a halfway intelligent person understands about how people behave in real life, but they’re there, by God. In a book like Misery’s Lover, Anna Stevenson would undoubtedly run Daughters and Sisters because she had been an abused woman herself… or because her mother had been. But I was never abused, and so far as I know, my mother never was, either. I was often ignored by my husband-we’ve been divorced for twenty years, in case Pam or Gert hasn’t told you-but never abused. In life, Rosie, people sometimes do things, both bad and good, just-because. Do you believe that?” Rosie nodded her head slowly. She was thinking of all the times Norman had hit her, hurt her, made her cry… and then one night, for no reason at all, he might bring her half a dozen roses and take her out to dinner. If she asked why, what the occasion was, he usually just shrugged and said he “felt like treating her.” Just-because, in other words. Mommy, why do I have to go to bed at eight even in the summertime, when the sky is still light outside? Just-because. Daddy, why did grandpa have to die? Just-because. Norman undoubtedly thought these occasional treats and whirlwind dates made up for a lot, that they must offset what he probably thought of as his “bad temper.” He would never know (and never understand even if she told him) that they terrified her even more than his anger and his bouts of rage. Those, at least, she knew how to deal with.

“I hate the idea that everything we do gets done because of the things people have done to us,” Anna said moodily.

“It takes everything out of our hands, it doesn’t account in the least for the occasional saints and devils we glimpse among us, and most important of all, it doesn’t ring true to my heart. It’s good in books like Paul Sheldon’s, though. It’s comforting. Lets you believe, at least for a little while, that God is sane and nothing bad will happen to the people that you like in the story. May I have my book back? I’m going to finish it tonight. With lots of hot tea. Gallons.” Rosie smiled, and Anna smiled back.

“You’ll come for the picnic, won’t you, Rosie? It’s going to be at Ettinger’s Pier. We’ll need all the help we can get. We always do.”

“Oh, you bet,” Rosie said.

“Unless Mr Lefferts decides I’m a prodigy and wants me to work on Saturdays, that is.”

“I doubt that.” Anna got up and came around the desk; Rosie also stood. And now that their talk was almost over, the most elementary question of all occurred to her.

“When can I move in, Anna?”

“Tomorrow, if you want.” Anna bent and picked up the picture. She looked thoughtfully at the words charcoaled on the backing, then turned it around.

“You said it was odd,” Rosie said.

“Why?” Anna tapped the glass fronting with one nail.

“Because the woman is at the center, and yet her back is turned. That seems an extremely peculiar approach to this sort of painting, which has been otherwise quite conventionally executed.” Now she glanced over at Rosie, and when she went on, her tone was a bit apologetic.

“The building at the bottom of the hill is out of perspective, by the way.”

“Yes. The man who sold me the picture mentioned that. Mr LefFerts said it was probably done on purpose. Or some of the elements would be lost.”

“I suppose that’s true.” She looked at it for several moments longer.

“It does have something, doesn’t it? A fraught quality.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.” Anna laughed.

“Neither do I… except that there’s something about it that makes me think of my romance novels. Strong men, lusty women, gushing hormones. Fraught’s the only word I can think of that comes close to describing what I mean. A calm-before-the-storm thing. Probably it’s just the sky.” She turned the frame around again and restudied the words charcoaled on the backing.

“Is this what caught your eye to start with? Your own name?”

“Nope,” Rosie said, “by the time I saw Rose Madder on the back, I already knew I wanted the painting.” She smiled.

“It was just a coincidence, I guess-the kind that isn’t allowed in the romance novels you like.”

“I see.” But Anna didn’t look as if she did, quite. She ran the ball of her thumb across the printed letters. They smudged easily.

“Yes,” Rose said. Suddenly, for no reason at all, she felt very uneasy. It was as if, somewhere off in that other timezone where evening had already begun, a man was thinking of her.

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

“I suppose you’re right.” Anna handed the picture over to her.

“But it’s funny about the charcoal it’s written in, just the same.”

“Funny how?”

“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,” Anna said.