Rose Madder by Stephen King

‘”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.

6

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—