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.
IV
The Manta Ray
1
Norman left his hometown on Sunday, the day before Rosie was scheduled to start her new job . . . the job she was still not entirely sure she could do. He left on the 11:05 Continental Express bus. This wasn’t a matter of economy; it was a matter — a vital matter — of slipping back inside Rose’s head. Norman was still not able to admit how badly her totally unexpected flight had rocked him. He tried to tell himself he was upset because of the bank card — only that and nothing more — but his heart knew better. It was about how he’d never had a clue.
Not so much as a premonition.
There had been a long time in their marriage when he had known her every waking thought and most of her dreams. The fact that that had changed was driving him nuts. His biggest fear — unacknowledged but not entirely hidden from the deeper run of his thoughts
— was that she had been planning her escape for weeks, months, possibly even a year. If he had known the truth of how and why she had left (if he had known about the single drop of blood, in other words), he would perhaps have been comforted. Or perhaps he would have been more unsettled than ever.
Regardless, he realized that his first impulse — to take off his husband’s hat and put on his detective’s hat — had been a bad idea. In the wake of Oliver Robbins’s phone-call, he had realized that he needed to take off both of his hats and put on one of hers. He would have to think like her, and riding the bus she had ridden was a way of starting to do that.
He climbed up the bus steps with his overnight bag in his hand and stood by the driver’s seat, looking down the aisle.
‘You want to move it, buddy?’ a man asked from behind him.
‘You want to find out how getting your nose broken feels?’ Norman replied without missing a beat. The guy behind him didn’t have anything to say to that.
He took a moment or two longer, deciding which seat
(she)
he wanted, then made his way down the aisle to it. She wouldn’t have gone all the way to the back of the bus; his fastidious Rose would never have taken a seat near the toilet cubicle unless all the other seats were full, and Norman’s good friend Oliver Robbins (from whom he had bought his ticket, just as she had) had assured him that the 11:05 was hardly ever full.
Nor would she want to sit over the wheels (too bumpy) or too close to the front (too conspicuous). Nope, just about halfway down would suit her, and on the left side of the bus, because she was left-handed, and people who thought they were choosing at random were in many cases simply going in the direction of their dominant hands.
In his years as a cop, Norman had come to believe that telepathy was perfectly possible, but it was hard work . . . impossible work, if you were wearing the wrong hat. You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn’t a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking. And when you finally had that, you could take a shortcut — you could go racing across the curve of your quarry’s thoughts and some night, when he or she least expected it, there you’d be, stepping out from behind the door . . . or lying under the bed with a knife in your hand, ready to ram it upward through the mattress the moment the springs squeaked and the poor sap (sapette, in this case) lay down.