Rose Madder (68 page)

“It's Rosie McClendon again,” she said. “We got cut off.” She took a calculated pause, then laughed nervously. “Oh hell, that's not exactly true. I got excited and pulled the phone jack out of the wall. Things are a little crazy here right now.”

“Yes, ma'am. An ambulance has been dispatched to 897 Trenton, as per request Rose McClendon. We have a report from the same address of shots fired, ma'am, is your report a gunshot wound?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do you want me to connect you with a police officer?”

“I want to speak to Lieutenant Hale. He's a detective, so I guess I want DET-DIV, or whatever you call it here.”

There was a pause, and when the 911 operator spoke
again, he sounded a little less like a machine. “Yes, ma'am, Detective Division is what we call it—DET-DIV. I'll put you through.”

“Thanks. Do you want my phone number, or do you trap calls?”

Definite surprise this time. “I've got your number, ma'am.”

“I thought you did.”

“Hold on, I'm transferring you.”

As she waited, she picked up the bottle of Pepsi and wafted it under her nose, as she had the other, much tinier, bottle. She thought she could smell just the slightest tang of bitterness . . . but perhaps that was only her imagination. Not that it mattered. Either he'd drink it or he wouldn't.
Ka,
she thought, and then,
What?

Before she could go any further with that, the phone was picked up. “Detective Division, Sergeant Williams.”

She gave him Hale's name and was put on hold. Outside her room and down the hallway, the murmuring and the groaning replies continued. The sirens were much closer now.

“H
ello, Hale!” a voice barked suddenly into her ear. It didn't sound at all like the laid-back, thoughtful man she had met earlier. “Is that you, Ms. McClendon?”

“Yes—”

“Are you all right?” Still barking, and now he reminded her of all the cops who'd ever sat in their rec room with their shoes off and their feet smelling up the place. He couldn't wait for information she would have given him on her own; no, he was upset, and now he had to dance around her feet, barking like a terrier.

Men,
she thought, and rolled her eyes.

“Yes.” She spoke slowly, like a playground monitor trying to calm a hysterical child who has taken a tumble from the jungle gym. “Yes, I'm fine. Bill—Mr. Steiner—is fine, too. We're both fine.”

“Is it your husband?” He sounded outraged, only a step or two away from outright panic. A bull in an open field, pawing
the ground and looking for the red rag which has provoked it. “Was it Daniels?”

“Yes. But he's gone now.” She hesitated, then added: “I don't know where.”
But I expect it's hot and the air conditioning's broken.

“We'll find him,” Hale said. “I promise you that, Ms. McClendon—we'll find him.”

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” she said softly, and turned her eyes to the open closet door. She touched her upper left arm, where she could still feel the fading heat of the armlet. “I have to hang up now. Norman shot a man from upstairs, and there may be something I can do for him. Are you coming over here?”

“You're damned right I am.”

“Then I'll see you when you get here. Goodbye.” She hung up before Hale could say anything else. Bill came in, and as he did, the hall lights came on behind him.

He looked around, surprised. “It must have been a breaker . . . which means he was in the cellar. But if he was going to flip one of them, I wonder why he didn't—” Before he could finish, he began to cough again, and hard. He bent over, grimacing, holding his hands cupped against his bruised and swollen throat.

“Here,” she said, hurrying across to him. “Drink some of this. It just came out of the icebox, and it's cold.”

He took the Pepsi, drank several swallows, then held the bottle out and looked at it curiously. “Tastes a little funny,” he said.

“That's because your throat's all swollen. Probably it's bled a little, too, and you're tasting that. Come on, down the hatch. I hate hearing you cough like that.”

He drank the rest, put the bottle on the coffee-table, and when he looked at her again, she saw a dumb blankness in his eyes that frightened her badly.

“Bill? Bill, what is it? What's wrong?”

That blank look held for a moment, then he laughed and shook his head. “You won't believe it. Stress of the day, I guess, but . . .”

“What? Won't believe what?”

“For a couple of seconds there I couldn't remember who you were,” he said. “I couldn't remember your
name,
Rosie. But what's even crazier is that for a couple of seconds I couldn't remember
mine,
either.”

She laughed and stepped toward him. She could hear a trample of footfalls—EMTs, probably—coming up the stairs, but she didn't care. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him with all her might. “My name's Rosie,” she said. “I'm Rosie.
Really
Rosie.”

“Right,” he said, kissing her temple. “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie. Rosie.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her face against his shoulder and in the darkness behind her closed lids she saw the unnatural mouth of the spider and the black eyes of the vixen, eyes too still to give away either madness or sanity. She saw these things and knew she would continue to see them for a long time. And in her head two words rang, tolling like an iron bell:

I repay.

L
ieutenant Hale lit a cigarette without bothering to ask permission, crossed his legs, and gazed at Rosie McClendon and Bill Steiner, two people suffering a classic case of love-sickness; every time they looked into each other's eyes, Hale could almost read
TILT
printed across their pupils. It was enough to make him wonder if they hadn't somehow gotten rid of the troublesome Norman themselves . . . except he knew better. They weren't the type. Not these two.

He had dragged a kitchen chair into the living-room area and now sat on it backward, with one arm laid over the back and his chin resting on his arm. Rosie and Bill were crammed onto the loveseat that fancied itself a sofa. A little over an hour had elapsed since Rosie's original 911 call. The wounded upstairs tenant, John Briscoe by name, had been taken to East Side Receiving with what one of the EMTs had described as “a flesh-wound with pretensions.”

Now things had finally quieted down a little. Hale liked that. There was only one thing he would like more, and that was to know where the hell Norman Daniels had gotten himself off to.

“One of the instruments is out of tune here,” he said, “and it's screwing up the whole band.”

Rosie and Bill glanced at each other. Hale was sure of the bewilderment
in Bill Steiner's eyes; about Rosie he was a little less sure. There was something there, he was almost sure of it. Something she wasn't telling.

He paged slowly back through his notebook, taking his time, wanting them to fidget a little. Neither of them did. It surprised him that Rosie could be so still—
if,
that was, she was holding back—but he had either forgotten an important thing about her or not fully taken it in to begin with. She had never actually sat in on a police interrogation, but she had listened to thousands of replays and discussions as she silently served Norman and his friends drinks or dumped their ashtrays. She was hip to his technique.

“All right,” Hale said when he was sure neither of them was going to give him a string to pull. “Here's where we are now in our thinking. Norman comes here. Norman somehow manages to kill Officers Alvin Demers and Lee Babcock. Babcock goes into the shotgun seat, Demers into the trunk. Norman knocks out the light in the vestibule, then goes down into the basement and turns off a bunch of circuit breakers, pretty much at random, although they're well marked on the diagrams pasted inside the breaker boxes. Why? We don't know. He's nuts. Then he goes back to the black-and-white and pretends to be Officer Demers. When you and Mr. Steiner show up, he hits you from behind—chokes hell out of Mr. Steiner, chases you guys upstairs, shoots Mr. Briscoe when he tries to crash the party, then breaks in your door. All right so far?”

“Yes, I think so,” Rosie said. “It was pretty confusing, but that must be about how it happened.”

“But here's the part I don't get. You guys hid in the closet—”

“Yes—”

“—and in comes Norman like Freddy Jason or whatever his name is in those horror pictures—”

“Well, not exactly like—”

“—and he charges around like a bull in the old china shop, stopping in the bathroom long enough to shoot a couple holes in the shower curtain . . . and then he charges out again. Is that what you're telling me he did?”

“That's what happened,” she said. “Naturally, we didn't
see
him charging around, because we were in the closet, but we heard it.”

“This crazy, sick excuse for a cop goes through hell to
find you, gets pissed on, gets his nose pretty much demolished, murders two cops, and then . . . what? Kills a shower curtain and runs? That's what you're telling me?”

“Yes.” There was no sense in saying more, she saw. He didn't suspect her of anything illegal—he'd've been cutting her a lot more slack, at least to start with, if he did—but if she tried to amplify her simple agreement, he might go on with his terrier-yapping all night, and it was already giving her a headache.

Hale looked at Bill. “Is that how you remember it?”

Bill shook his head. “I
don't
remember it,” he said. “The last thing I'm clear on is pulling up on my Harley in front of that police-car. Lots of fog. And after that, it's
all
fog.”

Hale tossed his hands up in disgust. Rose took Bill's hand, put it on her thigh, covered it with both of her own, and smiled sweetly up at him.

“That's okay,” she said. “I'm sure it will all come back to you in time.”

B
ill promised her he would stay. He kept his word—and fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow borrowed from the little sofa. It didn't surprise Rosie. She lay down beside him on the narrow bed, watching the fog billow past the streetlight outside, and waited for her eyelids to grow heavy. When they didn't, she got up, went into the closet, turned on the light, and sat crosslegged in front of the picture.

Silent moonlight informed it. The temple was a pallid sepulchre. The carrion-birds circled overhead.
Will they dine on Norman's flesh tomorrow, when the sun comes up?
she wondered. She didn't think so. Rose Madder had put Norman in a place where birds never went.

She looked at the painting a moment or two longer, then reached out to it, feeling the frozen brush-strokes with her fingers. The touch reassured her. She turned off the light and went back to bed. This time sleep came quickly.

S
he woke up—and woke Bill up—early on the first day of her life without Norman. She was shrieking.

“I repay! I repay! Oh God her eyes! Her black eyes!”

“Rosie,” he said, shaking her shoulder.
“Rosie!”

She looked at him, blankly at first, her face wet with sweat and her nightgown drenched with it, the cotton clinging to the hollows and curves of her body. “Bill?”

He nodded. “You bet it is. You're okay. We both are.”

She shuddered and clung to him. Comfort quickly turned to something else. She lay beneath him, right hand locked around her left wrist behind his neck, and as he entered her (she had never experienced such gentleness or felt such confidence with Norman), her eyes went to her jeans, lying close by on the floor. The ceramic bottle was still in the watch-pocket, and she judged there were at least three drops of that bitterly attractive water left in it—maybe more.

I'll take it,
she thought, just before her ability to think coherently ceased.
I'll take it, of course I will. I'll forget, and that'll be for the best—who needs dreams like these?

But there was a deep part of her—much deeper than her old girlfriend Practical-Sensible—that knew the answer to that:
she
needed dreams like those, that was who.
She
did. And although she'd keep the bottle and what was inside it, she wouldn't keep it for herself. Because she who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it.

She looked up at Bill. He was looking down at her, his eyes wide and hazy with pleasure. His, she found, was hers, and she let herself go where he was taking her, and they stayed where they were for quite some time, brave sailors voyaging in the little ship of her bed.

A
round midmorning, Bill ventured out to get bagels and the Sunday paper. Rosie showered, dressed, then sat on the edge of the bed in her bare feet. She could smell their separate
scents and also the one they made together. She thought she had never smelled anything nicer.

Best of all? Easy. No spot of blood on the top sheet. No blood anywhere.

Her jeans had migrated under the bed. She hooked them out with her toes, then retrieved the little bottle from the watch-pocket. She took the jeans into the bathroom, where she kept a plastic clothes basket behind the door. The bottle would go into the medicine cabinet, at least for the time being, where it could hide very easily behind her bottle of Motrin. She fished in the other pockets of the jeans before tossing them in the dirty clothes, a housewifely habit so old she was completely unaware she was doing it . . . until her fingers closed on something deep in the more frequently used left front pocket. She brought it out, held it up, then shivered as Rose Madder spoke inside her head.
A souvenir . . . do with it as you will.