Rose Madder (49 page)

She did not seem to be anywhere.

N
orman was too busy looking for Rose to see that the black woman who had noticed him earlier was noticing him again. This was an extremely large woman, one who actually did bear a slight resemblance to William “Refrigerator” Perry.

Gert was in the playground, pushing a little boy on a swing. Now she stopped and shook her head, as if to clear it. She was still looking at the cripple in the motorcycle jacket, although now she could only see him from behind. There was a bumper sticker on the back-support of his wheelchair.
I AM A MAN WHO RESPECTS WOMEN
, it said.

You're also a man who looks familiar,
Gert thought.
Or is it just that you look like some movie actor?

“Come on, Gert!” Melanie Huggins's little boy commanded. “Push! I wanna go high! I wanna loop the loop!”

Gert pushed higher, although little Stanley wasn't going to get anywhere near looping the loop—not in
this
litigious age, thank you very much. Still, his laughter was a kick; it made her grin herself. She pushed him a little higher, dismissing the man in the wheelchair from her mind. From the
front
of her mind.

“I wanna loop the loop, Gert! Please! Come on,
pleeeese!”

Well,
Gert thought,
maybe once wouldn't hurt.

“Hold on tight, hero,” she said. “Here we go.”

N
orman kept rolling even after he knew he'd gone by the last incoming picnickers. He felt it wise to make himself scarce while the women from Daughters and Sisters and their friends were eating. Also, his sense of panic had continued to grow, and he was afraid someone might notice something wrong with him if he stuck around. Rose should be here, and he should have seen her by now, but he hadn't. He didn't think she
was
here, and that made no sense. She was a mouse, for Christ's sake, a
mouse,
and if she wasn't here with her fellow Mouska-Cunts, where was she? Where did she have to go, if not here?

He wheeled beneath an arch reading
WELCOME TO THE MIDWAY
and traveled along the broad paved way, not paying much attention to where he was going. The best thing about riding in a wheelchair, he was discovering, was people watched out for
you.

The park was filling up, and he supposed that was good, but nothing else was good. His head was throbbing again, and the hurrying crowds made him feel strange, like an alien inside his own skin. Why were so many of them
laughing,
for instance? What in God's name did they have to laugh about? Didn't they understand what the world was like? Didn't they see that everything
—everything!—
was on the verge of going down the tubes? He realized with dismay that they all looked like lovergirls and fagboys to him now, all of them, as if the world had degenerated into a cesspool of one-sex lovers, women who were thieves, men who were liars, none of them with any respect for the glue that held society together.

His headache was getting worse, and the bright little zigzags had started to show around the edges of things again. The noises of this place had grown maddeningly loud, as if some cruel gnome inside his head had taken over the controls and was gradually turning the volume all the way up to max decibels. The rumble of the cars mounting the first slope of the rollercoaster track sounded like an avalanche, and the screams of the riders as the cars fell into the first drop tore at his ears like shrapnel. The calliope farting out its steamy tunes, the electronic chatter from the video arcade,
the buglike whine of go-karts speeding around the Rally Racer track . . . these sounds converged inside his confused and frightened mind like hungry monsters. Worst of all, pervading everything and digging into the meat of his brain like the blade of a dull auger, was the chant of the mechanical sailor in front of the Haunted Ship. He felt that if he had to listen to it bellow “Ahoy for
terror,
matey!” just one more time, his mind would snap like a dry stick of kindling. Either that or he would simply bolt out of this dumb fucking chair and go screaming through—

Stop, Normie.

He wheeled into a small empty space between the booth selling fried dough and the one selling pizza by the slice, and there he
did
stop, facing away from the milling crowds. When that particular voice came, Norman always listened. It was the voice which had told him nine years ago that the only way to shut Wendy Yarrow up was to kill her, and it was also the voice which had finally persuaded him to take Rose to the hospital the time she'd broken a rib.

Normie, you've gone crazy,
that calm, lucid voice said now.
By the standards of the courtrooms where you've testified thousands of times, you're as nutty as a Payday candybar. You know that, don't you?

Faintly, blowing to him on the breeze off the lake: “Ahoy for
terror,
matey!”

Normie?

“Yeah,” he whispered. He began to massage his aching temples with the tips of his fingers. “Yeah, I guess I do know that.”

All right; a person can work with his handicaps . . . if he's willing to acknowledge them. You have to find out where she is, and that means taking a risk. But you took a risk just coming here, right?

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Daddy, I did.”

Okay, the bullshit stops here. Listen up, Normie.

Norman listened up.

G
ert pushed Stan Huggins on the swings for a little while longer, his cries for her to “loop him around the loop some more”
becoming steadily more tiresome. She had no intention of doing that again; the first time he'd damned near fallen out, and for one second Gert had been sure she was going to drop dead of a heart attack.

Also, her mind had returned to the guy. The bald guy.

Did
she know him from somewhere? Did she?

Could it have been Rosie's husband?

Oh, that's insane. Paranoia deluxe.

Probably, yeah. Almost certainly. But the idea nibbled. The size looked about right . . . although when you were looking at a guy in a wheelchair it was hard to tell, wasn't it? A man like Rosie's husband would know that, of course.

Quit it. You're jumping at shadows.

Stan tired of the swings and asked Gert if she'd climb on the jungle gym with him. She smiled and shook her head.

“Why
not?”
he asked, pouting.

“Because your old pal Gert hasn't had a jungle gym body since she ditched the diapers and rubber pants,” she said. She saw Randi Franklin over by the slide and suddenly made a decision. If she didn't chase this a little, it would drive her nuts. She asked Randi if she'd keep an eye on Stan for awhile. The young woman said sure and Gert called her an angel, which Randi definitely was not . . . but a little positive reinforcement never hurt anyone.

“Where you goin, Gert?” Stan asked, clearly disappointed.

“Got to run an errand, big boy. Chase on over there and slide awhile with Andrea and Paul.”

“Slidin's for babies,” Stan said morosely, but he went.

G
ert walked up the path which led from the picnic area to the main drag, and when she got there she made her way to the entrance booths. There were long lines at both the All-Day and the Half-Day, and she was nearly positive the man she wanted to talk to would not be helpful—she had already seen him in operation.

The back door of the All-Day booth was open. Gert stood where she was a moment longer, gathering her resolve, and then marched toward it. She had no official capacity at
Daughters and Sisters, never had, but she loved Anna, who had helped her out of a relationship with a man who had sent her to the emergency room nine times when Gert had been between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Now she was thirty-seven, and had been Anna's informal second-in-command for almost fifteen years. Teaching battered newcomers what Anna had taught her—that they didn't have to keep going back to abusive husbands and boyfriends and fathers and step-parents—was only one of her functions. She taught self-defense skills (not because they saved lives but because they salvaged dignity); she helped Anna plan fundraisers like this one; she worked with Anna's frail and elderly accountant to keep the place on something which resembled a paying basis. And when there was security work to be done, she tried her best to do it. It was in this capacity that she moved forward now, unsnapping the clasp of her handbag as she did so. It was Gert's traveling office.

“Beg pardon, sir,” she said, leaning in the open back door. “Could I speak to you a second?”

“Customer Service booth is to the left of the Haunted Ship,” he said without turning around. “If you have a problem, go there.”

“You don't understand,” Gert said. She took a deep breath and worked to speak evenly. “This is a problem only you can help me with.”

“That's twenty-four dollars,” the ticket-agent said to the young couple on the other side of the window, “and six is your change. Enjoy your day.” To Gert, still without turning his head: “I'm busy here, lady, in case you didn't notice. So if you want to complain about how the games are rigged, or something of that nature, you just toddle on down to Customer Service and—”

That was it; Gert had no intention of listening to this guy tell her to toddle
anywhere,
especially not in that insufferable the-world-is-full-of-fools voice. Maybe the world
was
full of fools, but she wasn't one of them, and she knew something this self-important idiot didn't: Peter Slowik had been bitten over eighty times, and it wasn't impossible that the man who had done it was here right now, looking around for his wife. She stepped into the booth—it was a squeeze, but she made it—and seized the agent by the shoulders of his blue uniform shirt. She turned him around. The name-tag on the breast pocket of his shirt said
CHRIS
. Chris stared into
the dark moon of Gert Kinshaw's face, astonished to be touched by a customer. He opened his mouth, but Gert spoke before he got a chance.

“Shut up and listen. I think there's a chance that you sold a day-pass to a very dangerous man this morning. A murderer. So don't bother telling me how tough your day's been, Chris, because I don't . . . fucking . . . care.”

Chris looked at her, bug-eyed with surprise. Before he could recover either his voice or his attitude, Gert had taken a slightly blurred fax photograph from her oversized purse and shoved it under his eyes.
Detective Norman Daniels, who led the drug-busting undercover task force,
read the caption beneath.

“You want Security,” Chris said. His tone was both injured and apprehensive. Behind him, the man now at the head of the line—he was wearing an idiotic Mr. Magoo hat and a tee-shirt reading
WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA—
abruptly raised a videocam and began to shoot, possibly anticipating a confrontation that would land his footage on one of the network reality shows.

If I'd known how much fun this was going to be, I never would have hesitated at all,
Gert thought.

“No, I don't want them, not yet, anyway; I want you. Please. Just take one good look and tell me—”

“Lady, if you knew how many people I see in a single d—”

“Think about a guy in a wheelchair. Early. Before the rush, okay? Big guy. Bald. You leaned out of the booth and yelled after him. He came back. He must have forgotten his change, or something.”

A light had gone on in Chris's eyes. “No, that wasn't it,” he said. “He thought he was giving me the right money. I know he did, because it was a ten and two ones. He either forgot the handicapped price of an all-day pass, or he never noticed it.”

Yeah,
Gert thought.
Just the kind of thing a man who's only
pretending
to be a cripple might forget, if his mind was on other things.

Mr. Magoo, apparently deciding there wasn't going to be a punchup after all, lowered his videocam. “Would you sell me a ticket for me and my grandson, please?” he asked through the speaker-hole.

“Hold your water,” Chris said. He was an all-around
charmer if Gert had ever met one, but this was not the time to offer him helpful hints on how he could upgrade his performance. This was a time for diplomacy. When he turned back to her, looking weary and put-upon, she held out the picture again and spoke in a soft tell-me-o-wise-one voice.

“Was this the man in the wheelchair? Imagine him without hair.”

“Aw, lady, come on! He was wearing sunglasses, too.”

“Try. He's dangerous. If there's even a chance he's here, I
will
have to talk to your Security people.”

Boink, a mistake. She knew it almost at once, but that was still a couple of seconds too late. The flicker in his eyes was brief but still hard to misunderstand. If she wanted to go to Security about some problem that didn't concern him, that was fine. If it
did
concern him, even tangentially, it
wasn't
fine. He'd had trouble with Security before, maybe, or maybe he'd just been reprimanded about being a short-tempered asshole. In either case, he had decided this whole business was an aggravation he didn't need.

“It isn't the guy,” he said. He'd taken the photo for a closer look. Now he attempted to hand it back. Gert raised her hands with her palms against her chest, above the formidable swell of her bosom, refusing to take it, at least for the time being.

“Please,” she said. “If he's here, he's looking for a friend of mine, and not because he wants to take her on the Ferris Wheel.”