have been too surprised to learn that Rosie had turned this same rack, had picked a book from it ... and then put it reluctantly back again, not wanting to spend five dollars on three hours’ entertainment when she had so little money and so many unanswered questions.
He ate a salad, forcing himself to read the book as he did, and then went back to his seat on the bus. In a little while they were off again, Norman sitting still with his book in his lap, watching the fields open out more and more as the East gave up its hold. He turned his watch back when the driver announced it was time to do so, not because he gave a shit about timezones (he was on his own clock for the next thirty days or so) but because that was what Rose would have done. He picked the book up, read about a vicar finding a body in a garden, and put it down again, bored. Yet that was only on the surface. Deeper down, he wasn’t bored at all. Deeper down he felt strangely like Goldilocks in the old kids’ story. He was sitting in Baby Bear’s little housie. Before long, if all went well, he would be hiding underneath Baby Bear’s little beddie.
“When you least expect it, ” he said. “When you least expect it. ”
He got off the bus in the early hours of the following morning and stood just inside the door from the loading-gate, surveying the echoing, high-ceilinged terminal, trying to put aside his cop’s assessment of the pimps and the whores, the buttboys and the beggars, trying to see it as she must have seen it, getting off this same bus and walking into this same terminal and seeing it at this same hour, when human nature is always at low tide.
He stood there and let this echoing world flood in on him: its look and smell and taste and feel.
Who am I? he asked himself.
Rose Daniels, he answered.
How do I feel?
Small. Lost. And terrified. That’s the bottom line, right there. I’m utterly terrified.
For a moment he was overwhelmed by an awful idea: what if, in her fear and panic, Rose had approached the wrong person? It was certainly possible; for a certain type of bad guy, places like this were feeding-pools. What if that wrong person had led her off into the dark, then robbed and murdered her? It was no good telling himself it was unlikely; he was a cop and knew it wasn’t. If a crackhead saw that stupid gumball-machine ring of hers, for instance—
He took several deep breaths, regrouping, refocusing the part of his mind that was trying to be Rose. What else was there to do? If she’d been murdered, she’d been murdered. There was nothing he could do about it, so it was best not to think of it ... and besides, he couldn’t bear the thought that she might have escaped him that way, that some coked-up boogie might have taken what belonged to Norman Daniels.
Never mind, he told himself. Never mind, just do your job. And right now your job is to walk like Rosie, talk like Rosie, think like Rosie.
He moved slowly out into the terminal, holding his wallet in one hand (it was his substitute for her purse), looking at the people who rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As he watched, a man sprinted toward a woman and a little boy who had just gotten off Norman’s bus. The man kissed the woman, then seized the little boy and tossed him high into the air. The little boy shrieked with fear and delight.
I’m scared—everything’s new, everything’s different, and I’m scared to death, Norman told himself. Is there anything I feel sure about? Anything I feel I can trust? Anything at all?
He walked across the wide tile floor, but slowly, slowly, listening to his feet echo and trying to look at everything through Rose’s eyes, trying to feel everything through her skin. A quick peek at the glassy-eyed kids (with some it was just three-in-the-morning tiredness; with some it was Nebraska Red) in the video alcove, then back into the terminal itself. She looks at the bank of pay phones, but who is she going to call? She has no friends, she has no family—not even the