bland, pupilless eye, curve of ear. A sudden insight came to her. She had been both right and wrong—right about that second crashed statue’s not being visible before, wrong in her impression that the stone head had somehow just materialized in the picture while she’d been off recording The Manta Ray. Her idea that the folds in the woman’s dress had changed position might have been her subconscious mind’s effort to bolster that first erroneous impression by creating a kind of hallucination. It did, after all, make slightly more sense than what she was seeing now.
“The picture is bigger,” Rosie said.
No. That wasn’t quite it.
She lifted her hands, sizing the air in front of the hung picture and confirming the fact that it was still covering the same three-feet-by-two-feet area of the wall. She was also seeing the same amount of white matting inside the frame, so what was the big deal?
That second stone head wasn’t there before, and that’s the big deal, she thought. Maybe ...
Rosie suddenly felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing at her temples, where a headache was trying to be born. When she opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, it burst upon her as it had the first time, not as separate elements—the temple, the fallen statues, the rose madder chiton, the raised left hand—but as an integrated whole, something which called to her in its own voice.
There was more to look at now. She was nearly positive that this impression wasn’t hallucination but simple fact. The picture wasn’t really bigger, but she could see more on both sides... and on the top and bottom, as well. It was as if a movie projectionist had just realized he was using the wrong lens and switched, turning boxy thirty-five millimeter into wide-screen Cinerama 70. Now you could see not just Clint, but the cowboys on both sides of him, as well.
You’re nuts, Rosie. Pictures don’t get bigger.
No? Then how did you explain the second god? She was sure it had been there all the time, and she was only seeing it now because...
“Because there’s more right in the picture now,” she murmured. Her eyes were very wide, although it would have been difficult to say if the expression in them was dismay or wonder. “Also more left, and more up, and more d—”
There was a sudden flurry of knocks on the door behind her, so fast and light they almost seemed to collide with each other. Rosie whirled around, feeling as if she were moving in slow motion or underwater.
She hadn’t locked the door.
The knocks came again. She remembered the car she’d seen pulling up at the curb below—a small car, the kind of car a man travelling alone would be apt to rent from Hertz or Avis—and all thoughts of her picture were overwhelmed by another thought, one edged about in dark tones of resignation and despair: Norman had found her after all. It had taken him awhile, but somehow he had done it.
Part of her last conversation with Anna recurred—Anna asking what she’d do if Norman did show up. Lock the door and dial 911, she’d said, but she had forgotten to lock the door and there was no phone. That last was the most hideous irony of all, because there was a jack in the corner of the living-room area, and the jack was live—she’d gone to the phone company on her lunch hour today and paid a deposit. The woman who waited on her had given her her new telephone number on a little white card, Rosie had tucked it into her purse, and then out the door she’d marched. Right past the display of phones for sale she had marched. Thinking she could get one at least ten dollars cheaper by marching out to the Lakeview Mall when she got a chance. And now, just because she’d wanted to save a lousy ten dollars ...
Silence from the other side of the door, but when she dropped her eyes to the crack at the bottom, she could see the shapes of his shoes. Big black shiny shoes, they would be. He no longer wore the uniform, but he still wore those black shoes. They were hard shoes. She could testify to that, because she had worn their marks on her legs and belly and buttocks many times over her years with him.