Death Mask

tip of his nose.

On the table in front of him there was a shiny metal dish cover, and his face was reflected in that, but the reflection was so distorted that Sissy was unable to make out what he looked like.

So here were four companions eating their evening meal — but one of them was a mystery guest, and his presence was clearly disturbing one of the others. There was another strange element in the picture, too: a red rose was hanging upside down from the candelabrum just above the center of the table.

Sissy turned up the next card. La Blanchisseuse, the Laundress. It showed a young woman in a mobcap lifting a white dress or a nightshirt out of a wooden tub. The young woman’s eyes were closed. Either she was very tired, or she was daydreaming, or else she didn’t want to look at the horror of what she was doing, because the wooden tub was filled to the brim with blood, and the nightshirt was soaked in blood, too.

A small side window in the laundry was open, very high up, and a man was looking in. Presumably he was standing on a ladder. He had staring eyes and a ruddy face, almost as red as the blood in the wooden tub. All around the window frame, red roses were growing.

Sissy stared at the card for a long time. Mr. Boots realized that she was unsettled, because he lifted his head and made that mewling sound in the back of his throat.

“What do you make of this, Mr. Boots?” Sissy asked him, showing him the card. “It looks to me like somebody’s going to get badly hurt, and somebody else is going to try to wash away the evidence.”

Mr. Boots barked, just once. Sissy slowly put down the laundry card and picked up the next one. This was even stranger, le Sculpteur — showing a young sculptor in his studio. The sculptor was slim, with long hair, and strangely androgynous, so that he could have been a girl in boy’s clothing.

He was chiseling the naked figure of a man out of a block of white marble. The figure was holding up both hands, as if it were surrendering or appealing for understanding, and both of its hands were bright red, as if they been dipped in blood.

All around the studio ceiling, there were stone carvings of roses.

“Somebody is going to get badly hurt, and then somebody is going to wash away the evidence. But it looks to me as if a third person is going to create an image that shows who really did it. Now — who do we know who can do that, Mr. Boots?”

Sissy picked up the cards and was about to take them inside to show Molly, when she saw something bright and red and blurry out of the corner of her eye. She turned, and there it was, in one of the terra-cotta pots. A tall scarlet rose, its petals almost tulip shaped, with a yellow ladybug crawling up its stem.

She approached it very slowly, took off her spectacles, and peered at it. She hadn’t seen it on her way out. In fact, she was absolutely sure that she had never seen it before, ever.

She sniffed it, but it had no fragrance at all.

“Molly!” she called, too softly the first time for Molly to hear her. Then, “Molly!”

“I’m in the kitchen,” Molly called back. “I’m just getting myself some clean paint water.”

“Forget the darn paint water. Come out here.”

Molly appeared on the back porch. “What is it? I really have to finish this illustration.”

“I thought you couldn’t grow roses,” said Sissy.

“I can’t. I told you. I’m the Angel of Death when it comes to gardening. Even my fat hen curls up and dies.”

“So what’s this?”

Molly came barefoot into the yard. She stared at the rose in disbelief. Then she laughed and said, “Oh, you’re nuts! You stuck it in there yourself, just to fool me!”

Sissy shook her head. “Look at it, Molly. It’s the exact same rose you’ve just been drawing. Right down to the yellow ladybug.”

Molly took hold of the rose by the stem and gently tugged it.

“You’re right,” she said, and her wide eyes widened even more. “It’s rooted. And it is exactly the same. Exactly. Look — this is insane! — it even has brush marks on the petals.”

“It’s not possible,” said Sissy. “But it must be possible. I can see it.”

“We should show somebody else,” Molly suggested. “Maybe there was something in the salad.”

“Something in the salad like what?”

“I don’t know. Jimsonweed or something. Maybe we’re, like, hallucinating.”

“How could Jimsonweed have gotten into your salad? I watched you make it. It was nothing but rocket and scallions and sliced beets and hard-cooked eggs.”

“But how can this rose possibly be real? I didn’t grow it, I painted it!”

“Maybe it’s a miracle,” said Sissy.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“If it’s not a miracle, what else could it be? Maybe it’s a sign from God.”

“Why would God send us a sign like this? I mean, even if he did, what’s he trying to tell us? We don’t have to grow roses from cuttings? All we have to do is paint them?”

Sissy said, “Maybe it’s more than a miracle. Maybe it’s a warning.” She held up the DeVane cards. “I was just reading my immediate future. Look at this — four people sitting at a table, but one of them looks as if he’s some kind of threat to the other three. Then there’s this — a washerwoman rinsing blood out of somebody’s clothing. And this — a sculptor carving the likeness of a living man, but the man has blood on his hands.”

“I don’t understand. What does it mean?”

“I think it’s something that’s going to happen to us. or something that we’re going to find ourselves involved in. Somebody’s going to get hurt, maybe killed even.”

“Not one of us?”

“I surely hope not. But this sculptor — I think he might represent you. Whoever’s responsible for this wounding or this killing, the police are going to ask you to sketch his likeness.”

Molly shook her head. “Come on, Sissy — I haven’t been asked to do any police sketches for months. February, I think, was the last one, when that teacher got raped at Summit Country Day School. The CIS prefer computers these days.”

“It’s here in the cards, Molly. The cards don’t have any reason to lie to me.”

“Well, maybe you should read my tea leaves, too, just to make sure. The cards may not be lying, but they could have made a mistake, couldn’t they?”

“Molly — there are roses in all of these cards, and they mean something, too, although I don’t know what. And what do we have here, blooming right in front of us?”

Molly looked confused and unhappy. “Look,” she said. “I don’t know what to think of this. I’d best get back inside and finish my painting. Why don’t you try the cards again? Could be they’ll tell you something totally different this time. Something less, you know, brrrrr!”

Sissy shrugged. “Okay, I can have a go. But I promise you, they’ll come out the same, or the same message told with different cards. They always do, like the night follows the day.”

Molly reached out toward the Mr. Lincoln rose, and for a moment Sissy thought that she was going to pick it, but then she hesitated and drew her hand back, as if picking it would somehow make it more real.

“Might as well leave it,” she said. “Probably the only rose I’ll ever manage to grow.”

She gave Sissy a quick, unconvincing smile and went back into the house. Sissy turned back toward the vine trellis.

“Come on, Mister, let’s see if we can make the future look a little more rosy. Or a little less rosy, I should say.”

She had just hitched up her dress to sit down when Molly appeared at the back door again. “Sissy?” Her voice was as colorless as cold water.

“What is it, Molly?”

“Come see for yourself.”

Sissy followed her into her study. On her desk lay the gardening book, still open at the photograph of the Mr. Lincoln rose. The oval mirror was still there, too, and so was Molly’s box of watercolors. But the sheet of cartridge paper on which she had been painting was completely blank.