Death Mask

wanted her Barbie to have a bouquet.”

Sissy spooned coffee into the percolator. “You’re still not going to tell Trevor where they came from?”

“I don’t see what good it would do.”

“I don’t really see what harm it would do.”

“Oh come on, Sissy. You know Trevor. He needs to be in control of things. That’s why he doesn’t like your fortune-telling cards. They’re not logical, and he doesn’t understand how they work. If I told him that I could create real flowers just by drawing them. it would make him so wary of me. He would feel like there was a part of me that he could never reach, and I don’t want him to feel like that.”

Sissy switched on the percolator. “I think I’ll brave the bugs and go for a cigarette.”

“Well, they’re disgusting, and they’re noisy, but they won’t hurt you. Just don’t let them get caught up in your hair.”

“Don’t! Maybe they’ll do what Frank and Trevor never could, and persuade me to give up smoking.”

Wrapped up in her green satin bathrobe, and wearing Trevor’s Adidas running shoes in case she trod on any cicadas, Sissy went outside, with Mr. Boots following close behind. Here in the yard, the mating chorus was even harsher and even higher, and the swooping noise sounded even more weird, like a musical saw.

She flapped a few of the cicadas away with her hand, but one of them persisted in perching on her shoulder, prickling her with its tiny claws and staring at her with its scarlet, wide-apart eyes.

“My God, look at you,” she said. “You must have been feeding on sap from the ugly tree.”

She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the cicada, and it whirred away, flying only an inch away from Mr. Boots’s nose. Mr. Boots snapped at it, but only because it had surprised him. He had tried to eat a wasp once, and ever since then he had treated anything that buzzed or hopped or chirruped with the utmost caution.

The radio-static noise went on and on, and Sissy couldn’t stop thinking about her dream. She very rarely had recurring dreams, and even when she did, it had been months or even years in between each dreaming. She had to assume that this was more than a dream, it was a warning, or an omen — either from her own subconscious or from somebody else’s spirit. The giant standing by the road could be some kind of a symbol. But a symbol of what? And why did he seem so terrifying?

A flurry of cicadas flew up in front of her like the locusts in her dream. And it was then that she saw the flowerpots on which they had been feeding. The five roses were standing there, nodding in the morning sunshine along with the hollyhock and the Shasta daisy. They were all intact, as if Trevor had never cut them.

Sissy felt a tight shrinking sensation in her scalp. These roses couldn’t be real roses, after all. They must be something else altogether. A mirage? A hallucination? She couldn’t understand it.

“Molly!” she called. “Come out here! What the hell do you make of this?”

Molly stared at the roses for a long time. “I don’t know. How could that happen?” She took hold of one of the stems and tugged at it. “It’s firmly rooted, just like it was before.”

Sissy looked around, frowning. “When you painted them, did you imagine them here — in this particular flowerpot?”

“Yes, I did. Even this first rose, the one I was painting for Fairy Fifi.”

“Maybe they have to come back here, because this is the only place that they really exist.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, neither do I, to be frank. But let’s try something. Let’s cut them again and see if they come back here a second time.”

Molly looked dubious. “Maybe we should just leave them alone. This whole thing is beginning to give me the willies.”

“Molly — think of what the cards predicted. Violence, and bloodshed. And you could be involved in it somehow. The sculptor, the artist, the creator of likenesses — that’s almost certainly you.”

“Maybe Trevor was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that Red Mask composite.”

“I really don’t know. But I still think that the roses are the key to all this. If we can understand how and why these flowers come to life, it may help us to keep you safe.”

Mr. Boots was chasing after cicadas, jumping up and down at them as they scattered into the air, but being careful not to catch any in his mouth.

“Okay,” said Molly. “I’ll bring some scissors.”

Sissy smoked while Molly cut the roses again. They took them back inside and arranged them in the vase in the same way that they had been arranged before. They had just put them back on the hutch when Trevor came in, his black hair tousled, yawning.

“First chance I get for a couple of hours’ extra sleep, and what do I get? Ten thousand horny cicadas singing outside my window.”

“Your mom’s making eggs. Do you want some?”

“Coffee first. Black. I need to jump-start my heart.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Killing Time

Chrissie Wells climbed out of the back of the taxi and caught her purse on the door handle. As she struggled to disentangle it, she dropped her cell phone and the folder of papers that she was carrying under her arm. The morning breeze caught them and blew them across the sidewalk.

When she had managed to untwist her purse and pick up her cell phone, she frantically gathered up her scattered papers, bending over again and again like a dipping bird until she split the seam at the back of her red cotton skirt. The taxi driver waited for her with an expression on his face like St. Sebastian, martyred with a hundred arrows.

Chrissie fumbled in her purse, took out a twenty, and accidentally dropped a shower of loose coins onto the taxi’s front seat. The taxi driver gave her a ten and said, “Don’t worry about a tip, miss. I’ll pick it up later, off the floor.”

As usual, Chrissie was running late. She always seemed to be running late, no matter how early she set her alarm. She felt that she had been born out of sync with the rest of the planet — fated to miss every bus she wanted to catch and every appointment she was supposed to keep. She never arrived at concerts on time and had to wait in the foyer until the interval. She was always hurrying, always hot, always out of breath, and still she couldn’t catch up.

She bustled up the steps of the Giley Building, but she was stopped in the entrance by two police officers.

“Morning, ma’am. Need some ID, if that’s okay.”

“ID?”

“Driver’s license. Anything like that.”

Chrissie opened her purse and dropped her file of papers again. One of the officers bent down and picked it up for her. She rooted through every compartment inside her purse and finally managed to pull out her Cincinnati public library card.

“Okay, that’ll do it,” said the officer. “You don’t look much like a serial killer anyhow.”

“You haven’t found him yet? I didn’t have time to catch the news this morning.”

“No, ma’am. But we will. You can be damn sure of that.”

Chrissie pushed her way through the revolving doors. All three elevators were working now, and the left-hand elevator still had its doors open. Chrissie called out, “Hold it, please! Hold it!” and click-clacked her way across the lobby. By the time she had reached the elevator, however, more than a dozen people had crowded into it, and there was no more room, especially for a size 14.

The occupants of the elevator stared at her balefully, as if to say, Don’t even think