What Rose Forgot

by Nevada Barr

  “You want to see it?” Eddie asks dangerously. “You want me to take it out and show it to you?”

  “A verbal description will be sufficient,” Rose manages. She is surer than ever it is a severed head, but can’t fathom whose. The cola nurse? Chuck? The thought of Chuck Boster and his “good” wife’s love of roses makes her eyes sting. “Let me see it.” The words stick in her throat, producing a croak.

  Eddie shoves the bag in her direction with the side of his foot. “I wouldn’t open it too wide if I were you,” he warns. “Wouldn’t want your cop pal peeking in.”

  No trail of blood smears the pale tile floor where the bag has slid. Fluorescent lights and black fabric make it impossible to tell if any bodily liquids stain the bag. Rose doesn’t smell anything. She’s read that blood smells like copper tastes. Or vice versa.

  Not wanting to touch it, she bends in half and gingerly unzips the curved top flap. It falls inside, hanging down into the greater darkness.

  “Take a good look,” Eddie needles her maliciously. “You’re the one got all this started.”

  “Am not.” If her fingers touch hair, or anything squishy, she is going to scream. Then Warren will forget all about Bogey and Bacall and arrest both her and Eddie.

  Pinching the flap between the tip of her thumb and forefinger, Rose peels it back.

  “You happy now?” Eddie prods.

  Rose shoots him a nasty look. “God, Eddie, you had me scared to death.” Giddy with relief, she laughs. “This is nothing but a gun. Not even a fancy semiautomatic, a plain old cowboy wheel gun. A gun! Talk about sudden-onset impermanence.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he hisses. “It’s not just a gun. Read the note.”

  “It came with a gift card?”

  Eddie puffs up, grows red in the face. For a second Rose thinks he might hit her, or explode like a cartoon character and fill the air with Eddie confetti.

  She gives Warren a little wave. He smiles and waves back. Eddie seethes less conspicuously. “It’s in the bag. A Post-it Note. Yellow.” He buries his face in his hands.

  “You’ve got a smaller bandage,” Rose notices. “Is your finger—I mean stump—healing up okay?”

  “Just read the frigging note,” Eddie mumbles thickly.

  The Post-it has partially adhered to the butt of the pistol. Rose plucks it free and reads it aloud. “‘Finish the job or next time we won’t put this where you will be the first to find it.’ You’re supposed to shoot me?” Rose asks.

  “Keep it down!” Eddie growls. “I’ve never even shot a gun.”

  “I could teach you.”

  Eddie looks up hopefully. “You’d do that?”

  “No!” Rose exclaims. “Because of the whole John the Baptist thing, I was so relieved you hadn’t been chopping off heads and carting them to malls in bowling bags that I suffered an inappropriate burst of generosity. I’m over it now. Of course I won’t teach you to shoot. You shouldn’t even be allowed to use a butter knife. You’re a criminal. Don’t let me forget that.”

  She glances at the note again. “What do they mean they’ll ‘put it where you won’t be the first to find it next time’? If you don’t use this one to shoot me, they keep delivering bigger and better guns?”

  “I’m a convicted felon,” Eddie explains with exaggerated patience. “It’s illegal for me to have a firearm. If I don’t deliver on this job, they’ll hide a gun where I won’t find it, then the cops get an anonymous tip, and it’s a one-way trip back to Central for me. Now do you get it?”

  “I’m keeping up,” Rose says. She puts the note back in with the gun, then zips the bag shut.

  For a long time they sit on the bench, neither speaking. Finally, Rose says, “You are between a serious rock and a hard place. You kill me, you go to jail for a long time. You don’t kill me, same thing happens.”

  “God damn.” Eddie blows out a sigh. “All the counselors and shit they make you talk to in the clink, even the other prisoners, they all tell you not to do that one last job. It’s the one that hangs you.” He sounds like he is about to cry.

  Rose picks up the bowling bag and sets it on the bench between them. She takes out her cell and pokes the buttons. “There, now you shooting me is on my To Publish list if anything happens to me.”

  “That’s just great,” Eddie says. For several minutes, Rose watches the shoppers. Eddie watches the floor between his feet.

  “You know, Eddie, this is that whole wicked web karma,” Rose says. “You’ve pretty much hit bottom. First they’ll repo your truck. Then you can’t work. No work, no Tania. Then a gun, prison. You are right royally screwed.”

  “Rub my nose in it,” Eddie says.

  “Just thinking out loud,” Rose replies.

  “Yeah, well, don’t.”

  “I might be able to get you out of this mess,” Rose says pensively.

  “I bet. You’ve done such a good job with that so far.”

  “What other choice do you have?” Rose asks.

  “Since I met you? None.”

  Rose punches him in the shoulder.

  “What was that for?” he nearly whines.

  “You are not the victim here, Eddie. Get your mind around that.”

  “Okay. So. What do I have to do?”

  Rose smiles and pats the bowling bag. “Just one last job,” she says.

  CHAPTER 26

  Given the vast number of things Rose has to regret, the great gouts of bad karma lapping at her heels like an incipient tsunami, the worst is lying to Mel. Honesty bonds them. From the moment they met, Mel twenty minutes old, Rose fifty-four years, Rose swore she would not only tell Melanie the truth but would also protect and defend the child’s truth as it changed and evolved.

  Tonight Rose has smashed that oath all to hell, no shading, no omissions; an outright, premeditated lie. Like all liars, Rose justifies her action as necessary. She and Eddie are setting out to break serious go-to-jail laws. Eddie, Rose refuses to feel responsible for. Once a man tries to kill a woman, all bets are off.

  If things go wrong tonight, even their status as minors would not save Mel and Royal from the justice system. Knowing they would insist on helping anyway, Rose has chosen to tell them she is going out to dinner and a movie with Brian, the Lyft driver, who waited for her outside Vincenzo’s.

  They seem to take it in stride that a recently widowed, recently drugged, in-the-midst-of-crisis woman is interested in a date with a cute boy. When she leaves, they are smirking, pleased with themselves. Cell phones in hands, the two are flopped on the couch, more or less watching TV.

  Eddie, in his truck, picks Rose up four blocks from the house.

  “You did good with the scary,” she comments as she buckles herself in. Eddie grunts. Instead of his usual deck shoes and cargo shorts, he is wearing black Levi’s, heavy motorcycle boots, a long-sleeved black pullover, and black leather gloves. The empty index finger of the right glove sticks straight out where he holds on to the steering wheel. Rose considers telling him she didn’t really eat his finger, and he can have it back if all goes well, but she doesn’t.

  Rose is neither scary nor disguised. She wears gray slacks and a pink oxford shirt borrowed from Izzy’s closet. On her feet are pink-and-gray Nike running shoes. In a Harris Teeter tote she carries cardboard signs she’s made, and a brick.

  “Got something to cover your head?” she asks.

  “Got it.” Eddie is clearly not enjoying the prospect of their evening out.

  “Mud on the license plate?”

  “Yeah. For all the good it will do.”

  Rose heard mud was one way criminals made their vehicles less identifiable to law enforcement. She, too, doubts its efficaciousness, but stealing or switching plates adds a new level of lawlessness to an already damning pile.

  “My contact”—Rose hopes to keep Marion’s name and existence as deep a secret as she does Mel’s —“has rented a house near Brevard in a development called Connestee Falls. It’s yours fo
r three weeks. Private, lots of trees, lots of seasonal folks and renters coming and going. You should be safe there.”

  Eddie grunts again.

  “It’s got a pool, a golf course, a gym, and pickle ball courts,” she adds enticingly.

  “What’s pickle ball?”

  Rose doesn’t know. “It’s fun,” she says. “My contact also assured me that the nurse I’ve worked with previously is on duty tonight.”

  It is Karen’s dedication to duty—or her aversion to admitting the extent of her dereliction of duty—that put this idea in Rose’s head. The plan hinges on Karen working the night nurse’s station. Even so, the cola-loving nurse and the handmade placards are the weakest point in Rose’s plan. If Karen is not sufficiently in hate with Rose, this whole house of cards will come crashing down. Should that happen, Eddie might get away, but Rose probably won’t see the outside of a prison cell for the foreseeable future.

  Negative thoughts.

  Rose lets them go and takes an envelope out of the tote. “This has directions to the house. It’s on Ugugu Lane. I don’t know if that’s the right pronunciation. There’s also a thousand dollars in cash. That should keep you in food and whatever else Chuck might need for a week or two.”

  “This Chuck guy, he’s crazy,” Eddie says. “I should keep the gun.” Eddie is wound so tight, he crouches in the seat like a hunchbacked troll and clutches the steering wheel close to his chest.

  “Not crazy. Drugged. Totally malleable. He’ll be out of it for a day or two; then he’ll start to get better.” Rose so very much hopes this is true. “Chuck is a gentle soul. I keep the gun.”

  As she speaks, she unzips Eddie’s bowling bag, takes out the revolver, and replaces it with the envelope containing the cash and directions. They drive beneath a streetlamp, and Eddie’s eyes flicker to the money.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Rose warns. “Or—”

  “I know, I know, Armageddon,” Eddie grumbles.

  Before she can suppress it, a look of surprise flits across her face.

  Eddie snorts. “Yeah. I know some big words, too. Catholic family. Armageddon. Excommunication. Damnation. What part of that isn’t on the menu for tonight?”

  Rose can’t answer that.

  At eight thirty P.M. they are unobtrusively lurking in the red-tipped photinia eight paces from the sliding glass doors of the MCU, Rose with her tote bag of placards, brick, and gun, Eddie with a crumpled grocery sack containing, Rose assumes, the rest of his disguise.

  “Just relax. Act like you belong here. Be cool, but not overconfident,” Rose advises.

  “Not babble like a crazy old lady doddering in the bushes with a gun in her purse?” Eddie whispers.

  “I do not dodder,” Rose grumbles, but she takes the hint and stops talking.

  They watch the doors. At eight thirty-seven a young woman in a black skirt, red-checked blouse, and red kitten heels, eyes glued to her cell phone, steps on the mat. The doors slide open. The receptionist is going home for the night.

  “I’ll keep the door open. When she’s gone, you come,” Rose reminds Eddie of the plan, if what she has in mind can be dignified with the word “plan.”

  As the receptionist steps out, Rose steps in, murmuring a pleasant “Good night.”

  “Good night,” the woman echoes, her eyes never leaving the tiny screen.

  Before the doors slide closed, Rose jams the brick between them. No alarms, at least none she can see or hear, go off.

  Eddie emerges from behind the hedge. He walks quickly to the doors. On his head is an orange wig. He muscles the doors far enough apart for him to squeeze through. Rose sees his face and gasps. “Jeez! I didn’t mean that scary.”

  He is wearing a Donald Trump mask.

  Under the empty-eyed gaze of the gross and terrible Trump, horror Rose has kept at bay slams into her. Like a Greek tragedy, her every action inevitable and disastrous, foreknowledge no defense. Oedipus is going to sleep with his mother. He is going to kill his father. It will not end well. She is doomed and there isn’t a doggone thing she can do about it.

  Bugger that.

  She is saving a friend’s life when no one else will. Chuck is not demented. He’d yelled “Help!” and “Chocolate!” One could fight through a drug haze if the need was great enough. No one could fight through dementia. Too much structural damage. Rose doesn’t know if that is true or not, but it soothes her.

  Not doomed. Not predestined.

  She has two choices: She can abandon Chuck and eventually rejoin him when her luck runs out, or she can do this.

  “Let’s do this,” she says.

  Inhaling to make herself bigger, she leads Eddie into the truncated hallway connecting the reception area with the lockdown unit. Eddie, in his scary mask and spike-studded boots, she plants beside the ficus tree in the dogleg of the short hall where he can’t be seen from the reception area or the nurses’ desk in lockdown.

  Rose slips up to the sliding glass door, Harris Teeter tote in hand.

  Karen is on duty.

  Karen is alone.

  So far, so good.

  Rose takes the placards from the bag, then raps lightly on the glass to get the nurse’s attention.

  Karen’s eyes flash from boredom to shock. “You!” Her lips form the word. As she reaches toward the phone to call security, Rose smacks the first placard against the glass. It reads:

  YOU STUPID BITCH

  The nurse’s face hardens into a mask of fury. Blurred fury. About her eyes and features there is the fogginess of drugs not yet cleared from her system.

  Rose drops the card and presses the second sign to the glass.

  NOT ONCE BUT TWICE!! HA HA HA

  Karen’s face turns dark red. She flies up out of her chair as if it is an ejector seat. Rose can hardly believe it. This is working. She doesn’t dare breathe as she lets the sign fall and puts the third in its place.

  SHIT FOR BRAINS

  Karen storms from behind the desk, rage in her every movement. Stalking toward the door, she appears huge, murderous. Rose is surprised that the big woman does not paw the ground and snort steam like the bulls in cartoons. Involuntarily, Rose flinches back as Karen whacks her plastic ID against the security door’s reader.

  The door swooshes open.

  To activate Eddie’s part in the scheme, Rose was to yell “Now!” But the nurse is preceded by such a wave of hatred, Rose manages only an “Eek!”

  A hand, strong from years of handling dead weight, closes on a fistful of Rose’s blouse. Buttons pop, hitting the wall with tiny snicks. Dangling from the nurse’s fist, Rose scrabbles madly in the tote. There is only a single item in it, but she can’t find the wretched thing what with the Goddess of War flipping her back and forth like a rag doll.

  Eddie finally gets the message and comes pounding menacingly from behind the ficus tree, his boots whomping on the tile.

  Rose gets hold of the revolver and drags it out, the tote flopping from her arm by one trapped handle. “Freeze!” she pipes. Karen doesn’t loosen her hold or notice the gun. She only has eyes for Eddie and his mask. Rose is jerked back and forth as the nurse sways on her feet.

  Eddie looms.

  Karen’s fingers loose. Rose staggers back a couple of steps. Steadying the revolver in both hands, she aims at the nurse’s center mass.

  Mouth angular and wild like one of the horses Rose remembers from Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art, Karen sucks in air through her nostrils.

  “Not a peep,” Rose warns. “You know what I’m capable of. You know I’m not a poster child for sanity.” The woman doesn’t look as impressed as Rose would like, but she doesn’t say anything either.

  “Back,” Rose orders. The woman doesn’t move. Eddie makes a sound like the howl of a basso profundo ghost. Karen steps back, hands held partway up, more in a warding gesture than one of surrender. She backs into the unit, Rose and Eddie following. The door slides shut behind them.

  “Sit on the sof
a,” Rose commands. Karen sits. It occurs to Rose that she should have said “floor” or, better yet, “Spread-eagle, hands behind your head,” but it is too late to change tactics.

  Karen opens her mouth to speak.

  “Not a peep!” Rose repeats and thumbs the hammer back. There is a satisfying metallic click. “Third room on your right,” she reminds Eddie. The Trump mask nods, eerily appropriate for a criminal enterprise.

  “What in God’s name do you want?” Karen whispers. She sounds near tears. “You come back and back like herpes. For what?”

  “You’re peeping,” Rose says, trying to sound dangerous.

  Eddie reappears half dragging a confused, pajama-clad Chuck. Chuck’s hair is standing on end like a rooster’s comb. His face is blank of affect, but for points of fear in his pale eyes.

  “Don’t—” Karen starts.

  Eddie growls and whuffs. He is under strict orders not to speak, not to do anything that will make him one iota more identifiable than he has to be. The muted roar is effective. Karen subsides. “Toss me your badge,” Rose orders her captive. For a second she thinks the nurse is going to refuse. Rose shoves the revolver a bit closer.

  The nurse unclips the badge and throws it at Rose’s feet. Eddie grabs it up, opens the door, then drops the badge inside so Rose can use it. From the corner of her eye, Rose sees him hustling Chuck down the hall. A minute later, she hears the pickup roar to life. In two hours they should be safely hidden in the mountains of North Carolina, as anonymous as any tourists fleeing the heat of the lowlands.

  Rose has done it. She has rescued Chuck. If she hasn’t accidentally murdered him.

  She waits another minute. Karen is thinking, gearing up; Rose can read resolution, stocked by cresting anger and druggy logic, writ plain on her broad face. Any second now, she is going to blow her top. Without taking her eyes off Karen, Rose backs to the sliding glass door, retrieves the badge, and presses it to the black plastic reader.

  “This is going to cost me my job.” The nurse spits out the words in a stream like foul-tasting liquid.

  “You didn’t tell them about last time?” Rose asks.