“Like I told you,” said Sissy. “It’s the roses.” She opened her purse and took out her deck of DeVane cards. “The roses are the key to all of this. They have been, right from the start.”
“I don’t understand.”
“In every single card that I turned up since you painted that Mr. Lincoln rose, there are roses. They’re like a code. If we can work out what the cards are telling us, then I think that we’ll find out how to find Red Mask. Or Red Masks, plural.”
“Sissy — I don’t think that we should even think about finding them. Honestly, it would be way too dangerous.”
“If we don’t do it, who will? Who’s going to believe us? Can you imagine Mike Kunzel’s face if we told him that he has to go looking for two living sketches?”
As if on cue, Detective Kunzel came back into the studio with his mouth full of Whatchamacallit. “Those composites ready?” he asked. Then he coughed and waved his hand from side to side. “What the hell have you been doing in here? Building a campfire?”
“Sorry,” said Sissy. “Slight accident.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Hooded Guest
They drove back to Blue Ash in a hailstorm of cicadas that smashed themselves against the windshield like the locusts in Sissy’s dream. Molly had to use the washer spray again and again so that she could see where was going.
“These bugs are beginning to get seriously horny,” she complained.
“Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? Sex is a matter of life or death, even for bugs.”
“Especially for bugs. Even if they don’t get squished all over my windshield and they manage to find themselves some lady cicadas, they’re all going to drop dead anyway, just as soon they’ve done their reproductive duty.”
When they reached home, they discovered that the backyard, too, was teeming with cicadas. Molly picked up an old squash racquet and swung it from side to side, swatting them out of their way. Mr. Boots followed her, jumping up and barking.
The roses were still nodding in the sunlight, even though scores of cicadas were crawling all over the flowerpot. Sissy lit up a Marlboro and stood looking at them, blowing smoke out of her nostrils.
“I still think they’re a miracle,” she said.
“Yes,” Molly agreed. “But that doesn’t make them any less scary. It’s a pretty fine line between miracle and nightmare, don’t you think?”
In one sense these roses are real, Sissy thought. Their thorns had pricked her thumb and drawn real red blood, just as Red Mask’s knives had cut real people’s flesh open. Yet they weren’t real at all. They couldn’t be. They had been created out of nothing but pencils and paint.
Maybe they were like ghosts, or the spirits of dead people appearing at a séance. Maybe they were only visiting this reality. But ghosts could be exorcized and the spirits of dead people could be sent back to the world of shadows. Maybe these roses could be sent back to the two-dimensional world of paper, where they truly belonged.
And if the roses could be sent back, maybe the two living drawings of Red Mask could be sent back, too.
Sissy was almost certain now that this was what the DeVane cards had been trying to tell her. Their predictions had been terrifying and strange, but if she and Molly could discover the secret of the roses, maybe they could change the future. Maybe there didn’t have to be any more killing. Maybe the two Red Masks who had committed this morning’s murders could be returned to the sketch pad on which they had been created, and their likenesses torn out and burned, and their ashes scattered forever.
Molly said, “It’s hot. I’m just going inside to change. How about a glass of wine?”
“Why not? It might lubricate the old psychic mojo a little.”
Sissy sat down under the vine trellis. Trevor had cut the roses with his pocketknife, but somehow they had managed to reappear here in the flowerpot. He had cut them, but they were only images, after all, not real flowers at all, and images belonged where their creator had imagined them, just as spirits belonged in the world beyond.
Molly had created them, so Molly was the only one who could make them vanish.
Mr. Boots made one of those mewling noises in the back of his throat. He was hot and tired, and the cicadas were beginning to annoy him. Sissy ruffled his ears and said, “Never mind, Mister. They’ll soon be gone.”
Molly came back out, wearing a tight pink T-shirt and white shorts and carrying two large glasses of chilled Zinfandel. “So, have you managed to break the code yet?”
“Not really. But I’m beginning to think that you have to cut the roses. You, personally, because you painted them. And I also think that when you cut them, you have to use the painting of a knife, rather than a real one.”
“The painting of a knife?”
“Trevor used a real knife, but real knives exist only in this reality — not ‘painting reality.’ He could imagine the roses being cut, and so they were, for as long as he kept his attention on them. But as soon as he turned his attention to something else, the illusion ended, and the roses returned here, to this flowerpot, just as you had first painted them.”
“Well, I’m not sure what the hell you’re talking about, but I’ll give it a try.”
“It’s simple. If an artist painted a picture of us sitting together in this yard, and then he stabbed the picture with a knife, neither of us would be hurt, would we, either in this reality or the painting’s reality? But if the artist took his paints and altered the picture so that you were stabbing me, and I was bleeding, then my image would be injured, wouldn’t it, even if the real me wasn’t?”
Molly shook her head. “Sometimes, Sissy, you leave me way, way behind. You know that?”
“No — it’s not difficult to understand. Think of the The Picture of Dorian Gray. The real Dorian Gray stayed young and handsome, didn’t he, while his portrait grew old and ugly? There are two different realities — real reality and painting reality. I know Dorian Gray is only a story, but Oscar Wilde is supposed to have borrowed it from a famous incident that happened in Paris in the eighteen hundreds. A cardinal had a secret passion for a prostitute, so he had her portrait painted, and then he blessed it. She stayed beautiful and unblemished for over thirty years, until she died. But when they found her portrait, hidden in her attic, it was supposed to have looked so hideous that men actually vomited when they looked at it.
“There are other stories, too, of real people getting lost inside paintings, and I don’t think they’re all hokum, either. If you go to the Whitney Museum in Stamford, in Connecticut, they have this huge painting of a family of colonists saying grace. I’ve seen it for myself. It was painted in 1785, but there’s a man sitting at the head of the table wearing a nineteen-forties suit and a wristwatch. They’ve had dozens of experts testing that painting, but there’s no question about it. The man with the wristwatch was painted at the same time as everybody else in the picture.”
“Ok-a-y,” said Molly, although she still didn’t sound convinced. “I guess that makes some cockeyed kind of sense. I’ll see if I can paint a knife.”
They went back inside the house. Molly took one of her steak knives from the wooden block on the kitchen counter, and then she went through to her studio and pinned a clean sheet of art paper to her drawing board. Sissy stood beside her as she deftly drew a pencil sketch of the steak knife and painted it with watercolors.