ROWENA, MISTRESS OF THE ROSES, RECALLED Dunny Whistler’s words again, but obviously more for her consideration than for Ethan’s: “He said you think he’s dead, and that you’re right.”
A rattle of hinges, a faint jingle of shop bells turned Ethan toward the front door. No one had entered.
The vagrant wind, having wandered out of the storm for a while, had here returned, blustering at the entrance to Forever Roses, trembling the door.
Behind the counter, the woman wondered, “What on earth could he mean by such a bizarre statement?”
“Did you ask him?”
“He said it after he paid for the roses, on his way out of the shop. I didn’t have a chance to ask. Is it a joke between the two of you?”
“Did he smile when he said it?”
Rowena considered, shook her head. “No.”
From the corner of his eye, Ethan glimpsed a figure that had silently appeared. Turning toward it, breath caught in his throat, he discovered that he had been tricked by his own reflection in the glass door of a cooler.
[159] In pails of water, on tiered racks, the chilled roses bloomed so gloriously that you could easily forget they were in fact already dead, and in a few days would be wilted, spotted brown, and rotting.
These coolers, where Death concealed himself in petals bright, reminded Ethan of morgue drawers, in which the deceased lay much as they had looked in life, and in whom Death dwelt but did not yet manifest himself in all the gaudy details of corruption.
Although Rowena was personable and lovely, although this realm of roses ought to have been pleasant, Ethan grew anxious to leave. “Did my ... my friend have any other message for me?”
“No. That was all of it, I think.”
“Thank you, Rowena. You’ve been helpful.”
“Have I really?” she asked, looking at him strangely, perhaps as puzzled by this odd encounter as by her conversation with Dunny Whistler.
“Yes,” he assured her. “Yes, you have.”
Wind rattled the door again as Ethan put his hand upon the knob, and behind him Rowena said, “One more thing.”
When he turned to her, although they were now almost forty feet apart, he saw that his questioning had left her more pensive than she had been when he’d first approached her.
“As your friend was leaving,” she said, “he stopped in the open doorway, on the threshold there, and said to me, ‘God bless you and your roses.’ ”
Perhaps this had been a peculiar thing for a man like Dunny to have said, but nothing in those six words seemed to explain why the memory of them clouded Rowena’s face with uneasiness.
She said, “Just as he finished speaking, the lights pulsed and dimmed, went off—but then came on again. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, not with the storm, but now it somehow seems ... significant. I don’t know why.”
Years of experience with interrogations told Ethan that Rowena had not finished, and that his patient silence would draw her out more surely and more quickly than anything he could say.
[160] “When the lights dimmed and went off, your friend laughed. Just a little laugh, not long, not loud. He glanced at the ceiling as the lights flickered, and he laughed, and then he left.”
Ethan waited.
Rowena appeared to be surprised that she had said this much about such a small moment, but then she added, “There was something terrible about that laugh.”
The beautiful dead roses behind walls of glass.
A beast of wind snuffling at the door.
Rain gnashing at the windows.
Ethan said, “Terrible?”
“I don’t have the words to explain it. No humor in that laugh, but some terrible ... quality.”
Self-conscious, she brushed at the spotless countertop with one hand, as if she saw dust, debris, a stain.
Clearly, she had said all that she wished to say, or could.
“God bless you and your roses,” Ethan told her, as though he were countering a curse.
He didn’t know what he would have done had the lights flickered, but they burned steadi............