“Well,” Rosie whispered, “it was.” She found herself thinking of Cynthia’s story about the picture in the parsonage where she had grown up… De Soto Looks West. How she’d sat in front of it for hours, watching it like television, watching the river move.

“Pretending to watch it move,” Rosie said, and ran up the window, hoping to catch a breeze and fill the room with it. The thin voices of little kids in the park playground and bigger kids playing baseball drifted in.

“Pretending, that’s all. That’s what kids do. I did it myself.” She put a stick in the window to prop it open-it would stay where it was for a little bit, then come down with a crash if you didn’t-and turned to look at the picture again. A sudden dismaying thought, an idea so strong it was almost a certainty, had come to her. The folds and creases in the rose madder gown were not the same. They had changed position. They had changed position because the woman wearing the toga, or chiton, or whatever it was, had changed position.

“You’re crazy if you think that,” Rosie whispered. Her heart was thumping.

“I mean totally bonkers. You know that, don’t you?” She did. Nevertheless, she leaned close to the picture, peering into it. She stayed in that position, with her eyes less than two inches from the painted woman on top of the hill, for almost thirty seconds, holding her breath so as not to fog the glass which overlaid the image. At last she pulled back and let the air out of her lungs in a sigh that was mostly relief. The creases and folds in the chiton hadn’t changed a bit. She was sure of it. (Well, almost sure.) It was just her imagination, playing tricks on her after her long day-a day which had been both wonderful and terribly stressful.

“Yeah, but I got through it,” she told the woman in the chiton. Talking out loud to the woman in the painting already seemed perfectly okay to her. A little eccentric, maybe, but so what? Who did it hurt? Who even knew? And the fact that the blonde’s back was turned somehow made it easier to believe she was really listening. Rosie went to the window, propped the heels of her hands on the sill, and looked out. Across the street, laughing children ran the bases and pumped on the swings. Directly below her, a car was pulling in at the curb. There had been a time when the sight of a car pulling in like that would have terrified her, filled her with visions of Norman’s fist and Norman’s ring riding on it, riding toward her, the words Service, Loyalty, and Community getting bigger and bigger until they seemed to fill the whole world… but that time had passed. Thank God.

“Actually, I think I did a little more than just get through it,” she told the picture.

“I think I did a really good job. Robbie thought so, I know, but the one I really had to convince was Rhoda. I think she was prepared not to like me when I came in, because I was Robbie’s find, you know?” She turned toward the picture once more, turned as a woman will turn to a friend, wanting to judge from her face how some idea or statement strikes her, but of course the woman in the picture just went on looking down the hill toward the ruined temple, giving Rosie nothing but her back to judge from.

“You know how bitchy us gals can be,” Rosie said, and laughed.

“Except I really think I won her over. We only got through fifty pages, but I was a lot better toward the end, and besides, all those old paperbacks are short. I’ll bet I can finish by Wednesday afternoon, and do you know the best thing? I’m making almost a hundred and twenty dollars a day-not a week, a day-and there are three more Christina Bell novels. If Robbie and Rhoda give me those, I-” She broke off, staring at the picture with wide eyes, not hearing the thin cries from the playground anymore, not even hearing the footsteps which were now climbing the stairs from the first floor. She was looking at the shape on the far right side of the picture again-curve of brow, curve of bland, pupilless eye, curve of ear. A sudden insight came to her. She had been both right and wrong-right about that second crashed statue’s not being visible before, wrong in her impression that the stone head had somehow just materialized in the picture while she’d been off recording The Manta Ray. Her idea that the folds in the woman’s dress had changed position might have been her subconscious mind’s effort to bolster that first erroneous impression by creating a kind of hallucination. It did, after all, make slighdy more sense than what she was seeing now.

“The picture is bigger,” Rosie said. No. That wasn’t quite it. She lifted her hands, sizing the air in front of the hung picture and confirming the fact that it was still covering the same three-feet-by-two-feet area of wall. She was also seeing the same amount of white matting inside the frame, so what was the big deal? That second stone head wasn’t there before, and that’s the big deal, she thought. Maybe… Rosie suddenly felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing at,her temples, where a headache was trying to be born. When she opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, it burst upon her as it had the first time, not as separate elements-the temple, the fallen statues, the rose madder chiton, the raised left hand-but as an integrated whole, something which called to her in its own voice. There was more to look at now. She was nearly positive that this impression wasn’t hallucination but simple fact. The picture wasn’t really bigger, but she could see more on both sides… and on the top and bottom, as well. It was as if a movie projectionist had just realized he was using the wrong lens and switched, turning boxy thirty-five millimeter into wide-screen Cinerama 70. Now you could see not just Glint, but the cowboys on both sides of him, as well. You’re nuts, Rosie. Pictures don’t get bigger. No? Then how did you explain the second god? She was sure it had been there all the time, and she was only seeing it now because…

“Because there’s more right in the picture now,” she murmured. Her eyes were very wide, although it would have been difficult to say if the expression in them was dismay or wonder.

“Also more left, and more up, and more d-” There was a sudden flurry of knocks on the door behind her, so fast and light they almost seemed to collide with each other. Rosie whirled around, feeling as if she were moving in slow motion or underwater. She hadn’t locked the door. The knocks came again. She remembered the car she’d seen pulling up at the curb below-a small car, the kind of car a man traveling alone would be apt to rent from Hertz or Avis-and all thoughts of her picture were overwhelmed by another thought, one edged about in dark tones of resignation and despair: Norman had found her after all. It had taken him awhile, but somehow he had done it. Part of her last conversation with Anna recurred-Anna asking what she’d do if Norman did show up. Lock the door and dial 911, she’d said, but she had forgotten to lock the door and there was no phone. That last was the most hideous irony of all, because there was a jack in the corner of the living-room area, and the jack was live-she’d gone to the phone company on her lunch hour today and paid a deposit. The woman who waited on her had given her her new telephone number on a little white card, Rosie had tucked it into her purse, and then out the door she’d marched. Right past the display of phones for sale she had marched. Thinking she could get one at least ten dollars cheaper by marching out to the Lakeview Mall when she got a chance. And now, just because she’d wanted to save a lousy ten dollars… Silence from the other side of the door, but when she dropped her eyes to the crack at the bottom, she could see the shapes of his shoes. Big black shiny shoes, they would be. He no longer wore the uniform, but he still wore those black shoes. They were hard shoes. She could testify to that, because she had worn their marks on her legs and belly and buttocks many times over her years with him. The knocking was repeated, three quick series of three: rapraprap pause, rapraprap pause, rapraprap. Once again, as during her terrible breathless panic that morning in the recording booth, Rosie’s mind turned to the woman in the picture, standing there on top of the overgrown hill, not afraid of the coming thunderstorm, not afraid that the ruins slumped below her might be haunted by ghosts or trolls or just some wandering band of thugs, not afraid of anything. You could tell by the set of her back, by the way her hand was so nonchalantly raised, even (so Rosie really believed) by the shape of that one barely glimpsed breast. I’m not her, I am afraid-so afraid I’m almost wetting my pants-but I’m not going to let you just take me, Norman. I swear to God I won’t do that. For a moment or two she tried to remember the throw Gert Kinshaw had shown her, the one where you seized the forearms of your onrushing opponent and then turned sideways. It was no good-when she tried to visualize the crucial move, all she could see was Norman coming at her, his lips drawn back to show his teeth (drawn back in what she thought of as his biting smile), wanting to talk to her up close. Right up close. Her grocery bag was still standing on the kitchen counter with the yellow picnic-announcement fliers beside it. She’d taken out the perishables and stuck them in the refrigerator, but the few canned goods she’d picked up were still in the bag. She walked across to the counter on legs which seemed as devoid of feeling as wooden planks, and reached in. Three more quick knocks: rapraprap.