The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
Out in the driveway next door, Miss Caroline Edgerton had put her cat very carefully into the cat carrier that she kept in the back seat for whenever she needed it. Her cat was named Edelweiss, because it was as purely white as some silly flower that grew in Switzerland, and it didn’t like going into the carrier for any reason whatsoever. Shelley was always a little surprised that Miss Edgerton didn’t take her cat to work every day. She surely lived with it like it was surgically attached when she was home. Sometimes, when Shelley looked into the windows at night, Miss Edgerton would be sitting in the big club chair in the living room with Edelweiss draped around her neck like a feather boa, the both of them watching something mind-numbingly boring on PBS. Shelley didn’t care if Miss Edgerton was somebody who had had a tragic life. She hated Miss Edgerton with everything inside herself, much the way she also hated Mrs. Keller who taught English at school and Mrs. Partree who ran that youth group at the Methodist church. Shelley’s parents went to the Methodist church. They made Shelley go with them. Twice a year they made Shelley go on a Bible retreat with the youth group, too. By now, Shelley had read through the really good parts of the Bible almost as often as she had watched Natural Born Killers — but only because she wasn’t allowed to watch Natural Born Killers in the house.
Miss Edgerton had Edelweiss safely in the cat carrier and the cat carrier safely on the floor of the back seat of the car. That was the safest place for Edelweiss to be if there was ever a car accident. Miss Edgerton came around front and got in behind the wheel. Her car was a trim little Volvo sedan, in navy blue, which matched her business suit today. Miss Edgerton always looked businesslike, even though she didn’t work at anything any more important than being a secretary.
Shelley moved away from her bedroom window and sat down on her bed. Her school clothes were hung on her closet door. Her makeup was laid out on the vanity table in front of the beveled mirror that was supposed to be good for making sure you covered up your flaws and imperfections. Her fingernails were bright green. It seemed impossible to her that she should have to get up and go out and spend the day at Matahatchee High School, where she was only a sophomore and not considered very important by the other girls in her class. Amanda was important. Amanda was so important, she was already a varsity cheerleader, and secretary of the student council, and a member of the Key Club. Once a month, at least, Amanda had her picture in the Matahatchee Echo, which was the school newspaper. Amanda was a peer tutor. Amanda was an anger management peer counselor. Amanda sang in the choir at church. Sometimes, when Shelley thought about killing somebody, Amanda seemed to be the very best one to kill. Then Shelley would think about Miss Edgerton and change her mind. It was just that the waiting was making her crazy. It got to the point sometimes when she couldn’t seem to make herself think. Now she got up and got her bright blue halter-top off its hanger and started to put it on. She didn’t know if she was glad to live in a place where it almost never got cold. She hated halter-tops. They made her feel as if someone were about to scrape away her skin.
School made Shelley feel as if she were already dead. It took her forever to get dressed to go there, and then it took her forever to walk the six long blocks that got her to its front door. To pass the time, she went looking for Miss Caroline Edgerton on Main Street, through the front window in the offices of Carmeth, Brane, and DeVoe, where she worked. Sometimes Miss Edgerton sat at the front desk there and answered the phone for hours. When she had the cat with her, the cat sat on the desk near the phone and looked up every time it rang. Sometimes the cat draped itself over the phone, as if it were a chicken and the phone was its egg. When it was like that and the phone rang, Miss Edgerton would lift the cat gently so that she could pick up the phone. She was never angry or impatient with the cat. She was better to Edelweiss than most parents were to their children. She was certainly better to Edelweiss than Shelley’s parents were to Shelley. This morning, though, neither Miss Edgerton nor the cat was anywhere to be seen. The woman behind the front desk was young and weighted down under a cascade of falls and hairpieces. Shelley went around the back to make sure Miss Edgerton’s car was in the parking lot — it was, right next to the bright red Porsche that belonged to Mr. DeVoe — and then she went to school, thinking about palm trees as she went. Amanda came from New York State someplace. She’d never seen a palm tree in person until her parents had moved here when she was still in junior high. Palm trees were the first thing she and Shelley had talked about, in Shelley’s backyard, on the day they met.
“They don’t look like real trees at all,” Amanda had said, and then she’d seen Miss Caroline Edgerton come out her back door to potter around in her yard.
Shelley went to her locker and stowed away most of her books in it. She brought books home every night, because if she didn’t, her parents screamed at her, her mother especially. They gave her lectures about how she would never amount to anything, and how she’d end up like those homeless people who slept every night on Segovia Avenue. She brought the books home, and she laid them out across the desk in her bedroom, but that was all she did with them. If she had homework and knew about it, she ignored it. Mostly she didn’t have homework, because if you weren’t in the college track, the teachers didn’t see any point in giving any. She did go to class. Not going was the surest way to get the principal to call your parents, and Shelley lived to make sure she wasn’t bothered by her parents.
She got her English book — Explorations in Literature, a complete bore — and headed down the hall to her homeroom. She would have skipped homeroom if she could have. It was nothing but sitting in a sea of people who didn’t want to talk to her and listening to announcements about things she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Chess Club. Glee Club. Future Teachers of America. Homeroom, though, was the one thing she could not skip, not ever. If you skipped that, you were counted absent for the entire day.
She was just adjusting the strap on her shoulder bag for the fiftieth time when she saw Amanda in the hall, and for the first few moments she didn’t pay attention. Amanda didn’t much like talking to her in school. Usually, they passed each other in the halls without even saying hello, and saved their conversations for after school, in their own bedrooms. Their houses were only across the street from each other. Shelley started to go on by and take her seat in Room 122, but Amanda snaked out her hand and grabbed her elbow.
“Go to the girls’ room,” Amanda said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Shelley hesitated. It really wasn’t all right to miss homeroom, although having to go to the bathroom was usually a good enough excuse for being tardy. She looked through the window in the door at Miss Carroll, who was wearing a sleeveless dress and a crucifix. She wore the crucifix because somebody’s father objected to the school board that they had a “Satanist” teaching in Matahatchee, by which it turned out he meant a Catholic. Shelley prodded at her hair. The school’s air-conditioning was only half working. Her hair was full of sweat.
“Go ahead,” Amanda said. “This is important.”