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:
It was the pink slips that decided it, in the end. Shelley had the pink slips and had to take them to the office. Miss Edgerton was in that very same office, doing some kind of work for the lawyer who was working for the Board of Education. Something. Shelley couldn’t remember. She only knew that as she made her way toward the center of the building, she felt better than she had in hours. She felt lightheaded and secure.
She’d expected to have to look around to find Miss Edgerton — in a back office, maybe, or closeted with the principal — but Miss Edgerton was right out front at a desk, next to Miss Lazio, and the cat was with her. Or rather, the cat was lying across a pile of papers, curled around a crystal paperweight that Shelley didn’t remember ever seeing before. Maybe it belonged to Miss Edgerton, or the cat, and Miss Edgerton had brought it along to keep the cat happy. Miss Lazio was certainly happy. She reached across to Miss Edgerton’s desk every once in a while to stroke Edelweiss’s back, and Edelweiss curled around to nuzzle the fingers when they came close. It was, Shelley thought, completely nauseating. They treated that cat the way they should have treated a child, except that neither of them had children. They probably didn’t even want them. Maybe Amanda was right. Maybe Miss Edgerton was a lesbian. Maybe Miss Lazio was her lover. Shelley seemed to be full of maybes today. It made no sense. She wished she could take off for the rest of the day and spend her time downtown, where there was nothing to do, but where nobody was watching her.
Miss Edgerton and Miss Lazio both looked up when she came into the office. Miss Lazio looked at the little clutch of pink slips with a frown. Miss Lazio was nowhere near as annoying as Miss Edgerton, because she was younger, and not so perfect. Her hair was forever falling out of the clips she used to try to hold it back.
“Well,” she said, as Shelley pushed her way up to the counter that separated the desks from the waiting area. “You seem to have been busy today. Let me see what you’ve got.”
She got out from behind her desk and came to where Shelley was standing. At the desk with the cat on it, Miss Edgerton sat still, staring. The cat was snaking around as if it were trying to rub itself rich. It was so white, it made everything near it look darker.
“I know you, don’t I?” Miss Edgerton said finally. “You live next door to me.”
“That’s right,” Shelley said.
Miss Lazio had gone through each of the pink slips. “I don’t want you to think she’s some kind of juvenile delinquent,” she said. “These are all minor enough. They always are, with Shelley.”
“That’s right,” Miss Edgerton said. “Shelley Altman. When you were younger, you used to play the piano.”
“I gave it up in fifth grade,” Shelley said.
“That’s a pity. It’s a fine talent, playing the piano. When I was younger, almost every girl learned. You should have had more ambition.”
“I like your cat,” Shelley said.
Miss Edgerton brightened and put out a hand to let Edelweiss nuzzle against it. The two of them together looked like some kind of joke: the old maid and her cat. Miss Edgerton had long fingers with blunt, well-tended nails. Her nail polish was clear and uneventful. Shelley wondered, suddenly, which of the Victoria’s Secret underwear sets she was wearing today.
“It can’t be helped,” Miss Lazio was saying. “Shelley? Are you listening? It can’t be helped. We’ve got the curricular plan for next year to get out of this office today. I’ve got Caroline here to help us with the legal documents we have to file. There’s just not going to be anybody free to talk to you about these until tomorrow. It would be different if you’d done something really serious. I could have sent you to Mr. Borden if you’d vandalized some property or threatened another student with bodily harm. But this—” Miss Lazio waved it all away with one hand. “This is barely worth talking about. You’ll have to come back tomorrow and talk to somebody then.”
“All right,” Shelley said.
“I don’t think it would have been better if she had vandalized property,” Miss Edgerton said.
Miss Lazio brushed hair out of her face. “Just let it go,” she said. “I’ll charge these off on the book. You can forget all about them. Except the homework, of course, and that’s up to your teacher. Why you girls don’t do homework is more than I can understand. But then, I don’t understand anything anymore, do I? We didn’t have air-conditioning when I went to high school. We got hot, that was all, and we learned to live with it. They never learn to live with anything.”
“I like your cat,” Shelley said again.
Miss Edgerton smiled. Then she leaned over and picked up Edelweiss and laid her across her shoulder. The cat purred and stretched and yawned.
“I like my cat, too,” Miss Edgerton said. “Nobody can be completely without sense if they truly love a cat.”
Lunch was at eleven o’clock. Shelley didn’t eat it. After she was finished in the office, she went down the corridor and out the side door, to the teachers’ parking lot. She looked up and down the rows until she found Miss Edgerton’s car. Then she walked through the planters until she was standing beside it. It had not changed since the last time she’d seen it. There was no reason why she should have expected it would. It was still dark blue, and it still had the cat carrier in the back seat. The carrier’s door was propped open now, though, to make it easier for Miss Edgerton to get Edelweiss inside it when it was time to go. All the doors were locked, and the trunk was locked, too. Shelley tried it. Whatever she was going to do next, she wouldn’t be able to hide in the back seat or the trunk until Miss Edgerton decided to go home.
She walked around the car a few times. She sat down on the concrete bumper that defined the parking space inside its two white border lines. The teachers’ parking lot was full of these bumpers, although the student parking lot had none. Shelley had no idea what they were for. She didn’t know how to drive, and it if was up to her mother, she never would.
She walked around the car again, and again, and again. She felt dizzy, but she didn’t want to stop. She thought of going into Miss Edgerton’s house when Miss Edgerton wasn’t there, but the cat was. She’d been doing that long before Amanda had moved to Matahatchee and had come up with the idea of killing off Miss Edgerton, and not just Miss Edgerton, but lots of people, all the people who deserved to die. Shelley would have thought of it on her own, though, eventually, because when she was in Miss Edgerton’s house and it was quiet and cool and dark, she sometimes imagined Miss Edgerton dead, on the floor, on the couch, stone cold and unable ever to come back to life again. Every once in a while, she even dreamed of it. She turned over in bed and there she was, in her head, in that house, with the body cold in the bathtub or the garage or someplace else out of the way. She sat down at the kitchen table, and Edelweiss came up to sit in her lap. She lay down in the big queen-size sleigh bed — why did Miss Edgerton have a bed that size, when she was the only one who ever slept in it? — and Edelweiss came to lie across her stomach. It was not stupid to love a cat, Shelley thought, if you loved it the right way. It was only stupid to treat a cat as a child. She was sure she would never treat Edelweiss as a child, if Edelweiss was her own. The only problem would be her parents, who did not like the idea of a pet in the house. They didn’t like the idea of Edelweiss, either. When Edelweiss came across the yard to look for Shelley, Shelley’s mother would shoo it back home. Cats bring lice, Shelley’s mother always said. Then she gave Shelley a lecture on why it was more important, and more Christian, to love your fellow human beings instead of a cat.