Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
Men like Crash Steensen, vets with “problems” and no family, or even with family, had a tendency to disappear, and there was no finding them no matter how motivated the search.
I wanted to find him, really wanted to, because Scotty McKey had never before asked me for anything, but the gone-for-good feeling I had about Steensen was running strong, and it felt like I was just going through the motions. Not the best frame of mind to start a search, but at least being conscious of it, I’d stay with it to the end.
So, feeling hopeless but determined, I hauled myself out of bed, got directions from the desk clerk, and put the Explorer on the road again, southwest.
To Polecat Springs, about twenty minutes from Tarboro, where I arrived in another downpour. I drove slowly through the tiny village of modest wood-frame homes, looking for the post office, which turned out to be a counter in the corner of the Polecat Springs General Store and Tattoo Emporium.
I stopped and got directions from the postmistress — a middle-aged woman, wearing jeans and a tube top, and sporting a variety of wildlife body art over her shoulders and chest and a flaming-red head of curly hair.
And she remembered Crash.
“Crazy-looking guy, sure,” she said. “Come in here couple times last year.”
“You haven’t seen him since?” I asked.
“Nah. Not since way last fall,” she told me. “Had a box, and came in to pick up his government check a few times, then — whoosh — never came back. Had to return the last couple checks that came for him and some other mail, ’cause he didn’t pay the rental on the box.”
“No forwarding address, then.”
She dug out a ledger from under the counter, flipped a couple of pages, and said, “No forwarding or residence address. Box rental paid through November last year, but I’ve got a note here that I returned his November and December’s VA checks, so the last I saw of him was probably October sometime.”
I nodded, then showed her the map Scotty had given me, which she studied for a moment.
“Well, that’s Fort Allen Road, anyway,” she said. “Takes you right past the springs.”
“The springs?”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh — like Polecat Springs?”
“Oh.”
“Can’t miss it, you going up that way.”
I pointed to the spot where the cabin was indicated on the shore of the Tar River. “How about this place here?”
“Oh, that’s swampland, way past the springs, right along Nasty Creek.”
“Nasty Creek?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Polecat Springs?”
“Yup.”
“Sounds inviting.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she told me. “I never get out that way.” She smiled at me and added, “There’s nothing out there.”
I smiled back at her. “Probably something.”
“Like what?”
I nodded. “Well, thanks,” I told her, and started out.
“Got a special this week on dirty birds,” she said.
I looked back. “Dirty birds?”
She smiled broadly and pointed to her neck and the ring of pigeons she wore there, like a necklace.
I waved no thanks and said, “I’m saving my neck for dirty mice.”
“Mice?” she said, sticking the tip of her tongue out at the corner of her mouth in a that-makes-me-sick way. “How weird is that?”
Right.
Sometimes, irony is as lost as a vegetarian in a steakhouse.
I found Fort Allen Road easily enough — a winding, narrow ribbon of asphalt that paralleled the river for a few miles, then crossed a narrow, shaky-looking bridge, looped south for a few miles more, then forked.
I flipped a mental coin and went left about two hundred yards, where the road turned suddenly unpaved, rutted, and semi- overgrown, and after a few bumpy miles it finally ended at the edge of a gloomy-looking swamp.
Where a handmade sign informed the interested, POLECAT SPRINGS — ONE MILE — HOLD YOUR NOSE.
And though I wasn’t terribly interested, I put on a poncho, got out, found a semi-dry trail, and hiked into the swamp, which was thickly treed and unusually uneven with boggy mounds. It seemed to go on forever.
After about a twenty-minute walk, I came to a small flowing stream I knew was Nasty Creek. It flowed from a steamy, bubbling pond that I knew also was Polecat Springs.
I knew because the sulfuric emanation produced the deadliest smell I’ve ever encountered, and nose-holding was, indeed, well recommended.
Following the creek south a few hundred yards more, I came to the point where it flowed into the Tar, where I stopped and scanned the area with my binoculars.
I could see nothing of any cabin, though this was where my map showed it to be. After a few minutes, I gave it up and turned back to go upstream — and found it.
The cabin was about a hundred feet from where I stood, buried in a cluster of mangrove and resting on a gnarl of roots. I got my feet wet just hiking in.
It was a small thing, more of a hut than a cabin, with walls of weather-grayed planks, a slanted sheet metal roof, and a rusted pipe for a chimney. A boarded-up window in front had the remains of a bird’s nest in it, and the door seemed to hang in its frame a bit crookedly.
As I got close, that unmistakable sense of “nobody’s home” came through loud and clear, but when I got to the door, I gave it a good hard knock anyway, which scared a squirrel that’d been on the roof into leaping onto a tree branch right over my head, and also opened the door a little because it hadn’t actually been closed. I gave it a slight push and took a step inside, smelling the odor of rotting wood that had me stepping very gingerly over the deep-sagging plank floor.
The cabin was one room, roughly twenty by twenty, and the pine wood ceiling had a sag in the middle, giving the place a very cramped look. There was a cot in one corner with a rolled sleeping bag under it, and an overturned kerosene heater in the other corner with a broken flue hanging from the ceiling above it. Against the right wall, just under a broken window, was a rusted sink with a hand pump that was leaning down toward the floor. There was a folding card table and a broken chair in the middle of the room, and the whole place was littered with clothes, cooking utensils, books, papers, other odds and ends, tree leaves, and animal droppings — and everything was drenched and rotting.
Crash Steensen wasn’t home, and hadn’t been for a long while.
Walking carefully over the squishy mess on the floor, I came to where the card table stood, on which was spread a few sodden pages of the sports section of the Raleigh News and Observer for October 12th of the previous year.
The Yankees had won the World Series.
Not the sports scoop of the century.
Looking around myself in the dim light, I saw a pile of rubbish under the cot, so I walked over, squatted down, and poked through it, finding only... rubbish. But then farther under the cot near the wall was a large gray bag, and I reached and brought it out. I had found Steensen’s treasure.
A Zippo lighter, a pouch of marijuana, some cigarette papers, a few ancient issues of Rolling Stone, and a stained Purple Heart medal, dangling from its case.
The citation, on onionskin paper, was folded inside, and although the light in the cabin was too poor to make out the whole of the faded text, the name “Steensen, Ralph J., 1st Lt.” was clear enough.
So I was, at least, in the right place.
I put the ribbon and citation back in the bag with everything except the grass, which I prudently tossed onto the cot, then stood, looking around myself again.
“So, where’d you go, Crash?” I asked the dark room.
There was no reply, only the sound of the creaking floor and the rain thudding on the roof. The wild-goose-chase feeling was running strong in me.