The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
After I examined her, I gave her a light sedative. She’d be hysterical before long if she continued to think back over this day, the arrival of Belle, big-eyed to see the baby, her questioning of Belle until she understood the tale that had been started.
When I went out in the night again, I paused below the cabin. My gaze moved over the windswept reaches of the wild mountains. I didn’t know exactly what I expected to see, perhaps Rufe’s shadow in the pale, cold moonlight that had come with clearing skies.
Alone in my house that night, I lay in my feather ticking and tried to sleep. The rushing wind, moaning in the eaves, annoyed me. Slumber danced away from me in the flames in the fireplace. My mind was on edge, remembering.
It was written in bone, muscles, blood, and brain that Jack and Rufe be either friends the powers of darkness couldn’t sever or the bitterest enemies. There was no middle ground, no meeting place for those two. The presence of one was a challenge to the other.
It had begun years ago, when both attended the one-room country schoolhouse below Walnut Gap. Jack’s ma had died and his pa had sent him from north Georgia, one segment of a broken family, to live with an aunt and her husband.
Rufe waited for Jack by the schoolhouse pump that first day. Rufe spat on his knuckles and said, “You have to fight me if you go to this school.” Rufe’s words carried no bravado. He wasn’t a bully, simply a young, primitive king already sensing a challenge to his domain. The boys fought that day, as if they were men, toe to toe, silently. Neither quit; both stopped fighting from exhaustion that left them on the earth sucking for air. But Rufe knew in his heart that the other boy had the edge on him.
They fought eleven times during that school term. Beatings by their elders failed to stop them, and the beatings they gave each other settled nothing.
Rufe went away to school, and Jack went to work on his aunt’s rocky, hillside farm. Rufe had advantages that Jack could never have, security, the prestige of a family that had long supplied the hill people with leadership. Yet Rufe would have gladly surrendered all these things if he could have, one single time, met Jack Clane on exactly equal terms and thoroughly and decisively whipped him.
When war came, both men quietly enlisted. Rufe became a lieutenant, Jack a sergeant. Rufe caught a piece of shrapnel on his first beachhead in Italy. Jack’s fighting carried him all the way from Normandy to the Rhine.
After they came home, sobered by war, they fought less often; only when they met at a schoolhouse dance or shucking bee.
The real trouble began when Edie Simmons came to the village to take the telephone operator’s job. With her delicate beauty she was like a gust of springtime. Rufe began seeing her constantly. He grew quieter in bearing. His eyes shone when he spoke her name. His hand trembled when he touched her.
Edie met Jack some time later when she went to a quilting party at his aunt’s house. He drove her home that night, and from that moment, she was a changed woman.
Six months later she married Jack. Men sat in church during the ceremony, blood pulsing thick and cold in their veins, and wondered if there was going to be a shooting in the church yard when the service was over.
But nothing so direct would now have appeased Rufe’s anger. Several months later he suffered the final outrage. He heard that Edie was going to have a child. Up to this point he might have felt that somehow he would gain her in the end. Now he knew that she was lost to him forever. He took the news with a pale face, and lips that tightened until his flashing white teeth were laid bare.
He took to stopping by the Clane place when he was in the neighborhood to pass the time of day, he said. It was a suffering man’s excuse to torture himself with the sight of her blooming toward the birth of another man’s child. Here for Rufe’s eyes was the evidence of love, the token of the manner in which her spirit was welded to the spirit of the hated enemy.
Jack was quiet on these occasions, as he was when he and Rufe met in town. Jack recognized the deadliness in the man before him. The same sidewalk wasn’t big enough to hold the pair of them, and it was Jack who slipped to one side, but with a calm grace that bespoke no cowardice, only common judgment, and made him the silent, un-aggressive victor.
Rufe was sheriff now, a young man of power in the community. What thoughts passed through his head none can say, but his cold attitude, the glitter in his eyes when Jack Clane’s name was mentioned indicated that Rufe had but one hope for his future, the utter annihilation of his enemy.
It so happened that a hound dog put Jack at Rufe’s mercy. A big, red-spotted creature, the hound belonged to a sullen farmer named Clem Coggins. The dog ran beneath the wheels of Jack’s truck as he was homeward bound in the dusk.
He delivered the dog’s crushed body to the Coggins place. Coggins came out of the house, saw the dog, and knocked Jack down. Jack struck back. Coggins tumbled from the blow and struck his head against the corner of the cement cap on his well.
Coggins was groggily getting to his feet when his wife and three children came out of the house. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Coggins,” Jack said. “I didn’t mean to kill the dog, or hurt your husband either. Better get him inside and dress that head wound. It’s bleeding some. And try to calm him down and tell him I’ll pay whatever the dog is worth.”
That was Jack’s story, as related by Edie.
I was called to the Coggins place late that night. Clem was in a near-coma when I arrived. He was suffering a fractured skull.
Jack vanished into the hills, a fugitive from a warrant charging him with attempted murder. Perhaps he hoped that Clem would relent as his condition improved. Or perhaps he hoped not at all, struggling only because that dogged courage would not allow him to do otherwise, knowing that surrender would place him in the hands of Rufe. Six days now he had endured the pinching hunger, the bone-rotting cold. In his mind must have been the intention to endure indefinitely, until Edie had her baby, until he could steal the two of them away to leave the hills and Rufe’s hatred forever.
It was a hatred poisoning my own flesh and blood; Rufe was my only son...
Lack of sleep caused aches to filter in my joints the next day. The snow still lay in the hollows and the earth crunched beneath a footfall. The sky was a cold, metallic blue. It turned into a leaden sheet as the day progressed and finally was tinged with purple when I went home.
The woman from the tenant family on my place, who has swept the house and done the cooking since my wife died, had put my supper in the range warmer. I felt too tired to eat, but ate anyway. I’d made the Clane place my last stop before heading for supper, and my mind was filled with thoughts of Edie. She was waiting for something horrible to happen, and I wasn’t surprised that her endurance was being beaten down to the vanishing point. Later tonight I intended to make another call at the Clane place.
Meanwhile there was a fire spreading its warmth through the parlor. The high-backed leather chair had molded to my body through years of use. My head nodded forward. I slept.
A shaft of brittle cold moonlight was reaching through the window when I awoke. The fire had died away to a few embers in the fireplace. My body shook against the cold that had seeped into the house. I started to get out of the chair, and a hand, lean, sinewy, strong, clamped over my mouth.
“Don’t holler, Doc,” Jack said quietly.
I relaxed and he took his hand away. I turned to look at him. He was a thin shadow beside my chair. Moonlight touched his face, making shadows of his eyes.
“I heard the tale, Doc. I came to see. She hasn’t had her baby, but she’s having it now. Worry and nervous strain are hurrying things up.”