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:
The best thing, Shelley thought, would be to kill Miss Edgerton where nobody could see it and to hide the body where nobody could find it. That way, it could be months before someone came along to do something about the house, or the cat. She wouldn’t even have to worry about the grass growing out of control. Miss Edgerton didn’t have grass. She had pebbles in decorative colors, the way a lot of people did, so that they didn’t have to look at brown and dying lawns during the long months of water rationing in the summer.
Shelley got up from where she was sitting, walked around the car again, and sat down again. When she put her hands into the thick warm air, she could feel Edelweiss’s fur on her fingers. Buried in the white like that, her fingers looked as dark as sand.
It was ten minutes after twelve when Miss Edgerton came out of the building and headed for her car. Shelley was still there, in the parking lot, making no sense at all, and for a single frightened moment she thought that Miss Edgerton would not be alone. Mr. DeVoe would be with her, surely, or Miss Lazio would walk her out. That was the kind of thing adults did with each other. Shelley looked around, but the parking lot was deserted. So was the space at Miss Edgerton’s back. There was only Miss Edgerton, carrying the cat.
“Miss Altman?” Miss Edgerton said.
Shelley had only been called “Miss Altman” before by teachers — schoolteachers or Sunday-school teachers — and then because she was about to be in trouble. She blushed four shades of red and looked directly into Edelweiss’s eyes. He looked miserable. He looked as if he knew what was about to happen to him. And why shouldn’t he know? He’d probably been put in the car, and the cat carrier, often enough.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Shelley said. “I was just... just—”
“Just what?”
“Just looking for somebody to give me a ride. Out to Grandview Park.”
“Grandview Park?” Miss Edgerton blinked. She had her keys in one hand. She had Edelweiss in the other, tucked under her arm like a loaf of bread. She got the back passenger door open and reached for the cat carrier. “Why ever would you want to go to Grandview Park?”
If Edelweiss had been her own cat, Shelley would never have put her in the cat carrier. She wouldn’t even put her in the car, if she didn’t like to drive places. She stared stupidly as Miss Edgerton got Edelweiss into the carrier. Why ever would she want to go to Grandview Park?
“Shelley?” Miss Edgerton said. “Why do you want to go to Grandview Park?”
“Oh,” Shelley said. “Well. My mother’s there. For the afternoon. You know. She does nature stuff.”
“Does she? I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Oh, yeah. She does. She always has. You know. Since college. She went to Agnes Scott, did you know that?”
“No.” Edelweiss was hunched down in the carrier, making a noise like an angry purr. Shelley had to hold herself back from trying to rescue her.
“Well,” Shelley said. “She did. Go to Agnes Scott. And now she does nature stuff. And she’s out at Grandview and I’m supposed to meet her there. Except my ride isn’t here.”
“Who is your ride?” Miss Edgerton asked. “Possibly we could phone him.” She reached into her bag and came out with a cell phone.
“I don’t know her name,” Shelley said quickly. “It’s somebody my mom knows at the Methodist church. I mean, I know her first name. It’s Elizabeth. I just don’t know her last one. If you see what I mean.”
“I see that this seems to be a very disorganized undertaking,” Miss Edgerton said. “Are you always this confused about your plans? Is your mother always this confused? She keeps such a nice house. I wouldn’t have imagined she wasn’t meticulous about her arrangements.”
“There’s never been any problem before,” Shelley said, wondering when, exactly, this before was supposed to have taken place. The last time she’d been out to Grandview Park, she’d been ten years old and on a hike with the United Methodist Church’s Girl Scout troop. That was when her mother was still insisting that she belong to the Girl Scouts, before it turned out the Girl Scouts didn’t have anything against atheists joining, or gays. Then Shelley’s mother had gone on a long tirade about how she should have known it all along. Girl Scouts were always such tomboys. They hiked and tied knots. They were as masculine as lady wrestlers.
Miss Edgerton was standing by the side of her car. She had her keys in her hand. She had her jacket over her shoulders as if the day was a cool one instead of a lethally hot one. She squinted in the sun.
“I suppose there’s no reason for me not to drop you off, if you have to go,” she said. “But I do worry about what your mother is likely to say. I’m sure she doesn’t want you driving around with strangers.”
“You’re not a stranger,” Shelley said. “You live next door.”
“Yes,” Miss Edgerton said. Then she got in behind the wheel and popped the locks on the two doors that were still closed.
Shelley closed the door next to Edelweiss’s cat carrier and opened the one to the front passenger seat. Behind her, she could hear the cat making that same low growl, miserable and angry. Shelley knew she would be miserable and angry, too, if somebody had put her in a cage.
It got too much to listen to after a while. Shelley could hear the low tortured growl over the sound of the Volvo’s engine, even over the hum of National Public Radio, which seemed to have nothing else on it except people talking endlessly about things that didn’t make much sense. All the radio stations Shelley had ever listened to either played music or Rush Limbaugh. When Rush Limbaugh talked, he sounded excited, not hushed and secretive like these people here. Shelley tried to concentrate on the conversation — about gardening, and whether it was better to grow vegetables or flowers — but finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to make Miss Edgerton stop.
“It’s not as if I mean to make the cat suffer,” Miss Edgerton said. “I put her in the back like that because it’s the best place for her. She’s safe there. If I put her up on the seat, she rocks the carrier until it falls over.”
“It’s all right,” Shelley said. They had stopped near the curb on one of those long stretches of two-lane road that were everywhere in this part of Florida. Palm trees lined the sidewalks on both sides, but nothing else did. Shelley looked around as she was getting the cat carrier out to put on her lap in the front seat, and there was nothing to see. The nearest house was blocks away, except you couldn’t call it blocks because there weren’t any blocks. The nearest gas station was half a mile down the road. She shut the back door and climbed into her seat with the cat carrier in her hands. She got her seat belt on and her arms around the carrier. She could put her fingers through the grille at the carrier’s front, the little cage part. Edelweiss nipped at her, causing no pain.
“She really is quite all right in the back,” Miss Edgerton said. “She doesn’t like it, it’s true, but we can’t always like all the things we have to do. I’m sure you don’t like all the things you have to do.”
“She doesn’t know any better,” Shelley said, although that was not what she meant. Edelweiss seemed to her to know better than just about anybody.
Miss Edgerton got back on the road. It wasn’t very far to Grandview Park now. If Shelley had ignored the noise, the cat would not have had to suffer any longer than a few more minutes. Still, Shelley felt better. Edelweiss had stopped nipping her fingers and begun to nuzzle them. She had stopped making that noise that sounded like agony.