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:
Grandview Park announced itself with a tall gate that was always open, with a latticework arch above it that spelled out its name in metal letters. Miss Edgerton turned the Volvo into the drive and went in for the five hundred or so feet that were possible before all traffic had to stop. It was not really a park. It was a “wilderness area,” designated as such by the federal government, and set aside to remain completely undeveloped. Like the Everglades, its only purpose was to exist. Shelley got out of the car and looked around. There was no sign of Amanda she could see. There was no sign of anything except a narrow trail leading in through the Spanish moss and the high grass. Shelley shifted from one foot to the other, unsure what to do.
Miss Edgerton got out of the car. “Your mother doesn’t seem to be here. There’s no car parked anywhere I can see.”
“It’s probably parked around the other side.”
“Let’s go there, then.”
“Oh, no,” Shelley said. “That’s not necessary. I know where she goes. It’s easy enough to reach from here. It’s just—”
“Yes?”
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, walking in with me? I get a little spooked by the stuff, you know. Bugs and things. And there are alligators.”
“If there are alligators, you shouldn’t go in at all.”
“Oh, the alligators aren’t roaming around loose. I mean, they are, but they live at the bottom of this clifflike thing, you know, and they never come out where they’re going to bother you. My mother comes out here bird-watching and stuff all the time.”
Shelley rubbed the side of her face. She had no idea what she was saying. The park could be crawling with alligators. There could be an alligator behind every bush. She really did not remember, in any detail, the last time she had been here, except that she had sat down on a path and cried when she found out they hadn’t brought any Coke. She should have brought a different kind of coke. That would have been the best idea. She looked around. She wished she knew where Amanda was. She wondered if she could do this on her own, and then decided she had to. If she had closed her eyes at just that moment, she could have seen Miss Edgerton dead again, this time on the overgrown grass, with alligators coming toward her.
Miss Edgerton looked from one side of her to the other, and then up the path. There was nothing to see there. The trees were too thick. So was the grass. So was the Spanish moss. When you looked up the path, all you saw was darkness.
“We’ll bring Edelweiss,” Miss Edgerton said suddenly. “I don’t like to leave her in the car very long in this heat. She’ll get dehydrated. Bring me the carrier now, and show me the way your mother will have gone. We’ll walk for a while, but if we don’t find her soon we’ll go back. I’m not going to have you wandering around a swamp in central Florida on your own.”
Shelley snatched Edelweiss in the carrier and came around the side of the car. Miss Edgerton took the carrier and nodded toward the path.
“You lead,” Miss Edgerton said. “You’re the one who knows where we’re going. And call out. Maybe your mother will hear us and show us some mercy.”
“Right,” Shelley said, looking back at Edelweiss in the carrier. All she could see were the eyes in white fir, eyes as black as the asphalt pebbles that sucked up onto the road every year in the worst heat of the summer.
She turned toward the path and started in, her stomach turning, her head full of fuzz. Now that the moment was here, she could barely think at all. She needed Amanda to be here, and Amanda was not. Amanda would know what to do. As it was, all Shelley could manage was to walk steadily forward, into the trees, into the brush, and to imagine, as she had always imagined. For some reason, though, she couldn’t seem to imagine Miss Edgerton dead — she couldn’t imagine Miss Edgerton at all. It was as if Miss Edgerton had never existed. All Shelley could concentrate on was the light on Edelweiss’s face as she let her out of the cat carrier and into the daylight. You shouldn’t keep an animal caged, Shelley thought, you really shouldn’t. Not even to ride in a car. If there was no way for Edelweiss to be safe in a car without a carrier, then she and Edelweiss would walk everywhere they went. They would start by walking home, as soon as Miss Edgerton was dead.
You shouldn’t keep an animal caged, Shelley told herself virtuously, one more time. And then something hit her hard, on the back of the head.
Farther back on the path, Miss Edgerton stopped and put the cat carrier down next to her feet. She had seen the poker arch and Shelley’s body fall, but she hadn’t witnessed the details of the wound, and she had no intention of doing so. That was why she had her helpers in the first place. She needed someone to handle the messy parts, and she had never much cared for the sight of blood. Now she waited patiently while Amanda walked farther up the path and threw the poker into the brush. Then she came back into view, stripping off her white cotton gloves. There was a time when women everywhere wore white cotton gloves as automatically as they wore panties, but those days were dead and gone, and Miss Edgerton knew it.
“Well,” she said.
“She wasn’t paying any attention,” Amanda said.
“They never do,” Miss Edgerton said. “They get distracted by the cat. I’d better give you a lift home, or people will start wondering where you are.”
She turned around and went back down the path, toward her car. She did not look back at Amanda, and would not have, no matter what she thought the girl was doing. She got to the car and put the cat carrier in the back seat, where it belonged. She got behind the wheel and waited. Amanda would want to look at the body, to prod it, to make sure of it. She’d been at this only six months, and this was only her third adventure.
Miss Edgerton could remember when she had been at this for only six months — but that was decades ago, and she had been younger then.
William Harrison
Texas Heat
From The Texas Review
Carla met him first: an oddly handsome, tall, grinning cowboy type with large red hands. He introduced himself as Boomer Smith and said he grew up in Harlingen and the valley, but moved around these days chasing deals. He wanted a nice house out in the hill country, he said, with a pool, a view, and, if possible, stables.
Carla told her partner, Mary Beth, about him. They owned a small realty company, Lantana, out on Highway 290, west of Austin, and specialized in small ranches.
“He bring a letter from a bank?” Mary Beth asked. “He sounds too good to be true.”
“Said he’d pay cash. But he also said we could check his credit, though I haven’t done it. I think we’re talking a buyer who’ll spend a million or two.”
“You like him?”
“Kinda. Once or twice this look came over his face, though.”
“What sort of look?”
“Like he definitely might want to get in my pants.”
“Carla, we’re having a lousy month and you know it. You might have to sacrifice your body.”
“Tell me about it,” Carla answered, and they shared a snort of laughter.
Mary Beth and Carla decided in college that they could run a successful real estate business together, but since that time they had suffered failed marriages, money problems, heartbreaks, and heavy competition from the larger real estate firms in both Austin and over in Blanco County. They struggled to pay rent on their office building, a washed-out abode with noisy plumbing set back in a grove of scrub oaks and windblown mesquite trees halfway out toward Dripping Springs. Mary Beth had a nine-year-old son with asthma, Luke, who sat on the bench for his Little League team and Carla had a demanding mother with too many cats and a series of bad hairdressers who cut too much off. Even so, both Carla and Mary Beth danced the salsa at Miguel’s, the Texas Two-Step at the Broken Spoke, and up close on Sixth Street with assorted telephone linemen, executives, former halfbacks and dull professors. They traded date notes after occasions at Threadgill’s or the Oasis and agreed on just one general rule between them: no musicians.