Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс, Пикард Нэнси
- Год: 2008
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008». Краткое содержание книги:
“Do you want to sit with us?” These were the pretty girls who liked to have hush-hush parties with beer in the study room of the dorm. Jen was always with them, and she scooted over to make another place. Tatum sat down next to her, and Jen adjusted the scarf around Tatum’s neck.
“Like that.” She loosened the ends. “So it doesn’t look like it’s strangling you to death. Now you can breathe.” Tatum felt Jen watching her closely as she took a deep breath.
“Have you seen him again?” one of the pretty girls asked her. Tatum thought she might like to get some new glasses like Officer Cathy’s so she’d look extra smart, and they’d ask her opinion on all kinds of things. She could explain everything she knew — about how feelings can become whatever memory you need them to be.
Tatum shook her head. She was not supposed to talk about him with the other girls. Officer Cathy said she would do the talking as part of her investigation. Rumors on campus can rage out of control.
“My sister once had some people follow her at the mall. They stole her purse. She never got it back again,” one of the girls at the end of the table volunteered.
“We thought my younger brother got kidnapped once when we couldn’t find him,” another girl stated. “But he’d fallen asleep in the car.” She paused to chew on a cherry tomato. “Good thing the windows were open, or he might have suffocated.”
“Did you know that they might let that guy John Hinckley out of jail?” Jen volunteered. “Or I guess he’s in a loony bin. He’s the one who tried to kill Ronald Reagan. He’s crazy.” Reagan had been President before Tatum was born, before they all were born. Everyone, even Jen with her Suchness, wanted to tell a scary story.
“I found something down by the pond, near the bench.” Tatum pulled the condom wrapper out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table next to the butter. All of the girls gazed at it as if it were a sacred relic.
“You touched it?” Jen whispered incredulously.
“It’s just the wrapper.” Tatum replied. The dark-green rectangle was ripped carefully along the top. One of the girls pushed at it with her fork. Someone snickered. “Maybe that should go in the school paper, too. Under lost and found. You’ll be famous, Tatum, one way or another. Just you wait and see.”
Tatum picked the wrapper back up and stuffed it in her pocket. She tugged on the scarf as she stood up. “I need to get to the library to finish my history project.” She didn’t want to be the last one left at the table.
Some of the other girls grabbed their backpacks. Tatum walked out first. She liked being at the front rather than the back of the group. She fingered the torn wrapper in her pocket.
On her way to the library, Tatum called her mother on her cell phone. Usually, she got up out of bed for dinner. They ate late at home. Her father answered.
“She’s still sleeping,” he stated quietly. Tatum would not ask how she was doing. Her father sighed on the other end of the phone as if he, too, had just gotten up from a long nap. “I’ll tell her you called.”
“Dad.” She paused. Her father was older than her mother by a lot, maybe twenty years. He was the one who was supposed to die first. “Yes, Tate?”
“There’s a man following me on campus.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Again?” he added quietly.
“They wrote about it for the school newspaper. The security guard, Officer Cathy, she’s on the lookout for him.” Her father was silent for a minute.
“SOP,” Tatum added.
“Well, Tatum, it sounds like you’re doing the right thing. Notifying the authorities.” He paused to swallow. “I’ll call the headmaster in the morning.”
His voice sounded crackly, like that of an old man. He was not as tall as he used to be. His gray hair had grown wiry and wild, not cut short like when he traveled for the newspaper. As the foreign correspondent, he had seen the world, both its good and bad parts. Newspapers were his source of reality. What got printed there was what had actually happened.
“Dad?” She wanted to tell him something else, something that would make a memory for her mother, too. But he’d already hung up. She wanted him to tell her mother about the colorful, striped scarf she wore around her neck. Tatum wanted her mother to know that she was letting her hair grow extra long. And that she washed it every other day. She wanted her mother to know that she was taking walks with Officer Cathy and about the history project. And she wanted her mother to know about Suchness, about everything that was happening, even as her own world was slowing down.
Instead of going to the library, Tatum headed back to her room. She removed her bed comforter, satin pillow, and secret notebook. Down in the basement, the door was no longer propped open. Tatum recovered the brick from behind the bush and placed it in the doorway again. She walked to the pond, to the bench near where she had found the condom wrapper. Lying down, she tucked the comforter all around her. The sky was dusky, nearly dark, with the wind making tiny, turbulent waves on the lake. The air smelled fresh, like the first hope of springtime.
Officer Cathy, Jen, her father, the headmaster, the pretty girls, or anybody else who bothered to look would find her on the bench. And Tatum would tell them about the man — about how he had been there too, his arms holding her tight, his legs tangled up with hers, his face close, breathing hot breaths on her chest. When morning came she’d write down the memory, that feeling of Suchness, all deep and hard inside of her.
© 2008 by Rosemary M. Magee
The Other Half
by Mick Herron
Private eyes Joe Silvermann and Zoe Boehm star in several of Mick Herron’s novels but they make their first appearance in EQMM this month. Their creator was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He currently lives in Oxford and commutes to work in London. His highly acclaimed first novel Down Cemetery Road was published in 2003. His latest book to see print in the U.S. is Reconstruction (Soho, April 2008).
When she’d finished with the computer she returned to the bathroom, set the boiler’s timer to constant, and collected the shirt: a black silk, collarless affair evidently saved for special occasions. She carried this downstairs, turning the thermostat up as high as it would go as she passed, then hung it on the kitchen door while she sorted out her remaining tasks. The clock on the wall read Nearly Time To Go, but she didn’t need telling; her body was already sending out signals — pinpricks at the back of the neck, a fizziness in the blood; the on-the-edge messages the primal self transmits at useful moments. She’d promised herself ten minutes, max, and they were almost up. Kitchen jobs done, she retrieved the shirt and let herself out the back door, locking it behind her with the key from the hook next to the cooker. For a moment she stood fixed to the spot, gauging the quality of the neighbourhood noise. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She released the breath she’d been holding, then placed the key on the window ledge before looking down at the shirt in her hand. “Now, what are we going to do with you?” she asked; though if the truth were told, she already knew.
“Reformatted,” Joe repeated.
“The hard drive, yes.”
“Which is bad,” he ventured.
“You don’t get computers, do you, Joe?”
Joe Silvermann shook his head regretfully. While he didn’t mind that he didn’t get computers, he hated disappointing people.
Tom Parker said, “Basically, Tessa wiped it. Erased all the work stored in the machine plus all the software loaded on it, which, trust me, comes to an expensive piece of damage on its own. Even without her other party pieces.”