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:
It seemed like a practiced speech, one delivered by a curious foreigner, and although her mouth twitched involuntarily and although she wanted to bolt away she gazed out the window yet again to see the sun’s last rays pick up something metallic in the hillside stand of cottonwoods. A car. It was out there in the woods. She looked more closely and knew this was what he had meant her to see. Somebody’s car, green. And then she knew.
“Come on, we’ll get your clothes,” he told her, leading her away. She embraced his words in hopeless hope, wanting everything to be zany and perfectly all right, wanting Boomer to be the guy at the pinball machine, the big clumsy guy, but she knew better. The ring, she knew, had belonged to some woman before her. His signature. Prayers and memories fell on her, then, like weights.
He led her through the master bedroom to an enormous bathroom covered with the remains of Mary Beth and Luke. In a far corner, smeared with blood and casually tossed aside, was the pinstripe baseball cap, and why, she asked herself, why me? I don’t deserve this, nobody does, I’m really a good person, a little lonely, trying hard, and he’s not even named Boomer, he used somebody else’s name, and I don’t even believe he’s from Texas, not at all, he’s lying, he’s not one of us.
Alan Heathcock
Peacekeeper
From The Virginia Quarterly Review
Spring, 1993: There were more direct routes to the Oddfellows Hall, on a dry knob north of town, but Helen Farraley could not see below the muddy flood waters, couldn’t risk wrecking the boat on a tree, or chimney, or telephone pole; who knew what was just below the surface? The streets of town were lined with ancient oak, the leafy tops of which stuck out from the water like massive shrubs, and Helen steered the boat through the channel between them. The others in the boat sat silent as they passed their neighbors’ homes, slate-shingled Victorians underwater to the second-floor windows. Helen trolled high above the town’s main street, Old Saints Road, and the treetops dropped away as the land sloped into the valley’s low.
They passed the Super America gas station, only the hump and peak of the S/A on its road sign visible. The others stared into the muck water as if they might see the pumps or store below. Afloat in the current was random lumber, tree branches and strips of siding, a pair of trundling bar stools, a long metal box Helen believed was either a school locker or a feed trough. Then came Freely’s Diner and Freely’s General, three-story brownstones on opposite sides of the road, water up to the white-stone facing, roofs like rectangular docks. They passed within arm’s distance of the electric sign that read FREELY’S, which usually shone bright red, but was now dark and hung just above the water line. Freda Lawson, who wore a chambray dress over yellow waders and sat beside Helen, ran a finger along the sign’s second E. Helen yanked down the woman’s arm.
“They’s wires,” she snapped. Then she gently held Freda’s elbow and softened. “Please be careful, hon.”
They passed high above the converted boxcar that was the old Fox Tavern, and the First Baptist Church, its steeple jutting crooked from the water like the mast of a sunken ship.
“They’ll steal everything we got,” Jake Tiernen said from the bow, his wife beneath his arm. “They’ll take what all they want.”
Freda twisted the hem of her dress around her fist. “I wet myself,” she whispered to Helen, crying.
“Ain’t nobody stealing nothing,” Helen said, and leaned a shoulder into Freda to let her know she’d been heard.
“To hell,” Jake said. “To hell they won’t.”
Christmas Eve, 1992: Light from Freely’s Diner spilled over the snowy walkway and into the cruiser. Helen checked her face in the rearview mirror. Her left eye was badly swollen, and she tried to hide it by tilting her cap over her brow. She considered driving on. But then Freely stood in the diner’s window, the old man thin and hunched and his hands cupped against the glass. Helen climbed out into the cold. She walked around the car and Freely moved to the door and opened it a crack.
“I got pecan pie,” the old man said through the crack, then Helen was at the door and he opened it wide.
Helen stepped in and Freely had his arms around her in a hug. Ten years she’d worked in Freely’s General before becoming Krafton’s first and only law officer. It’d been Freely, longtime mayor of Krafton, who decided any real town had a sheriff, and raised funds to buy an old cruiser from the Boonville force, and called a town meeting in the First Baptist Church. It’d been a joke that Helen, a middle-aged grocery store manager, had been nominated and then elected, and when protests arose — I thought it’d be a goof to vote for her, didn’t think she’d win — it was Freely who declared civilized democracies stuck by a vote.
The dinner crowd had just left. Ham and potatoes fragranced the air. “I ain’t hungry,” Helen said. ‘Just saw the lights on.”
“No, no,” the old man said, hustling behind a glass counter. He pulled one of two pies from the dessert case and put the pie in a box. “You coming for Christmas supper? Marilyn said you might.” Helen studied the front window. Jocey Dempsy’s photo was in all the shop windows: her middle-school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her hawk nose, MISSING across the top. REWARD across the bottom. “Don’t know,” Helen said.
The old man was in front of her again. He held the box with the pie inside and wore a fur-lined coat that was much too large for him. “What you done to your eye?”
Helen turned toward the door. “Slipped on some ice.”
“Clumsy girl,” and he took her arm. “Walk me home?”
They left out onto the walkway. Freely’s hand quivered and he struggled to put the key in the lock. His house was down the road and up a small hill. Warm light shone from the windows, colored lights twined around two large spruce by the porch steps. “Looky there,” he said, pointing across the road. Over the dark field colored sparks burst, rained, faded in the night sky. They sounded far away, maybe miles, the pop of fireworks like a puff of breath in Helen’s ear.
December 19, 1992: The cruiser’s headlights caught the shadows of footprints across the road’s new snow, and Helen pulled to the shoulder. The gravel sky looked heavy, the woods flanking Pent-land Road lost in a fog of flurries. The footprints disappeared through a gap in the brambles. The girl, Jocey Dempsy, hadn’t come home from school, had been gone over a day. Nobody in town had seen or heard from her. Her folks said she often took walks in these woods. Helen retrieved the holster and pistol from the seat beside her. She turned the cruiser’s spotlight on the tree line but could not see through the falling snow. She shut off the engine. The motor ticked in the dark quiet, wet snow piling upon the windshield.
Christmas Eve, 1992: In the glass of the door Helen’s swollen eye looked as if a stone had risen onto her face. Snow curled up the porch steps and over her boots. The door opened. There stood Connie Dempsy wearing a red sweater with snowflakes embroidered in silver thread. She did not say hello but stepped aside for Helen to pass.
The front hall smelled of popcorn, of cinnamon. A little girl in pajamas, a smiling bear on her belly, hid behind Connie’s leg. She was Jocey’s baby sister and looked like her. Warm light fell into the hall from the kitchen, and then David was in the light, wiping his hands on an apron. Helen did not know where to stand. There was no doormat and she did not want to track snow into their house.