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:
“Merry Christmas,” she said.
Connie lifted the girl into her arms, would not look at Helen.
“Would you like something to eat?” David asked, still down the hall in the kitchen doorway.
A puddle had formed on the tiles beneath her boots. “I don’t have any news,” Helen said. They did not move. They said nothing. Helen held out the pie box and another package wrapped in green paper with a white ribbon. “Here’s one of Freely’s pies,” she said. “And I got something for the girl. It ain’t much of anything, but it’s something.”
They went into the family room, an upright piano in the corner, the tree beside it, tiny colored lights flashing. Helen had removed her boots and was afraid her feet stunk; she’d worn the same wool socks five straight days. But she smelled only popcorn and cinnamon. The family sat on a sofa, the girl in the middle. Helen faced them in a high-backed wooden chair, her gun belt awkward against the armrest.
The little girl did not tear the paper like most kids. She picked at the tape, her mother helping, and carefully unfolded the wrapping to reveal a box. Inside was a tiny pink shirt. Across the front was a golden star and the words JUNIOR DEPUTY; KRAFTON, INDIANA. Connie and David glanced at each other. Light glimmered off the silver thread in Connie’s sweater. The apron hung down between David’s legs. The little girl wrinkled her nose and stared at Helen’s face, and Helen was sure she’d ask about her swollen eye.
Helen crossed one socked foot over the other. She looked at Connie. “It ain’t much,” she said. “I didn’t know what to give a child.”
December 19, 1992: Helen crossed Pentland Road and pushed through brambles and into the woods. Her flashlight created a tunnel of light, inside of which were the arms of catbrier and low-slung limbs and the occasional shallows of footprints. She pulled her stocking cap to her brow. She felt the immense silence. Helen trudged on, and deeper in, where gray dusk lit the bench above her, she saw tracks of black soil where the snow had been tramped. Helen climbed, her feet slipping as she scaled the slope and stopped on the ridge to examine a scuttle of boot prints.
Slivers of pink broached the flurries in the western sky. She paused, breathing heavily, and stared down over the valley. A black stream cut the mottled white, powdered trees hunched on their hummocks. In one distant corner of the prairie the last of daylight glinted off a tin roof.
Some gentle movement in her periphery made her notice the near trees. Far below, a large white oak still held its autumn leaves, its branches gently waving. Through a gap in its canopy she glimpsed a flash of pale skin. Her breath drew away, and then she was shuffling down the bench, and she slipped and fell hard on her back, sliding in the new snow to the base of the slope.
The oak towered above her. She shone her light up into it, over the girl’s exposed ribs, her dangling arms, and between her buds of breasts curved a swag of dried blood, dripped from where the rope had torn the skin of her neck. Helen turned on her side and retched. Vomit steamed in the dirt. She took clean snow into her mouth and caught her breath. She stood and unsnapped the latch over her pistol, and approached the darkness beneath the boughs.
The girl’s toes dangled inches from the ground. She wore only shoes. Clunky black shoes with square heels. Her naked skin glowed white against the dusk. Her mouth hung open and what little light came through the saffron boughs gleamed in her braces. Helen took off her coat. She tried throwing the jacket up over the girl’s shoulders, but it slid off and fell in a lump on the ground.
It was the girl. Jocelyn Dempsy, who everyone called Jocey. She raced motorbikes on a dirt track by the old mill, played J.V. basketball as an eighth grader. She loved Moon Pies. Loved cherry cola. She’d come to the General and buy them, and Helen would watch her eat alone by the road and return the bottle before riding off.
Brisk wind whistled through the limbs. Helen stumbled to sit against the trunk of the oak, her legs stretched out before her, pistol drawn in her lap. Dusk had settled. The prairie was tinted blue, shocks of blue sedge stiffly swaying.
Spring, 1993: The current took the boat and she shone the spotlight across the black water and onto the house, the flood up to its second-floor sills. She hooked the tow rope around a window box and the prow knocked against the siding. She pressed her forehead to the window’s cool glass. The room’s red fabric wallpaper had silver stripes that flashed in the spotlight like metal bars. A twin bed lay diagonal in the middle of the room. A cardboard box made a crater in the mattress, a new-looking ball glove atop the box. Alone on a wall above a small dresser hung a poster of three busty women in yellow swimsuits, each suit with two letters that when pressed tightly together spelled YAMAHA.
Helen forced open the window. Careful not to sway the boat, she held her holster and stepped down into the room. It was the first time in hours she’d been out of the boat, and her legs tingled. The carpet glistened in the spotlight, a dark line three feet up the wall marking the flood’s highest point.
The room had not been disturbed, was kept like a museum; Helen had been in the room that winter, putting on a play of sorts, searching the girl’s drawers and beneath her bed and taking notes on what she passed off as evidence — report cards, a menu from the Boston Connection restaurant in Terre Haute, a ticket stub from a motocross event at the Motorhead in Evanston — she knew would lead nowhere. She wrote it all up in a report for the Staties.
The bedroom door was locked from the inside. Helen opened the lock and door, wiped the knob clean, then walked down the hall. Water splashed with each step. The walls were tiled with Dempsy family photos: Jocey, very young, donning a boy’s shag haircut and straddling a small motorbike; the family in matching cream sweaters with David on a hay bale, the baby on his lap, Jocey and Connie each behind one of his shoulders; Jocey’s school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her nose.
At the back of the house Helen entered the master bedroom. A canopy bed filled most of the room. Helen gazed out the bedside window at the flooded world, the dark roofs of houses spread wide like barges on a big river. Everything smelled of soil and fish. So much water, so much washed over, but perhaps when they’d start anew everything could be better, everything forgiven. Perhaps God would allow the girl to be dredged up by the flood and found, her parents granted their closure, yet the unrighteous cause of her death kept a gracious unknown.
Helen walked to a bureau and searched the drawers, one filled with scarves and nylons, the next with panties neatly folded and separated by color. She moved to the closet and shone her light over the clothes: pants at one end, then blouses, then dresses. Sweaters were on a shelf above the hanging clothes. She pulled the red sweater from the middle of a stack, unfolded it to be sure it was the right one. The silver thread of the embroidered snowflakes twinkled in Helen’s spotlight. She held the sweater to her face; it smelled faintly of Connie’s perfume. It was an impulse, and Helen could not explain why she needed it other than to say it was something clean and lovely in a world of mud. She hugged the sweater to her throat and lay down on the bed, the mattress soft and pulling her in, her boot heels heavy on the waterlogged carpet.
December 19, 1992: Blue smoke trailed from a pipe in the cabin’s tin roof. His footprints had frozen like fossils in the snow, and Helen tracked them down through the prairie. The cabin belonged to Robert Joakes, who came into town once a month for supplies and sold beaver and coon pelts to a coat maker in Jasper. A dim light came from the cabin’s only window, a small square high up the wall. Helen stood on her numb toes and peered through the window. A lantern on a rough wood table gave a scant circle of light. A figure hunched beside an iron stove. Helen removed a glove and drew her pistol, felt its weight in her hand, adjusted her finger on the trigger. For a good while she watched the dark figure, embers glowing behind the stove grate. Then Joakes moved off into the shadows.