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:
She’d found Jocey’s clothes atop a mound of salted venison in the root cellar and sat thinking on the cellar steps with the girl’s jeans across her lap. Laws on killing, even God’s demands, didn’t allow for peace. Not always. There’d still be pain; missing that child would break her parents’ hearts. But what Helen knew, what she’d seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.
She made a plan to hide it all and knew she’d have to be careful. She’d be ruined if Joakes got loose, or if someone found him like this, or if he died too soon. Those in town, and especially those from outside Krafton, might not see grace in her methods; what she’d begun to call in her mind the Big Peace.
Spring, 1993: Danny emerged far downcurrent, pummeling the churning spate, flopping, thrashing. Helen gave chase, but the current was unpredictable and, afraid she’d brain him with the boat’s hull or outboard’s blades, she dare not get close. His body went slack, and he was swept toward the ropey tops of willow trees, disappearing through the curtain of their branches.
Helen cut the motor and scrambled to the bow. She grabbed several branches as they whisked past and was jerked backwards into the stern. The rush of water was amplified in the blackness. She held the ropes and took her feet and balanced herself, and with her free hand drew around the boat’s spotlight.
The canopy was a crewelwork of limbs, the water topped with brown froth and swirling as if over a drain. Danny draped one arm over a thick branch, his cheek against the trunk, his shoulders beneath the water. Helen pulled the boat deeper through the mess. Danny lifted his head, managed to tilt his chin into the tree’s crotch. “We was looking for my dog,” he said, gasping.
The branch forked into the water and Helen could not get to him. She leaned over the branch and reached as far as she could. Danny stared blankly at her hand. His head lolled, his elbow unhooking from the branch, and he held on with just his hand, his body dragging in the current. Helen lunged her entire body onto the branch and grabbed his wrist. She centered her weight and pulled until his elbow was hooked back safely, then dropped her feet down into what she thought would be the boat, but instead was the rush of freezing water. The boat had drifted from beneath her, the spotlight a trailing beacon as the hull curled into the rope branches, was held briefly, then the limbs parted and fell back into place and the boat was gone. Helen hugged the branch and held Danny, the flood whirling darkly around them, Connie Dempsey’s Christmas sweater a lump in the gathers of her jacket.
December 22, 1992: Helen scanned the frozen prairie, worried someone had seen her sneak through the dawn-tinged woods and into the cabin. Behind her, bound to the chair, Joakes stank of urine and shit. She carefully untied his ankles, then his legs, his waist.
Three days in the chair and his legs had atrophied; they buckled as he stood, and he staggered as she walked him to a snowy swale in the river’s bend. There she took down his soiled pants and told him to relieve himself. He stood shivering, loins exposed, mouth and upper body still bound, head drooped. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, and began to weep. Sunrise washed full over the eastern hills and burned through shreds of fog in the near woods. Someone’ll see him, Helen thought, and she rushed to him, trying to pull up his pants and get him to stand. But he just wept and shook, and Helen could do nothing with him.
She dragged him by his armpits, inch by inch, his pants at his ankles, bare legs wet and red with cold, heels leaving ruts in the snow. She dragged him past the pump frozen over with icicles, and past a stack of vegetable crates covered in snow, in which lived brown chickens that did not move and might be dead. The dog’s stiff body lay at the side of the stoop; it would look right that way, Helen figured; a man who kills his dog is a man who’s lost all hope.
It took half an hour to get him back in the chair. She removed his pants and covered his lower half with a heavy blanket. She carried the pants to the river, stomped a hole through the ice, and dangled the crotch in the water below. She returned and lay the pants over half the stove, and on the other half heated oats in a pot. A square blazon of sunlight flooded the window and covered his face. His eyes, scorched by the mace, were a deep watery red, the skin not covered by beard the color of tin.
She unbound his mouth and pushed oatmeal on a wooden spoon between his lips. He took the oats into his cheeks and she pushed in another spoonful. He stared through her, his red eyes narrowed in the sunlight, and for a moment Helen remembered what he’d done and stood frozen before him.
Joakes spat the oats into her face. He licked his lips. “I’m a Christian man,” he said, hoarsely, oats in the beard beneath his mouth. “I’m forgiven.”
Christmas Day, 1992: Freely sat in a lounger by the fireplace, a blanket over his lap, his eyelids batting, closing. Helen sat on the hearth, the fire warming her back. She’d not worn her uniform for the first time in a long while, and found her old jeans to be loose in a way she greatly missed. On the floor by the tree a circle of children played a game where they rolled dice and moved tiny farm animals around a board. The adults sat around a long table, drinking hazelnut coffee and discussing a foundry opening in Jasper. Helen’s feet prickled with pain, and she worried they were frostbitten. Her swollen eye gave a headache aspirin could not help.
The front bell rang. Freely’s wife, Marilyn, walked to the foyer, wiping her hands on the back of her dress. She opened the door and in rushed the cold and the children sat upright to see who was there. Pastor Hamby, a bear of a man in a black overcoat, filled the doorway. Marilyn stepped aside to let him in, but he stayed where he was. He leaned down and talked quietly to Marilyn and glanced into the house at the same time. Then Marilyn turned, and they both looked at Helen, and Pastor Hamby waved her over with a gloved hand.
Helen stepped gingerly out on the porch and closed the door behind her. Four men in parkas, the First Baptist Deacons, stood at different levels on the steps, colored lights in the spruce reflecting in tracks of ice on the porch. Helen did not have her coat, and hugged herself with one arm and sipped her coffee.
Pastor Hamby’s cheeks were flushed, his thin lips drawn tightly over his teeth. “We were delivering care baskets out in the knobs like we always do,” he said, and looked back at the deacons.
They’d found Joakes’s body, this Helen knew by their faces. She tried to still her own face, her heart, to quiet the guilty part of her that wanted to confess and be forgiven. Frank Barker, a squat man in glasses, stepped a boot on the porch and leaned over his leg. “The holidays is hard on some,” he said. “It ain’t joy and cranberries for everyone. For some it’s only lonesome pain.”
Spring, 1993: Willow limbs hung limply in the brightening morn, the current’s froth filling with light and bending prisms where black branches emerged. All night Helen had listened in darkness to the flood’s drone, and in a waking dream she’d seen the girl’s body float up from the quarry depths, drift and drift in the murky current to be caught in the high branches of one of the town’s ancient oaks, and as the water receded, her neck wedged in a crook, there the girl dangled above Old Saints Road for all to see.
Now Helen sat high in the willow and tore away limbs until she could see out over the water. A single ridge humped out in the east. Her boat was nowhere to be seen. Danny was in a sort of sleep. She’d given him Connie Dempsy’s Christmas sweater and handcuffed his wrists to a branch overhead so he would not fall. His head hung in the hammock of his arms, the sweater too small and the sleeves far up his wrists.