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:
To the north sunlight winked off the hull of a bass boat. Helen screamed and screamed, but with the rushing water she knew she would not be heard. She drew her pistol and fired into the gap of sky. She fired twice more before the boat veered their way, then fired again to keep the boat on track. Once it was close enough, she began to holler. She glanced below at Danny, who picked up his head and stared up at her, the sweater stretched tight across his chest. He too began to scream, and Helen could see the boat was steered by the long-haired man from the night before. He cut the motor, the hull piled high with bodies of dogs, and shaded his eyes to see into the tree.
The prow parted the canopy, and Helen stared down between her legs, the long-haired man watching her as he passed below. Danny called out to his friend, and the boat bumped against the trunk. The long-haired man held the tree with one hand, and with the other lifted a shotgun and aimed it up at Helen.
“No, Ray,” Danny said. “She’s all right,” and Danny stared up at her. “You all right, ain’t you?”
Helen nodded, held her hands out where he could see them.
“She’s all right, Ray,” Danny said again, and the man in the boat let the gun fall to his side.
Helen uncuffed Danny and they both climbed carefully into the boat and had to sit on the same tiny bench to avoid the dogs. Dogs filled the hull; a collie atop a German shepherd, and several hunting dogs, blueticks and grays. Stacked in an orderly way, heads at one end, tails the other, stacked like firewood. The boat drifted from beneath the tree, willow branches washing over them, and then the sun was warm.
Wisps of clouds feathered out above. Ray stuffed his lip with chaw and stared Helen down. “I found a body,” he said, then turned away and wrapped a cord around the outboard flywheel.
Christmas Eve, 1992: Joakes quietly sobbed, lips smacking as if from thirst, and asked to smoke just one cigarette. Helen considered it a moment, then untied his right arm. She carried the lantern to the cupboard and pushed aside ajar of pickled eggs, and there was the thin wooden box. The smell of tobacco came out strong. She kept the lid open, hoping the smell would overtake the odors of Joakes himself. She even held it beneath Joakes’s nose. He shut his eyes and seemed to take solemn pleasure from the scent. Then he opened his lids and his red eyes drew onto her.
Like trap jaws sprung, he snatched the lantern from her and Helen was struck in the face and fell hard to the floor. The lantern light was gone. Moonlight through the tiny window lit a back wall where skinning tools hung on metal pegs. Sharp pain pierced Helen’s eye, shot deep into her skull. Chair legs thumped as Joakes rocked and fumbled with his free hand to untie his bindings. Helen’s eye swelled quickly; within seconds the eye was closed to sight. Dizzily she took her feet and drew her pistol. She stayed still until she found the pale skin of his bald spot in the moonlight, then Helen struck him and Joakes shrieked. With all her weight she struck him once more. Joakes’s head bobbed violently, and he made no sound.
Helen staggered into the yard, clutching her gun, and broke an icicle off the pump’s handle. She lay back in the snow, dim stars turning in fractured tracks, the frozen ground beneath her seeming to turn, and though she meant to hold the ice to her eye, she brought up the pistol, and it was cold and soothed her just the same.
December 20, 1992: Parked on the quarry’s service road, the cruiser growing cold with the motor off, Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn’t begun that way, was nothing she’d planned, but now she saw that’s how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don’t want this. I ain’t the one to make the world right. She swallowed more schnapps, then capped the bottle and put it away in the glove box.
Helen stepped out onto the road and popped the trunk. The air had warmed, the boreal wind stilled. Like ashes from a furnace, thick and gentle snow began to fall. She’d taken the clothes from Joakes’s root cellar, washed them in the river, dressed the girl, and wrapped the girl in a green canvas tarp. Helen struggled lifting the body from the trunk. But she tugged the torso out over the fender and the rest followed and flopped down to the road. Helen had needed a sled, and without knowing its use Freely sold her one at half-price, and now she turned the canvas parcel onto the sheet of red plastic tethered with rope.
She dragged Jocelyn Dempsy on the sled, the girl’s weight breaking the undercrust of old snow and new snow collecting in wet mounds about her head. Helen pressed onward, eyes closed to the cold, legs plodding into drifts.
At the quarry’s rim she paused to unfasten the tarp. She did not look at the girl. She moved behind the sled and shoved it all over. From her knees she watched the sled and tarp flutter and the body turn and break through the film of ice with barely a sound.
Flakes fused to flakes and piled on her thighs and gloves. The quarry would soon be thick with ice, and what was below would be held for a time. In spring the body would rise through the gray slush and be found. The town told stories of children who’d fallen to their deaths in this quarry. Teenagers were drawn to its danger. They would all believe Jocey had just drowned, and it would be over. Helen gazed into the quarry. This is how I’ll be, she thought. I’ll be this icy hole, this season, this falling snow. I’ll just freeze myself over.
Spring, 1993: In the flume between hillocks the floodwaters converged, dammed by logs and mud, a kitchen chair, a section of roof, a child’s plastic slide, refuse thick and high and brown water sluicing through random gaps. A riot of gulls hovered, filling the sky, the refuse wall alive with white birds. Ray ran the boat onto the grassy hillside and hopped out and stomped the anchor into the earth. Helen climbed cautiously over the mound of dogs, a glove to her nose. Scum-water churned at the dam’s base. The torrent on the other side, the swollen Little Squirrel River, charged madly east. Helen feverishly scanned the refuse. The tan face of a mare, what looked like a carousel pony, stuck out from beneath what might be a green tarp. Helen’s hands trembled; she’d lost control of her hands. She stuffed them in her pockets and clenched them into fists, thinking of Jocey’s school portrait on the Evansville news, remembering Freely, only weeks ago, taking down the same picture from his diner window.
They climbed the hill where rail tracks split the ridge and stood on the wooden ties. Down by the river lay swine, black-faced sheep, more dogs. Helen thought of Haley Winters’s cattle. Where’d all those cattle gone?
Ray pointed at an outcropping of rock. A body lay on a slab of limestone, fully clothed, feet spread apart. A gull roosted on the body’s shoulder, and Helen could not see the face. “I seen that boy some in the Old Fox,” Ray said. “Don’t know his name. Never said so much as hey to me.”
Helen rushed down the hillside, her momentum carrying her in a reckless sort of run. Wind blew the long grass flat. She followed the grass down with her eyes and then she was falling and landed hard on her side. The gull on the body raised its wings and glided downshore. It was Keller Lankford, a hay and bean farmer who lived south of town, nearly three miles from the river. His face was the blue of his overalls, his blackened fingers clawed into a fence slat clutched to his chest. Then Danny was over Helen pleading, don’t do that, oh come on now, and pulled her into his arms.
Helen shoved him away. She tried taking her feet, only to crumble. Her ankle was badly hurt. She wiped sweat from her eyes and face, and noticed small cuts had brought blood to her palms. “Take off that sweater,” Helen screamed at Danny, blood streaked across her cheeks. “Throw it in the river. It ain’t yours to be wearing.”