Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Эллин Стенли
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Год: Penny Publications
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016». Краткое содержание книги:
“Say?” Ezell asked. “Did I ever tell you about this buddy of mine from Minnesota?”
“Only about fifty times in the last week,” Miller said.
“Miller, hon,” the schoolteacher said. “There’s no need to be impatient.”
Her saying that was worse than Miller’s hatefulness. He didn’t need a schoolteacher to stick up for him, and he didn’t have any respect for a son who would let his wife rebuke him as if he were a child.
“Ah, hell,” Ezell said. “There ain’t much worth telling about him no way.”
He forked in a mouthful of lumpy, unsalted potatoes and kept his eyes on his plate while Miller and the schoolteacher went back to their blather about the doings at the library and the school. The town council was squeezing the library’s budget again; a new book catalogue had come in this morning, and Miller’s heart was broken because there were at least a dozen good titles he wouldn’t be able to order. A little girl had come to school with lice for the third time this year. Principal Taylor let the new English teacher know miniskirts and scoop-necked sweaters were not acceptable attire at North Harps Junior High. It was the biggest pile of cow crud Ezell had ever heard, but the schoolteacher and his son hung onto each other’s words, cooing and commenting as if this discussion was so interesting it was a shame no one had thought to broadcast it on the television. Ezell frowned at his green beans and let his mind wander, just as he’d once done on long stretches of highway. My name is Ezell, he thought. I once cut trees for a living and then I started driving a truck. I had a house somewhere not far from here, a wife I called Becca and a daughter named Sarah to go along with this here boy.
He remembered the stickiness of wood pulp and the drumming of tires on pavement, the crackle of a CB radio and the taste of truck-stop coffee. Most of all, he remembered a waitress with sharp little teeth and dark hair who came to him while the truck’s engine rumbled, and the smell of diesel filled the air. After a moment, his thoughts left her and rambled back to Thomas Stamps and then took a sharp turn to a white-tailed deer he’d spotted this very morning. He found himself thinking of his wife and daughter again, and he whispered their names to himself in the hope that saying them would help him remember when those pit-black shadows began to seep in. Closing his eyes, he saw Becca in her coffin, prematurely gray, bloated from the diabetes that had killed her — a woman three years his junior but one strangers believed was his mother, not his wife.
He dropped his fork and met Miller’s eyes. “Whatever happened to your sister? Sarah, I mean. What become of her?”
Miller and the schoolteacher gave each other a long look. “She died, Pop,” Miller said.
“That’s a shame,” Ezell said. “What happened to her?”
“Something went wrong inside her, and she died. Leave it at that.”
“It’s why you live here now,” the schoolteacher said. “That’s why we get to have you with us.”
“And I bet you all are just thrilled about that,” Ezell said.
“Miller drove all the way to Arkansas to get you and bring you back,” she said with that phony sweetness that hurt his ears. “Arkansas was where you and Sarah were living.”
He closed his eyes, saw cotton fields and an old gray barn, smelled frying bacon, tasted the sharpness of a beer. “I remember that,” he said. “But say, that Watkins or Watson fellow didn’t hurt her, did he? That ain’t what happened to my Sarah, is it? Don’t lie to me now.”
“No one ever hurt Sarah but herself,” Miller said. “She wouldn’t stop drinking and popping pills, chasing ex-cons and married men. She was just like you. Stubborn, never willing to hear a thing anyone said.”
“Honey,” the schoolteacher said.
For once Miller didn’t listen. “No,” he told her. “This needs to be said. Everything was a joke to her. But she quit laughing when the police kicked in her door, found her pills and her boyfriend’s meth, and charged both of them with trafficking. As soon as her friends scrounged her bail, she drove to the end of a dirt road and put a bullet in her head. And your Sarah cared so much for you that she didn’t leave a note or call anyone to say you were alone in her house. You were six days fending for yourself before they called me to come get you.”
“Miller,” the schoolteacher said. “That’s enough.”
Miller spoke again, and the schoolteacher spoke right back to him, but Ezell stopped paying attention. His mind wandered back to Thomas Stamps and his ideas about big women. Ezell studied the schoolteacher’s cleavage. When he looked up, he realized Miller was watching him, eyebrow arched, waiting for the answer to a question that Ezell hadn’t heard.
“What?”
“I want to hear what you think now that the truth is out.”
Ezell wasn’t sure what truth Miller was talking about and didn’t really care one way or the other. But he knew if he didn’t answer, it would be one more thing for Miller to hold against him.
“Well,” he said after a time. “It seems to me no matter her failings, your sister had enough sense to put salt and pepper on the table at suppertime.”
He dozed in bed, watching reruns of a sitcom he vaguely remembered from a lifetime ago and then woke in the flickering dark with his heart racing. The room was warm, and the heat clouded his head so that he wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten here. The idea came upon him that he’d awoken in a prison cell — that he’d been locked up for a crime he couldn’t remember and most surely hadn’t committed. Then he focused on the television screen where Felix and Oscar were engaged in an argument over a dripping umbrella.
“I am in my bedroom in my son’s house. My son’s name is Miller. Mine is Ezell. That’s The Odd Couple playing on the television,” he said to confirm his knowledge.
He felt around on his nightstand, knocked over a glass, finally found the remote control. He put an end to Felix and Oscar’s argument and caught the sound of another coming from the bedroom down the hall.
“You can’t react like that,” the schoolteacher was saying in her schoolteacher’s voice. “You can’t let him goad you. Dr. Vincent said...”
“I know what he said.”
“He provokes you to give himself a sense of control. You can’t blame him for feeling helpless. I know I would. But when he makes you react, it feeds the illusion he’s still in charge of things, and that makes it harder for you and for him and for everyone else.”
“I know what the doctor said, Pam. But he doesn’t know that old man and you don’t know either. You think you do, but you have no idea what he was like before he became whatever the hell he is now.” There was a short pause, and then Miller went on, speaking softer, so Ezell had to strain to hear. “He wasn’t mean, not exactly. Not to me or my mom or Sarah, at least not in an obvious way. He was just distant, closed off. When he was home, which wasn’t that often, he was like an actor trapped in a part he never wanted to play. The real him, the man he was and wanted to be, was inside his head, watching, mocking us, marking time until he could get out. It sounds crazy, I guess.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the schoolteacher said in that too-sweet tone that meant she believed Miller was ready for the loony bin. “But it also doesn’t change the here and now. Whatever he was, he isn’t that anymore. Now he’s just an old man who is sick and in need of help. I’m not sure we’re the ones who can give it to him...”
“We’ve been through this. There’s no way we can afford it right now.”