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:
“I understand,” she said. “But that means we have to do things right. Letting him provoke you into old arguments... well, that doesn’t do anyone any good.”
Miller said, “I know you’re right. I know.”
Ezell couldn’t make sense of it all. The fact they didn’t want him here came as much of a surprise as snow at the North Pole. But he’d always figured Miller was just a sour man and ungrateful son. He had never imagined himself as anything but a loving husband and a good father, and he’d been certain his family had been happy. On the occasions he tried to summon those bygone days, he saw Sarah as a chubby-faced little girl with a Tootsie Roll stuck in her mouth, remembered the smell of his wife’s Saturday-night perfume, and heard the wind whisper through the grove of maple trees at the back of the house. Now he wasn’t sure about anything other than those maple trees. How happy could their lives truly have been if Miller turned out the way he had and little Sarah had killed herself? He puzzled it for some time, trying to fit the now with the then that he wanted to remember, but he couldn’t bring the two together. In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. Happy or unhappy, his family was gone. Now they were just figments, no more to him than characters in a storybook he’d read long ago.
The river was a different matter. Something terrible had happened, and he felt as compelled to remember the details as an alcoholic feels to take a drink. The memory was close. He could almost reach out and snatch it from the shadows, but every time he tried, it scurried deeper into darkness. Thinking about it made him cold and tired, so he crawled beneath the blankets and fell asleep, that half-formed knowledge taunting him from the shadows that darkened his memory.
Two days later he went back to the river, hunkered on the sandstone lip, and watched the water roll on and on. He’d forgotten his coat, and he was bone-chilled and weary. The last few hours had been lost in a haze as thick as plasma. During the worst of it, he’d forgotten his name, how to feed himself, that the full feeling in his bladder meant he needed to relieve himself.
“Good days and bad days,” a voice had whispered from a deep pit. “Sometimes he’ll seem ready for the nursing home, and others, he’ll be just like his old self.” The voice had grown stronger, and Ezell recognized it as belonging to a doctor, although he could not say who this doctor was or why he had seen him. “But make no mistake,” this doctor had said. “Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease. The good days will get fewer until they are gone.”
Ezell wasn’t ready to say so long to the good days just yet. This spot on the river had been the clearest in his memory, and so he’d fled the house and let his feet lead his clouded head.
Now he stared at the rushing water while the wind whipped his face and snow flurries watered his eyes. Gradually the blond woman took shape in his memory. Large breasts, brownish nipples, narrow waist, flared hips. He closed his eyes and let it come to him, saw her clear and true. Her hair was matted, sticky with blood. She was screaming. A small boy clutched a bedsheet and screamed right along with her. He was a handsome child, not more than five, with dark, wavy hair and blue eyes.
“That was me,” Ezell whispered.
The sound of an engine dragged him from the memory, and he glanced through branches, saw a little foreign car pull into the gravel drive beside the cabin. A girl got out, clutching a baby tightly against the wind. She seemed familiar. Ezell’s memory stuttered, misfired, finally caught. They’d talked not long ago right near this very spot. He didn’t remember what they’d talked about, but knew that she’d been nice to him.
A man with a gray beard and salt-and-pepper hair opened the cabin’s door and stepped into the yard. He wore dungarees and a short-sleeved shirt and shivered in the wind. He said something. The girl shook her head, clutched her baby tighter. When she made to move past him, he grabbed her and punched her upside the head. She staggered, went to one knee, but managed to hold onto the baby and stumble on inside the cabin.
The haze burned away from Ezell’s memory. He saw Sarah in a hospital bed, wrapped like a mummy with tubes stuck in her nose and mouth. He flashed on another image — a man lying in the dirt with his heels kicking and his hands clamped to his throat while blood spurted through his grimy fingers.
Then the sound of a little boy’s shrieking rose in his head and knocked him off balance, and the blond woman flashed in his mind. Ezell’s knees gave way, and he hit the cold ground.
Sometime later, he stood on shaky legs and staggered into the woods. In his hurry, he caught his foot on a downed limb and fell again. He was halfway to his feet when a boot stepped on his aching, cold-raw fingers.
“What are you up to, old man?” Mr. Salt-and-pepper asked, grinding his boot heels into Ezell’s hand. “You’ve been creeping around here too much for my liking.”
“I’m lost,” Ezell said.
“That’s right. And you ain’t likely to be found.”
Salt-and-pepper pulled a gun from his waistband, stuck the barrel to Ezell’s forehead. It was a.38 snub-nose, some kind of Smith & Wesson knockoff. Ezell was proud he remembered what all of those things meant.
“Give me a reason I shouldn’t kill you,” Salt-and-pepper said.
Instinct brought a knife-edged certainty to Ezell’s mind. He did not need to think. His muscles knew the answer. He just had to get out of their way and let them do what they’d done before.
“Because you’re slow and because you’re stupid,” he said. “But most of all, because you’re weak.”
“You got some brass, old man. It’s about to get you...”
Ezell didn’t wait for him to finish. He clamped his right hand onto Salt-and-pepper’s wrist, lunged forward, and drove his weight into the man’s knees. Salt-and-pepper stumbled; Ezell yanked and found the gun in his hand. It was that easy.
He pulled himself to his feet, straightened his back, and felt his full height for the first time in years. “Now you give me a reason,” he said. “But keep in mind, I ain’t slow, stupid, or weak, so you got to come up with one of your own.”
“Listen,” the man said. “You don’t need to do nothing crazy. I was just trying to scare you. And now you’ve scared me pretty bad. That makes us even, don’t it?”
“We ain’t ever been even or equals or anything like that,” Ezell said. “You shouldn’t have hit that girl. She ain’t nothing like the schoolteacher.”
Salt-and-pepper seemed confused by that but kept his confusion to himself. “Look,” he said. “I know what you’re saying. You don’t have to tell me. I get a little drunk or I’m coming down from crank, and she gets mouthy. You know how it is. The way my daddy told it, guys you-all’s age never put up with nothing from your women. Come on, now. Just between us. You never gave your old lady a smack or two?”
“I don’t exactly remember,” Ezell said. “Probably I did. But the big difference between me and you is, there ain’t nobody killed me for it yet.”
The man’s nerve broke. “I got a son,” he said, blubbering. “Maybe you saw him? He’s just a baby.”
“You ain’t the first that’s begged,” Ezell said and knew this to be true as soon as the words were spoken. “I don’t reckon it did them any good either.”
His finger tightened on the trigger, but he couldn’t squeeze it. He wasn’t the kind of man to shoot someone in cold blood. He wasn’t now, and he had never been. Sure, it was possible his temper had gotten away from him on occasion, and it was likely that Watkins or Watson, or whatever his name was, ended up dead on one of those occasions, but that wasn’t who Ezell had been, not in his heart, not where it really mattered.
“Shut up your moaning,” Ezell said. “I ain’t going to kill you.”