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:
It would have ended there, but Mr. Salt-and-pepper wiped his nose on his coat sleeve and smirked up at him. Seeing it clenched Ezell’s jaw and set his teeth on edge. He palmed the gun, slammed it hard into the man’s nose, heard the bone shatter. The spurting blood and his anger about the girl, about Sarah, about time and old age, about Miller and his school-teaching wife was too much for him to resist. He swung the gun again. He didn’t stop until Salt-and-pepper was writhing and groaning, his heels kicking and his blood streaming on the frozen ground.
That night Ezell went to his room early. He lay on his bed with the television flickering and tried to make sense of everything that he had done.
He’d hurt that fellow pretty good. He hadn’t killed him; he was sure of that. But he’d done him some real damage. By the time Ezell had made it home from the river, his legs were weak, his thoughts chaotic. He’d been standing in the kitchen, cursing Miller because he didn’t have the good sense to keep beer in the fridge, when he realized he still had the.38 in his hand. Exhausted, he went back outside, removed the ventilation grid, and hid the gun beneath a strip of fallen insulation. Then he had realized his shirt cuffs were soaked with blood, so he stripped down and washed his clothes and his body in the freezing water from an outdoor faucet.
Now he grew tired of staring at the television screen, lay back on his pillows, shut his eyes. Ravens called to him from somewhere deep in the cavern of his memory, and he followed them to the edge of sleep, so that he was unsure if the sights he witnessed and the voices he heard came from his dream or his memory.
The blond woman waited for him, blood-soaked and terrified. “Not here,” she was saying over and over. “Not in front of my boy.”
The child’s shape came clear. He stood in the corner of a small living room, wearing flannel pajamas and clutching a bedsheet in his hand.
“Send him outside,” the woman sobbed. “Please.”
Then a scarred hand splotched with freckles reached down to grab her matted hair. Ezell sat up in bed, his heart racing and misfiring until he feared it would give out. He blinked his eyes into focus. The Adam West version of Batman was on the television, and Ezell’s heart settled. He’d never liked Batman or any of that superhero nonsense, but right now, he counted Adam West as one of his best friends. Miller had loved comic books when he was a boy. On the few occasions he actually spoke at the dinner table, he’d bored Ezell to tears by rehashing the ridiculous plot lines. Now Ezell remembered that Bruce Wayne’s parents had been murdered and that he’d become an avenger, taking out his loss on the criminals of Gotham City. It struck him that although his mind had discarded most of his memories like yesterday’s newspaper, it had clung to those facts about a funny book character, so they must have been important to him for some reason. He just didn’t know why. Then he thought of the woman and the little boy with the dazed blue eyes. And it all became clear.
Ezell sprung from bed, banged his knee on his dresser but ignored the pain, and rushed to the bedroom at the end of the hall. “This ain’t no time to sleep,” he said. “I know what happened at the river.”
A bedside lamp flared on, and Miller blinked at him, molelike, confused. The schoolteacher flopped around on the bed and clutched a sheet to her bosom.
“What’s wrong?” Miller asked. “What time is it?”
“It don’t matter what time it is,” Ezell said. “I’m Batman.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” the schoolteacher said.
“Dad,” Miller said. “What are you talking about?”
“That was me. I was the little boy.”
“What little boy?”
“Jesus Christ,” the schoolteacher said.
“They killed my momma. Somebody did. I was the little boy with the blue eyes. I saw it all.”
Miller groaned. “You were dreaming.”
“I wish I was,” Ezell said. “I saw some awful things.”
“Go back to bed,” Miller said.
“They killed my momma. You expect me to sleep after that?”
“Grandma Louise was nearly eighty when she passed. She had a stroke and died at the Greenview Community Hospital. Now go back to bed.”
“That ain’t right,” Ezell said. “Why are you lying?”
And of course the schoolteacher had to chime in. “Listen, Ezell. You just had a bad dream. No one killed your mother. I know nightmares can seem real, but it’s over now.” She sat up in bed so she could work up some more syrup in her voice, but then squinted at him, and her fat face turned as red as a Beef Heart tomato. “Oh my God!” she screamed. “Get him out of here!”
“What?” Miller asked. “What’s happening?”
“Look at your father. Really look at him.”
She yanked the sheet up to her double chin and set to cursing and yapping, bleating like a sheep. Miller blinked some more.
“Oh Jesus,” he finally said.
“Right now!” the schoolteacher yelled. “I mean it!”
Miller nearly leapt out of bed. “For God’s sakes, cover yourself.”
“Cover my what?” Ezell asked.
Then Miller had him by the arm and was pulling him down the hall. Ezell was so confused and off balance, he let his son yank him like a misbehaving four-year-old. But when they reached the threshold to Ezell’s room, he bucked up and stood his ground. Miller shoved, but he wasn’t able to move him more than half an inch.
“You come into our bedroom like that one more time and you’ll be in a nursing home so fast it will make your head swim,” Miller said.
Before Ezell could form the words to ask what it was that had Miller and his schoolteacher so worked up, he glanced down at the gaping fly of his boxers. He shrugged and tucked himself back in.
“There you go,” he said. “It wasn’t nothing for your schoolteacher to carry on about.”
Miller took a deep breath, let it out in that nose-whistling way of his. “Stay in your room. The only way I want to see you out of here again is if the house is on fire, and I’m not a hundred percent sure I want to see you then.”
Ezell studied his son’s face. “What does she got on you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What’s she holding over you to make you turn against your own kin?”
“Keep talking,” Miller said. “You just go ahead and keep at it. See if I don’t have them carry you off before the sun comes up.”
“You don’t even care what happened to your grandma, do you?”
“Go to bed,” Miller said. “You were dreaming. Can’t you get that through your head?”
“I know what I saw. You can lie all you want, but that don’t change it one damn bit.”
Miller ran his hand through his thinning hair. “When was it?” he asked. “Never mind I know for a fact she died when she was an old lady, because I was in the waiting room at Greenview Community when you came out and told us. Hell, maybe I’m the one who’s crazy, and you’re the one who knows what he’s talking about. So when was it that all of this happened?”
The question robbed Ezell of his certainty. “I don’t really know,” he admitted. He tried to conjure the memory. “There was a ’fifty-five Mercury parked out front. I can see it as clearly as I see you standing here. Black as sin with whitewall tires. I always liked a Mercury, and that one was a beauty. Newish but not brand new, so I guess it had to be somewhere around then.”
Miller smiled his now-I’ve-got-you-on-my-dusty-shelf smile. “So nineteen fifty-six or fifty-seven? You would have been nineteen or twenty. You and Mom were married or at least close to it by then. Either way, you weren’t a little boy. Now go to bed and forget all this nonsense.”
When Miller left, Ezell tried to work it out. It seemed to him he could remember a late-night phone call from the hospital saying his mother had had a stroke. He could remember the drive to the emergency room and see the ground fog that had risen from the bottoms and clung to the weed fields like wisps of cotton candy. He rubbed his eyes and caught the memory of his mother lying gray-haired and waxy in an overpriced coffin. But he also knew what he’d seen and what he’d felt at the spot on the river. He could hear the blond woman’s screams, see the little boy’s wide, glassy eyes.