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:
He tried to reconcile the memories, but he couldn’t make sense of any of it. Every time he felt close, Miller and the schoolteacher’s voices intruded.
“I’ve tried and tried. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but this is too much, Miller,” the schoolteacher was saying. “I swear to God I understand now why your sister killed herself. If he’s here much longer, I might jump on that bandwagon.”
“I know,” Miller said. “I know.”
“He has to go. Tomorrow.”
“I have to work in the morning. We’re starting inventory, and I’ve got to be there.”
“You have a phone, don’t you? Call around until you find a place for him.”
“It’s going to cost a fortune,” Miller said, his voice miserable.
“We’ll take a second mortgage on the house if we have to.”
“Jesus,” Miller said. “What a mess.”
They kept talking on and on into the night, but Ezell lost interest. He lay atop his covers and shut his eyes, but his mind would not stay still. He remembered his momma in her casket, but he also remembered being a small child clutching a bedsheet while she begged for mercy from an unseen man.
Desperate, he tried to summon another memory of his mother and after an eternity of struggling finally brought her whole and breathing into his mind. She stood at a cook-stove, stirring a pot of pinto beans and yelling that he was to get his mongrel dog out of the house right now and at this very minute. The beans were steaming. Wisps of her hair had fallen from the bun she wore spring, summer, fall, and winter, and that hair was as dark as a raven’s wing.
None of it fit. He could not make it whole. His mind was like a jigsaw puzzle that had been flung across the room by a spoiled child, its pieces scattered, a few lost forever.
“They had hair coloring,” he whispered. “Even back then, they did. Maybe she dyed it.”
But he knew a lie when he heard one. Not long after the first gray light of morning seeped through his window, the truth finally spoke in his head. He turned on the bedside lamp and lifted his hands. He studied the scars on his knuckles and the splotches of freckles that ran from his wrist to fingers. And finally everything made sense.
Long before he heard their chirpy alarm, he had finished his preparations and lay on his bed, willing time to move faster. Finally, Miller left for work, and as she usually did on Saturdays, the schoolteacher went back to bed. But Ezell’s vigil was not over. He forced himself to sit still, to count minutes, to wait for the sound of her snores.
It was torture. After years of hibernation, his hunger had reawakened, and he felt like a half-starved man led to a feast but forced to check his appetite until grace was said. Then finally he caught the sound of the schoolteacher’s puffing snores, and his heart trilled in anticipation. He pulled the carving knife he’d taken from the kitchen from beneath his pillow and trailed a finger across the blade. It wasn’t as sharp as he would have liked it, but it would serve his purpose, and touching the blade was a comfort. He remembered the blond woman’s pleading, the screams of the little boy.
“My first,” he said aloud.
He opened his nightstand drawer, lifted the roll of duct tape he’d taken from Miller’s garage. At one time, he’d worn gloves, but that was when he was younger — when he still cared about little things like fingerprints. Back then he had been careful, and he’d gotten away with more than his share. He couldn’t recall the exact number, but he knew the numbers didn’t really matter.
He slipped from his bedroom, moved quietly down the hall, and paused at the schoolteacher’s door. Her snores were deep and rumbling, as regular as a ticking clock.
She lay sprawled across the bed, arms flung out, covers kicked off her dimpled white legs. He watched her breasts rise and fall until his hunger was unbearable.
When he finished, he posed her on the bed, took the time to admire his work, and smiled when he imagined Miller’s reaction to finding this.
“Stick that in one of your precious books,” he said aloud.
Then he shut the bedroom door.
He was bone-weary and aching, but he trudged on to the river. Before he’d left Miller’s house, he’d showered away most of the schoolteacher’s blood and dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt, but he’d become confused and misplaced the wool socks he’d intended to wear. The idea that his rediscovered identity might just melt away had raced his heart and left him trembling in frustration. He’d hurried outside to retrieve the revolver and headed into the woods.
Now he emerged from the thickets into a clearing, crossed a small gravel drive, and knocked on the fishing cabin’s door. The girl answered, her baby slung on her hip, her eyes red and puffy as if she’d been grieving over what was yet to come.
“Who the hell is it?” Mr. Salt-and-pepper slurred in a drug-thick voice.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said.
Ezell pushed her aside and spotted Salt-and-pepper sprawled on the sofa. He looked like a man who should have been in a hospital, but a trip to the doctor would have meant that the law would come around asking questions about what had happened and exactly what old Salt-and-pepper was up to out there in the woods.
Ezell raised the revolver. Salt-and-pepper lunged for a small lady’s gun lying on the coffee table, but he was slow and drug-clumsy. Ezell shot him in mid lunge, watched him kick and shudder, and then squeezed the trigger again.
“You killed him,” the girl said. “Why did you do that?”
Then she began shrieking and the snot-nosed baby joined right in with her. Ezell cocked the snub-nose’s hammer, gave her a second to realize that he was pointing the barrel at her baby’s head.
“Sit down and keep quiet,” he said. “If you don’t, you ain’t going to like what happens next.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Right now that don’t matter one way or the other. Not to you, it doesn’t. You got to worry about shutting your mouth and stopping that baby from squalling.”
She sniveled some, but sucked it up and walked wooden-legged to a ratty armchair. He admired her self-control. Shoot, she wasn’t much more than a girl, but she was a tough one. The schoolteacher had wailed and blubbered on right up to the end. The girl’s eyes darted to the little automatic on the coffee table. Gumption, Ezell thought. Then he grabbed the pistol and dropped it in his pocket.
It was warm in the cabin and the heat clouded his thoughts the way it always did. For a second, he felt staggered. The baby’s caterwauling was like an ax blade driven through the back of his head.
“Make him stop,” Ezell said.
“He’s hungry,” she said.
“Well, hell, girl, feed him or smother him one. I’ve had about all of it I can stand.”
She nodded and worked loose the buttons on her denim blouse. Ezell closed his eyes and heard a little girl squealing as she rode a tire swing higher and higher into the branches of a sugar-maple tree. Sarah. The name made him smile. He remembered how greedy she’d been for the breast, whereas Miller had always been mewling and finicky.
“He eats good,” he said now.
The girl smiled over the baby’s head as if even in this situation, she couldn’t help but be grateful for praise directed at her son. Ezell liked her. She’d been nice to him, had spoken to him as if he was a real person instead of a nuisance to be avoided or a burden that there was no choice but to bear. It was why he’d come here in the cold when all he wanted was to rest.