The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
He met Valerie during a business trip to New Orleans and spent every weekend down there until he married her a few months later.
They went to Europe for about a month, and Grande Isle awaited their return with the usual small-town expectancy and curiosity. They settled into married life on the modest Deveau plantation, and Grande Isle quickly had its answers about her. Robert Deveau couldn’t have made a better choice. Tall, lithe, chestnut-haired, strongly beautiful, Valerie made Grande Isle her home with such a natural ease and unpretended warmth that folks soon dis-remembered she hadn’t been born in the parish. I figure that Robert was the key to that. Robert was her home, just as she was his. The two of them could have been at home in Baltimore or Borneo, just so long as they were together.
About the eighth year of their marriage, they went up to the Great Smoky Mountains near Asheville for a short summer vacation. One night as they were returning to their rented cottage, the brakes faded on their car during the long drop down the steep mountain road. The car hurtled into a tight hairpin curve even as Robert reacted to the emergency. It plunged down the mountainside, rolling over and over with glass shattering, metal rending, and hot oil and water spewing from the engine’s guts.
Robert was knocked out the first time the car turned over. When he groaned back to pain-filled consciousness, he knew he was badly hurt. His stomach, chest, and head felt as if a team of Louisiana mules had walked across him. From the numbness in his left leg, he suspected what his groping fingers confirmed. He had broken the left femur, the big thigh bone, just above the knee. The sharp, jagged end had punctured the flesh, and blood was coursing down his calf.
The first shock of pain began to build in the fractured femur, but it wasn’t as important as the emptiness of the car.
“Valerie...”
He realized that he was lying awkwardly on his side against the top of the car. It had come to rest upside down. The door near his face had sprung open during the long and violent fall.
“Valerie...”
Had she been thrown clear, escaped relatively unharmed? With the prayer on his lips, he dragged himself out of the car.
He lay for a moment fighting off faintness, dwarfed by the hugeness of the moon-washed mountains and their desolate silence. He sucked at the clean air and found a little strength.
Raising his head, he saw her face, not a dozen feet from him; just her head and shoulders. The rest of her was pinned between soft, loamy ground and the curve of the topsy-turvy front fender.
He crawled toward her, the sight of the stillness of her features killing his own pain for a moment. His trembling hand touched her lips, her throat, the place where the fender pressed down on her.
He looked up the long, moon-spangled slope, seeing the trail of broken brush and shattered saplings the car had plowed. Against the heights was the dark band, like a black scar on the mountain’s face, made by the road cut. Perhaps he had strength to crawl the distance up to the road. Maybe there’d be the luck of a passing car he could stop for help. He had a chance to save himself before he bled to death from the leg wound. A chance with strength and just the smallest bit of luck... but, he knew, he didn’t have the time. If she was still alive at all, Valerie wasn’t breathing under the weight and pressure of the fender. She couldn’t wait for help. She was suffocating now.
He dug his hands into the earth under her shoulders and started tearing it away. Inch by inch he gave her room, somehow hanging onto consciousness and sanity. Each handful of dirt he grubbed out loosened the clamp against her chest a little bit more.
He heard a faint popping sound, the recoil of cramped muscles within her rib cage, and with a shuddering gasp, the first thread of air streamed past her lips and into her lungs. It was followed by a stronger gasp, and then another, and in a few seconds she moved her head a little and moaned.
She was trying to speak his name, and he said weakly, “I’m here, Valerie.”
“Oh, God, Robert...”
“Can you manage? Wiggle out?”
“I’m hurt, Robert. My arm... my stomach...”
“Try, Valerie. Work your way out. A little at a time. That’s it. Keep trying. You’ll have to do it... I’m plain tuckered. Give me a minute... just a minute... to rest...”
His eyes closed slowly, and the last drops of life oozed through arteries and flesh sliced by the razor-sharp end of the broken femur bone.
When Valerie brought his body back, Grande Isle closed up for the day and joined her mourning. His service was held in the community church, and the long procession of cars wound its way the ten miles out to the Deveau place.
Robert was interred in the family mausoleum, which stood a hundred yards to the rear of the house in a grove of live oaks. The burial place was like a dozen others in the parish, a thousand others in our part of Louisiana where the nature of the swampy soil rules out below-ground burial. It was an almost-crude blockhouse built from stone. Weather had pitted and stained it and ivy smothered the walls. The sheet-iron door that was pulled open to admit Robert Deveau to his own niche in the dark crypt was blackened with rust. His father and mother were in there, his grandparents and their parents — and no doubt in that moment Valerie Deveau thought that in some distant day there’d be room for her. In keeping with custom, if it should be necessary, the bones of a long-dead Deveau would be pushed to the rear of a niche to make room for the new arrival.
Meantime, there were the pieces of her life to pick up, and she did so with the quiet brand of Deveau courage. She ran the business of the plantation on a reduced scale. She kept up old friendships. She drove into Grande Isle once a week for her volunteer day at the parish’s small hospital. If her thoughts or wishes strayed beyond the plantation, she never showed any sign of it.
She might have married again, a dozen times. A lot of the parish bachelors made the try. As far as she was concerned, however, the male gender began and ended with Robert Deveau, before whose tomb she placed a basket of fresh flowers once each week.
The years burnished her hair to smooth gray, added wrinkles to the corners of her green eyes and full-lipped mouth, and tugged faintly at the animal beauty of her body; but she was structured not to grow old with bent back and rheumy eyes, and she remained a striking woman, even after thirty years of widowhood.
My mind was far and away from anything connected with the Deveaus the day Carlin Soulard drifted into Grande Isle. As constable, I didn’t fancy his type. He was a hulking youth with hair like dirty frayed blond ropes hanging to his heavy shoulders. His stubbled face was brutish and habitually sullen. He wore dirty jeans tucked into run-over boots and a filthy green T-shirt with “Make War — To Hell With Love” stenciled across the chest. I figured he’d smoke pot and spit on the floor.
He came from beyond Chad Bayou, where the Soulards were a sizable interbred Cajun clan that existed on its knack for poaching, making moonshine, waylaying the infrequent stranger, and stealing from one another.
Once previously, Carlin had drifted into Grande Isle. His sojourn had stretched to sixty days in the local jail after a drinking bout with a home-grown tough had ended in a fist fight. This time, I hoped, he was just passing through, but on the third straight day that he chalked his cue in the Little Andy Poolroom & Beer I decided to mention that our jail food had improved none at all, inflation being what it was.
He was crouched over the second table, running a rack of balls. He didn’t see me right away, moving around the table, sighting his next shot.