Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998
- Автор: Alexander Gary, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998». Краткое содержание книги:
But The Dreamers hadn’t been wrapped to go to the library. As I’d dragged the other three paintings out to the car, Jake had carefully tied up The Dreamers in a clean piece of cloth he’d found in the loft.
It did occur to me that maybe The Dreamers wasn’t supposed to go. Maybe Mr. Hornton had changed his mind at the last minute and not told Mrs. Hunt. Maybe...
“Maybe he was going to show it to someone. Maybe.” I looked down into my lap, stopped my tapping. “But then he didn’t.” I stared out the window, watching the garish lights of the local clam shack, ice cream place, and pizza parlor slip by. “Or he couldn’t.” I shut my eyes and said, “ ‘You’ll be sorry if you show The Dreamers.’ ” I opened my eyes and looked at Jake, but he said nothing.
“Case really closed?” I asked.
“Never was a case,” he said as he pulled into the circular lot of Manamesset County General Hospital.
I wandered out into the waiting room. Jake had only stayed a few minutes with Mr. Hornton. Now he was sitting on a worn vinyl chair, elbows on his legs, his head forward. No one had been very forthcoming, not the nurses, not the doctors on staff. There had been no change in Mr. Hornton’s condition, and now he might be taken by ambulance to Boston for surgery.
“I’m going to tell you this,” I said, managing — just barely — to keep my mouth from trembling, my words from spilling over into tears. “That painting, it’s going on display Saturday. Right there in the library. And if there is any connection, case or no case, I’m going to show that son of a—”
A loud boom rocked the ward, the entire building. Nurses came running and interns and orderlies; patients along the corridor were crying out. Then we heard an orderly shout, “There’s been some kind of explosion down in the parking lot. There’s a couple of cars on fire!”
The Volvo was totally destroyed, firebombed along with two other cars belonging to doctors, a Jaguar XJ6 and a Cadillac Seville STS. There were firetrucks out there, police squad cars from both Manamesset and Northport, and a long line of people being held back by police along the periphery of the parking lot.
And then a Jeep Cherokee tore up, nearly onto the sidewalk, right to where Jake and I were standing. It was Paul Fiore, slamming on his brakes, jumping out, and heading straight toward Jake.
“I ought to take you apart, you stupid fool!” he screamed. “You took the kid with you, knowing something like this could happen!” Suddenly two policemen were there grabbing Paul’s arms.
“Hold on, Paul,” Jake said, walking toward him. “I didn’t know...”
“The hell you didn’t!” Paul barked back. “Then why’d you and Emily switch the paintings back at her house? There’s a maniac out there who wants that picture, and you knew it! You knew it!” For a whiny and irritating guy, Paul Fiore was surprisingly strong, throwing off first one man, then the other. “You ought to get written up, Valari, tossed off the force.”
He wiped his eyes, then his face. Suddenly, using that same expletive that had gotten me in so much trouble, he turned away and walked off to join his men as they put out the last of the fire.
Five minutes ago, seeing that burning car, its hull now a smoldering, blackened heap, I had felt like my heart, lungs, and stomach had all been pulled out of me. I’d thought The Dreamers was gone and with it whatever this had all been about. But suddenly I was wrong again. It wasn’t over. Not yet.
Arguing, back and forth, loud and sometimes violently, then softer and apologetic. I lay on my stomach listening to them, then I slipped on my headphones and let Depeche Mode, low, soft, depressing, lull me to sleep...
And into dreams of my own.
Who was I? Where was I? On a beach. On an island somewhere in the bay.
Could be any island, any part of the bay, but the gulls are filling the sky, chasing the terns, diving into the shoals, swooping down at pieces of bread that someone, that she, tosses into the air for them.
And who am I? Where am I? With a paintbrush in my hand and an easel in the sand, looking down at them, not dreamers but lovers, racing across the sand on a deserted beach island where they can be, can do, can feel anything they want. And they see me, but they don’t notice me, don’t care. I’m just a painter in the sand, and whatever I’m doing, painting the water, the rocks, the broken-down jetty stretching into the distance, it’s nothing. Dreamers and lovers, and they pause somewhere in all of this and she puts her head on his shoulder and they turn to the blaze of sun spilling across the gold-lapped waters.
I paint them, looking down to the water, the sunset, the gulls, the gold and blue bay before them; I paint them with their faces turned away, to preserve their privacy, to protect them.
And I call them The Dreamers, with respect, not with derision.
And I understand. I know.
I sat up straight in bed, awake and alarmed, knowing, having it right there on the tip of my consciousness. I knew. And if they’d only given me half a chance, I would’ve done what they wanted, what they asked, even destroy the painting I’d taken so long to complete. I would have because I’m not a heartless or vindictive man. I would’ve kept their secret, but they didn’t know that, they didn’t know me, didn’t know my word was good. I hadn’t even wrapped it up to go to the library.
I’d left it on the easel, up in the loft, to show...
I sat forward farther, trying, trying, trying to hold onto it, the bits and pieces of a dream that was shattering before me.
It was gone. Yet for a moment I’d known why Mr. Hornton had fallen and what it had to do with the dreamers — the two people in the painting, not the painting itself. I knew.
And what I knew, I’d lost.
“You’ve got to get some sleep, Emily.”
I awoke to a different voice, not Paul Fiore’s, and not my mother’s. I glanced at the clock; five in the morning.
“You can’t do this any more.” That was my mother responding to Jake. And though her voice was low and soft, it wasn’t weak; it held that fiery edge to it that both Jake and I had learned to respect. “You can’t involve my son in these matters. I know you’ll say he does it himself, he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there’s also you. You do understand that, don’t you? Herbie’s emulating you.”
I slipped out of my bedroom quietly. Barefoot, careful to avoid the places on the stairs where the boards creak, I went down to the bottom and listened. They were in the living room, so I eased the door open a crack.
“And I don’t want police cars parked out in front of my house all night,” my mother went on. “The neighbors will think I’m carrying on with the whole Manamesset police force.” She tried to laugh, couldn’t.
I eased the door open even farther.
“Just a precaution, Emily. If anyone heard what Paul said tonight at the hospital—” He left it unfinished.
“ ‘What Paul said.’ ” My mother’s voice was too ironic. “You say that as though—”
“He interfered. He should’ve kept his mouth shut.”
“Damn you, Jake, Paul was just being protective!”
“Protective? You know how he could have been protective? By keeping quiet so I could let the papers write that the four paintings that were going on display Saturday were destroyed in the fire. He just made things more complicated.”
“Oh, did he?” she snapped. “So let me ask you this, what’s the plan now, Jake? Wait until Elmer wakes up, if he ever does? Then ask him what’s going on here? Because I’ve got an easier solution. We drag that thing out onto the front lawn of the Town Hall, dump gasoline all over it, and set it on fire.”