The Best American Mystery Stories 1998
- Автор: Ballard David, Bartels Scott
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin
- ISBN: 978-0-395-83586-9
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 1998». Краткое содержание книги:
The diverse styles and themes employed in this collection showcase an impressive array of talent certain to further the popularity of the genre. Already a bestseller in its first year, The Best American Mystery Stories, as evidenced by this year’s edition, promises to keep readers intrigued and coming back for more.
“Not at all,” I said inanely and was then passed on to his family, a rough-looking couple who seemed uncomfortable in this formal setting, and a self-conscious youth who looked so much like Edward Barefoot that I figured he was the youngest brother. He and his parents just nodded glumly when Aunt Zell and I expressed our sympathy.
As we worked our way back through the crowd, both of us were aware of a different pitch to the usual quiet funeral home murmur. I spotted a friend out on the porch and several people stopped Aunt Zell for a word. It was nearly half an hour before we got back to my car and both of us had heard the same stories. The middle Barefoot brother had been slipping around with Chastity and he hadn’t been seen since she was killed.
“Wonder if Dwight knows?” asked Aunt Zell.
“Yeah, we heard,” said Dwight when I called him that evening. “George Barefoot. He’s been living at home since he got out of jail and—”
“Jail?” I asked.
“Yeah. He ran a stop sign back last November and hit a Toyota. Totaled both cars and nearly killed the other driver. He blew a ten and since he already had one DWI and a string of speeding tickets, Judge Longmire gave him some jail time, too. According to his mother, he hasn’t been home since Sunday night. He and the youngest brother are rough carpenters on that new subdivision over off Highway Forty-eight, but the crew chief says he hasn’t seen George since quitting time Friday evening. The two brothers claim not to know where he is either.”
“Are they lying?”
I could almost hear Dwight’s shrug over the phone. “Who knows?”
“You put out an APB on his vehicle?”
“He doesn’t have one. Longmire pulled his license. Wouldn’t even give him driving privileges during work hours. That’s why he’s been living at home. So he could ride to work with his brother Paul.”
“The husband’s alibi hold up?”
“Solid as a tent pole. It’s a forty-mile roundtrip to his house. Tracy says he answered the calendar call around nine-thirty — that’s when his wife was dropping their kid off at the day care — and you entered his prayer for judgment between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty. Lucky for him, he kept his Bojangles receipt. It’s the one out on the bypass, and the time on it says twelve-oh-five. It’s another forty minutes to his work, and they say he was there before one o’clock and didn’t leave till after five, so it looks like he’s clear.”
More than anybody could say for his brother George.
Poor Edward Barefoot. From what I now knew about that bunch of Barefoots, he was the only motivated member of his family. The only one to finish high school, he’d even earned an associate degree at the community college. Here was somebody who could be the poster child for bootstrapping, a man who’d worked hard and played by the rules, and what happens? Bad enough to lose the wife you adore, but then to find out she’s been cheating with your sorry brother who probably shot her and took off?
Well, it wasn’t for me to condemn Chass Barefoot’s taste in men. I’ve danced with the devil enough times myself to know the attraction of no-’count charmers.
Aunt Zell went to the funeral the next day and described it for Uncle Ash and me at supper.
“That boy looked like he was strung out on the rack. And his precious little baby! Her hair’s blond like her mama’s, but she’s been out in her wading pool so much this summer, Retha said, that she’s brown as a pecan.” She put a hot and fluffy biscuit on my plate. “It just broke my heart to see the way she kept her arms wrapped around her daddy’s neck as if she knew her mama was gone forever. But she’s only two, way too young to understand something like that.”
From my experience with children who come to family court having suffered enormous loss and trauma, I knew that a two-year-old was indeed too young to understand or remember, yet something about Aunt Zell’s description of the little girl kept troubling me.
For her sake, I hoped that George Barefoot would be arrested and quickly brought to trial so that her family could find closure and healing.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen quite that way.
Two days later, George Barefoot’s body was found when some county workers were cleaning up an illegal trash dump on one side of the back roads just north of Dobbs. He was lying on an old sofa someone had thrown into the underbrush, and the high back had concealed him from the road.
The handgun he’d stuck in his mouth had landed on some dirt and leaves beside the sofa. It was the same gun that had killed Chastity Barefoot, a gun she’d bought to protect herself from intruders. There was a note in his pocket addressed to his brother:
E — God, I’m so sorry about
Chass. I never meant
to hurt you. You know
how much you mean
to me.
Love always,