The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“Here’s the key to your boyfriend’s suite.” She pushed her sunglasses onto her head for a moment and her eyes were glittering even more than Leonard’s when he was about to do something crazy. “I think you’d better get right up there. Tell him how you feel about things.”
Dolores took the card and ran her finger over the surface. It wouldn’t fit in the little paper cups but she’d keep it anyway. “My bag...?”
“It’s still in the car. I’ll go and get it while you’re going to the room.”
“Where do I go?” Dolores was confused about so many things; all she really wanted to do was lean against the wall and close her eyes.
“He’s on the top floor where the big suites are. The elevators are over here.” She put the sunglasses on and took Dolores’s elbow, pushing her across the thick carpet, past the gorgeous sofas and into a marble foyer with elevators along both walls. “It’s straight ahead when you get out of the elevator.” She seemed to remember something. “You know how to use this key?”
Dolores stared at the floor.
“Okay, you shove it into the slot above the handle with the strip away from you. Bring it out again and when the little light turns green, you can open the door.”
“But my bag? Where’d you say my bag was?”
“I’ll be waiting right here with your bag.” Jennifer was talking very softly now, almost whispering. “When you’ve told him... well, whatever you want to tell him, come back here and I’ll give you your bag.” She pushed something with her gloved finger and the elevator door slid open.
Dolores hesitated but Jennifer pushed her in and reached behind her to push a button inside the elevator.
When the elevator stopped, Dolores peered out, making sure there was no one in the hall. She held the card that Jennifer had called a key but the door across from the elevator was already ajar. She pushed it farther open and stuck her head in, humming the two notes as loud as she could. When no one stopped her she stepped into a light green vestibule with a huge painting of cactus and desert sand on the right wall. She hesitated and then called out softly, “Bryce?” She wished she’d rehearsed what she’d say to him but there was no answer. She walked into a living room, with another of the scrumptious sofas on a pale beige carpet. Two glasses half full of some kind of liquid and melting ice cubes sat on the coffee table. She glanced at the kitchen but it was empty. There was another half-open door leading off the living room. She walked over and pushed it fully open.
At first she thought they were sleeping, Bryce on his back, his naked torso partly covered by a sheet and the girl with her long blond hair spread out on the pillowcase. But then she saw the blood and the hole in Bryce’s forehead where no one should have a hole. And when she leaned over to get a better look, she noticed the girl’s hair was covering a section of her cheek that was red and pulpy and leaking blood.
A gun lay on the pillow. She thought for a second about picking it up, but it was much too big for her treasure collection so she left it where it was. She felt sad about Bryce and about the pretty girl too. But she knew in her heart that what Dr. Bradford had said was true. She and Bryce weren’t really engaged. It was just a kind of dream of hers.
She heard a siren and then another and when she looked out the window she saw several police cars pulling up to the hotel’s entrance. The doorman was tugging on his tunic and flapping his arms around.
Dolores decided to take the stairs down. She could stop at each floor and see if there was any sign of Jonathan Finn. He might be wondering where she’d got to and she didn’t like to keep him waiting.
Before she left she looked again at the couple on the bed. She’d like to leave a gift for them, some sort of memorial like people left her when her grandmother died, but all of her treasures were in Jennifer’s car. Then she remembered the temporary crown in its little bed of napkins in her pants pocket. She pulled it out and dropped it near Bryce’s hand. She noticed the little pink fingernail was caught in the folds, but it looked so pretty against the white sheet she decided to leave that as well.
Emily Raboteau
Smile
From The Gettysburg Review
“Row!” his père commands but Tee Paul’s arms are jelly. His père’s back at the prow of the pirogue is a trunk of muscle. “Row you peeshwank capon, row! “ Between them on the peeling pirogue floor lies Bowleg’s boy, Smile, with a broken head. “Row!” His père’s oar slides into the brack like a knife, deeper and darker down bayou they go, until the shore lights extinguish, until even the shadows have shadows. His throat is a knot. The bullfrogs croak, “Oh no, oh no.”
Tee Paul can’t work his oar for looking into his podna’s licorice face in the lantern light. Smile’s blood is mixing with the half-inch pool of swamp water down there. Smile’s eyes are two dead coins with a hold on him.
“Row!” Instead of sailing straight, the boat wig-wags like a lizard tail through the silent, bearded cypress. And slowly because only his père is doing the work. “Row!”
“Can’t, Pop,” Tee Paul says. He’s got those jelly arms. He hasn’t the strength to slap at a mosquito.
“What?” his père spits, spinning around. He’s got the whiskey smell and the mad dog look.
“I got the mal au coeur!” he says and vomits a slop as thick as the Atchafalaya itself over the side of his père’s pirogue.
Tawk! His père reaches his oar across and cracks him one good on the head, same way he did Smile with the doorstop rock for stealing his alligator money. Tee Paul’s afraid now. The shock freezes him. The fear moves him. Father and son cut the swamp like lard.
A smell rises. Smile must’ve shit his pants in a death spasm. “Pooyeye,” says Tee Paul’s père. When the flies come he ropes Smile’s middle to the anchor and dumps him by the roots of a strangler tree. The swamp swallows Smile up fast, bottom first, head last. The old man tips a bit and says, “Listen, couyon. He was a no-good burglar nigger, him. Dass all. Not of we and us.”
On the long way back, he’s thinking how the tooloulou must be fiddling over Smile’s face already, pinching out his eyes. Or maybe a gator would get him.
Back in their shack on stilts, Hermogine, in her stovepipe hat, squats, skinning a beaver from one of the traps. All Tee Paul meant was to save enough to steal her from harm, to stow away with her on a big river barge. He could have carried her off on his back. She’s a little wisp of a thing, sickly. Her nightgown is so thin. There’s a blue vein beating in her forehead.
“Why you wake, bebette?” their père grumbles, freeing his bunions from his boots. “Fais do-do.” She asks do they want coffee, but the old man’s already reaching for the other stuff.
Tuesday is her birthday. They wrap her in a quilt, set her in the buggy, and ride her to town to pick out a gift.
Do she want dat doll? Do she want a yard of dat yellow gingham to make a apron? Do she want dis pop-up picture book from France? No, she want de pair of chartreuse lovebirds in dat cage over de crawdaddy barrel. Can she have dem birds? Weh, she can.
The old man pays with a cut of his rescued money. Tee Paul had stole it one nickel at a time. All winter long he stashed the money in his podna’s tackle box, where his père was never meant to look. Smile kept count for him. They’d lay down their fishing poles in the muck to look at all the coins collecting in there. “Soon,” Smile would smile then draw his harmonica out from the bib of his overalls. “Mais, I’m gon miss ya podna.” When there was enough Tee Paul would run away. He would carry his little sister up the Bayou on his back. He would save her.
The coins clink on the counter now like chains. Hermogine’s kissing at the birds through the bars. Un p’tit bee. Their wings are clipped. Their beaks are coming off. They have reptilian eyes. They are not cheap.