The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“No,” I told him, “you never gave me advice about women.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s the only reason I’m not gonna start.”
When you’re having great sex, it seems to be the center of the world. Everything else — work, the news, people on the street — has a remote, second-tier quality, as if none of it will ever fully reach you. The rest of life seems a pretext, a recovery period before the shuddering starts again.
Over the holidays, Clarissa and I divided time with the boys. For Christmas she took them on the annual journey to Pennsylvania and her parents’ home. Knowing their absence would be hard on me, I accepted when one of my partners offered his cabin up in Skageon. Clarissa hated the cold, and it had been years since I had passed any part of winter in the woods. On a chance, I invited Karen and she accepted, eager to avoid the annual holiday collisions with her father.
We left late on the twenty-fifth and made an elaborate Christmas dinner while it stormed outside. What followed were three of those crystalline days that occasionally bless the Midwest, when the snows magnify the available light and the lack of clouds leaves the air thin and exciting. We snowshoed for hours, then, exhausted by our treks, passed the long dark nights in bed, an intermittent languor of sleeping and reading, lovemaking and laughter. Driving back to the Tri-Cities, to the year-end deadlines of my law practice and the turmoil of my broken marriage, I felt the exhilaration of having finally, briefly, lived the life I’d longed for.
I spent the next couple of nights at Karen’s apartment. I had second thoughts about the Levitzes, who also knew Carissa, but they were away. Even in her own bed, Karen slept poorly. Initially I was afraid it was my presence, but she said she never got more than three or four hours in a row, which seemed somehow at odds with her resigned exterior. She would buck awake, thrashing with the demons of a savage nightmare.
“What was the dream?” I asked the second night.
She shook her head, unwilling or unable to answer. She was naked and had her arms wrapped about herself. When I laid my hand on her narrow back, I could feel her heart hammering.
“Go back to sleep,” she said. “I’ll get up until I calm down.”
I asked what she would do.
“I have my things. I like cognac. I like Edith Piaf, in some moods. Or big symphonies. It’s a good time to reflect.”
Clarissa also did not sleep well. She read. In the middle of the night I’d find her propped on her pillow, a minute lamp clipped onto her book. The only pleasure I ever took in business travel was in not having to sleep with a pillow over my head.
Without warning Karen said, “I was dreaming about a fire.” She was looking at the ceiling and a plaster rosette sculpted where a gas lamp had hung decades before. “I was in a fire with my father. I was watching the fire come toward him and there wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Frightening,” I said.
“It’s not what I dream that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s the way I react. All I had to do was shout, ‘Watch out.’ But the person I was in that dream — she didn’t even know that shouting was possible. Why do you think you’re yourself in a dream when you don’t know the most basic things?”
Perhaps that was how life really was, I said, full of blind spots and the inability to do what seems obvious. She didn’t take much to the suggestion.
“Do you dream about your father often?” I asked.
She wrinkled her mouth. “Why would you ask that?”
I didn’t have an answer, not one I could speak. She went for her robe and told me again to go back to sleep.
“You know, my father likes you,” she said in the morning, as I was driving her to work. “He says you’re solid.”
I wasn’t sure what basis Maurie had to comment, although it was a remark that, a year before, I might have made about myself.
“He has a lot of good qualities,” she added. “He’s not all one way. Did you know he was a war hero?”
“Really? What kind of hero?”
“Are there kinds? A hero. He has medals. From Korea.”
“Did he kill anyone?”
“God,” she said. “What a question. Like I’m going to say, ‘Daddy, who’d you shoot?’ It was a war. He saved some people. He killed some people. Why else do they give you medals?” She kissed me before leaving the car, but bent to eye me from the curb. “What’s your thing with my father?” she asked.
Karen and I spent New Year’s Eve with the Elstners, enjoying dinner at their home, then, as midnight approached, a few minutes of revelry in the local hangout where Paul made an appearance most nights to smoke a cigar. I thought it had gone well — Elstner and I had engaged in our usual good-spirited mocking of one another, amusing the women — and when Paul and I went to a game later that week, he made it a point to say how much Ann and he had liked Karen.
“The only thing is,” Elstner said, as he drove to the University Field House after dinner, “I nearly soaked my socks every time she mentioned her father. She always talk about him that much?”
“She works with him, Paul. He’s her boss.”
He gave an equivocal nod, clearly not inclined to question my hasty defense.
“Truth is,” I added, “I always wonder how she’d be about her father if that story you told me had the right ending — you know, if Maurie got nabbed for offing his relative, and Karen knew it. Probably make a big difference, don’t you think?”
“How’s that?”
“She has no perspective on him. I mean, he’s her dad. So whenever he clobbers her, she’s inclined to think maybe it’s her fault, that he’s really a good guy underneath. But if she knew what a cruel character he is, an actual killer, that would have an impact.” I was moving full throttle with the idea that had propelled me for months now, the belief that new perspectives and new information could make life a happier enterprise.
“Well, that didn’t happen,” he said. “Maurie’s roaming free. And nobody’s going to be diming him out now. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “But it’s strange knowing.”
Paul had been keeping a close eye on the traffic. We were caught in the pregame rush, staggering a few feet and then stopping again as the cars funneled into the lot, but Elstner turned to me fully now. He might as well have said I told you so.
“Maybe strange is what you want, champ,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you could have walked away as soon as you figured out who she was.”
“Hey, I like this woman. More than ‘like.’”
Paul had worked his mouth into a funny shape as he reflected. “Here,” said Elstner, “mind if I tell you a weird story?”
“Another one?”
He paused to give me a sick smile, then asked, “Remember Rhonda Carling?”
“Rhonda Carling? The woman you went out with before Ann?”
“Her. Did I ever tell you about our sex life?”
“Christ, I don’t think so.”
“This was the bad old days, right? Virginity mattered.” He grimaced. “Listen to me. ‘Bad old days.’ A man with two daughters.”
“Don’t act like a Cro-Magnon. Rhonda Carling and her virtue. I have the context.”
“Well,” he said, “she liked to play halvsies.”
“Halvsies?”
“You know. To go just partway. So she remained, you know, intact.”
“No,” I said.