"Aldridge, Ray - Filter FeedersV1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldridge Ray)

She wondered about Linda and Thomas aboard their old boat. Were they in bed, too? At least they weren't alone. She tried to imagine Thomas. A younger Sterling Hayden, perhaps, a craggy-faced seafarer who couldn't be happy unless he was sailing the blue water? No, her imagination wouldn't have it that way at all. A man who would make his sick girlfriend go ashore alone to do the shopping . . . he must be some sort of jerk. Did Thomas ever leave his cabin? Teresa was somehow sure it had been Linda who had anchored the boat, that first evening.

Now she was picturing some sort of pale subterranean creature, and she had to laugh. A sea-going vampire. But Linda hadn't seemed anemic, exactly. Mentally anemic? No. Something else. She couldn't put a word to it.

Teresa suddenly felt very tired. She set her soda can aside and pulled up the sheet.

As she drifted into sleep, half-dreams floated up, briefly vivid. Linda, naked, beautiful opaque eyes rolling, mouth open, thin legs wrapped around an amorphous male figure, which plunged into her as tirelessly and forcefully as a slow-motion piston. Linda clawed at her lover, bared her teeth in a grimace of ecstasy or pain.

The image faded, and she dreamed of the old boat riding serenely at anchor, white hull glowing in the shoreside lights. The boat moved to the rhythm of the man-piston, the rolling hull began to generate small ripples. The dim anchor light at the top of the mainmast arced back and forth across the starless sky and the waves spread out over the glassy black water of the harbor.

"Love waves," Teresa murmured, and even at the threshold of sleep, she was envious.

Linda came into the Chandlery again the next afternoon, and Teresa felt a strange embarrassment, remembering her imaginings in the night.

"I need some flax packing," Linda said in her small voice. "Quarter inch."

Teresa went to get it. When she came back to the counter, Linda was leaning against the counter, looking as though her eyes were about to roll back in her head. Her tan had gone gray, her hands clutched the countertop, white-knuckled.

Teresa darted around the counter and held her up. She was astonishingly light.

Teresa helped her to a bench in the back, settled her there. "Put your head down," she said, and ran to fetch a paper cup of water from the cooler.

When she returned, Linda had dropped her head between her knees, and her trembling hands were interlaced over the nape of her slender bony neck. After a while she took a shuddering breath and sat up. She sipped the water, smiling wanly. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Have you been to a doctor?"

Linda looked vaguely alarmed. "It's nothing, I'm sure. Maybe the heat, the humidity. I'm not used to it, I guess."

Sure, thought Teresa. Linda had just sailed from Isla Mujeres, almost 600 miles south of Destin, right off the Yucatan coast . . . definitely a cooler, dryer clime.

"Maybe you're hungry," Teresa suggested.

Bob was gracious. "Go ahead," he said, giving Linda a brilliant smile, more charming than any smile he'd ever given Teresa. "Take your time, have a good lunch." Teresa felt another illusion crumble. Happily married Bob.

They walked across the highway to a ferny sandwich shop, where Linda showed a respectable appetite.

"Are you a sailor?" Linda asked after a while, dutifully sociable -- or so it seemed to Teresa.

"No. Actually, I've never done anything."

"Really?" Linda seemed wistful. "I always said the same thing."

Teresa found this difficult to accept. "I guess that was before you sailed away." Teresa felt a hot pang of resentment. By what right did an attractive adventurer like Linda claim an empty existence? That was Teresa's personal territory.

"Yes, I suppose so."

"But since then you've led a life of wild excitement?"

"In a way." Linda was almost whispering.