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

But Linda, apparently sensing her reluctance, looked stricken. "Please," she said. "It would be so nice to have a visitor. We almost never do."

Teresa softened; how many times had she been just as desperately lonely as Linda seemed to be now? "It sounds like fun. I've never dined on a yacht before. It'd be an experience."

Linda smiled a bit more vividly than Teresa would have thought she could. "That's great! Would you like to come tonight, for a late supper? I could pick you up in the dinghy after work." She seemed so eager that Teresa became uneasy.

"Actually," Teresa said. "I'm off tonight. Could we eat early? Before dark? I had plans for later." She didn't, of course, but the lie might rescue her if the mysterious Thomas was planning on dinner and deviance. Besides, she wanted to meet him in the sunlight, just to be sure he wasn't a vampire.

Linda seemed pleased, which didn't necessarily reassure Teresa -perhaps the white-haired woman wasn't as sexually adventurous as her lover.

After Linda left, Teresa felt a little silly. All this sexual paranoia . . . what did it mean? Maybe the Sailorman had some grasp of her situation after all, despite his grotesque turn of phrase.

What an awful idea, she thought, with a little shudder.

Bob let her off early so she could go back to the motel and get ready. She showered, then put on a long loose white skirt and an aqua blouse -appropriate dress, she hoped, for dinner and a dinghy ride.

Linda met her on the beach behind the Chandlery. "You look nice," Linda said, with such an air of satisfaction that Teresa became uncomfortable, her suspicions stimulated again.

She got her sandals wet helping Linda launch the dinghy, but the ride out to the boat was uneventful and silent. Linda seemed to need all her strength to keep them moving, though the breeze was light.

They approached the old ketch and for the first time Teresa could see the boat's name, painted in faded gilt across the wineglass stern. Rosemary, she was called. Thomas could have had the grace to rename the boat after his current girlfriend, Teresa thought disapprovingly. "Rosemary," she said. "Who was that?"

The dinghy bumped the topsides lightly and Linda held the rail. "Not 'who.' 'What.' The herb . . . you know?" She cleated the dinghy's line expertly. "I forget the exact quote; Thomas can tell you. It's something from Shakespeare, something about rosemary being for remembrance."

"Oh," said Teresa, somewhat chastened but not completely convinced. While Linda held the dinghy steady, she climbed aboard into an empty cockpit of varnished mahogany.

Still no Thomas. But on a little table by the wheel there was a silver tray; it held three frosted goblets and a plate of crackers.

"This is nice," Teresa said and to her surprise it was. Though the boat's mildewed old hull had shown a little peeling paint, whiskers of green moss at the waterline, and the occasional rust stain, the cockpit was beautifully maintained, the varnish mirror-bright, the cockpit cushions a soft blue, the old bronze wheel polished to a warm glow.

"Let's sit," said Linda. "Thomas will be up in a moment."

Teresa settled on the starboard seat and Linda handed her a goblet. The wine was pale and almost sweet. Nothing like it had ever been served at the Bugeyed Sailor. Teresa took a sip, then another, resisting the urge to gulp. Curiosity filled her.

Linda sat beside her. The white-haired woman seemed for the first time completely at ease, sipping her own wine and gazing off across the harbor. She wore her usual ragged cutoffs and a sleeveless silk blouse, blue-white against her dark tan. She made Teresa feel overdressed and dowdy, but not resentful. Linda seemed so defenseless. Teresa had seen a face like Linda's before. The memory surfaced: Teresa had met a blind man, years before, who had briefly courted her. Only in his own home did the uncertainty and tension leave him. Only in a place where every object conformed to his memory could he feel reasonably safe.

This train of thought crashed when Thomas emerged from the louvered doors of the main hatchway. Teresa's first reaction was open-mouthed amazement.

She had never seen a more beautiful man, though his beauty was quite unconventional. He climbed through the hatch with an almost unnatural grace and vaulted into the cockpit, landing so lightly that his bare feet made no sound. He nodded to Teresa and took the last goblet.

"Hello," he said, in a voice so soft that she was sure it reached only to her ears and no further. He had some sort of accent, unidentifiable.

"Hello," she replied, in a voice almost as soft; she was breathless, her lungs seemed to have forgotten their function.

Thomas had dark wavy hair shot with white streaks, a shaggy mane perfect in its artlessness. Thomas's eyes were a vivid blue-violet, the lashes so long and thick that he seemed to be wearing mascara, and the soft full mouth contributed further to the androgynous quality of his features. But this impression was countered by his skin, mahogany dark, which seemed at first glance quite old, or at least weathered, a membrane of age over the face and body of a much younger man. The skin stretched taut and burnished over the strong bones, but with a thousand fine wrinkles in the hollows.

She tried to guess his age; it was impossible. His hands were well-shaped and youthful. He wore faded jeans and an old cotton dress shirt without buttons, the sleeves hacked off at the elbows. His bare chest was striated with wiry muscle, his forearms corded like an oyster tonger's.

He seemed to feel no need for conversation; he gazed out across the harbor, smiling a faint smile. Teresa felt a hot piercing envy for Linda, and a sudden embarrassing hope that her sexual paranoia was well-founded, after all. She tried to maintain her equilibrium, she reminded herself that this was the man she had, with complete certainty, dismissed as a jerk. That idea now seemed ridiculous; she was actually ashamed to have thought it, despite the lack of any real evidence to the contrary. The world, after all, was full of beautiful jerks.