"Cabot, Meg - 1-800-Where-R-You 04 - Sanctuary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cabot Meg)

strolled up to the police officer with his hands at his sides instead of in the
pockets of his leather jacket, I guess to show he wasn't holding a weapon or
anything. Rob is pretty leery of cops, on account of having been arrested
before.
"What's going on, Officer?" Rob wanted to know, all casual-like. You could tell
he, like me, was worried about the whole driving without a license thing. But
what kind of police force would set up a roadblock to catch license-less drivers
on Thanksgiving? I mean, that was going way above and beyond the call of duty,
if you asked me.
"Oh, we got a tip a little while ago," the cop said to Rob. "Regarding some
suspicious activity out here. Came out to have a look around." I noticed he
hadn't taken out his little ticket book to write me up.Maybe , I thought.Maybe
this isn't about me .
Especially considering the floodlight. I could see people traipsing out from and
then back into the cornfield. They appeared to be carrying things, toolboxes and
stuff.
"You see anything strange?" the police officer asked me. "When you were driving
out here from town?"
"No," I said. "No, I didn't see anything."
It was a clear night. . . . Cold, but cloudless. Overhead was a moon, full, or
nearly so. You could see pretty far, even though it was only about an hour shy
of midnight, by the light of that moon.
Except that there wasn't much to see. Just the big cornfield, stretching out
from the side of the road like a dark, rustling sea. Rising above it, off in the
distance, was a hill covered thickly in trees. The backwoods. Where my dad used
to take us camping, before Douglas got sick, and Mikey decided he liked
computers better than baiting fishhooks, and I developed a pretty severe allergy
to going to the bathroom out of doors.
People lived in the backwoods … if you wanted to call the conditions they
endured there living. If you ask me, anything involving an outhouse is on the
same par with camping.
But not everyone who got laid off when the plastics factory closed was as lucky
as Rob's mom, who found another job—thanks to me—pretty quickly. Some of them,
too proud to accept welfare from the state, had retreated into those woods, and
were living in shacks, or worse.
And some of them, my dad once told me, weren't even living there because they
didn't have the money to move somewhere with an actual toilet. Some of them
lived there because theyliked it there.
Apparently not everyone has as fond an attachment as I do to indoor plumbing.
"When you drove through, coming from town," the police officer said, "what time
would that have been?"
I told him I thought it had been after eight, but well before nine. He nodded
thoughtfully, and wrote down what I said, which was not much, considering I
hadn't seen anything. Rob, standing by my mom's car, blew on his gloved hands.
Itwas pretty cold, sitting there with the window rolled down. I felt especially
bad for Rob, who was just going to have to climb back on his motorcycle when we
were through being questioned and ride behind me all the way into town and then
back to his house, without even a chance to get warmed up. Unless of course I
invited him into my mom's car. Just for a few minutes. You know. To defrost.
Suddenly I noticed that those police officers, hurrying in and out of that