"Charles L. Grant - Oxrun Station 4 - The Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

wind that pelted him with dust and dead leaves. He covered his eyes instantly with his forearms and ducked
his face toward his chest, holding his breath and waiting, thinking for no reason my god it's a tornado until
the air abruptly stilled.
The silence made him realize the wind hadn't made a sound.
Cautiously, counting slowly to ten in case there was a resurgence, he lowered his arms and looked
around him, frowning. Saw nothing amiss except a faint swirling of dust that hung darkly over the slope a
dozen yards away. It hovered, scattered a moment later, and he was hard put to believe he had seen it at
all.
The sky was still blue, untouched by clouds.
There was no breeze; the leaves were still.
"Nice," he told the air then. "How about the next time you bring me the stupid plow."
He pushed himself off the rock and dusted his jacket, brushed fingers through his hair. A brittle brown
leaf clung to one knee, and he flicked it off, watched it fall, kicked at it and missed. Great, he thought; the
wind was exactly what he needed to end one hell of a miserable day. The mud was cold, the woods were
cold, in spite of the gloves his hands were cold. And all because of a lousy plow that's probably long since
rotted into the side of the hill. It was, he told himself sourly, easily the dumbest thing he had ever agreed to
find. If the request had come from anyone else but Mrs. Thames . . .
Home, then. It was time to head home when even the wind didn't want him sneaking around.
The faint sound of a siren wafted from the west. A downed tree, he guessed, or a branch through
someone's front window.
As he started down the slope he glanced to his right, at a thick and rich stand of maple that protruded
from the forest, a broad-boled and ancient stand that sur-rounded (and now concealed) a three-story
clapboard farmhouse a quarter mile distant. He felt himself taking a step toward it, changed his mind with a
warning whistle, and continued down through the brush, angling away from the homestead toward the car
he had parked at the end of the flatland. He sidestepped a patch of sodden, sinking ground and jammed his
hands into his jacket pockets, worked his face to a passable scowl.
Anyone else but Mrs. Thames . . .
He spat angrily. All he was doing was skirting the solution, and he hated it, especially when he knew,
when he positively knew that the answer was right here in front of him, his eyes for the moment simply
unable to focus on the clues he needed. Failure was not exactly a stranger to his work, and he could
remember without half thinking about it worse times than this.
But it was just so goddamned frustrating! And so goddamned unfair.
After the barn lofts and the attic rafters and the stables of the valley's tenants had proved depressingly
empty, he had made himself a series of maps of the land, blocked off and marked for quick
identification-Then he had launched a series of excursions through the lower woods in hopes of coming
across remnants of foundations that signaled a forgotten farmhouse or desolate outbuilding. Each time he
returned empty-handed he shaded the map, stared at it, at the others, hoping the roughly drawn lines would
suddenly join in an arrow, an X-marks-the-spot that would save him his temper, and Mrs. Thames'
patience.
It had only been two weeks, he kept telling himself, but the shadow of the Vermont trip refused to leave
him be. And today was the fifth day of trying, his first in an area of briar and ash at the back of Don
Murdoch's place; and his feet, he thought sourly, were rapidly turning to moss.
He kicked out in reflex, glanced back again at the house he could not see.
Murdoch—a large man dark from his curly hair to his constantly squinting eyes, from his spiked
eye-brows to the ghost of a beard that made one wish he would either grow it or shave closer—had
purchased the small parcel of land only the summer before. He had made it clear he had no intention of
working it (other than tending a rather large, successful garden), used the fields instead for the walks he
claimed he needed to write some of his books. Josh had never heard of him or his work, and Nat Clayton at
the library had told him one afternoon that Murdoch was not the most sought-after author she had ever
encoun-tered, apparently selling just enough to keep his publishers happy and his readers from desertion.