"Death Trance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Underestimate him? I'm not even thinking about him. I've got dead to bury and a factory to rebuild. That's all that worries me.'
Neil said, 'You're one-hundred-per cent determined, aren't you, sir?'
Randolph nodded, although for some reason he felt that Neil was asking him a far more fateful question and that this single nod of agreement somehow set into motion some kind of dark and secret roller-coaster ride that he would never be able to stop.
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CHAPTER TWO
Lac aux Ecorces, Quebec
They were sitting on the veranda overlooking the lake, with the moths stitching patterns around the lamp, talking quietly and. eating potato chips, when they heard the first noise. It was an extraordinary crackle, seemingly close but so unexpected they could not believe they had actually heard it.
'Now that was something,' John said.
'Moose probably,' said Mark, who was afraid of few things.
'Are mooses dangerous?' asked Issa.
'What's the plural of moose?' their mother wanted to know. 'It can't be mooses, can it?'
'Well, it isn't mice and it isn't moosen, so it must be mooses.'
They sat quietly, listening. Mark crunched on a potato chip and they shushed him. But for a long time there was no sound other than the cool summer wind, blowing southwesterly across the silver surface of the lake and sighing in the trees like the saddest of abandoned women. The moon had only just disappeared behind the saw-toothed pine trees on the horizon, but it had left behind an unnatural glow in the sky, as if there were an alien city somewhere beyond the hills.
Marmie Clare held out her glass and said to John, 'Pour me some more wine, would you, darling?' She watched with a smile as John carefully picked up the bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse and attended to her glass with the same slow care his father would have taken.
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At the age of forty-three, Marmie felt that she was beginning to blossom again, just like the magnolias down in Memphis. She was a tall, well-boned woman with deep-set brown eyes, a straight nose and a strong jawline. Her chestnut-coloured hair was streaked with grey now, but whereas three years ago that used to horrify and depress her, she took it today as a mark of her newfound maturity and poise.
When she reached thirty-seven, Marmie had been frightened. The fear had started with the sudden realization that she was no longer young and that what she had then considered to be the best part of her life was behind her. She had stared hard at herself in the mirror, knowing that the tiny wrinkles beginning to appear around her eyes would never disappear. Then she had wondered what her life had been for, this brief, bright life that seemed now to be nearly ended before it had even reached its stride. It had hardly, seemed worth the effort to make herself look attractive when the only man she had been trying to arouse was her husband of seventeen years. And why should she try to excel at anything else - at tennis, or music or swimming - when she was already too old to be the very best?
It was the death of Randolph's father that had changed her attitude towards herself. When Ned died and Randolph took over Clare Cottonseed, Randolph had been rejuvenated; it was a powerful and responsible job and a hair-raising challenge. Over the previous six or seven years, his father had allowed the Clare processing plants to collapse in a welter of lax discipline and obsolescent equipment, and he had relied for his dwindling income on long-standing 'gentlemen's agreements' with cotton-plantation owners as conservative and decrepit as himself. Randolph had shaken the company like a dusty rag, from boardroom to loading bay, and during that time, he had relied on Marmie to be everything he had married her for: charming, elegant, patient, beautiful, tireless, cooperative, opinionated, warm and supportive.
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Marmie had reached her forty-third year knowing that she was someone special. She was looking to the years ahead, not to the years behind. And her children were just on the verge of proving what an accomplished mother she had been. She had emerged from self-doubt and dissatisfaction like someone newly born, someone who realizes that every human life consists of several different lives and that the arrival of each new one is an event to be welcomed.
Issa said, 'Dad hasn't called.' Issa resembled her mother except that her hair reached halfway down her back and she had inherited her paternal grandmother's extravagant bosom. Randolph always said there wasn't a boy in Memphis who wouldn't swim the Mississippi for Issa, although she was only thirteen; and Marmie always said that he was jealous, which was probably true. Tonight Issa wore a yellow- and white-striped T-shirt and white jeans, and with her pink-painted toenails and brushed-back hair and summer suntan, she could have been Miss Young America herself.
John said, 'He's probably busy, for Christ's sake.' John was his father all over again: the same profile, the same mannerisms, the same gentleness mixed with insanely stubborn ethics, the same sudden flares of incandescent, wildly unreasonable temper. And the same deep capacity to love. In fact, he was so much like his father that it was amazing that they got on together. By rights they should have been head-butting, but they rarely did. Most of the time they supported each other, made excuses for each other and were comfortable in each other's company.
Mark, on the other hand, was quiet and introspective. He loved both of his parents but he had his own way of looking at things, his own quirky sense of humour, his own ambitions. In appearance he was more like his mother than his father but he had inherited his father's well-meaning clumsiness. His taste in clothes had always been eccentric; tonight he was wearing a bright green shirt and a pair of indigo-coloured denim shorts.
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John said, 'We could take the kayak out tomorrow morning and catch some fish.'
'If you want to,' Marmie told him.
'Oh, I don't want to fish,' Mark retorted. 'Fishing's so goddam boring.'
'Mark!' his mother admonished him.
'Well, it is,' he grumbled. 'And we never catch anything without Daddy being there.'
Issa said, 'I don't know why we didn't go home with Daddy. We could be back in Memphis now, watching TV.'
'It's beautiful here,' Marmie replied. 'It's beautiful and we're going to stay, and if Daddy manages to finish his work in time, he'll come back and join us. Come on, I think you're all tired. It's time you went to bed.'
'Sleep, eat, fish, sleep, eat, fish,' protested Mark in a monotone.
It was then that they heard another crackle. They paused in silence, their heads lifted like caribou.
'Now that was definitely something,' John said.
'It was probably only a porcupine,' Marmie reassured him. 'Your father said there are dozens of them around here.'
'What if it's a bear?' asked Issa.
'Of course it's not a bear. Don't be ridiculous,' John scoffed. 'Besides, even if it is, we've got the gun.'
There was another crackle, closer this time. Marmie frowned and set down her glass of wine on the wicker table. 'I think we'd better go inside,' she said. 'You never know.'
'This wouldn't be happening if we were back in Memphis,' Issa complained.
All the same, Issa gathered up the magazines she had been reading, and John helped Mark drag the chaises back to the side of the veranda, against the cabin wall, and Marmie brushed down her dress and picked up her wine glass and the bowl of potato chips.
They were about to go inside when something dropped to the veranda steps from the roof of the porch with a
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quick, scrabbling sound and then scurried away. They jumped with fright and Issa screamed. Then they burst out laughing.
'A squirrel, after all that!' said Marmie.
'My heart's bumping!' Issa cried out. 'Oh, my God, my heart's bumping!'
'Well, I think it's time we went inside anyway,' Marmie told them. 'It's getting kind of chilly to sit out here.'
They went into the cabin's spacious living room and closed the door. Randolph's father had discovered the cabin about twenty years earlier, one day when he was fishing. In those days it had been dilapidated and abandoned, a home for martens and squirrels and occasional minks. Ned Clare had bought it from its owners, repaired it and extended it, and now it was a luxurious lakeside cottage which - to Randolph and Marmie, if not to their children - was heaven. The children's principal complaint, of course, was that there was no television, although Randolph had promised on his honour to install a VCR so that at least they could watch old movies.
'Could you stack the fire, please, John?' Marmie asked, walking across the wide, brown-carpeted living room and through to the kitchen. John went over to the old-fashioned brick fireplace and poked the spruce logs crackling in the grate. Mark followed his mother into the kitchen, obviously on the lookout for something more to eat. Issa sprawled on the tan leather sofa and continued reading her magazines.
'Do you know what it says here, Mommy? It says you should always massage your moisturizer into your cheeks with your knuckles. Can you show me how to do that?'
'If I knew how, I'd tell you,' Marmie called back with a chuckle.