"Donald Olson - Cry Before Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Olson Donald)

Anna bit her lips and looked worried. “How sweet of you, but I’m afraid
Carter’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Come into the living room. I’ll fix us drinks before you unpack. I’m dying to
tell you everything.”

“Things can’t possibly be as desperate as your telegram implied.” In the other
room Maureen fished the telegram from her snakeskin bag and read it aloud:
“Something terrible has happened. Need you desperately. Don’t fail me. Come at
once.”

An endless flow of long, intimate letters had kept the friendship alive, Anna’s
far more emotionally extravagant than Maureen’s, but it was probably that difference
in temperament that helped account for the youthful bond between them. After high
school Anna had married well, moved to Porthaven, lost a baby in childbirth.
Neurotic complications had ensued, contributing to the gradual erosion of the
marriage while Anna poured out her misery and self-pity in effusively indiscreet
letters to her friend across the continent.

Maureen, the loner, the artist and dreamer, had eventually settled down near
one of those historic Pueblo ruins in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains south of Taos,
New Mexico. There she had established her own pottery, eking out a modest legacy
from a deceased aunt by selling her works in shops around Santa Fe and
Albuquerque. Her descriptions of the solitary life had filled Anna with horror; she
could not conceive of such an existence, without even a phone or running water, but
she’d had the good taste not to express her distaste, for that flow of letters had
become as essential a lifeline to her as blood transfusions to a hemophiliac. Without
you I would go insane became a recurring theme in her letters to Maureen. Anna’s
husband Carter, as much a victim of the doomed marriage as Anna, regarded the
correspondence with sardonic disapproval, using words like “unhealthy” and
“pathological.”

Now Maureen regarded the other woman with a faintly sceptical look, as if the
telegram couldn’t have been dispatched by the same person who sat facing her with
no sign of mental distress in her heavy-lidded, protuberant blue eyes. “You always
did have a talent for hyperbole.”

“I meant every word! It was the last straw. The final crisis.”
 “You’re talking about Carter.”

“Who else?” Over the years Anna’s voice had acquired an habitually carping
tone.

“So why didn’t you leave him? You never did give me a straight answer in
your letters. And all that rubbish about planning to kill yourself. Really, girl.”

“I meant that, too. I even changed my will, just as I told you. Everything I
have goes to you.”