"Brian Plante - The Astronaut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

mail out of the box and I let myself into the house through the back door, into the
kitchen. The whole two months I was mowing her lawn, I had never been inside the
house before.
I glanced at the mail before leaving it on the island in the middle of the kitchen.
There was a bill from the electric company, addressed to one Mr. Richard Keyes.
Who was Richard Keyes? The name sounded familiar. There were a couple of
pieces of junk mail made out to Rosemary Horton. Finally, there was a letter from
Randolph AFB in San Antonio for one Col. Richard Keyes.
Okay, Richard Keyes was her man, all right, but were they really married? She
wore a wedding ring, but she didn’t have the same last name. Perhaps there was still
hope for me yet! Maybe she was just living with the guy—if he ever showed up, that
was.
And he was a colonel, presumably in the Air Force. That made some sense,
since it might explain the secrecy. He was probably on some sort of military mission,
and Mrs. Horton’s saying he was an engineer was probably just a cover story.
Maybe he was a spy.
Mrs. Horton’s house was mostly like my own, only a bit nicer and slightly
larger. I turned the air conditioning down a bit, made sure the sinks and toilets
weren’t running, and watered the houseplants. I was so curious about Mrs. Horton
that I just had to look around a bit.
In the refrigerator was a pitcher of iced tea, ready to go. I almost took a glass,
but thought better of it. She had trusted me with the key to her house. Was I
breaking that trust by snooping? I decided to keep everything exactly as it was. But I
couldn’t help myself—I still looked.
The kitchen seemed too orderly. The floor was spotless and the countertops
neat and tidy. Only a single coffee cup in the sink gave any indication that someone
lived there. The dining room looked like it had never been used—the dark cherry
wood table shined as if it had been polished every day, and the six upholstered
chairs looked as if they had never been sat in. Fancy museum-piece china filled a
glass cabinet.
The breakfast nook looked nearly as untouched, except for one of the chairs.
The chair was pulled away slightly from the knotty pine table. Looking closer, I
noticed that the varnish at the end of one of the armrests was marred—chipped away
in hundreds of tiny ruts, perhaps by the repeated drumming of fingernails.
In the family room, the Hortons had one of the biggest holovision sets I’d
ever seen. I found the remote and turned it on. It was tuned to the Mars Channel. So
Mrs. Horton watched that, too. But instead of the usual live transmission from the
Romulus, a studio anchor at Mission Control was reading some news copy.
Apparently, while I was sleeping late, there had been an important story.
During the night, a fire had broken out aboard the Romulus. The crew had to
don their pressure suits and evacuate the air from the cabin to put the blaze out. It
was dicey for a while, but everyone was okay and the mission was continuing. They
were still one month away from Mars.
I turned off the set and put the remote back where I found it. I should have
left the house then, but I wanted to look upstairs. I wanted to see her bedroom. I
was a horny teenager and she was the most beautiful woman I knew, so I wanted to
see where she slept. It was a betrayal of trust, but I had to see.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms, just like at my house. The one that was
like my bedroom was being used for storage, with cardboard moving boxes stacked
four high. Another bedroom had an ironing board, a sewing cabinet and a dress