"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

She rose and took his chin and turned his face so that she stared into his eyes. Then she kissed both his cheeks. "But now everything's been said and we'll forget about it, because we've found each other. After all this time."
Then she busied herself with clearing the table and washing the dishes. She did it all with clean, economical movements, and by her straight-ahead efficiency, he knew that she had adjusted to being alone, if not to the tragedy that had befallen Rachel.
When she heard him come into the kitchen, she turned and he slid his arms around her, holding her close. He could hear her heart beating fast and he ached for her, and for himself. At last, they broke away, and returning to her washing, she said, "Lew, what else did Rachel say to you when she was awake?"
"Your daughter is angry."
Matty, her hands encased in yellow rubber gloves, nodded sadly as she rinsed off a plate. "Aren't ninety-nine percent of the teenagers in the world?" She said it as if she needed to convince herself. Rinsing off a plate, she gave him an anxious glance over her shoulder. "What's the matter? You too old to remember what it's like?"
"Despite what you see on TV, they aren't all taking drugs," he said. "Also, they're not all hiding a secret like Rachel is."
Matty whirled around, her face suddenly pinched with new concern. "What kind of a secret?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "I was hoping you'd tell me. She wouldn't."
Matty went back to washing dishes, but he could see she was shaken.
He took a plate out of the drain board and began to dry it. "Have you noticed a difference in Rachel over the past, say, three or four months?"
She shook her head. "Not really. She's been uncommunicative, reclusive since Donald died. When he was killed six months ago something seemed to snap inside Rachel. I don't know what it was, except maybe then her hope that he would one day welcome her back into his life was shattered."
"Have you talked with her about it?"
"Many times. But I don't get anything about her world. Try as I might, I can't understand Green Day or any of these other rock bands that spew out noise. It all sounds like a hissy fit to me." She put another plate on the drain board and began scrubbing a pot. "And to be brutally honest, Rachie would rather I don't get it. Any attempt at contact with her world she takes as an intrusion."
"Matty, the amount of drugs she's been doing-something's seriously wrong. Can you remember anything at all?"
"As you can imagine, the breakup didn't help." Then she shrugged. "There's nothing else, really. I mean, six months ago she went to Dr. Stansky for her annual school physical and everything was okay." She frowned. "I'll tell you one thing, Stansky didn't say anything to me about her taking drugs."
"No surprise there," Croaker said. "Chronic drug users know all the tricks to pass physicals." He leaned forward. "Are you sure there's nothing? No erratic behavior, failing grades in school, no chronic lying, no money missing out of your purse, that sort of thing?"
"Absolutely not. She gets straight As in school. As to the rest, I brought Rachel up with better values than that."
"Drugs can change people, Matty." He waited for her to respond.
When she didn't, he said, "I'd like to take a look at Rachel's room. Is that okay?"
Instead of answering, she said, "I wish I'd had a chance to talk to her."
"Do you know someone named Gideon?"
She turned around. "A boyfriend is my guess. I know she saw someone named Gideon. I never met him, though. She wouldn't talk about him."
"You let her see him without knowing anything about him?"
"Lew, Rachel is fifteen going on twenty-two." When she saw the look on his face, she said, "What would you have me do, put a leash on her? I can't ground her every night of the year. She seems to hate me enough as it is. These days, she says it often enough."
"And her father? How did she feel about him?"
Matty sighed. "There isn't a bigger mystery in my life. I've told you that Donald never seemed to care much about her. Of course Rachel was aware of it, but it never seemed to faze her. When he was away she used to hang on every call he made, waiting to talk to him. And even though he'd disappoint her every time, her hope seemed undiminished. Just the opposite, in fact. Oh, how that used to infuriate me!" Her voice rose harshly as she continued to amass a pile of clean pots and plates.
He had been tuning into her wavelength for some time, and he was struck by this discordant note. "Matty, what is it?"
"Nothing."
"You've come this far," he said gently. "Take the next step."
She shook her head. "Don't read into anything." She shrugged. "It's just that, you know..." He could see her take a deep breath. "Well, sometimes it seemed to me that Rachel and Donald... that this thing between them was some kind of sick game." She gave off an embarrassed laugh that was almost a sob. "Stupid of me."
"No, it's not," Croaker said. "Tell me what you mean."
Matty washed dishes as she did everything else, with a meticulous attention to detail. No wonder Donald's Henry Higgins routine worked so well with her. As she had proved in school and again at the ad agency she had unlimited aptitude. "It's just that this approach-avoidance thing with them while Rachel was growing up..."
"Before the divorce, you mean?"
Matty nodded. "Yes. There was something about it, an edge. Sometimes it seemed to me they fed off it, that it was their way of dealing with each other. Rachel would approach him, Donald would fend her off, and it would escalate like that until they were both at some kind of fever pitch."
"And then what would happen?"
"I don't know." Matty's eyes were bleak at the remembrance. "Like a bubble it would suddenly burst. One moment it would be there and the next... their emotions were back to normal."
"Did he finally consent to see her? Was that how the tension resolved itself?"
"Sometimes, yes; at others, I don't think so. At least, I wasn't aware of them being together." It was clear Matty was struggling with this mystery. "In either case, Donald was back to his routine and Rachel would be sunny and somehow calm. Until the cycle started all over again."
Croaker said gently, "Matty, I have to ask this. Was Donald in any way abusive to Rachel?"
"Absolutely not." Her eyes were clear and he could see no reason to doubt her. "You know me better than that, Lew. I never would have allowed it. But the issue never arose; Donald was not that kind of man. He was too confident in himself and in everything he did. He knew so many subtle ways to exert his power he'd never even consider the physical one."
For a time, she seemed lost in thought. She was through washing. Pulling off her gloves, she put a hand gently on his arm. Her eyes glittered with tears. "Go see her den of iniquity."
He went down the hall, his footsteps muffled by the thick carpet. At the far end of the hall, he took a step into Rachel's room. It looked like a typical teenager's bedroom. It was painted clear white with trim black as funeral bunting. There were posters on the wall of Kurt Cobain, the late lead singer of Nirvana, along with posters of other rock bands: Stone Temple Pilots, Live, and REM.
The bedspread was black-and-white in a pattern that reminded Croaker of those old dinettes from the 1950s. He sat on the bed and looked around. He wanted to get a sense of the room from Rachel's point of view. When she got up each morning, this is what she saw. It had been his experience that people liked to wake up looking at their favorite possessions. He saw Kurt Cobain on the wall; he saw the window with the lights of Palm Beach strung like jewels around a dowager's crepey neck; he saw a photograph on her dresser. Inside the black wood frame was a black-and-white shot of a striking young woman with dark, chin-length hair. She was dressed in a see-through vinyl raincoat and was clutching a white, long-haired cat to her chest. Beneath the vinyl raincoat, the woman wore a thick black belt covered in metal studs. Croaker got up and went over to it. The photo was not personal, but a page cut out of a magazine. The young woman was a model. He turned the frame around and opened it, but the back of the page held nothing more informative than part of an ad for Buffalo jeans. The name of the magazine or the date did not appear.
He replaced the photo in its frame, took up another, smaller photo that had been hidden behind the first one. This one was of Rachel. She had on an aquamarine satin dress with a sweetheart neckline. She was made up and there was a string of pearls-perhaps a loan from Matty-around her neck. She looked beautiful and very grown up. About to go to a prom, Croaker guessed. The only thing was she didn't seem at all happy. He slid out the photo of her his sister had given him and compared the two shots. In his, Rachel had been caught in an unguarded moment. In this other, posed shot, her intensity dominated to the point where she appeared brooding, almost sullen.
He put down the prom photo, but as he looked at it, something bothered him. It had moved slightly and there seemed to be something behind it. He slid if out of its frame, and to his utter surprise found a picture of himself. For a moment he could not remember when or where it had been taken. Then the memory came flooding back. It had been at their cousin's wedding in Forest Hills. But hadn't this photo originally been of him and Matty? He held the photo up to the lamplight, saw that the left side had been carefully cut away. Looking this closely, he recognized part of his sister's arm and hip.
After he returned the photos he went methodically through Rachel's drawers, checking in corners, through piles of black T-shirts and cotton blouses, underpants, and bras. He was looking for two things: any sign of drugs and her diary. Girls her age almost always wrote in diaries. Diaries were for secrets, and he suspected his niece had more than her share of those. Like who was Gideon? Someone she saw at night. Matty thought a boyfriend; to that Croaker would add drug connection. He found nothing except a large sachet of lilac potpourri in the bottom drawer.
Her walk-in closet was more empty than full. There were some clothes-mostly all black, three pairs of jeans, a couple of pairs of thick-soled Dr. Marten's boots, the ones that laced high up like U.S. Army combat boots, one pair of black-and-white retro-looking Airwalk sneakers. A cluster of black belts larded with metal studs of different shapes and sizes hung from a wire hanger. He thought of the photo of the model in her see-through vinyl raincoat and black studded belt. In a corner he found a black leather jacket.
Across the back someone had handwritten the word manman in white permanent paint.
Directly below, heaped on the floor, was the aquamarine satin prom dress. He stooped, picking up the dress to hang it, when he saw something lying on the floor. He couldn't have seen it before because the dress had covered it. He used his stainless-steel nail to bring it out into the light.
It was a red rubber ball with silk cords attached to either side. Croaker had seen such items before. This was a ball gag, part of the ominous, ritualistic paraphernalia used by people into S-M. The ball went into the mouth, the cords tied at the back of the head to hold it in place. For a long time, he crouched there, staring. A vein pulsed in one temple as he contemplated the growing enigma that was Rachel. When it came to sex his attitude had always been live and let live, but this discovery shook him. This was his niece, not some hooker on the Tamiami Trail.