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

Into his mind came Matty's face, her confusion painful to witness. She had been talking of Rachel's relationship with her father. To Croaker, there was more than a hint of S-M to it, even if it was only expressed on an emotional level. Matty was smart enough to suspect this. But what if, in Rachel, it was more? What if her sexual relationship with Gideon involved a true acting out of these perverse emotions?
At length, he reached out, put the ball gag into his pocket. He had no intention of letting his sister find it. She'd had more than enough shocks for the time being. Before he did anything else, he carefully hung up the prom dress, smoothing the bodice. It seemed important to get rid of all the wrinkles, as if by this act alone he could restore his image of Rachel to what it had been before he'd found the red rubber ball fraught with so many dark implications.
He went methodically through the pockets of the leather jacket. He discovered half a roll of Life Savers, a couple of wadded-up tissues, thirteen cents in change, a small ball of aluminum foil. It was tightly packed. He extruded a stainless-steel nail and opened it carefully with the razor sharp tip. There was nothing inside except a whitish residue. He put this up to his nose, then licked it tentatively. Could be coke, he thought, but there was too little to be sure.
He was putting back the Life Savers in the left-hand pocket when something fell against the back of his knuckles. He felt around but couldn't get to it. Curious, he took the jacket off its hanger and turned it inside out. He checked the seams. They were solidly stitched except for a four-inch length on the left side, which had been hastily basted. He snagged the loose thread and, with a sudden sense of foreboding, pulled. Then he stuck his fingers inside.
He extracted an ounce plastic bag filled with white powder. Opening it, he gave it a taste on the tip of his tongue.
He cursed mightily under his breath. The taste was unmistakable. It was cocaine.
Matty was working steadily in the kitchen. She'd brewed coffee and she was slicing a slab of what looked like a rich Russian coffee cake she'd taken from the freezer. "Emergency rations," she said when he came in. "If this isn't an emergency I don't know what is."
She gave him a tentative smile as she popped the pastry into the microwave, turned it on. "Find anything interesting?"
"There's something about Gideon and Rachel," he said softly.
Fear harrowed Matty's face as he took out the one-ounce bag of coke.
She put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Christ. Is it...?"
He nodded "Cocaine. I found it in Rachel's closet."
Croaker watched her beautiful, haunted eyes. The microwave beeped and automatically she opened the door. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and walnuts and coffee. She stood staring blankly into the interior. At last, she said, "What in God's name is she doing to herself, Lew?"
"I don't know." He watched as she slid the coffee cake onto plates then, licking her fingertips, poured coffee into pale green mugs. But her frayed nerves betrayed her at last and she spilled some before Croaker, coming quickly up behind her, steadied her hand.
"Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus." She leaned back against his solid strength, rocking a little. "My daughter and I haven't had much of a relationship. The sad truth is I don't know who she is."
Croaker held her tenderly while she gathered herself.
"I'll take the food in," he said.
But she shook her head and slowly disengaged herself. "No, I need to do this. I can do this."
She carefully finished pouring the coffee and Croaker could see that her hands no longer shook. Then she put their plates and mugs on the tray, and led him into the dining room. She sat down, swept her hair back from the side of her face, sighing. "My God, I feel as if I married a stranger."
He took a bite of the coffee cake. "Not so long ago I was involved with a woman-a married woman." When Matty raised her eyebrows, he added: "An unhappily married woman, but that didn't make it right." He took another bite of the pastry, washed it down with the rich coffee. "Anyway," he went on, "this woman had a daughter. She was a beautiful girl, and smart. But she was sick. Bulimic. She got sick because of her parents. They had a terrible, almost adversarial relationship and the girl was aware of it all."
Matty, who had been stirring cream into her coffee, paused. "You see a parallel?"
"This girl felt she was unloved."
He could see his sister stiffen. Color flushed to her cheeks and she began to tremble. "I love my daughter," she whispered.
"I know you do. I said the girl felt she was unloved. That's not the same as her being unloved. In fact, her mother loved her desperately."
"I love Rachel desperately." She looked at him imploringly. "Besides you, she's the only important thing in my life, Lew. But now I think, What if I've come to that realization too late?"
"Tell me something, where was Rachel when you and Donald were riding to hounds in England, playing polo in Argentina, and crewing in Newport?" He waited a moment. "She needed you then; she must have. Girls need their mommies."
Matty used a nail to slowly and methodically extract the walnuts from the cake. She did this until she had made a hole clear through the pastry. At last, she said, "In those days, I tried to be there for her. But Donald was so insistent. He needed me, too. He'd given me so much, opened up so many doors for me. So I went with him and left Rachel with the nanny." Matty gripped her mug with both hands, as if trying to warm herself beside a fire. Her knuckles were white and her eyes seemed bleak and lifeless. At last, she said, "What's happened to our lives-what's happened to her when I wasn't looking?" She was shaking in terror. "Do you think that when Rachel says she hates me she really means it?"
"What I think doesn't matter; I'm only a newcomer here," he said. "What do you think?"
"Lew, she's taking drugs, she's seeing people I know nothing about. At night, she goes... I don't know where she goes. And when she woke up it was you she wanted to talk to, not me." Her face was stricken. "And now all I want is to make it up to her. I want to hold her close and tell her how much I love her, but what if it's too late."
She trailed off and Croaker squeezed her hand in his. He wanted to tell her that it wasn't too late, but the words felt hollow in his mind. In a week, maybe two, Rachel could be dead. "Don't give up hope. I'm using all my resources to try and find her a kidney."
She bit her lip. "My God, Lew, do you think you can? It would be a miracle."
"Hold on, Matty. Just hold on."
Tears rolled silently down his sister's cheeks, dropping one by one on the tabletop. When she could trust herself to speak, she said, "Donald gave me everything I ever wanted. In return for making me into a fairytale princess, I did everything to please him, which was maybe the problem. Somewhere along the way I got lost."
"No, honey," he said, "you were already lost when you met him."
Croaker, staring at the photo of the model in the clear vinyl raincoat, fell asleep on Rachel's bed. Afterward, Matty tiptoed in and covered him with a light cotton blanket. Before she tucked the left side all the way around him she took a long look at his biomechanical hand. She didn't have to wonder what it must be like to be so seriously maimed. The first two months after Donald walked out on her she'd felt as if her legs had been amputated. Dead though the marriage might be, it had become her life-support system. Without it she was certain she was going to die. That she hadn't had come as a minor revelation to her.
As she covered her brother with the blanket she realized that she had never asked him the details of what had happened to his left hand. Typical, she thought. It was not her way to confide or ask confidences. Any form of intimacy other than the strictly physical kind was painful for her. It had been this way for so many years that it had become the norm. But she saw now what a terrible failing that was. It probably had been with Donald; it certainly had been with Rachel.
Matty wished with all her heart that she had been able to fully embrace Rachel after the breakup, to take her daughter into her confidence so that neither of them would have had to feel so alone. But she just couldn't. So many terrible emotions...
In misery, she realized now she'd suspected for some time that Rachel was having a hard time. She just couldn't admit it to herself. But now the full extent of her daughter's emotional pain hit her with the force of a freight train. For a moment, she doubled over just as if all the wind had been taken out of her. Her legs gave way and she found herself kneeling on the floor of Rachel's room. The carpet felt rough against her burning cheek and with each shuddering breath she took she drank in the smell of her daughter as if it were lifeblood that could sustain her.
What else could she do except pray? Dear God, she whispered. Don't take my baby away before I have a chance to get to know her.
DAY THREE
1
Croaker arose before dawn. He had a kind of internal alarm clock that never failed him. He showered, dressed in his same clothes, and slipped out the front door all without waking Matty. It would be hours before she got up-God knew she needed her sleep-and by then she could make her own way to the hospital.
Outside, glimmers of security lights skittered like fugitive spirits along the sidewalk. He listened for the crash of the surf, heard hungry gulls calling instead, and the peaceful lapping of the Intracoastal.
He decided to walk to the hospital, not more than fifteen minutes on foot. By the time he got there, daylight would have broken, and he wouldn't have to bother returning Matty's Lexus. His T-bird was still 'in the hospital parking lot-hopefully. If it hadn't been stolen or vandalized.
On the way, he stopped at a rank of newspaper vending machines, got a copy of the Sun-Sentinel It was the Broward County daily and would list all the current events scheduled for the area. He riffled through local news, looking for the right section.
It hadn't been happenstance that he had fallen asleep in his niece's bedroom. He'd wanted to breathe her in, to give his unconscious time to work on the significance of what he had seen. Some things in Rachel's room just hadn't added up to the mental picture he was forming of her. Out-of-place elements usually meant one thing: the picture you'd formed was in some way false.
I once went out to fish, Stone Tree had told him. I was hungry, and the hunger drove me outside into the rain. But the moment I put my hands on the boat I knew. If I went out in it, I would not return. So I went back inside and screwed my door and windows shut. Within the hour, the wind was so high it drove sand through the cracks in my house boards. So now I remember: if a thought doesn't feel right, put it aside.
Croaker had fallen asleep with the image of the model in his head, but that image didn't feel right. He had awakened seeing in his mind the strange word handpainted on the back of the black leather jacket-the coke jacket. Thoughts, images, or impressions he had just before going to sleep or as he was waking up were often the purest and, therefore, truest, even if at first they made no sense. Eventually, when enough other pieces fell into place, they always did. They always led him to the truth.
manman was what the jacket back had said. What in the world was Manman? He hadn't had a clue last night, didn't even know whether it was significant. But this morning intuition had quickly bloomed into a suspicion. He'd got up and stared from one poster of a rock group to another.
He was more or less in the middle of the Flagler Bridge when he found the club listings in the Sun-Sentinel On the surface, it seemed like a very long shot that he'd find it here, but he kept scanning the listings and the ads, thinking of the leather jacket and when Rachel would wear it. On rainy days, maybe, though leather was not waterproof. The handful of really cool days in the winter? Okay. When else? At night, when she went out to clubs.