"Webb-TheEvilMiracle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Webb Don)

DON WEBB

THE EVIL MIRACLE

Martha Wills made the down payment on the Starlight Motel in 1966 in memory of
her only love. Now in 1992 she is sixty-seven and wondering if there is a chance
of selling it in a terrible real estate market. And there are the spiders.

The tarantulas-- big furry black ones-- had always been a problem. Just one of
them padding across the asphalt would bring a Yankee tourist screaming for
his)or more likely his family's) life. Across the highway the old prairie dog
town was full of 'em, and they became quite frisky in the warm weather. Martha
knew them as harmless. You damn near had to step on one to get him to bite you.
As a child she and her brother Billy used to fish 'em out of holes with bubble
gum. You'd get your well-chewed bubble-gum -long, dangly, and pink -- and you'd
lower the string into a prairie dog hole. You'd pull up a tarantula and swing
'em round--sort of a living hairy yo-yo. Tourists didn't relate well to this
story. Next were the garden spiders. Black-and-white wonders of the spider
world, they could've been designed by Picasso. They spun huge webs to glisten
rose window-like with the morning dew. Usually she'd have one on the roses out
front and one in the bear grass out back. But this year they were everywhere --
linking guests' cars with their sticky floss; obscuring doorways, filling the
aluminum steps which led to the diving board of her pool. Martha had taken to
getting up at dawn and dewebbing the place.

Finally there were the brown recluses. A different matter. They were one of the
truly poisonous species. The bite could be fatal. Martha's cousin was once
bitten. The tissues of his leg turned black and smelled of rot. When months
later-- Robert had healed, he was missing a handful of leg. The tiny brown
recluse likes to sleep in shoes and other tight places. Martha had found six in
the twenty-seven years she owned the Starlight. Three of the six she had found
last month. She figured that the spider increase was somehow due to pesticide
use. She'd half-slept through a TV movie with that theme. She didn't tell anyone
about the spiders. She didn't want rumors to start. Brown recluses could kill.
In the days when the Starlight catered to an interstate tourist trade, a death
would have meant nothing. Somebody from New York/ Ontario/Alabama had died. So
what.? Who cares? But the small patronage the Starlight now enjoyed was
connected to the hospital. Her clients were the families of the patients. They
came in from nearby little towns and left after cures, deaths, or loss of hope.
But they recommended the Starlight to their plagued neighbors. Cheap and clean,
they said, in walking distance of the hospital and the McDonald's. One death
from spiders -- or even the notion that such a death was likely -- would close
the Starlight by the same word of mouth that kept it open.

Martha hadn't told her niece or her nephews that she was going to sell the
Starlight. If she told them-- she'd have to do it. 'Cause she's that way. Women
don't make it in the business world if they appear indecisive. It was like Mr.
Rheims said, you have to have fire in your heart and ice in your veins. Mr.