Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

’

I told her the story of Doug and Janine Hunter, or at least the parts that were fit to print: I went very light on the forensic details. Ruth Seaforth sighed a lot as she listened, and after I was done.

‘It sounds like her,’ she said, seeming not the slightest bit surprised to hear about her sister’s return from the dead. ‘I mean – the violence sounds like her. You have to understand, Mister – I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name . . .’

‘Castor. Felix Castor.’

‘Mister«"">&er Castor. I don’t believe that violence was something she was born with. I think it was my father’s gift to her.’ After a pause she added: ‘To us all.’

‘You don’t strike me as a violent woman, Miss Seaforth,’ I demurred.

‘Don’t I?’ Ruth dabbed her mouth on a lace-edged napkin. ‘No, maybe not. But that’s mainly because I’m old, isn’t it? Old people always seem harmless. I guess because they move slowly and look a little vague sometimes. It doesn’t mean there’s any less fire inside. It just means you don’t get to do so much about it.’

There was a bitterness in her voice that surprised me. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘So would it be fair to say that you and Myriam had an unhappy childhood?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you feel that-?’

Juliet cut right through my measured and mealy-mouthed phrases. ‘Did your father abuse you?’

Ruth folded the napkin three times with excessive care before putting it back down on the plate. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

‘Sexually? Or did he just beat you?’

‘The one shaded into the other. I was happy when he died, because he was the fountainhead of violence in this house. It all flowed from him. To our brothers, Zack, Paul and Tyler. To Myriam. And to me.’

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Ruth seemed to consult her memory – or at least she paused, looking into the depths of her lemonade, before she answered. ‘Well,’ she said, almost dreamily, ‘he slipped and fell off the roof of the barn when he was fixing it for winter. I wrote to Myriam to tell her, and she wrote back that she’d already heard. She said she was happy he hadn’t died in his bed, but sorry it wasn’t slower.’

‘And your brothers?’ Juliet asked.

Another pause. ‘Tyler died first,’ she said. ‘Some men from out of town came into the Pit Stop Bar in Caldwell. A blond man in a white suit, they said, and two others. They picked a fight with him, and they took it outside. Beat him to death, more or less, though he lived a couple of days on a machine.

‘Zack got himself drowned in some mud, over by Caldwell Creek. There’s a wallow there that’s very deep, and he fell into it and didn’t come out. Perhaps he was drunk. It’s not that difficult to climb out if you’re sober.

‘And Paul died from a heroin overdose. That was a big scandal, as you can imagine. Nobody even knew you could get heroin around here back in those days. The doctor said it had to be the first time Paul had ever tried it, because there were no needle marks anywhere on his body. So I guess he didn’t know how strong the dose was, and he just took more than he could handle. I gather that’s easy to do.’

When Ruth finished this litany of disasters, nobody spoke for a moment or two.

‘How long ago did these thing happen, exactly?’ I asked, breaking the strained silence.

‘A long time,’ she said. She met my gaze and stared me out.

‘While Myriam was still alive?’

‘Yes. That long ago.’

‘So is it possible . . . ?’ I left the question hanging. Ruth put her glass back down on the tray, hard. It hit the side of the jug, and the ringing sound hun«ngisp;g in the air for a second. She tensed, seeming to be about to stand, but the impulse spent itself in a sort of tremor that passed through her. Still she didn’t avoid our eyes: she seemed to me to have made a decision at some point in her life not to duck or flinch from anything.

‘God works in mysterious ways,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘Or so we’re told. But He doesn’t have a monopoly on that, does He, Mister Castor? It was an awful thing. Of course it was. But it spared me. All those deaths . . . spared me. I was twenty years old, and I was hoping to escape this house by getting married, but my father wouldn’t let me out and he wouldn’t let any boys come by. He said he’d had one daughter go wild on him and he wasn’t going to have another go the same way. So I stayed here, with him. And with my brothers. All the day, and all the night.’ She looked at her hands, spreading the fingers slowly as if she was examining them for scars or imperfections. ‘Somebody had to come and save me. And somebody did.’

Ruth paused, but she didn’t seem to have finished speaking, and neither I nor Juliet jumped into the gap. After a few moments she took up again in a different tone, softer and more wistful.