Читаем Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989 полностью

“The places on the highway are closed by this time. There’s an all-night restaurant in the nearest town.”

“Will you take me there?”

“If your husband doesn’t mind.”

“He doesn’t. The truth is, I told him you were taking me for coffee and not to expect me back for a while. He’ll go to sleep on Dan’s bed when Ira and Rita leave.”

“In that case,” I said, “let’s go.”

We walked past the Boniface cottage to my own, and I put her in the front seat of my Ford and went around and got in beside her, and we drove down the lake road to the highway and south on the highway about fifteen miles to the nearest town, which made a total distance, lake road and highway together, of about eighteen miles. She sat all the way on the far side of the seat by the door, her body slumped and her pale head against the back of the seat and her eyes staring at the roof of the car above the windshield as if she could see through it to the stars in the sky beyond. Now and then I turned my head and looked at her, and I began slowly to see and feel the beauty of her, not lush and belting beauty like that of Rita Boniface, but a stark, high-fashion beauty that a man, once he was aware of it, might never forget. She didn’t speak once in the eighteen miles.

In the all-night restaurant, which wasn’t much of a restaurant in a town that wasn’t much of a town, we sat across from each other in a booth and had good coffee, and finally she began to talk, or it seemed she did, but afterward I realized that she mostly listened to the talking of John Laird. I told her how I happened to be running a fishing resort, and why I liked what I did and didn’t particularly want to do anything else, none of which was important to anyone but me, and it wasn’t long before early dawn when we left the restaurant and started back for the lake. She was more relaxed then, and I thought there was more color in her hollow cheeks beneath high bones. She sat close to me in the seat and rested her head on my shoulder, and I liked the feel of it there, the nearness of her pale hair. On the lake road, just before we reached the cottages, she sat up and kissed me lightly and said, “Thanks for humoring me, John Laird,” and I said, “It’s part of the service,” and then, in a minute, we were pulling into the area beside my cottage, and Ira Boniface was standing there waiting for us in the first faint light of the day.

That was the little bit of good in all of it, the short time with Laura Quintin, and it was the end of the good when we saw Boniface. I knew it even before we got out of the Ford, before Boniface spoke.

“Where the devil have you been?” he said.

“To town for coffee,” I said.

“You were gone long enough,” he said.

“We took our time,” I said.

“Never mind that now,” he said. “Laura, you’d better go to your cottage. The one Dan had.”

“I know which one,” she said.

She looked at him for a moment after speaking, as if trying to decide whether to go or not, and then she shrugged and walked across the slope to the cottage and went in.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Did you see Dan Grimes last night after we got back from eating?”

“Yes. He was drunk. Passed out in the Quintins’ cottage.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. He’d been sick. He went into the cottage and passed out in a chair. Laura Quintin found him there, and I helped her lay him on the bed.”

“How’d you happen to be around?”

“I’d been down to the point. On the way back I passed the cottage, and she heard me. She called me in to help.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath and held it and then released it slowly. “Dan’s dead.”

“Dead? You mean he died after we left him?”

“He was killed. Someone murdered him.”

I had felt in my bones that things were going bad, but not this bad, and I stood there for a long minute staring at him and trying to make some kind of sense of what he’d said, and then, when I had, the first thing I thought afterward was what a hell of a bad break it was for my little camp that I’d worked so hard to build into a good place for good people to come fishing.

“How?” I said.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

He spun around abruptly and started across the face of the slope with long strides, and I went after him. A small table lamp was burning beside the bed in the last cottage. Boniface had left it burning, I suppose, after his earlier visit. We went inside and stood beside the bed in the area of light and looked down at the body of Dan Grimes. He was wearing, I thought at first, some kind of long, barbaric earring. Then I saw that it was not an earring at all. It was a metal stringer. The stringer was made of about a dozen large pins, much like safety pins, attached to a chain. Someone had unsnapped one of the pins and straightened it and driven it into Dan Grimes’s brain through the auditory canal of his right ear. It was the stringer, I somehow knew at once, that I had left on the oak stump between this cottage and the next after I’d finished cleaning six bass the night before.

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