"Avram Davidson - The Woman who Thought she Could Read" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

warning and soтАФ") and smashed into their car. It fell off the road into the canal. The police were called
right away and they came and pulled it out. ("Oh, oh! Then they're all right!" my mother cried. Then she
was willing to understand.) But they weren't all right. They'd been drowned.
So we forgot about the deaf neighbor lady because my mother, poor thing, she got hysterical. My
father and the policeman helped her inside and after a while she just lay there on the couch, kind of
moaning. The door opened and in tiptoed Mrs. Grummick. She had her lower lip tucked in under her
teeth and her eyes were wide and she was kind of rocking her head from side to side. In each hand she
held a little bottleтАФsmelling salts, maybe, and some kind of cordial. I was glad to see her and I think my
father was. I know the policeman was, because he blew out his cheeks, nodded very quickly to my
father, and went away.
Mother said, in a weak, thin voice: "They didn't go on the boat. They didn't go because they had a
warning. That's whyтАФ" Then she saw Mrs. Grummick. The color came back to her face and she just
leaped off the couch and tried to hit Mrs. Grummick, and she yelled at her in a hoarse voice I'd never
heard and called her namesтАФthe kind of names I was just beginning to find out what they meant. I was, I
think, more shocked and stunned to hear my mother use them than I was at the news that Sister and Jim
were dead.
Well, my father threw his arms around her and kept her from reaching Mrs. Grummick and I
remember I grabbed hold of one hand and how it tried to get away from me.
"You knew!" my mother shouted, struggling, her hair coming loose. "You knew! You read it there,
you witch! And you didn't tell! You didn't tell! She'd be alive now if she'd gone on the boat. They weren't
all killed, on the boatтАФBut you didn't say a word!"
Mrs. Grummick's mouth opened and she started to speak. She was so mixed up, I guess, that she
spoke in her own language, and my mother screamed at her.
My father turned his head around and said, "You'd better get out."
Mrs. Grummick made a funny kind of noise in her throat. Then she said, "But,
LadyтАФmisterтАФnoтАФI tell you only what I seeтАФI read there, 'Don't go by the water.' I only can say
what I see in front of me, only what I read. Nothing else. Maybe it mean one thing or maybe another. I
only can read it. Please, ladyтАФ"
But we knew we'd lost them, and it was because of her.
"They ask me," Mrs. Grummick said. "They ask me to read."
My mother kind of collapsed, sobbing. Father said, "Just get out of here. Just turn around and get
out."
I heard a kid's voice saying, high, and kind of trembling, "We don't want you here, you old witch!
We hate you!"
 Well, it was my voice. And then her shoulders sagged and she looked for the first time like a real old
woman. She turned around and shuffled away. At the door she stopped and half faced us. "I read no
more," she said. "I never read more. Better not to know at all." And she went out.
Not long after the funeral we woke up one morning and the little house was empty. We never heard
where the Grummicks went and it's only now that I begin to wonder about it and to think of it once again.