"Ty Drago - Bitter Reflections" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drago Ty)

"'No!'
"'Don't be afraid. You know me! Don't you remember?'

"'No! No, I don't!'

"'I remember. I remember lots of things. I remember Mom and Dad.'
"'Please...'

"'You shouldn't have done it, Larry. You shouldn't have killed them .'"
* * *




In her chair, Loretta gasped out loud. If he heard her, Benedict gave no sign. His eyes
were distant, wide with remembered horror. His hand worked ceaselessly, wringing the air
between them.

"I tried to pull away again. But each time I did, he seemed to come... further out. I could see
the signet ring again, and then a wrist, enclosed in the same dark sweater I was wearing. I
seized that wrist with my free hand, trying to pull it off me. The skin the warm and alive. I
thought I could feel a pulse beneath my fingers.
"'You fixed their car just a week after your nineteenth birthday, didn't you? Made a present of
their deaths to yourself!'

"I heard Dickerson on the other side of the door, his key working in the lock. As the door
opened, the hand released me. I staggered two or three steps and then collapsed onto the
floor."

Benedict fell silent, and filled his cup with the last of the brandy. Loretta sat back in her chair,
her own drink forgotten, her eyes locked on the frightened, broken man before her. After
several moments, she found her voice. "Is it true? Did you kill them?"

Benedict took a long final swallow and nodded slowly. Then he shrugged, the noncommittal,
disinterested shrug of a youth guilty of an offense but unconcerned about his punishment. "It
was... nothing personal. My father was running a good business into the ground. I needed
that business, and I couldn't waste my time playing the attentive son to my widowed mother.
So I resolved to remove them both."
Loretta blinked, slowly digesting the confession, uncertain which horrified her more: the
admission, or the almost casual way it was offered. A sociopath, she thought; a man totally
uninterested in anyone's welfare but his own. Was his malevolent reflection some sort of
imaginative representation of his long-overdue guilt?
"Dickerson found me on the floor... in tears. I had him remove all the glass in the room and
paint the brassware black. It was hours before I slept, only to awake in the night, shaking
with terror. I'd... already had your name and number by then, Doctor. I'd had them for more
than a week. It... just seemed too much a show of... weakness to call you. But after this
evening..." He straightened up, trying to recapture his vanished dignity. "So, Doctor. Am I
insane, or is it real?"

Loretta rubbed her face in her hands and regarded the man, caught between her revulsion