"Philip Jose Farmer - Traitor to the Living" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

The house was comfortable and quiet, though he often
felt lonely in it. It was in the middle-class Knoll-
woods division on the edge of the middle-sized, mid-Illinois
city of Busiris. Carfax had purchased it shortly
after being hired by Traybell University. It had needed
some repair and much interior decorating. He had finished
the repairing but had not yet gotten around to the
interior by the time he had married Frances. She had
been happy to quit her job as secretary to the clean of
women at Traybell, and to plunge into fixing up the
house according to her excellent tastes.
And then, as she was about done with the decorating
and was looking for another project, she had died.
On that twilit summer evening, Gordon Carfax had
commented that he was out of cigarettes. Frances had
refrained from her usual answer that she wished he
would give up smoking. Instead, she had offered to
drive to the shopping center for him. There she would
also stop in at the book emporium and pick up a paperback
mystery. This had irked him because the
house was full of books, ranging all the way from the
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heaviest of classics to the lightest of murder mysteries.
There must have been at least a score of the latter
which sae had not yet read.
He said something about this, and she had replied
that she wasn't in the mood for any of them. She had
then asked him if he'd like to go along for the ride. It would do him, and her, some
good to get his nose out
of a book.
Somewhat crossly, perhaps because he felt guilty, he
had said that the book was one which he could use for
tomorrow's class in Medieval English History. And if
she was hinting again that he did not talk to her
enough, she should remember that he had taken her
out last night to a show and a few drinks at the Golden
Boar's Head.
Frances had slammed the door hard enough to startle
him. She was justifiably angry, he told himself later,
since they had not talked during the movie, and in the
tavern they had been joined by the head of the English
Department and his wife and so had exchanged only a
few words.
A few minutes after she left, she was dead. An old
man had driven his large, heavy car at fifty kilometers
an hour through a stop sign in a 30-kph zone and
rammed through the door of her German import and
into her.
Frances went underground. Mr. Lincks, a very solid