"Alexander Jablokov - Fragments Of A Painted Eggshell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

FRAGMENTS OF A PAINTED EGGSHELL
Alexander Jablokov
"I'm not sure what you mean," Paula said, leafing through the immense stack of letters that had somehow
come to be covering her kitchen counter. "Which old postcard are you talking about?" She tapped and
aligned the envelopes, making them seem orderly.

"Well, any of them...but there is one specific one I'm thinking of." Mark's voice sounded hollow. He did
insist on using that ancient heavy-handset phone, bought at some long-ago yard sale. He'd gotten it after
the divorce, good riddance, and Paula had replastered the spot on the kitchen where it had hung. She
wore a headset, and could move around as she cooked dinner. Mark had never been able to recognize
the simplest solutions to things.

She started to open the letters with the cleaver, but quit when she saw how much red bell pepper she
was getting all over everything. Besides, she should really finish chopping the pepper before she got to
anything else.

"A postcard from France." She wandered from the kitchen into her office to look for a letter opener.

"Yes, that's right." Only something really important would make him call outside their usual schedule for
sharing out Rue's time. So what was it about the postcards Mark had sent her while they were still dating
that made her ex-husband desperate enough to talk to her?

"I just threw all that old stuff in boxes," she said, distracted by the Billable Accounts file displayed on her
computer screen. She plopped down in her work chair, throwing the stack of letters into the overflowing
"To Do" box on the floor, and started looking through the active accounts. "I wasn't in much of a mood
to be too orderly. I don't even know if I still have any of it."

"You have it. Could you please take a look?"

"Sure, sure...." There were some extra hours to be billed on the Hammersly house -- Paula Pursang
Construction had completely redesigned their moldings three times now. Easy money, but a pain in the
ass....

"Paula, are you paying attention to what I'm saying?" Mark's voice wasn't angry, just tired.

"Of course I am. It's somewhere in the basement. I'll just have to put a bucket over my head to protect
myself against the Tergiversator, and go down there."

He laughed. He didn't want to, but he did. "Just take a position when you go down there, and hold it."

The Tergiversator was a creature who hid under the basement stairs and lived on equivocation. Paula
couldn't remember how it had first been born -- it might have been from a crossword puzzle clue -- but it
had a firm place in Pursang family mythology.

"That never works. Eventually you get an itch and have to scratch something, and...."

"Just find it, Paula. Please."

She knew exactly where that damn postcard was. It was in a cardboard box under a stack of heating
ducting and vent grates, in a corner of the basement behind the furnace. If the basement flooded, as it