"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

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At three o'clock in the morning, frigid with iced water, I was lying on my back on the bed in my room.
I had been talked to by both the hotel management and the local police, who'd been understanding,
while insisting I relinquish the gun for the duration of my stay. I let the funeral carry the day. I do have a
licence to carry a concealed weapon, which surprised them. But they observed, reasonably enough, that
the licence doesn't say I can wave it around in bars. The papers from Davids's office, the ones that
announced I now had 1.8 million dollars cash, were carefully laid out on the heater to dry. I was no
longer angry at anybody. The fact that my father's last will and testament now smelled of spilt beer
seemed to effectively make his point.
After a while I rolled over, picked up the phone, and dialled a number. The phone rang six times, and
then an answering machine kicked in. A voice I knew better than my own said that Mr and Mrs Hopkins
were sorry they couldn't answer the phone, but that I should leave a message. They'd get back to me.

2
At ten o'clock the next morning I stood, pale and penitent, at the end of my parents' driveway. I was
wearing a clean shirt. I had eaten some breakfast. I had apologized to everyone I could find in the hotel,
right down to the guy who cleaned the pool. I was amazed that I hadn't spent the night in a cell. I felt like
shit.
The house sat near the end of a narrow and hilly road on the mountainside of Dyersburg's main
residential area. I'd been a little surprised by it when they moved. The lot was decent-sized, about half an
acre, with a couple of old trees shading the side of the house. Properties of similar size bordered it, home
to nice late Victorians, that no one looked too obsessed about painting. A neat hedge marked the edge
of both sides of the property. Mary lived in the next house up, and she wasn't anything like wealthy. A
college professor and his post-grad wife had recently moved in on the other side. I think my dad actually
sold them the house. Again, decent people тАФ but unlikely to bathe in champagne. The house itself was a
two-storey, with a graceful wraparound porch, a workshop in the cellar and a garage round the back. It
was, without question, a nice-looking and well-appointed house in a good neighbourhood. Someone
wanted to set you up there, you wouldn't complain. But neither would Homes of the Rich and Famous
be doing a showcase special anytime soon.
I waved across the fence in case Mary happened to be looking out the window, and walked slowly
up the path. It felt as if I was approaching an impostor. My parents' real house, the one I'd grown up in,
lay a long time in the past and a thousand miles west. I'd never been back to Hunter's Rock since they
moved, but I could remember that house like the back of my hand. The arrangement of its rooms would
probably always define my understanding of domestic space. The one in front of me was like a second
wife, taken too late in life to have a relationship with the children that extended beyond distant cordiality.
A galvanized trashcan stood to one side of the door, the lid raised by the full bag inside. There were
no newspapers on the porch. I assumed Davids had seen to that. The right thing to do, but it made the
house look as if it already had a dust sheet over it. I pulled the unfamiliar keys from my pocket and
unlocked the door.
It was so quiet inside that the house seemed to throb. I picked up the few pieces of mail, junk for the
most part, and put them on the side table. Then I wandered for a while, walking from room to room,
looking at things. The rooms felt like preview galleries for some strange yard sale, each object coming
from a different home and priced well below its value. Even the things that went together тАФ the books in
my father's study, my mother's collection of 1930s English pottery, neatly arrayed on the antique pine
dresser in the sitting room тАФ seemed hermetically sealed from my touch and from time. I had no idea
what to do with these things. Put them in boxes and store them somewhere to gather dust? Sell them,
keep the money, or give it to some worthy cause? Live within this tableau, knowing that in the objects'