"The Wells Of Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

One
It was one of those crisp, cold afternoons in Connecticut when the leaves are rusting off the trees and the sky is as clear and blue as a child's eyes. I came bouncing up the driveway of the Bodines' place in my dusty Country Squire, my eyes screwed up against the fall sunlight that sparkled through the trees, my red baseball cap firmly tugged down and my sheepskin collar firmly pulled up. In the back of the station wagon, all my wrenches and spanners and lengths of pipe banged and jangled, and my faithful cat Shelley sat beside me in the passenger seat, his paws neatly together and his ears shining bright pink.
I pulled up in front of the house and climbed out. I said to Shelley: 'You coming?' But he closed his eyes as if he was feigning a headache, and that meant he considered it was too damned cold out there, and he'd rather stay where he was and listen to the radio, the lazy s.o.b. I said: 'Please yourself,' and left him.
I walked through drifts of curled, crunchy leaves to the front verandah. The Bodine house was a big old Victorian place, set on a low hill on a curve of Route 109, between New Milford and Washington Depot. This was quiet, rural country, all trees and tiny hamlets, and now the tourists and weekenders had all gone back to New York City, it was populated as sparsely as it had been back in colonial days, and everybody was snuggling themselves down for the winter.
Jimmy Bodine was in back, raking leaves. He was a young guy, not more than twenty-five, which made him a whole decade younger than me. He had curly blond hair and buck teeth, and in his plaid lumberjack coat he looked like somebody out of an old Norman Rockwell painting. He said: 'Hi, Mason,' and leaned on the handle of his rake.
'How are you doing?' I asked him.
'Okay. Pretty raw this morning, ain't it?'
I sniffed the sharp, smoky air. 'You betcha. Do you want to go inside?'
'Sure. Alison s got some coffee on.'
He set his rake against the back verandah rail, and we went in through the screen door to the kitchen. It was warm and fragrant in there, with copper moulds hanging on an old pine hutch and a cake cooling on every window-ledge. Alison Bodine was just taking out a tray of cinnamon and apple cookies, and I thought to myself that when I died there could be worse ways to go than choking on Alison Bodine's cookies while making love to Raquel Welch on a well-sprung mattress.
Alison Bodine looked older than Jimmy, somehow, but then she'd always been the motherly type. She had dark hair, drawn back in a bun, and a thin friendly face with wide brown eyes. She was real small, one of those tiny women you could never hold around the waist, only round the neck, not without kneeling anyway. She said: 'How are you doing, Mason?' and brought down three pottery mugs and poured coffee.
We sat down at the heavy old kitchen table and ate cookies while the pale afternoon light came straining through the windows.
'You're having trouble with the well,'then?' I asked them.
Jimmy just managed to catch a piece of cookie that crumbled as he bit it. 'That's right,' he nodded, collecting fragments. 'It's pretty recent. Only about the past two or three days. But I'm worried in case we're going to have trouble with it during the winter, when the ground's hard.'
'Well, you're right to call me,' I told him. 'What's going wrong, exactly?'
'It's not all the time, but every now and then the water's been coming out discoloured. Kind of yellowy-greenish. Not a strong colour. Just a tint. And it don't taste of nothing, neither. But it don't look right.'
Alison nodded. 'I'm kind of hesitant to use it, you know? I've heard all that stuff about seepage and chemical fertilisers getting into the water supply.'
'Does it run clear if you leave the faucets open?' I asked them.
Jimmy nodded. 'If we leave it running for ten, fifteen minutes.'
'And how about residue? Does it leave a ring around your basin? Is there any sediment in it?'
8
'No, nothing. The water is just tinted.'
I sipped at my coffee. It didn't sound like anything very important to me. There were all kinds of factors that could affect the quality of well water - soil, minerals, seepage - and the only thing that the Bodines really had to worry about was somebody's sewage leaking into the water table. We'd had a pretty wet year, on the whole, and that meant the ground was saturated. When the underground water levels were as high as they were now, they could occasionally flow into a septic system, but the chances of that happening were pretty rare. From what the Bodines were saying, it sounded to me like their water was filtering through some underground minerals or vegetable matter, and that was what was colouring it up.
'The best I can do is take a sample,' I told them. 'I could have it over to New Milford this evening, and if Dan Kirk does a rush job on it for me, I could let you know by this time tomorrow. It doesn't sound none too serious, though. I remember a couple of years ago, up at Kent, an old fellow turned on his faucet and the water came out the colour of blood. It was only some kind of potassium in the soil, and all we had to do was dig the well a few feet deeper.'
Alison gave a vague smile. 'Well, that sounds more reassuring. I was worried the water was poisoned.'
'You haven't been sick, have you?' I asked her.
'Not at all. None of us have.'
'Young Oliver's okay?'
'He's fine. Tough as a truckload of logs.'
I finished my coffee, and stood up. 'Do you want to lend me a glass jelly jar, something of that kind, so that I can take a sample?'
'Sure thing,' said Alison, and brought me one from her cupboard. I stole another cinnamon and apple cookie from the plate and stuffed it into my mouth as I followed her through into the scullery. No wonder I was having trouble with my waistline. A fellow could jog three miles before he'd burn off one of those cookies.
'At first I thought it was rust from the pipes,' said Jimmy, as we gathered around the sink.
'Oh, did you?' I answered, showering out cookie crumbs.
'It seemed the natural answer,' he nodded. 'But when it came out the same colour from every faucet, I guessed it was probably something else. And like I said, there's no deposit, no flakes of rust?
I turned on the kitchen faucet and let it run. At first, it came out clear, but after a little while I began to notice a distinct coloration. Nothing startling, not like the blood-coloured water up at Kent, but a pale, unpleasant kind of yellow. Crudely speaking, it looked like piss. I solemnly took a sample in the jelly jar and held it up to the light.
'What do you think?' asked Jimmy.
I shrugged. 'Almost nothing right now, except that it looks as if it's some kind of mineral. It's clear enough.'
I smelled the water, but it didn't seem to have any particular odour. I passed it around for Alison and Jimmy to smell, too. Jimmy just shrugged, but Alison sniffed it once, and then sniffed it again, and said: 'Fish.'
'Pardon me?' I asked her.
'Well, maybe I'm crazy,' she said, 'but it smells to me like fish.',
I held it under my nose again and inhaled. 'Not that I can detect,' I told her. 'How about you, Jimmy?'
Jimmy tried again, but he shook his head, too. 'I think it's just your imagination, honey. In any case, there ain't going to be any fish down our well, now are there?'
I screwed the lid on the jar and tucked it in the pocket of my sheepskin coat. 'Whatever it is, Dan Kirk will find it. He once found insecticide that was seeping through eight layers of limestone into a subterranean stream and ending up in someone's drinking water seven miles away. I mean, he's the Sherlock Holmes of H2O.'
'And who are you?' asked Alison. 'The Scarlet Pimpernel of plumbing?'
I grinned. 'Just because I'm difficult to get hold of, that doesn't mean I'm impossible to get hold of. I have to work hard, okay? Right now I'm supposed to be putting in new radiators round at the Harrison place. Do you know they're having new radiators?'
'Sarah told me,' nodded Alison. 'Don't you have any fresh gossip?'
'The Katz boy got kicked out of college, if that's of any interest.'
Jimmy raised his eyebrows. 'Really? David Katz?'
'I knew that already,' said Alison. 'Wendy Pitman told me down at the Northville Store.'
'The Northville Store,' I remarked, as we walked back through the kitchen and out on to the back porch. 'That's where they say that if they don't have it, you don't need it, and believe me that's true. Including all the gossip that's fit to whisper.'