"Maureen McHugh - Ancestor Money" - читать интересную книгу автора (McHugh Maureen F)

What was it she had talked to on the phone? Some kind of Chinese spirit? Not an angel. "I'll tell you
about it when I get back," she said.

She did not take anything. She did not even close the door.

"Rachel," Speed said from her door. She stopped with her hand on the gate. "Are you going to wear
shoes?" he asked.

"Do you think I need them?" she asked.

He shrugged.
The geese were gathered in a soft gray cluster by the garden at the side of the little clapboard cabin
where they had been picking among the tomato plants. All their heads were turned towards her.

She went out the gate. The road was full of pale dust like talcum powder, already warmed by the sun. It
felt so good, she was glad that she hadn't worn shoes.

As she walked, she seemed to walk forward in time. She came down and out the hollow, past a white
farmhouse with a barn and silo and a radio in the windowsill playing a Red's baseball game against the
Padres. A black Rambler was parked in the driveway and laundry hung drying in the breeze, white sheets
belling out.

Where the road met the highway was a neat brick ranch house with a paved driveway and a patient
German Shepherd lying in the shade under a tree. There was a television antenna like a lightning rod. The
German Shepherd watched her but did not bark.

She waited at the highway and after a few minutes saw a Greyhound bus coming through the valley,
following the Laurel River. She watched it through the curves, listening to the grinding down and back up
of its gears. The sign on the front of the bus said LEXINGTON, so that was where she supposed she
would go next.

The bus stopped in front of her, sighing, and the door opened.




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By the time she got to Lexington, the bus had modernized. It had a bathroom and the windows were
tinted smoky colored. Highway 25 had become Interstate 75, and outside the window they were passing
horse farms with white board fence rising and falling across bluegreen fields. High-headed horses with
manes like women's hair that shone in the sun.

"Airport, first," the driver called. "Then bus terminal with connections to Cincinnati, New York City, and
Sausalito, California." She thought he sounded northern.

Rachel stepped down from the bus in front of the terminal. The tarmac was pleasantly warm. As the bus
pulled out, the breeze from its passing belled her skirt and tickled the back of her neck. She wondered if