"Roberts, Nora - Divine Evil(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberts Nora)

knees. He was leaning on his hoe, grinning self-consciously at the camera. His
red hair was cropped in a crew cut, and his pale skin showed signs of sunburn.
Though well out of adolescence, Jack Kimball had still been all legs and elbows.
An awkward scarecrow of a man who had loved flowers.
Blinking back tears, Clare turned the next page in the album. There were
Christmas pictures, she and Blair in front of a tilted Christmas tree. Toddlers
on shiny red tricycles. Though they were twins, there was little family
resemblance. Blair had taken his looks from their mother, Clare from their
father, as though in the womb the babies had chosen sides. Blair was all angelic
looks, from the top of his towhead to the tips of his red Keds. ClareТs hair
ribbon was dangling. Her white leggings bagged under the stiff skirts of her
organdy dress. She was the ugly duckling who had never quite managed to turn
into a swan.
There were other pictures, cataloging a family growing up. Birthdays and
picnics, vacations and quiet moments. Here and there were pictures of friends
and relatives. Blair, in his spiffy band uniform, marching down Main Street in
the Memorial Day parade. Clare with her arm around Pudge, the fat beagle who had
been their pet for more than a decade. Pictures of the twins together in the pup
tent their mother had set up in the backyard. Of her parents, dressed in their
Sunday finest outside church one Easter Sunday after her father had turned
dramatically back to the Catholic faith.
There were newspaper clippings as well. Jack Kimball being presented a plaque by
the mayor of Emmitsboro in appreciation for his work for the community. A
write-up on her father and Kimball Realty, citing it as a sterling example of
the American dream, a one-man operation that had grown and prospered into a
statewide organization with four branches.
His biggest deal had been the sale of a one-hundred-fifty-acre farm to a
building conglomerate that specialized in developing shopping centers. Some of
the townspeople had griped about sacrificing the quiet seclusion of Emmitsboro
to the coming of an eighty-unit motel, fast-food franchises, and department
stores, but most had agreed that the growth was needed. More jobs, more
conveniences.
Her father had been one of the town luminaries at the groundbreaking ceremony.
Then he had begun drinking.
Not enough to notice at first. True, the scent of whiskey had hovered around
him, but he had continued to work, continued to garden. The closer the shopping
center had come to completion, the more he drank.
Two days after its grand opening, on a hot August night, he had emptied a bottle
and tumbled, or jumped, from the third-story window.
No one had been home. Her mother had been enjoying her once-a-month girlsФ night
out of dinner and a movie and gossip. Blair had been camping with friends in the
woods to the east of town. And Clare had been flushed and dizzy with the
excitement of her first date.
With her eyes closed and the album clutched in her hands, she was a girl of
fifteen again, tall for her age and skinny with it, her oversize eyes bright and
giddy with the thrill of her night at the local carnival.
SheТd been kissed on the Ferris wheel, her hand held. In her arms she had
carried the small stuffed elephant that cost Bobby Meese seven dollars and fifty
cents to win by knocking over a trio of wooden bottles.
The image in her mind was clear. Clare stopped hearing the chug of traffic along