"Matt Ruff - Set This House in Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ruff Matt)

started in on her own breakfast by then, warmed-over biscuits with marmalade. When the lid stuck on
the marmalade jar, she offered it to Seferis.
Seferis's size ratio to the body is the inverse of Jake's: his soul is nine feet tall, and crammed into
Andy Gage's modest frame he radiates energy and strength. He got the jar lid off with a simple twist of
thumb and forefinger, a trick I couldn't have managed even using the same muscles.
"Efcharisto," Mrs. Winslow said, as Seferis handed the jar back to her with a flourish.
"Parakalo," Seferis replied, and crunched another radish.
 When the last of the food had been consumed, Mrs. Winslow switched on the little
black-and-white TV on the kitchen counter, and poured a fresh mug of coffee for my father, who came
out to visit with her for a while. They liked to watch the news together. Mrs. Winslow used to watch with
her husband, and I guess my father's company brought that back for her in some way; likewise, sitting
with Mrs. Winslow gave my father a sense of the normal family life he'd always wished for. But this
morning was less pleasant than most. The lead news item at the bottom of the hour was an update on the
Lodge camping tragedy; it upset my father even more than the VCR clock, and blackened Mrs.
Winslow's mood as well.
Maybe you remember the Lodge story; it never received as much national coverage as it might
have, because of another similar case in the news at the same time, but people did hear about it. Warren
Lodge was a groundskeeper from Tacoma who'd gone camping in Olympic National Park with his two
daughters. Two days after the start of the camping trip, the state police spotted Mr. Lodge's jeep
weaving between the lanes on Route 101 and pulled him over. Mr. Lodge, who appeared delirious and
had a deep scratch across his scalp, claimed that a cougar had invaded the campsite and attacked him,
knocking him unconscious. When he came to, he found his daughters' tent slashed to ribbons, their
sleeping bags torn and bloody; the girls themselves -- Amy, twelve, and Elizabeth, ten -- were nowhere
to be found, although he'd searched for many hours.
It could have been true. Cougar attacks are not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest, and Mr.
Lodge looked strong enough to survive a wrestling match with a big cat, if he got lucky. But watching him
on TV -- the day after the police pulled him over, he called a press conference to plead for volunteers to
help search for his girls -- I felt a growing sense of unease. Mr. Lodge's story could have been true, but
something about the way he told it was wrong. It was Adam, looking out from the pulpit into Mr.
Lodge's tear-stained face, who first put my intuition into words: "He's the cougar."
Ever since then -- almost a full week, now -- we'd been waiting for the police to reach the same
conclusion. So far there hadn't been a whisper of a suspicion in public, although Adam said the cops had
to be thinking about it, unless they were totally incompetent. My father, meanwhile, had pledged that if
Mr. Lodge weren't arrested soon, he was going to call the Mason County DAs office himself, or have me
do it.
"Do you really think he killed them?" Mrs. Winslow asked now, as the newscast replayed Mr.
Lodge's plea for volunteers; the update was just a rehash of previous reports, with an added note that the
searchers had all but abandoned hope of finding the girls alive.
My father nodded. "He killed them, all right. And that's not all he did to them."
Mrs. Winslow was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "Do you think he's insane? To kill his own
children?"
"Crazy people don't try to hide their crimes," my father said. "He knows what he did was wrong,
but he doesn't want to face the consequences. That's not insane. That's selfish."
Selfish: my father's worst epithet. Mrs. Winslow didn't ask the obvious next question, the one I
always wondered about, which was Why? Even granting a total disregard for the welfare of others, what
would make someone want to do to another human being what Mr. Lodge had done to his own
daughters? Mrs. Winslow didn't ask that question, because she knew my father didn't have an answer,
though he'd spent most of his life searching for one. She didn't ask any other questions, either, only sat
there in angry silence as my father finished his coffee and the newscast turned to other matters. Soon it
was time for us to leave for work; my father kissed Mrs. Winslow on the cheek and gave me back the