"TUROW, SCOTT - THE BURDEN OF PROOF" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turrow Scott)

A policeman leaned into the room through the half-open door.

"Lieutenant, Nogalski asked me to tell you they found something. Up in
the bedroom. He didn't want to touch it till you seen it."

"What is that?" asked Stern.

The cop looked at Stern, unsure if he should answer. "The note," the
officer said at last.

It was them on Stern's highboy, jotted on. a single sheet of her
stationery, laid out beside a pile of handkerchiefs which the
housekeeper had ironed. Like the grocery list or a reminder to get the
cleaning. Unassuming. Harmless. Stern picked up the sheet, overcome
by this evidence of her' presence. The lieutenant stood at his
shoulder. But them was very little to see. Just one line. No date. No
salutation. Only four words.

"Can you forgive me?"

ON the dark early morning the day of the funeral, a dream seized Stern
from sleep. He was wandering in a large house.

Clara was there, but she was in a Closet and 8, would not come out. She
clung shyly to one Of the hanging garments, a woman in her riffles whose
knees knocked in a pose of childish bashfulness. His mother called him,
and his older brother, Jacobo, voices from other rooms. When he moved
to answer them, Clara told him they were dead, and his body rushed with
panic.

From the bed, he contemplated the illuminated digits on the clock radio.
4:58. He would not sleep again, too frightened by the thronging images
of his dream. There had been such a peculiar look on Clara's face when
she told him Jacobo was dead, such a sly, calculating gleam."

About him the house, fully occupied, seemed to have taken on an inert,
slumbering weight. His older daughter, Marta-twenty-eight, a Legal Aid
lawyer in New York--had flown back the first night and slept now down
the hall, in the room which had been hers as a child. His younger
daughter, Kate, and her husband, John, 'who lived in a

distant suburb, had also spent the night, rather than fight the
unpredictable morning traffic over the river bridges. Silvia, Stern's
sister, was in the guest room, come from her country house to minister
to her brother and to organize the house of grief. Only the two men,
Peter and, of course, Dixon--forever the lone wolf were missing.

Last night, the task of mourning in its grimmest ceremonial aspects had
begun. The formal period of visitation' would follow the funeral, but