"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Julian(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

"Not much to go on, now is there?" he asked. "We'll put the license number through a routine check, but ten years is a long time, kid."
Julian knew the sergeant would do nothing. Another nut report, that was how he thought of it. He had not asked to see the motel registration book, or anything else, but simply had made notes while Julian talked and then soothed him enough to get rid of him.
At the FBI office he talked to a young man named Walter Montgomery who wore a sports shirt and no tie, which surprised Julian. He thought they always wore three-piece suits.
"Julian," the agent said soberly, "I think you should talk to a psychiatrist. You were twelve, right? She excited you sexually and you even had an orgasm. In your mind she became young and beautiful and desirable. You couldn't face the knowledge that an old woman might have excited you, so you altered her to suit your preconceived idea of what a beautiful girl should look like. She sounds pretty much like a centerfold cutie to me. The illusion you created, your excitement, and your guilt over spying all combined to give you a nightmare that's still with you. I can't help you, but a psychiatrist is trained to deal with this kind of thing. There's nothing shameful about it, or really very complex, it seems to me. It's a natural development."
"And her address, the phony license plate?"
"So she was hiding from someone or something. People do it all the time. Ran away from her old man, didn't want him to track her down. Must be a thousand reasons why people do a vanishing act. And ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the time it's harmless."
* * * *
"Julian, you saved all my letters! And I thought you never even opened them!" Rachel sat on the floor emptying a box that he had packed hastily when he had moved out of the dorm to this apartment that they shared. "I wonder what your parents think of me. A pursuing bitch, I guess."
"Ha! You should have heard my mother's voice when I mentioned, rather obliquely I thought, that I might like to have my own apartment this year. She nearly shrieked with joy. Her very next words were, 'How's that nice girl, Rachel?'" He grinned at her, then went back to the term paper he was working on. His grades had picked up this year, and it seemed likely he would make straight A's, something he had never done in his life. He thought the shock might kill off both parents. For the first time since his early childhood his parents felt good about him, and he was at peace with himself. He looked up a moment later; a light rain was failing, and for a second he had a feeling of fear, but it passed so quickly that it might not have existed at all. Sometimes he remembered like that, a passing rush of adrenaline, a fleeting memory. Finally he had accepted the FBI agent's theory that his prepubescent self had played a trick on him, accepted it out of desperation, he knew, but still there had been nothing else he could have done.
"What are you doing with all these?" Rachel asked. She had found the stack of motel registration books.
"The old man made me buy them all, or none. So there they are."
"Instincts of a pack rat," she muttered, and began leafing through one of the books.
He added a few lines to his paper, read a paragraph, made a note to consult his textbook, and started to write again.
"You were thirteen, not twelve," Rachel said. "It was ten years ago."
"Twelve," he said, not looking up, keeping his place in the book with one finger while he wrote. "I was in the sixth grade."
"Not according to this," she said firmly.
Irritably he closed his book with his pencil in it, and went to take the registration book from her. There were eight of them altogether, all the years Mr. and Mrs. Gunn had owned the motel. Rachel was right, Stella Johnson had registered ten years before. He snatched up another book and opened it to May -- there she was again. And again.
Two books had been flooded until little in them was legible, but the other six all showed that year after year Stella Johnson had spent the last three days of May in that motel.
The rush of adrenalin was like a surf increasing before a storm. He stared at the entries, compared the signatures, the license numbers, the addresses, and in his mind he saw the smiling young woman, hair fluffing out, skin glowing with health.
"Julian!"
Rachel's voice was almost too distant to be audible; he knew she was at his side, her hand shaking his arm, but when he turned toward her, that other face was still there. He blinked and shook his head, and although the vision faded, the surf pounded, pounded.
"Julian, are you all right? I thought you were going to pass out or something. Look, it's a coincidence. You just happened to pick a woman who has business in Cincinnati every year. Maybe she has a parent in a home there. Maybe she's having a lifelong affair with someone whom she meets each spring. Maybe she stays in the motel several different times each year. Have you looked through the other months?"
He had not thought of it, but now he went through them all. She was there only in May.
"Whatever the reason," Rachel said, "no doubt it is entirely harmless and innocent. None of your business. You have to let it drop, Julian. You're going to graduate in two weeks. You have finals and term papers to finish. You have to let it drop."
She had faded out again as she spoke. Stella Johnson would be there this May, he realized. He would find her.
He got through the rest of his term with no clear memory of what he did. His grades, steadily high all year, plummeted, and one professor called him for a conference and suggested a medical check-up. Mononucleosis, he suggested, could be the reason for the sudden lassitude.
Rachel insisted on going to Cincinnati with him. They drove her VW and arrived on the twenty-eighth. "Now what?" Rachel asked despondently, surveying the room. Everything in it was either brown or gold, even a picture on the wall. They were on the first floor, steps from the swimming pool area, and squeals and shouts were very audible.
"You take a swim. I want to look around. I'll meet you at the pool in half an hour."
She shook her head. "I'll come with you. The pool is solid kids, in case you didn't notice."
He shrugged, and together they strolled back to the lobby, a large open room with half a dozen vinyl-covered chairs, some dim lamps, a tiny newsstand to one side, doorways into two halls, and an arch that led to the elevators.
Julian nodded. It would be simple to sit here and watch anyone checking in. They looked over the dining room and the coffee shop, and he checked entrances and exits. There was no way Stella Johnson could avoid going through the main lobby.
That night he told Rachel that he was planning to stay in the lobby the following day until Stella Johnson appeared and he found out her room number.
"And what am I supposed to do while you do your private eye act?"
"Whatever you want. I don't care."
"I know you don't care! You don't care about anything now, do you? You're too busy chasing a childhood illusion!"
"I didn't ask you to come, remember. I didn't even want you to come!"
"Well, maybe I won't stay very long! This is crazy! You know this is crazy, don't you?"
Furiously he stalked out of the room and sat by the pool glowering at the children in the water. Crazy, it kept coming back to that. In a little while Rachel came and sat by him.
"I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I'll go downtown tomorrow and do a little shopping, buy a couple of books. If she doesn't come tomorrow, can we go home? Will that satisfy you?"
He nodded. She would come.
* * * *
Late in the afternoon the next day the manager of the motel asked him why he was loitering in the lobby. It was the same woman he had talked to the year before, but obviously she did not remember him at all. He mumbled something about his wife visiting her family, and small rooms giving him claustrophobia, but after that he knew the desk clerk was keeping an eye on him.
Stella Johnson showed up at four-thirty. He recognized her instantly. She wore sunglasses that covered nearly half her face, and her hair was hidden by a scarf, but he felt certain enough to approach the desk and start examining the tourist brochures as she registered. About mid to late thirties, he estimated, noticing the small lines about her mouth, and the way her hand was already starting to look bony. He stayed close enough to hear her room number when the clerk gave her a key, and then wandered to the window, ostentatiously checked his watch, and left. She was on the second floor, number twenty-two.
"What are you going to do now?" Rachel asked. She was subdued and looked frightened.
"Sometime before she has a chance to leave, I'm going to grab her and keep her for a day or two and then put her in a shower. You'll see. And then I'm going to deliver her to the FBI."
Rachel paled. "That's kidnapping! You can't do that! Julian, please, just call the police and tell them; let them take care of it now."
"I went through that once," he said brusquely. "Not again." He thought, then said, "I'll follow her tomorrow, see where she goes. There might be a lot of them, maybe they meet here every year."
The upper rooms all had two entrance doors, one from the balcony that led down to the pool area, and an inside door to the hallway and elevators inside. Julian missed Stella Johnson when she left the motel. At ten-thirty he put in a call to her room and no one answered the telephone. At eleven he watched the cleaning woman enter and he knew he had lost her.
"I don't want to hang around here all day," Rachel said. "She won't be back until God knows when. Do you plan to sit and watch her door all day long?"
"Let's go to the zoo," Julian said. "Spend the afternoon there, have a nice dinner, see a movie if you want. Okay?"