"Aaron Wolfe - Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Aaron)

"Or any other animal," I agreed.

"Are the horses calmed down?"

"I don't hear them any more," I said.

"Do you think it'll be backтАФwhatever it is?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

We stared at each other. Her perpetually startled eyes seemed even
wider than usual. My eyes were probably wide too. We were frightened,
and we didn't know why. No one had been hurtтАФ-or even threatened. We
had seen nothing frightening. We had heard nothing frightening. It had
done nothing more than scare the horses. But our fear was real, vague but
indisputable: intuitive.

"Well," she said abruptly, "you were longer than I imagined you'd be.
I'd better start dinner."

I drew her to me and hugged her. "Rotten horses."

"There's always later."

I kissed her.
 She kissed backтАФand smiled when Toby called for us from the living
room. "Later."

I released her, turned back to the sun porch door, and slid the bolt latch
in place, although we usually left it unlocked. When we went through the
kitchen door, I closed and locked that too.


Chapter Four
After dinner I went into the den and took from the shelves all the
volumes that might conceivably help me to identify our mysterious new
neighbor. Sitting behind the heavy, dark oak desk, a short brandy at hand,
the empty gun cabinet at my back, I spent more than an hour paging
through eight thick books, studying descriptions, drawings, and
photographs of wildlife prints and spoors. With those animals whose
marks I found altogether unfamiliar, I turned the examples on their sides
and upside down, hoping to come across the prints that I was looking for
simply by viewing these at odd angles. In some four hundred samples,
however, there was nothing vaguely similar to what I had seen in the
snow, regardless of the view that I took of them.

I was putting the books back on the shelves when Connie came into the
den.

She said, "Any luck?"