"Cold Day in Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Richard)

4

ROBIN BURRELL WAS an extremely organized person. She had divided the letters and the printed-out e-mails into three categories and set them in separate piles on her dining table.

“These are the general ones,” she had told me, indicating the largest of the piles. “They’re pretty much ‘you go, girl’ letters. A lot of them are very sweet. ‘Keep your chin up. Don’t let them get you down. We’re behind you.’ That kind of thing.”

I picked up a letter from the pile. It was from Karen from Texas. That’s how the author of the letter had signed it. It was written on holiday stationery, a sheet of cream-colored paper bordered with red silhouettes of reindeer. Karen’s handwriting was round and precise. She made her O’s large and, in words with two of them in a row, strung them together so they looked like the eyes of an owl. Karen might have been eleven or eighty, it was impossible to tell.

Dear Robin,

On TV you look very brave. I’m sorry the lawyers are being so mean to you but I guess that is their job. I thought I should tell you that when you look right into the camera you look like you regret everything that happened from the bottom of your heart. I am including you in my prayers. God bless you.

Karen from Texas

“Most of the ones in that pile are from women,” Robin said. “Though with some of the e-mails, if they don’t sign their names, it’s sometimes hard to tell from the e-mail address.”

The other two piles had interested me more. There were fewer letters in these piles. Mostly, they were e-mails that Robin had printed out. One of the piles contained messages from men who wanted to either meet Robin, date her, introduce her to their family, marry her, or take her far, far away from New York. This last category included a proposed thirty-day hike in New Zealand.

“That one actually made me think twice,” Robin said. “Thirty days in New Zealand sounds like a paradise to me right about now.”

“What do you think of Gary?” I held up a photograph of a thirtyish man wearing a red baseball cap and posing alongside a six-foot-tall Minnie Mouse. Gary ’s was a marriage proposal. He wrote that he lived in the Finger Lakes district of central New York State, owned a house and a small boat, and had a contact at one of the local wineries, so he could get “the good stuff” at below cost.

“It says here he’s single and never been married. What’s a grown man with no kids doing down in Disney World getting his picture taken with Minnie Mouse?”

“Please don’t make fun of him,” Robin said. “I’m guessing he’s a very lonely person. That’s what a lot of these seem to be from.”

“Which piles are the kinky ones in?”

“I put those in with the hate mail.” She tapped a finger on the remaining pile. “Listen, I can’t thank you enough for doing this. Are you sure you don’t want any tea or something? A drink?”

“I’m fine.”

“I feel bad imposing myself on you this way.”

“You’re not imposing. Don’t mention it.”

She picked the top sheet off the third pile. “A lot of these are just stupid horny stuff. Still, it’s creepy, being on the receiving end. But some of the others get really nasty. I just figured either way, nasty or stupid, they’ve come from people I wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley, so I bunched them all in as hate mail.”

She scanned the paper in her hand, and tears came to her eyes. She handed it to me. Her voice was choked. “Why is this happening?”