The Mural. Michael Mallory

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СКАЧАТЬ Marc Broarty, I hope.”

      “It was someone named Danica Lindstrom.”

      “Oh...um, what did she say?”

      Elley stared at him for a moment. “Not as much as the expression on your face.”

      “Look, Elley—”

      “I have to go pack. I’ll eat later.” She spun around and headed up the staircase, disappearing into their bedroom, whose door closed with a resounding slam.

      Jack sighed.

      “I’m hungry, Daddy.”

      Turning, he looked at his daughter, whose warm brown eyes were opened wide like those of a cartoon character. “I’m hungry too. Let’s eat.”

      Getting plates from the kitchen, he set them down on the table and started unpacking the food bag, setting out the Styrofoam container holding Robynn’s fish and chips in front of her, and putting his containing the grilled sea bass next to it, holding it carefully so as not to let any of the dark juice drip onto the snowy tablecloth.

      “Isn’t Mommy coming?” Robynn asked.

      “Mommy’s busy right now, she’ll be down later. But let’s you and I eat.”

      “Mommy’s busy a lot.”

      “I know.”

      Jack scooped the fish and rice onto his plate and took a bite. It was excellent, but he was not really able to enjoy it. He had given Dani his cell and home numbers before leaving San Simeon, and gave her permission to call him if she discovered anything about the mural, but he had not expected her to do it so soon. If he hadn’t been so anxious to get out of the house, he might have intercepted the call, and pretended it was Yolanda. If he hadn’t been so intent on taking the time to insult the old bag at the restaurant he might have even made it back in time to catch it before Elley did. Earlier, if he hadn’t been so involved in making his notes and drinking his beers, he might have given some thought to dinner ahead of time. If he had only given Dani his cell number, this would not have happened at all.

      If, if, if, if, if, if.

      Well, he would talk to Elley. He’d have to. The noose he had managed to tie around his neck could not be totally undone, but maybe it was possible to slacken it up a little, just enough to breathe.

      He got up and went to the fridge and pulled out the one remaining Sam Adams from the six-pack. Fucking bitch! he thought furiously, walking back to the table, no longer certain at whom he was directing his rage.

      CHAPTER SIX

      God, what an idiot she had been for not simply hanging up when Jack didn’t answer himself. His wife had not said anything overtly accusatory to her, but the frost level in her voice fully communicated that she did not believe for a nanosecond Dani was innocently helping Jack out with a work project. While there was no denying that his wife would be justified in feeling so had she known that Dani had climaxed more times with Jack in one day than she had with Perry in the last six months of their marriage, Dani had said nothing to indicate what they had done.

      Had Jack confessed? Dani doubted it. Had he done so, his wife would have gotten screaming hysterics from his wife instead of icy condescension. From now on she would avoid calling him at home.

      What she had intended to tell Jack, had she gotten him on the phone, was information she had gleaned from spending the day in Glenowen, which proved to be a charming, historic village whose local industries were arts, crafts and antiques. In the course of rambling through the town’s century-old-or-better business district she had stopped into a tiny bookshop which featured locally written and published works. One of them was a book of ghost stories from the Central Coast area. The back cover had promised more in the way of local folklore than things bumping in the night, but Dani bought a copy anyway and took it back to the motel, where she started to read it while sipping a mimosa in the Pines bar.

      Even though Dani had not been looking for anything in particular, she quickly found something pertinent: a section on Wood City. It failed to provide any sources for the information, which meant it was probably a combination of old folk tales with a few newspaper articles thrown in for the illusion of veracity, but actually having visited Wood City, accepting the conclusions made by the author of the book did not take a great stretch.

      Cursed Ghost Town in the Pines

      Deep in the forest at the base of the Santa Lucia Mountain Range in between Glenowen and San Simeon lies the deserted ghost town of Wood City. It was originally designed and built in the 1930s by industrialist Henry J. Breen as the place where the workers of his intended lumber mill, which was to be located nearby, would live. Newspapers of the time proclaimed that Wood City would be an idyllic village, but old timers who remember the town say it looked more like a work camp. Some claimed it was the concept of a company store taken to the extremes: an entire company village.

      But that isn’t reason the Depression-era town has spawned a legend all its own. Even before it opened for business, Wood City was said to be cursed. Many thought it was because Breen himself collapsed and died right in the center of town just before it was completed, and that his spirit remained to haunt the place. More rational people of course simply claim that Breen’s sudden death, combined with his unwise business decision to build the town before the mill that would support its residents, doomed the entire venture. Some have even said that the town was destined to fail from the very start, since Breen seems to have chosen the location for his mill more from a standpoint of nettling his neighbor, rival tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whom Breen hated, rather than the belief that the forests of the Central Coast were prime for such a venture. Ego wars among the rich are not recent inventions.

      None of that, however, can explain the reports of disappearances amongst the citizens of Wood City. Entire families were said to have simply vanished. Many have argued that these disappearances were for perfectly sound reasons. There was, after all, little reason for anyone to stay in the town once it became clear that the lumber mill would never actually be constructed. But because of its strange history, over the years the story of Wood City has taken on a legendary aspect, similar to the mysteries of the disappearances of the Virginia colonists from Roanoke Island or the abandoned “ghost ship” the Mary Celeste.

      Whatever the truth of the situation, within a few years of Breen’s death Wood City was nothing more than a memory. Ruins of the old town still exist, and over the decades there have been many reports from hikers and travelers through the area of having been overcome by strange, foreboding feelings.

      That last part had caused Dani to shiver. Even now she could feel the uninviting aura of the place, the sense of grimness that permeated it like an old, bad memory, which could not be explained simply by way of its desolate location. It was something else, an aura that hung over the site like a cloud. And it had clung to her.

      She had felt that sense of abandon, the sudden conviction that nothing else mattered except satisfying her basest urges, right before she had jumped on Jack Hayden in his truck and rode him like a mechanical bull. It was still lingering within her when they continued to make love at the motel. It did not abate until hours later, after she had actually considered picking up another man in the bar and taking him back to her room. When the feeling had finally gone away, she had reacted not so much with a feeling of guilt, but of shock. It was not like her to be a sexual predator, or even sexually aggressive, and hard as she had tried, Dani could not explain away the feeling of being driven by some outside force to act in a way that was not natural for her as either СКАЧАТЬ