The Amulet. A.R. Morlan

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СКАЧАТЬ But what did bother Arlene was the thought of the questions:

      What were you doing out at that time of the morning?

      What were you in the woods, off the path?

      What were you looking for?

      Why did you wait this long to call, ma’am?

      Why didn’t you come right to the station?

      Arlene put the phone back on its little black painted phone stand and sat down on Don’s old wing chair, the one she had never been allowed to sit on when he was alive. Screw you, Donald, she thought, picking petulantly at a loose thread in the right antimacas­sar, while mulling over her dilemma.

      Clearly, she had a choice here—either tell what she knew and have her name splashed all over the paper (and even if they kept her name out of the paper, people would know anyhow­—you couldn’t break wind in Ewerton without everyone and his third cousin knowing you ate beans for supper), and worse yet, have people know for a fact that she was nothing but an old garbage picker, (“See, I tole you Don’ didn’t leave her squirt—”), or sit back and wait until someone else found the body. If she waited long enough, Chief Stanley or Sheriff Sawyer would be able to smell it for themselves, and save her the trouble of coming forward.

      But then again, if there was a murderer about, he or she might have seen her, and be waiting to shut her up before she told. In that case, it would be best if the police were at least aware that she was in danger.

      Brushing her cat Silky off her lap, Arlene got up and went to the phone, fishing in her smock pocket for a handkerchief as she did so.

      FIVE—After Work

      Anna let herself into the house early that afternoon without bothering to knock. Even though Ma got done with work an hour or so before Anna, the young woman knew better than to expect Ma to open the door for her, or for there to be any meal on the table. Not after one of her “I’m so tired!” episodes. If things went as they usu­ally did, it wouldn’t be until late Tuesday or early Wednesday that Ma would so much as talk to Anna, or quit banging into Anna whenever she passed her in the hallway.

      From past experience, Anna knew that things might be smoothed over for the moment if she simply acted as if nothing had happened that morning, so as she closed the door behind her, Anna said, “You wouldn’t believe what those pigs did this time. Broke both gumball machines and then threw the gumballs in one of the driers and turned that on...the crap was baked on the drum. I had to call Gordy to come down and look at it, and naturally he acted as if it was my damned fault.”

      Silence from Ma. Anna pulled off her knit cap and fluffed her hair out with her fingers as she continued, “And I don’t know, if it was the same people or what, but someone dumped a couple of cans of soda all over the carpeting, so I had to mop that up before I could use the vacuum on it. Geez, you’d think they’d drink the whole can after paying fifty cents for it....” Anna let her voice trail off as she wiggled out of her coat, her mouth going dry in the too-quiet house. Apparently, smoothing things over wasn’t going to be easy this time.

      Biting her lip as she hung her coat up, Anna sniffed deeply and thought, The least you could have done was change the cat pan. How would you like it if you were locked in an outhouse for five hours? Not to mention that Anna would have to sleep in a smelly room that night, if she was destined to get any sleep at all. Usually Ma made sure she sat up all night with the TV turned up full blast. Ma could sleep, open-mouthed and snoring blattily, anywhere and at any time, regardless of any noise around her, waking up only when Anna ventured out to turn down the volume.

      Anna went into the bedroom, dodging Mouth as the fat tiger spay ran out into the hallway. Hoping that Ma wouldn’t do anything to the cat while she was busy in the bedroom, Anna held her breath and attacked the full litter pan. As she scraped up the used litter and rolls of poop with a piece of cardboard, dumping the offal onto a sheet of newspaper, Bruiser came sliding up behind her, butting and rubbing his massive head against her back and behind, making soft, high-pitched churrup noises.

      “You’re Mama’s good Bruiser, huh, boy?” she asked the huge black tom, who churruped in reply. Fastidiously, the cat began to scrape the carpet nap over the mound of litter and cat dirt on the big sheet of newspaper spread out before Anna’s knees. Twisting the mess into the middle she said, “There, all gone. See? Mama made all gone with it.”

      Bruiser sat there solemnly regarding his mistress (he was Anna’s cat—Ma wouldn’t even look at him, or allow him out of Anna’s bedroom very often), his wide-spaced green eyes loving and luminous. Ever since he’d relented last January­—after two years of roaming around outside the house—and allowed Anna to take him inside, Bruiser had been her boy. Ma claimed that the only reason the eighteen-pound male had allowed Anna to take him in was be­cause his hind feet were slightly frostbitten, that the winter of ’86 was just too much for him, pride or not.

      “The cold killed old man Holiday, didn’t it? So, it was enough to make him come to you. The cold, not love,” as Ma liked to insist, to try and spoil the total, utter affection between Anna and the huge black cat with the thick neck and ropes of muscles across his shoul­ders. True, Anna still loved her other cat, but somehow, with Bruiser, it was different. And it didn’t bother Anna to admit that she loved the cat more than her own family. Bruiser never yelled at her or made her feel as if she was somehow less than human.

      “Oh, no, no water. Oh, Brupie, Mama’s sorry,” Anna crooned, after glancing at the empty blue water dish on the floor. Bruiser rubbed his big head against her palm, snorting softly, as if to say, “I forgive you.”

      Anna gently nudged the cat back into the room as she backed out, thinking that she had to face Ma sooner or later, so it might as well be now. But Ma wasn’t in the bathroom, even though the door was shut (If I pulled that kind of a stunt, she’d be all over me—), and she wasn’t in the kitchen, either. The basement light wasn’t on, but that didn’t mean anything—Ma had superb night vision, and some­times went into the basement without turning on the lights, just to show Anna how wasteful she was when she turned her light on to clean the cat pan down there.

      After giving Bruiser his water, Anna swallowed her pride and knocked on her mother’s bedroom door. No answer. She cracked open the door and peered in. The bed was unmade, and Ma’s clothes were strewn around the room, some in piles on the floor, others draped over chairs. Nothing terribly unusual there. But no Ma, ei­ther.

      “Office at the FmHA must have been dirty,” she muttered as she went back into the kitchen, finally noticing that her mother’s coat wasn’t hung in its usual place—on a hanger outside the big double closet in the dining room. If Anna were to leave her coat out like that, it would mean another round of swearing and shouting.

      Telling herself that nobody had promised her life would be fair, Anna peered in the refrigerator, trying to make out the back in the darkness (the light had gone out months ago—some sort of short in the wiring), gave up, and turned on the kitchen light.

      “There you are, my pretties.” Anna grabbed the package of freezer-burn-discolored hot dogs she’d found at the IGA last week and went to set them on the counter, before getting a pot from under the stove...until what she saw on the cabinet door made her stand there, arms limp at her sides, the hot dogs fallen to the floor.

      It was as if the very wood of the cupboards was bleeding. Viscid fluid bubbled up from between the coarse pale grain in huge, mis­shapen, oozing letters:

      I’M FUCKING GONE!!!

      Drops of smeary crimson had settled to СКАЧАТЬ