The Drifter. Сьюзен Виггс

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      The Mundy place had a real honest-to-God bathhouse, Jackson was pleased to discover. Apparently, this had been a fine estate at one time, and the previous owner had spared no expense in endowing it with luxuries. Perpetua Dawson, the small, busy woman who ran the kitchen, had shown him to the bathhouse, pointing out the deep zinc tubs and the furnace-heated water supply.

      After laboring to bring the crippled boat into harbor, Jackson had looked in on Carrie, finding her listless and vague. Trying to calm the panic beating in his chest, he went to the baths to enjoy the first good soak he’d had since…Santa Fe, was it? No, there was that night in San Francisco not so long ago. A frizzy-haired whore, wet-brained from too much beer, had careered right into Jackson and landed in his lap. Laughing, Carrie had struck up a conversation with her and blurted out that they’d bought passage to Seattle. He’d thought the whore was too far gone to hear. He hoped he was right.

      Carrie had cajoled him into spending his winnings on a room at the Lombard Hotel. She had exclaimed gleefully over the luxurious velvet draperies, the champagne and oysters, the tray of chocolate truffles….

      But then she’d looked at the fancy grille on the window and shivered. “This is a prison, Jackson. They’ll never let me out of here. I’ll never be safe. Never.”

      “Hush now, Carrie,” he’d said, repeating an age-old pledge. “I’ll keep you safe.”

      “Build up the fire,” she had begged. “It’s too cold in here.”

      The thought ignited an old, old memory that raised a bittersweet ache in his chest. The years peeled away and he was a boy again, sitting on the wet brick pavement in the moldering courtyard of the St. Ignatius Orphan Asylum of Chicago. Through a grille-covered window he could hear a little girl sobbing, sobbing.

      Carrie. With shaking hands, Jackson had held the bundle of sweets he’d stolen from the pantry of the refectory. The sweets were never given to the children, of course. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon saved them for themselves.

      Holding a little cloth bag of gumdrops, Jackson started to climb. His feet, in worn and ill-fitting shoes, wedged into the gaps left by crumbling mortar. His wiry arms trembled as he pulled himself up. A sliver from the windowsill stabbed into his hand. He ignored the pain. At St. I’s, kids knew better than to cry over a sliver.

      “Carrie,” he said, finding a toehold on the rain gutter. “Carrie, it’s me, Jackson.”

      Her sobbing hiccuped into silence. Then she spoke, her little-girl’s voice clear as a crystal bell. “They locked me in. Oh, save me, Jackson. I’m so cold. I’ll die in here.”

      “I couldn’t pick the lock,” he said apologetically. “I tried and tried.” He pushed the bag of sweets between the rusty bars of the window. “Gumdrops, Carrie!”

      “Red ones?”

      The silence spun out. A distant horn blew, signaling the end of the shift for Chicago’s dockworkers at Quimper Shipyards. The swampy smell of Lake Michigan blew in on a cold wind through the courtyard. “Carrie?” Jackson strained to see inside the locked room, but spied only shadows. “You all right?”

      “No,” she said, the word muffled by a mouthful of candy. “What’s this, Jackson?”

      “Something I made for you. Carved it out of firewood.”

      “It’s a bird.”

      “Uh-huh.” He imagined her turning it over in her small hands. He was proud of his work, his attention to detail. It was a dove; he’d copied the stained glass Holy Ghost in St. Mary’s Church. At Christmas and Easter, the brothers scrubbed the orphans up and paraded them to church, and Jackson had always spent the hour staring at the jewel-colored windows.

      “Oh, Jackson.” Her voice came through the barred window. “I’ll keep it with me always.”

      “I put a hole in the back so you can wear it on a string around your neck.”

      “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, and he had the eerie impression she wasn’t speaking to him. “I just wanted to hold the baby, just wanted to be warm by the fire, but they blamed it all on me, put me here in the cold. I’m scared, Jackson.”

      His legs began to tremble from the effort of holding himself up. “Carrie—”

      “You there,” barked a deep, familiar voice. “Get down from there, boy!”

      Jackson didn’t have to look back to know Brother Anthony stood below, flexing a knotted belt while his eyes gleamed with hell’s fury and his costly ring of office flashed in the light.

      “Are you deaf, boy, or just stupid? I said get down.”

      He СКАЧАТЬ