Читать книгу Ripper - Исабель Альенде, Isabel Allende - Страница 16

Wednesday, 11

Blake Jackson received half a dozen missed calls from his granddaughter while he was running around like a lunatic after a squash ball. After he had finished his game, he caught his breath, showered, and got dressed. By now it was past nine at night, and his buddy was hungry for Alsatian food and beer.

“Amanda? That you?”

“Who were you expecting? You called me!”

“Did you call?”

“You know I called, Grandpa, that’s why you’re calling me back.”

“Okay, jeez!” Blake exploded. “What the hell do you want, you little brat?”

“I want the lowdown on the shrink.”

“The shrink? Oh, the psychiatrist who was murdered today.”

“It was on the news today, but he was murdered the night before last or early yesterday morning. Find out everything you can.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk to Dad.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will, as soon as I see him, but in the meantime you could get a head start on the investigation. Call me tomorrow with the details.”

“I have to work tomorrow, and I can’t be calling your dad all the time.”

“You want to carry on playing Ripper or not?”

“Uh-huh.”

Blake Jackson was not a superstitious man, but he suspected that the spirit of his late wife had somehow managed to pass to Amanda. Before she died, Marianne had told him that she would always watch over him, that she would help him find comfort in his loneliness. He had assumed she was referring to him marrying again, but in fact she was talking about Amanda. Truth be told, he’d had little time to grieve for the wife he loved so much—he spent the first months of widowhood feeding his granddaughter, putting her to bed, changing her diapers, bathing her, rocking her. Even at night he did not have time to miss the warmth of Marianne’s body in his bed, since Amanda had colic and was screaming at the top of her lungs. The child’s frantic sobbing terrified Indiana, who ended up crying with her while he paced up and down in his pajamas, cradling his granddaughter while reciting chemical formulae he had learned back at pharmacy school. At the time Indiana was a girl herself, barely sixteen years old, inexperienced in her new role as mother, depressed because she was still as fat as a whale and because her husband was worse than useless. No sooner had Amanda stopped suffering from colic than she began cutting her first teeth; then she had chickenpox, with a burning fever and a rash that extended even to her eyelids.

This levelheaded grandfather was surprised to hear himself talking aloud to the ghost of his dead wife, asking what he could do with this impossible creature, and the answer arrived in the form of Elsa Domínguez, a Guatemalan immigrant sent to him by Bob’s mother, Doña Encarnación Martín. Elsa already had more than enough work, but she took pity on Blake Jackson, whose house was like a pigsty, whose daughter couldn’t cope, whose son-in-law was never there, and whose granddaughter was a spoiled crybaby, and so she gave up her other clients and devoted herself to this family. From Monday to Friday, while Blake Jackson was working at the pharmacy and Indiana was at high school, Elsa would show up in her clapped-out car, wearing sweatpants and carpet slippers, to impose order on the chaos—and she managed to transform the screaming ball of fury that was Amanda into a more or less normal little girl. She talked to the child in Spanish, made sure she cleaned her plate, taught her to take her first steps and, later, to sing, to dance, to use a vacuum cleaner and lay the table. On Amanda’s third birthday, when her parents finally separated, Elsa gave her a tabby cat to keep her company and build up her strength. In her village in Guatemala, she said, children grew up with animals, they drank dirty water, but they didn’t get sick like Americans, who succumbed to every germ that came along. And her theory proved to be correct; Gina, the cat, cured Amanda of her asthma and her colic.