Читать книгу At The Stroke Of Madness - Alex Kava, Alex Kava - Страница 11

Wallingford, Connecticut

Lillian Hobbs loved her Mondays. It was the one time she left Rosie alone during the busy rush hours, steaming milk for lattes, collecting sticky quarters for cheese Danishes and the New York Times. Not a problem. According to Rosie, the busier, the better. After all, it had been Rosie’s idea to add a coffee bar to their little bookstore.

“It’ll bring in business,” Rosie had promised. “Foot traffic we might not get otherwise.”

Foot traffic was just the thing Lillian had dreaded. And so at first she had revolted. Well, maybe revolted was too strong a word. Lillian Hobbs had never really revolted against anything in her forty-six years of life. She simply hadn’t seen the wisdom in Rosie’s side enterprise. In fact, she worried that the coffee bar would be a distraction. That it would bring in the gossipmongers who would rather make up their own stories than purchase one off their shelves.

But Rosie had been right. Again. The coffee crowd had been good for business. It wasn’t just that they cleaned them out of the daily New York Times and USA TODAY. There were the magazine sales, and the occasional paperbacks that got picked up on impulse. Soon the regular coffee drinkers—even the mocha lattes with extra whipped cream and the espresso addicts—were browsing the shelves and wandering back into the store after work and on the weekends. Sometimes bringing their families or their friends. Okay, so foot traffic hadn’t been such a bad thing, after all.

Yes, Rosie had been right.

Actually, Lillian didn’t mind admitting that. She knew Rosie was the one with a head for business. Business was Rosie’s forte and books were Lillian’s. That’s why they made such excellent partners. She didn’t even mind Rosie rubbing her nose in it every once in a while. How could she mind when she was allowed to revel in her own passion every single day of the week? But Mondays were the best, like having Christmas once a week. Christmas sitting in a crammed, dark storage room, soothed by her cup of hazelnut coffee and armed with a box cutter.

Opening each box was like ripping into a precious gift. At least that’s what it felt like for Lillian, opening each new shipment of books, pushing back the cardboard flaps and taking in that aroma of ink and paper and binding that could so easily transport her to a whole different world. Whether it was a shipment of eighteenth-century history books or a boxful of Harlequin romances or the latest New York Times bestseller, it didn’t matter. She simply loved the feel, the smell, the sight of a box of books. What could be more heavenly?

Except that this Monday the stacks of ready and waiting cartons couldn’t keep Lillian’s mind from wandering. Roy Morgan, who owned the antique store next door, had raced in about an hour ago, breathless, ranting and raving and talking crazy. With his face flushed red—Lillian had noticed even his earlobes had been blazing—and his eyes wild, Roy looked as though he would have a stroke. Either that, or he was having a mental breakdown. Only Roy was probably the sanest person Lillian knew.

He kept stumbling over his words, too. Talking too fast and too choppy. Like a man panicked or in a frenzy. Yes, like a man who was losing his mind. And what he was saying certainly sounded like he had gone mad.

“A woman in a barrel,” he said more than once. “They found her stuffed in a barrel. A fifty-five-gallon drum. Just east of McKenzie Reservoir. Buried under a pile of brownstone in the old McCarty rock quarry.”

It sounded like something out of a suspense thriller. Something only Patricia Cornwell or Jeffery Deaver would create.

“Lillian,” Rosie called from the door of the storage room, making Lillian jump. “They have something on the news. Come see.”

She came out to find them all crowded around a thirteen-inch TV set that she had never seen before. Someone had slid it in between the display of pastries and the napkin dispenser. Even Rosie’s coveted antique jar that she used for the pink packages of Sweet’n Low had been shoved aside. As soon as Lillian saw the TV, she knew. First a coffee bar, now a TV. She knew that whatever was happening would change everything. Not for the better. She could feel it, like a storm brewing. Could feel it coming on like when she was a child, and she had been able to predict her mother’s temper tantrums before they started.

On the small TV screen she saw Calvin Vargus, her brother’s business partner, standing in front of the petite news reporter. Calvin looked like a plaid railroad tie, solid and stiff and bulky but with a silly boyish grin as if he had discovered some hidden treasure.

Lillian listened to Calvin Vargus describe—although they were getting his bleeped version—how his machine had dug up the barrel out of the rocks.

“I dropped it. Bam! Just like that. And its (bleep) lid sort of popped off when it hit the ground. And (bleep) if it wasn’t a (bleep bleep) dead body.”

Lillian checked the huddled crowd—about a dozen of their regulars—and looked for her brother. Had he come in yet for his daily bear claw and glass of milk? And his opportunity to complain about today’s aches and pains. Sometimes it was his back, other times it was the bursitis in his shoulder or his ultrasensitive stomach. She wondered what he would think about his partner’s discovery.

Finally, she saw Walter Hobbs sipping his milk as he sat at the end of the counter, three empty stools away from the frenzy. Lillian took the long way around and sat on the stool next to him. He glanced at her and went back to his copy of Newsweek opened in front of him, more interested in the headlines about dead Al Qaeda members found a world away than the dead body in their own backyard.

Without looking up at her and without waiting for her question, Walter Hobbs shook his head and mumbled, “Why the hell couldn’t he have stayed away and left that fucking quarry alone?”