Читать книгу The Twisted Shadow - Edith Dorian - Страница 6

THE COLOR FLAMED BACK INTO JUDY’S FACE AS SHE gaped down at the top of the ranger’s dark head. She had never been more furious at anyone in her life.

“What do you mean don’t hurt him?” she snapped. “He was rattling his tail. I heard him.”

“Of course he was,” the ranger said. He struggled to his feet with two yards of snake in his arms, and eyed her reproachfully. “Wouldn’t you make fierce noises if somebody tried to tramp on you?”

His voice sounded so aggrieved that Judy felt herself beginning to laugh. Then, to her dismay, she discovered she couldn’t stop. The more alarmed the ranger looked, the harder she laughed.

“Here, stop that,” he ordered, and Judy promptly stopped to glare at him. Who did he think he was to order her around? He couldn’t be more than a year or so older than she was! She opened her mouth to say something withering, but he didn’t give her a chance.

“Relax, will you?” he begged. “Nobody’s found a poisonous snake in Maine for a hundred years. This pine snake was just putting on a show so you’d leave him alone. If you’d come look at his eyes, you’d know next time. Rattlers have elliptical pupils. This snake’s are round as marbles.”

But Judy refused to budge.

“I don’t care what he is,” she said firmly. “I still don’t like him.”

“Well, you would if you knew him better,” the ranger assured her. “Believe it or not, snakes make good pets.” He scratched the pine snake under the chin and smiled at her cheerfully. “This fellow’s a summer resident like you. I drove him down from New Jersey.”

Fortunately for her blood pressure, Judy was too aghast even to notice the comparison. She was staring at him, appalled.

“You mean you actually had that thing in a car with you?” she demanded. “What were you trying to do, panic the parkways?”

“Okay, okay, you win,” the ranger conceded soothingly. “If you don’t like him, you don’t like him.” Looking resigned, he hooked a stout, screened cage out from under a bayberry bush with his foot and deposited the snake inside.

Judy, however, still registered a marked lack of enthusiasm for the whole situation. A little whittled stick stuck through a hasp failed to impress her as an adequate way to secure a six-foot reptile mean enough to imitate a rattlesnake. But the ranger straightened up again, acting as if everything were now under control.

“Maybe I’d better introduce myself,” he said. “Assistant Ranger Timothy Wade, at your service. Do you want a key to a cabin or are you just looking for friends?”

“Neither,” Judy retored with dignity. “I’m Judith Carrington from the bookmobile.” Retrieving the book she had thrown at the snake, she added the two from the doorstep and handed them over in a neat stack. “These must be yours,” she said frostily. “But we don’t have the book on Brazilian antivenins yet. We had to order it.” Then turning on her heel, she was about to start for the station wagon when she thought of something else. “And if it comes, you can walk out to the bookmobile to get it. Hereafter, I only stop and honk.”

Get stuck on a date with that ranger and you’d need a mongoose, Judy thought crossly as she headed the bookmobile up Gallows Road. It was a miracle he didn’t hiss when he talked! Maybe she should have stayed where she belonged and worked in the New York Public Library again. But after all, she ought to be able to ignore one ranger; the rest of them were probably human. And she did not like humid heat. New York was perfect for college in the winter; it just was not her idea of a summer resort. That was why she had jumped at this job when the Personnel Bureau at Barnard had told her about it, she reminded herself—that and the fact that Sinnett Harbor made her family seem nearer. Even after all these years, her mother still had a Harbor accent. Her father must be right; a born State of Mainer was always a State of Mainer. He claimed you could scratch the surface of any of them, no matter how long they had been away, and come spang up against a Maine ledge every time.

Judy shelved the obnoxious ranger, and put her mind firmly back on the road. On her bookmobile route map, Sinnett Harbor looked like a big mitten dropped down on Pentecost Bay, and Gallows Road ran between the tall pines of the Park preserve and the salt water of the Bay’s inlet right along the edge of its gargantuan thumb. What kept surprising Judy about it was the lack of traffic. Somehow, with the entrance to the National Park at the end, she had expected campers to be hiking all over the scenery. Instead it ribboned emptily out ahead of her. She had not seen another car all afternoon. Except for its paving, Gallows Road must look exactly as it had in her mother’s childhood. For that matter, it probably had not even changed since the eighteenth century when the notorious pirate, Bold Dick, used to anchor his Sea Hawk impudently off Gibbet Ridge practically in the shadow of the town gallows!

Remembering Bold Dick set Judy’s thoughts wandering again. Ever since she had written that term paper in American lit., she had been wondering why Sandys Winter had waited till last year to write Rogue’s Hour. She would have thought Bold Dick was a natural for one of his first books. After all, not every novelist had a handy piratical ancestor who struck his Jolly Roger and came sailing home to haul his ship’s eighteen-pounders onto Gun Point in the nick of time to save his native town from the British. Mr. Winter even still lived in the same house Bold Dick had built after he rescued his lovely Tory, Charity Royalle, from the gallows to marry her. At least, though, when Mr. Winter did get around to writing Rogue’s Hour, it had won him the Pulitzer Prize for the second time, and the movie version had just captured Oscars for half its cast.

For a barefoot boy from a salt-water farm who had sailed on a fishing schooner to earn money to go to college, Sandys Winter had certainly acquired the Midas touch, Judy decided. Everything he wrote turned into a smash-hit movie. It was strange that he had never married. His pictures looked distinguished enough, definitely Park Avenue tailoring and Dunhill pipes. Maybe success had turned him into a stuffed shirt. Anyway, she was likely to find out soon. She had not been in the library an hour this morning before she discovered he was the member of the board of trustees who had given the new wing.

A pair of great blue herons flapped down in the marsh grass along the inlet and Judy promptly forgot everything else. She even stopped the station wagon a while to watch them, and when she got going again, she no longer had Gallows Road to herself. A Model A was chugging toward her from town, but it seemed to be pulling over to the shoulder. Maybe her herons had lighted farther on now. When she looked at the Ford the next time, however, the driver was bending over its hood.

Of all the deserted places to get stuck in, Judy thought sympathetically as she stopped alongside the white-haired man in hip boots and salt-stained dungarees who was struggling with a crank. “Couldn’t I give you a push, or a lift or something?” she asked.

“A push would do it,” the man said gratefully. “She seems set against being cranked.” He smiled at Judy, his deep-set eyes startlingly blue in his weathered face. “I stopped to plug a lobster claw and my starter went dead.”

Judy nodded cheerfully. “Okay, here we go,” she said, and maneuvered until she could drive in behind him.

“I don’t dare stop again, but I’m much obliged,” he called out his window as his car got going once more. “We’ll meet soon anyway.”

Listening to the familiar chug-chug, Judy chuckled to herself. She thought it highly probable. With an obstinate starter and an ornery crank, he was likely to be still stuck near a Park cabin on her Friday trip if he had to stop to deliver his lobsters. So far this had been quite a day!

The rest of it was peaceful enough, however, and she spent the evening placidly unpacking and writing a ten-page letter to her family. Consequently, it was irritating to have snakes on her mind again before she could even get down to breakfast the next morning. Her brand-new lipstick had turned up missing, and she knew she had had it in her pocket right up to the minute she encountered that rangers repulsive reptile. Judy was in no humor to be philosophical about it either, not with payday four days off. Screwing up the two lipsticks she had on her bureau, she eyed them both with a grimace of distaste. If she had to make out with those stubs until Friday afternoon, somebody was bound to think she was trying to land a clown’s job with Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. Worst of all, “somebody” was likely to be her landlord and landlady, Captain and Mrs. Matthew Dunning—and Captain Matt was chairman of the library board.

As a matter of fact, however, the effect Judy achieved with one of those stubs was unlike any clown’s mouth on record, and Captain Matt’s shrewd blue eyes twinkled as he watched her swing up the harbor’s Foreside past his workshop after breakfast.

“Blonde and jet-propelled,” he remarked to his wife with interest, and Jen Dunning smiled at him.

“I shouldn’t wonder if the breeze around the library blew a mite brisker than it’s blown for quite a spell,” she agreed cheerfully.

But that Tuesday morning the breeze around the library was already brisk enough to suit Judy. She had her hands full with something called “Bold Dick Week.” Sinnett Harbor, she had learned, was about to celebrate the 175th anniversary of its famous escape from the British during the Revolution, and though it was possible someone in the town might not be on a committee, nothing happened to make Judy think it was probable. The library bulged all day with committee members hunting for weird information—like the ingredients of whipped silla-bub or the proper way to fasten a hangman’s noose.

About five-thirty, though, when she dashed out to the nearest drugstore to grab a sandwich and a cup of coffee for supper, Judy began to look confidently forward to an evening lull. With weather like this, nobody in his right mind was going to coop himself up if he could stay outside and watch a full moon rise over Pentecost Bay. But she had failed to reckon with Sinnett Harbor’s Yankee thoroughness. By six-thirty two committees had already put Miss Leonard, the head librarian, and her senior assistant, Miss Addison, out of action, and by seven Judy was wishing she were twins. Barry St. Leger, the director of the summer theater, had marched in with a slew of costume and scenery people in his wake, and she was doing a marathon between the circulation desk and the table they had preempted.

Being asked to help find books on period costumes she took in her stride, but a casual request for the original Hollywood sketches of the Rogue’s Hour costumes made her eyes pop. She would never have suspected that the Sinnett Harbor Library owned them and she had no idea where to start looking. Then when she did locate them, Sandys Winter’s longhand manuscript of Rogue’s Hour was stowed away in the same file drawer! And to top that, the men who had asked for the costume sketches turned out to be Broadway’s famous Sam Runner and Joe Harne, in town because they had done a musical version of the Winter book for Bold Dick Week. The Lady and the Pirate they told her it was called.

Back on her perch behind the circulation desk for a few minutes, Judy grinned to herself. She was suddenly imagining her college roommate’s face if she walked in and discovered Broadway in the reference room. According to Babs, working in a library was the equivalent of sealing yourself in a tomb, and she thought Judy was crazy to plan to go to library school.

“Why spend your life among fossils while the world wags by?” she argued. “Me for an office. I want to see something that at least looks like a date once in a while!”

Judy glanced at the playwrights across the room and grinned again. Mr. Runner and Mr. Harne might not qualify as dates, but Babs would certainly never classify them among the fossils. With her passion for the theater, she’d be standing on her ear in excitement.

Eventually even the theater people drifted out the door, though, and Judy promptly tackled the job of getting reference books back on the shelves. It was already twenty minutes of nine and she was not aching to stay overtime. The thought of Miss Leonard and Miss Addison stuck in the new wing with their committees troubled her, however. Obviously she could not walk out and leave them holding the bag. They must be dead on their feet. Still, twenty minutes were twenty minutes. They might all get out of the building on time yet. At least no one else would come in now.

Actually Judy cherished that comforting idea for less than seven minutes. The door latch clicked again, and she spun around to start back to the circulation desk, trying to look like a welcome mat and a time clock simultaneously. But she dropped the welcome part of the act in a hurry. Thirteen minutes to closing and she had to cope with Assistant Ranger Timothy Wade!