Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 18

“You never said what he looked like,” Ardis Troyer observed as she sat with her husband at the table in the dining area, their evening meal of grilled pork chops and boiled potatoes and carrots in front of them, their daughter’s drying in the oven. Ardis’s dog Keeper lay under the table, against her foot.

He glanced up. “What?”

“What he looked like.”

He turned away.

Ardis put down her fork like something fragile. “The only reason I ask, Ross, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that at least your daughter’s showing a little initiative for once. Venturing out into the world like a functioning adult female of the species.”

“There’s nothing functioning about seven hours to show a few properties.”

“No?” Ardis smiled. She picked up her fork. “How old was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Approximately.”

“No idea. Thirty.”

“Handsome?”

“What? How should I know?”

“You saw him! You talked to him, Ross! Ross, listen to me. Something about this mystery stranger has inspired your holier-than-the-Christ hermit daughter to get up off her skinny arse and drive him out to show him seven hours’ worth of properties. That’s the miracle unfolding as we speak, and it’s beyond me why you aren’t showing a little more interest or enthusiasm, something.”

When her husband did not respond, Ardis sat for a moment watching him, perhaps waiting to see if he was only taking his time. Waiting, she sipped her vermouth. As she set down her glass she murmured, “Of course with our luck he’ll be a serial killer.” Again she waited, and then she said, “Not that after seven straight hours of her anybody wouldn’t be.” She looked at him. “What properties?”

He shook his head.

In a musing tone she said, “It’s a long ways if she took it on herself to show him them two A-frames up by Biddesfirth.” “It’s not seven hours.”

“Not any more.” She was looking at her watch. “It’s eight.” She was thinking again. “Of course there’s meals. If she didn’t eat lunch, she’d need dinner. You know how hypo she gets. Candlelight at the Coach House maybe?”

His eyes came up to consider her.

“Ross, relax. Eat something, for God’s sake. Stop looking like somebody just rammed a hot poker up your arse. It’s not even dark yet. I’m sure she’ll phone when she comes to one. She’s fine. Exploring life, we should hope.”

His eyes had gone to the kitchen, to the clock over the stove. Now they came away from there.

Ardis resumed eating. After a minute she asked, “How tall was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, when you talked to him,” she said in a lilt of exasperation, “were you looking up, or down, or what?”

He gazed at her with incredulous loathing.

She had thought of something. “He didn’t have dark hair, did he? Fine and straight—?”

“I don’t remember.” He looked away. “Maybe.”

“A blue turtleneck? Stained?”

“A dark turtleneck. I don’t know about stained.”

She clapped her hands. “I talked to him yesterday! At the restaurant! He’s looking for property!”

“He’s not looking for property. He’s another reporter.”

Ardis was musing. “Maybe. That’s what I thought. But eight hours, Ross. Eight hours. You know yourself she won’t give reporters the time of day any more. You practically have to—Well well well. It does seem like she got lost, all right. Lost in a truck ceiling. Just like the rest of them around here after all. A little slow to sort her ass from the heavenly bodies, but—” Ardis sat back in an attitude of relief. A moment later she leaned forward with her eyes googled and waggling her hands at the sides of her face. “Feelings! Funny feelings! Whooo! Must be from on high!”

“The reason she took him out,” he said carefully, his attention upon his plate, the food untouched, “I wasn’t there.”

“So you claim. But there’s nothing very new about that, is there, Ross? It’s never got her to take them out before.”

“I know what she’s thinking,” he said in an ordinary voice, although it no longer seemed to be his wife he was addressing. “I’m not fooled.”

“Look on the bright side,” Ardis said. “Even as we speak she’s out there solving our problem. Either she’s got off her rear end to sell property or she’s on her back arranging things another way—What are you doing?”

He was holding his dinner plate in his right hand, touching the rim of it to his left arm just below the shoulder. He was doing this casually, with his head tilted downward and to the side as if to regard the plate, and yet his attention seemed upon some object more remote.

Ardis’s hand went to her heart. She was silent now, and watched in a freeze of dismay as the plate moved swiftly rightward across his chest, his right arm extending, fingers releasing so that the plate sailed like a Frisbee through the doorway and across the space of the kitchen to explode against the oven door. There a gob of mashed potato adhered a moment to the Pyrex of the oven window before it fell away to leave a white pucker, and Ardis understood that the pucker appeared at that moment as white as it did only because the Pyrex was carbon-fouled inside a double pane, owing to an engineering flaw in that so-called quality stove, they get a reputation and the next thing you know immigrants working for chicken feed are asleep on their feet throwing together any old crap, and who pays—? She was on her feet. “Ross, honey, don’t!”

He now held his bread-and-butter plate in that same hand, the rim of it just brushing his left arm midway between the elbow and shoulder as if to indicate something there, and she looked to it hopeful, but his arm moved swiftly back, extending as before, and the wrist flicked, the fingers releasing, and that plate too travelled through the air, to smash against the hall-entrance door frame and scatter down the length of the hall to the front door.

“She doesn’t fool me,” he said again, quietly. “I know her.” And then he put his hands over his face and sat in silence.

Ardis lowered herself into her chair. It was as if she had been struck a blow to the stomach. She had no breath.

When he brought his hands away he was calm. “I’ll clean that up,” he said. “And clear the table.” He pushed his chair back and with his hands on his knees, elbows spread, peered beneath the table at her stockinged feet, which were drawn together under her chair. The dog was still under there, and it looked out at him with frightened eyes. “Don’t walk.” He stood up. “I’ll get your shoes. You put the dog out and go straight to the room and wait for me there. Have the gear ready. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”

“Oh, Ross,” Ardis said, and sighed. Sighed so profoundly she could hardly speak. “I can talk a lot more like this than this, than, than, than—”

“No more. That’s enough. Where’s your fucking shoes?”

“My fucking shoes,” Ardis sighed and seemed about to faint in her chair at the table where she sat.