Читать книгу Kawanga - Jack Halliday - Страница 12

CHAPTER EIGHT

The house was dark as Harriet pulled into the driveway. She got out of the car, swung the door closed, caught it, reached back in and scooped up her purse, balancing it with her keys in her right hand; the envelope tumbled out as she re-closed the car door. It lay on the wet gravel in front of her, a gem in a rustic setting. Harriet bent over to retrieve it and dropped her keys. She grunted and crouched down, grabbed all of her things and unlocked the door. She flicked the light switch with her elbow.

World War Three had been fought in the living room of No. 10, Lindon St.

She gasped, dropped her purse, and her keys, slumped into the sofa, rested her heels on the hardwood floor.

The envelope lay in front of the fireplace, center stage.

“What on earth is happening to me?” she asked herself in the quiet of the Sydney evening.

The envelope was magnetic; her eyes were fastened to it now. It seemed almost to taunt her, to dare her to open it and further complicate her life, to add intrigue to extra-marital affair. Her mind reeled. She thought of Tom, of the intrusion of “romance” into her life, and at “her age.” She folded her arms, clutched herself, feeling the pain of her infidelity. “Money, marriage, madness!” she thought as she brooded over her relationship with Tom. And he was gone, in America. “And you’re here, alone,” she thought, lashing herself with her words.

“What was in that envelope?”

She slid off the sofa and sat, Indian-style on the bare floor. She picked up the envelope, turned it over, ran her long, ruby thumbnail along its edge, breaking the glue and tape sealing it. The “precious cargo” was a nearly blank sheet of typing paper, blank except for one lone word in the center of the page:

Kawanga.