Читать книгу Darker Than Night - John Lutz - Страница 19

Bent Oak, Missouri, 1987.

Two days before Luther Lunt’s fourteenth birthday, state employees in Jefferson City dropped a cyanide pellet in the gas chamber, killing Luther’s father.

Luther’s mother had already been dead for more than a year. She’d died on the same day and in the same way as his sister, Verna, beneath the thunder and buckshot hail of his dad’s Remington twelve-gauge. Luther had hunted with the gun twice and knew what it could do to a rabbit. What it had done to his mom and Verna was lots worse.

Seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, even listening to the slowing trickle of blood from his mom’s ruined throat, was the kind of thing that stayed in the mind.

Luther cried almost nonstop for days and nights, wondering why Verna had to go tell their mom what she and Dad had been up to. He shouldn’t blame her, Luther knew, as she was only twelve, and it was his father, after all, who’d squeezed off the shots from the old double-barrel.

But the fact was, Luther did blame Verna, as well as his mother. They all knew anyway, and it was Verna and his mom who brought it all into the open, who uttered the words that made it real so something had to be done about it. Everything had been going along fine until then. Going along, at least.

And since his father had taken it on himself to start going into Verna’s room, he’d stopped coming into Luther’s.

Verna’s fault.

Verna and his mom’s.

Then his father’d been taken from Luther to rot away in a cell in Jeff City, waiting to die when his appeals ran out.

Leaving Luther alone.

“He’s suffered something terrible,” Luther’s great-aunt Marjean from Saint Louis had said of him after the murders, “but I’m eighty-seven years of age and get by hardscrabble on my Social Security. No way I can help the poor thing.”

So Luther had gone into the foster-care system, and was taken in by the Black family, Dara and her husband, Norbert. The Blacks had temporary custody of three children besides Luther, who was the oldest. Dara Black, a stout woman with an apple-round face who almost always wore the same stained apron, watched over the children in the old farmhouse, while Norbert was away painting barns and houses in the surrounding countryside.

Luther used to watch her bustle around the house, smiling too much and even sometimes whistling while she got her work done. Luther was aware that she knew and didn’t know that Norbert was molesting the children. Nobody ever talked about the subject. Luther thought that was best.

The state paid the Blacks a stipend for their foster care, and Norbert’s painting brought in some more money. And it was true Luther would someday have to learn a trade, which was the excuse Norbert came up with to take Luther in as an unpaid apprentice, meaning Luther would do a lot of the heavy work, lugging five-gallon paint buckets, moving ladders and scaffolding, scraping weathered paint off hardwood with Norbert’s good-for-shit tools. What Luther learned mostly was how to work all day in the boiling sun.

The day after his father was executed, he ran away.

And eleven months and three days later he was found sleeping behind a Dumpster in Kansas City and returned to the Black farm.

Life as Luther knew it, with its hardships and terrible, intricate balances, began again.