Читать книгу Red Clocks - Leni Zumas, Leni Zumas - Страница 26

Malky’s been gone three days. Long for him—she doesn’t like it. The sun is dropping. Killers in the woods. Malky is a killer himself but no match for coyotes and foxes and red-tailed hawks. Every creature, prey to someone. The girl rides away from school in the car of a boy in an old-fashioned hat. (Does he believe the hat looks good?) Hat boy walks hips first, boom swagger swagger, pirate-like.

Not that the mender can warn her. She has been keeping away from town for fear the girl will catch her watching.

She wipes down the sink, the oak countertop. Tidies the seed drawer. Sets clean jars by a basket of eyeless onions.

Boom swagger boom.

A pirate slept off his dreadful deeds at a tavern on Cape Cod. He met the local beauty, not yet sixteen. Maria Hallett fell hard for this bandit. Then Black Sam Bellamy sailed away. She was packed with child. Child died the same night born—hid in a barn, choked on a piece of straw.

Or so went the story. Little did they know. The farmer’s wife who raised the child told no one but her diary.

Goody Hallett was imprisoned. Or banned from the village. Became a recluse. Lived in a shack by a poverty grass. Waited on the cliffs for Black Sam Bellamy in her best red shoes. Rode the backs of whales, tied lanterns to their flukes, lured ships to crash on the shoals. Got a reputation: witch.

Black Sam was the Robin Hood of pirates. They rob the poor under the cover of law, he said, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. In 1717, after some Caribbean plundering, Captain Bellamy rode back up the Atlantic with his gang of buccaneers. Their stolen ship, Whydah, sailed into the worst nor’easter in Cape Cod history. Ship went to pieces. Dead pirates all over the beach. Black Sam’s body was never recovered.

In 1984 the remains of Whydah were found off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. That same year Temple Percival bought a foreclosed tackle shop in Newville, Oregon, and arranged on the shelves some spooky trinkets and called it Goody Hallett’s.

Now Temple’s fingernails live in a jar on the cabin shelf. Lashes in a glassine packet. Head hair and pubic hair in separate paper cartons—both almost gone. The rest of her body in the chest freezer behind the feed trough in the goat shed.

Scratching on the doorstep. Malky slinks in without greeting or apology. She tries to sound stern: “Don’t ever stay out that long again, fuckermo.” He purrs tetchily, demanding supper. She gets a plate of salmon from the mini fridge. It is happiness to see his pink tongue lapping. Merry, merry king of the woods is he.

Two short knocks. Stop. Two more. Stop. One. Malky, who knows this knock, goes on eating.

“Is it you?”

“It’s me.”

She opens the door but stays on the threshold. Cotter is her only human friend, the kindest person she knows; doesn’t mean she wants him in the cabin.

“New client,” he says, holding up a white envelope. His poor pimpled cheeks are worse than usual. Toxins trying to exit. They should be leaving through the liver but are leaving through the skin.