Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗
Max wailed.
The old woman rocked and hushed him.
"You can have him back tomorrow evening," she said, "long as you, and Andy, do what’s asked of you. If not, I’m going to hold Max by his little feet, and swing him into the stone walls of the basement till there’s nothing left."
# # #
Kim and Steve woke early Thursday morning in their suite at the Harbor Inn. They dressed in clothes purchased specifically for this trip—Kim in a cream rayon skirt and matching sleeveless V-neck that tied at the waste, Steve in royal blue shorts and a canary polo shirt. He’d never sported such vibrancy in his life, but this was appropriate dress for honeymooning. He didn’t feel foolish. He felt grown-up. He was twenty-three now, a college graduate, married, and tingling with what he thought was maturity.
They crossed Silver Lake Drive and walked into the small office of the Harbor Inn, where they scavenged the meager continental breakfast. With their greasy pastries and Styrofoam cups of orange juice, the newlyweds stepped outside onto the pier and dined in the presence of the harbor, glittering in early sun.
They bogged down discussing plans for the day. Kim wanted to go shopping again at the craft and antique stores. She was insistent on buying more gifts for their parents and friends and mailing them back to Wisconsin.
"They’ll have to be in the mail by tomorrow at the latest," she told Steve for the second time in the last half hour. "Tomorrow at the latest."
He wondered fleetingly if he’d married an obsessive-compulsive.
"Well, I’d like to go to Portsmouth," he said. "See the ghost village. On the weather, they said there’s only a twenty percent chance of rain this afternoon."
Steve was certain she’d oblige him. He’d been a model husband thus far. It was Thursday. They’d been in Ocracoke since Sunday, and they’d shopped mercilessly every day of their honeymoon. Perhaps he’d have to put his foot down on this one.
"Kimmy," he said. "I really want to see Portsmouth."
"Steve, it’s soooo hot. I don’t want to be outside all day."
"Case closed," he said sternly, a line his father had used to much success with Steve’s mother. "We can shop all you want when we get back, and we’ll shop all day tomorrow. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. Do you?"
She turned away from him, watched the ferry bound for Cedar Island chugging out of the harbor. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet and she wiped sweatbeads from her forehead. She glared at Steve. He looked like such a little boy.
"Fine. We’ll go to the stupid island."
She started back down the pier toward Silver Lake Drive.
Steve called after her.
It felt so good to keep on walking.
# # #
Kim started talking to Steve again an hour later, on the walk over to the Community Store and the boat docks. The day was blue and intensely humid, and the novelty of their marriage and this quaint island, so far from their Wisconsin home, cleansed the rancid taste of their recent quarrel. They were lovebirds again and held hands while they walked.
When they arrived at the parking lot for the Community Store, Steve motioned toward the shack at the end of the dock, pointing out the TATUM BOAT TOURS sign mounted on the side.
"That’s it," he told Kim. "Guy said to be there at eleven."
"How much is it?"
"I think twenty dollars a person."
"Oh, jeez that’s expensive."
He chose not to point out that she’d already spent over four hundred dollars on gifts. Kim would certainly have a well-reasoned argument for each and every expenditure.
They walked into the Community Store, a modest, eighty-six year-old grocery offering a modicum of staples, beer and wine, local jams and canned peppers, even several shelves of videos for rent.
Potato chips and beef jerky seemed sufficient to tide them over until evening. Steve paid for the snacks and ten postcards that Kim required immediately. Loading everything into a small backpack, they crossed the burnished wood floor and walked back outside into the ever-thickening heat.
It was nearly eleven, so they headed for the steps leading up onto the dock.
Kim stopped suddenly on the weatherbeaten planks and peered down at the water.
"Will you look at that?" she said, pulling a disposable camera from the front pouch of the backpack she’d recruited her husband to carry. "He’s not even scared of us. Mom will love this picture."
She took several photographs of the tattered pelican.
"Look at its wing," she said. "I’ll bet it can’t fly anymore."
"It wants food," Steve said. "Should I give him a piece of jerky?"
"Jerky?" She sighed with immeasurable annoyance. "It would choke him."
"No, I don’t think it would—"
"Fine, Steve. You want to kill this sweet old bird, go right ahead. I’m walking to the end of the pier."
Footsteps clanked toward them. They both turned and watched a tall frail man painfully ascend five steps to the dock. When he reached the top, he stopped and leaned against the railing to catch his breath.
"Sir, you all right?" Kim asked.
"Yeah, I’m just old as shit," he said, grinning. "But I’ll make it." The man took a deep breath and said, "Whew. Glad I caught you two. You here to take the boat over to Portsmouth with me?"
"We sure are," Steve said. "You the gentleman I spoke with on the phone this morning?"
"Well, I don’t know about the gentleman part. What was your name again, young man?"
"Steve."
Steve reached forward and shook the man’s hand.
"And this is my wife, Kim."
The old man nodded to the young woman and said, "A pleasure. My name’s Charlie Tatum. I’ll be taking y’all over to Portsmouth today."
"Excellent," Steve said.
"Here’s the thing. See my boat up there?"
He pointed to the thirty foot Island Hopper moored to a rotting beam, where a man with a bushy white beard was busy padding up water on the vinyl seats from last night’s thunderstorm.
"That’s my brother, Wally, and he’s fixin’ to take that motor apart. Old net got caught in the blades when we was coming back into the harbor our last trip out."
A family of four strolled by, headed for the end of the dock.
"Yeah, Wally’s gonna have to turn those folks down, but look I’m running a ferry from our dock on the sound out to Portsmouth. There’s two more spots if y’all want to go."
"Steve, maybe we should just—"
"Absolutely."
That family sat down on a bench at the end of the dock. Wally said something to them, inaudible from this distance.
"Well, if you’ll come with me, I’ve got my truck here, and we’ll get going. We’ve got another couple signed up, too, and since it’s just the four of you, we should be able to make a nice long day of it."
They followed the old man to his truck—a rusted, dinged relic of a vehicle that seemed to have as much a chance of starting up as its owner did of running a marathon.
Kim sat in the front seat, her husband in the back. As the truck cranked and gargled out onto Silver Lake Drive, she gazed down to the end of the dock, wondering why that family of four was boarding a boat with a busted motor.
# # #
Steve climbed out of the back of the truck and followed his wife and Charlie Tatum through a disheveled front yard of waist-high weeds, around the side of a large and crumbling stone house. From the backyard, the sound stretched out before them, unstirred to the point of appearing frozen in the mounting, windless heat.
