Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

“That’s my wife, Betty Lou,” Wade said, smiling after her. “The only thing she loves more than cooking is watching people eat what she makes.”

“Where can I find a wife like that?” I asked.

“You can look anyplace but right here!” Wade chuckled good-naturedly and so did I.

I took a few more bites of my Big Rock Burger, then said: “I vaguely remember the people who used to run the place. Their name was Parkus, wasn’t it?”

“Josiah Parkus,” Wade nodded. “This place was in their family since the early 1900s.”

“Then why did they sell it?”

“Too much tragedy, I suppose.” Wade took a cloth from his apron and started to absently wipe the countertop. “Josiah’s wife Esme killed herself in ‘74. He woke up one morning and Esme was gone. A few hours later, he found one of their boats floating in middle of the lake. The anchor was missing.”

“Fisherman out trolling for macks snagged Esme’s dress in ‘75,” the old man with the coffee said. “Maybe it was ‘76.”

“Their daughter Kelly never really got over it, drowned herself the same way a few years later,” Wade said. “That just left Josiah and his son.”

“Cyril, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Wade nodded. “Neither one of ‘em was much interested in running the resort after that, though Josiah stuck it out on his own after Cyril went off to California. When Josiah died, Cyril sold the place to me. We used to run an RV park up at Spirit Lake, but we always envied this outfit.”

I finished up my burger and tried to figure out how all of this tied together with what I already knew. After thinking about it for a few minutes, the pieces fit pretty good.

Cyril knew Arlo Pelz because they grew up together, with Arlo probably resenting the hell out of Cyril the whole time. Arlo worked for Cyril’s father at the resort marina, fixing outboard motors, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Cyril treated Arlo as his employee, too.

After Kelly Parkus killed herself, Cyril went off to California, and Arlo got into drugs, eventually ending up in Seattle, where he met Lauren, who was either a drug addict, a drug dealer, or a whore. Or maybe all three.

Somehow they split up, how or why I don’t know. A few years went by. Arlo married Jolene, went to prison for dealing drugs, and when he got out, he stumbled into the discovery that Cyril, wealthy and powerful, was married to a woman with a dark, shameful past her husband probably didn’t know about. Arlo guessed Lauren would pay dearly to keep it that way.

Instead, something went wrong.

That something was me, Harvey Mapes.

I uncovered the blackmail scheme and told Cyril about it. Cyril confronted his wife with what I’d found out and then she, unable to deal with the exposure of her ugly past, killed herself.

Now poor Cyril was left to mourn the suicide of yet another woman in his life.

It all made sense. All that was missing were the sordid little details, which I expected to wring out of Arlo once I captured him.

“How about a slice of pie to go with that?” Betty Lou Wade asked, sliding a huge hunk of apple pie in front of me before I could answer.

I smiled back at her. “I don’t see how any sane man could refuse.”

She beamed again. I dug into the pie. Marie Callender and Sarah Lee had nothing on Betty Lou Wade. I picked up my plate and fork and worked on my pie as I wandered over to the wall of photos.

The snapshots captured nearly identical moments in time, spread out over decades, of people standing in front of the store, posing with their fish, smiling into the lens. Occasionally, a portion of a parked car or a particular style of clothing would give away when the picture was taken, but otherwise they could have all been shot today.

I saw what probably amounted to tons of dead fish.

I saw the Parkus family, I saw Arlo, and I saw most of the citizens of Deerlick that I’d met, even Little Billy when he actually was little.

And as I stared back through decades, the pie plate slipping from my hands and shattering on the floor, I saw what I got right and what I got wrong, and just how cruel and inescapable fate could be.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I rented the cabin closest to the woods for the night, parked my car right behind it, then called Carol from the pay phone outside the store.

I didn’t tell her anything that happened to me or what I’d found out. All I said was that I was in Deerlick, asking around for Arlo, and that I’d be staying at Big Rock Lake overnight. I told her I thought Arlo might be in town, but I didn’t know for sure.

That last part was the biggest lie of all.

I knew he was there. I felt it as clearly as my own heartbeat.

I gave Carol the number at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store, since the cabins didn’t have phones. She didn’t ask me why I gave it to her, and I was glad, because she probably would have seen through whatever lie I came up with. The truth was, if she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, I wanted her to know who to call first to go look for my body.

I wasn’t being morbid or fatalistic, just practical. I had every intention of capturing Arlo and bringing him in to pay for his crimes, but I also knew how badly things could go wrong. Recent experience certainly proved that.

I told Carol I loved her and this time it wasn’t hard to say. It sounded to me like saying it came pretty easy for her, too.

***

I spent the afternoon sitting on a chaise lounge on the lawn in front of my cabin, right where everybody could see me, drinking Cokes and looking at the lake.

I was surprisingly relaxed, considering what I still had left to do. I guess I was either confident in my abilities or too stupid to realize just how much danger I was in.

Sitting there like I was made me think of an episode of “Maverick,” which starred James Garner as gambler and conman Bret Maverick.

My dad loved that show. There was this one episode where Maverick wins a poker game, then convinces a banker to let him make an after-hours deposit to keep his money safe. The next day, Maverick goes in to get his money and the banker says slyly, “What money?”

See, nobody witnessed the transaction. It’s Maverick’s word against the banker’s, and who is going to take the word of a conman?

So Maverick tells everybody he’s gonna get his money back . . . and what he does is, he sits in a rocking chair across the street from the bank and just starts whittling. People walk by every day and ask him, “How’s it goin’, Maverick? You gettin’ your money back?” And every day he says, “I’m workin’ on it.”

The thing was, while he spent the whole episode sitting in that rocking chair, unnerving everybody by happily doing absolutely nothing, a gang of his conman friends were swindling the banker out of exactly what he owed Maverick.

My dad was a gambler, but mostly he was a loser. Whatever he won at the poker table, when he rarely won, was lost the next day. He never got ahead. I think my dad wanted to be James Garner as Maverick the way I wanted to be James Garner as Rockford.

What did that make me?

I didn’t have a gang of conman friends, or anybody else, to help me do what I was going to do that night. So it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to be sitting there, sunning myself like I didn’t have a care in the world. I should have been laying down some clever plan.

I had a plan. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t likely to work any better than my dad’s bluffs at the poker table.

It didn’t matter anyway. I was powerless to control what was going to happen next and I pretty much knew it. What I’d learned over the last few days convinced me that the outcome was inevitable and that I was just doing my predestined part.

When the sun set, it started to get chilly. The resort guests slowly drifted back to their cabins. I stayed where I was for a while, listening to the water lapping against the boats tied to the dock and watching the bats skim the surface of the dark lake.