JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 216 из 425He’s the one with the wolfhound.
Blueberry.”
“Ayuh. He carpenters a tad and caretakes a tad, just like his father before him. His dad caretook many of these places, you know, and back just after the Second World War was over, Normal Auster drownded Kenny’s little brother in his back yard. This was when they lived on Wasp Hill, down where the road splits, one side going to the old boat-landin and the other to the marina. He didn’t drown the tyke in the lake, though. He put him on the ground under the pump and just held him there until the baby was full of water and dead.”
I stood there looking at her, the clothes behind us snapping on their whirligig. I thought of my mouth and nose and throat full of that cold mineral taste that could have been well-water as well as lakewater; down here all of it comes from the same deep aquifers. I thought of the message on the refrigerator: help im drown.
“He left the baby laying right under the pump. He had a new Chevrolet, and he drove it down here to Lane Forty-two. Took his shotgun, too.”
“You aren’t going to tell me Kenny Auster’s dad committed suicide in my house, are you, Mrs. Meserve?”
She shook her head. “Nawp. He did it on the Brickers’ lakeside deck. Sat down on their porch glider and blew his damned baby-murdering head off.”
“The Brickers? I don’t—”
“You wouldn’t. Hasn’t been any Brickers on the lake since the sixties.
They were from Delaware. Quality folks. You’d think of it as the Warsh-burn place, I guess, although they’re gone, now, too. Place is empty. Every now and then that stark naturalborn fool Osgood brings someone down and shows it off, but he’ll never sell it at the price he’s asking. Mark my words.”
The Washburns I had known—had played bridge with them a time or two.
Nice enough people, although probably not what Mrs. M… with her queer backcountry snobbishness, would have called “quality.” Their place was maybe an eighth of a mile north of mine along The Street. Past that point, there’s nothing much—the drop to the lake gets steep, and the woods are massed tangles of second growth and blackberry bushes. The Street goes on to the tip of Halo Bay at the far north end of Dark Score, but once Lane Forty-two curves back to the highway, the path is for the most part used only by berry-picking expeditions in the summer and hunters in the fall.
Normal, I thought. Hell of a name for a guy who had drowned his infant son under the backyard pump.
Blueberry.”
“Ayuh. He carpenters a tad and caretakes a tad, just like his father before him. His dad caretook many of these places, you know, and back just after the Second World War was over, Normal Auster drownded Kenny’s little brother in his back yard. This was when they lived on Wasp Hill, down where the road splits, one side going to the old boat-landin and the other to the marina. He didn’t drown the tyke in the lake, though. He put him on the ground under the pump and just held him there until the baby was full of water and dead.”
I stood there looking at her, the clothes behind us snapping on their whirligig. I thought of my mouth and nose and throat full of that cold mineral taste that could have been well-water as well as lakewater; down here all of it comes from the same deep aquifers. I thought of the message on the refrigerator: help im drown.
“He left the baby laying right under the pump. He had a new Chevrolet, and he drove it down here to Lane Forty-two. Took his shotgun, too.”
“You aren’t going to tell me Kenny Auster’s dad committed suicide in my house, are you, Mrs. Meserve?”
She shook her head. “Nawp. He did it on the Brickers’ lakeside deck. Sat down on their porch glider and blew his damned baby-murdering head off.”
“The Brickers? I don’t—”
“You wouldn’t. Hasn’t been any Brickers on the lake since the sixties.
They were from Delaware. Quality folks. You’d think of it as the Warsh-burn place, I guess, although they’re gone, now, too. Place is empty. Every now and then that stark naturalborn fool Osgood brings someone down and shows it off, but he’ll never sell it at the price he’s asking. Mark my words.”
The Washburns I had known—had played bridge with them a time or two.
Nice enough people, although probably not what Mrs. M… with her queer backcountry snobbishness, would have called “quality.” Their place was maybe an eighth of a mile north of mine along The Street. Past that point, there’s nothing much—the drop to the lake gets steep, and the woods are massed tangles of second growth and blackberry bushes. The Street goes on to the tip of Halo Bay at the far north end of Dark Score, but once Lane Forty-two curves back to the highway, the path is for the most part used only by berry-picking expeditions in the summer and hunters in the fall.
Normal, I thought. Hell of a name for a guy who had drowned his infant son under the backyard pump.