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The Colorado Kid :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 10 из 81That was when they had the big fires over in Tinnock and Hancock. Those fires…they didn’tmake the paper, I won’t say that—although there were those who did at the time—but they give it a good runnin start, sure. It wasn’t until 1956 that I had as many ads as I did in the summer of ’48.”
“So you guys have been on the job for over fifty years, and in all that time you’venever come across a real unexplained mystery? Can that be true?”
Dave Bowie looked shocked. “We never said that!”
“Gorry, you werethere!” Vince declared, equally scandalized.
For a moment they managed to hold these expressions, but when Stephanie McCann only continued to look from one to the other, prim as the schoolmarm in a John Ford Western, they couldn’t go on. First Vince Teague’s mouth began to quiver at one corner, and then Dave Bowie’s eye began to twitch. They might still have been all right, but then they made the mistake of looking right at each other and a moment later they were laughing like the world’s oldest pair of kids.
3
“You were the one who told him about thePretty Lisa,” Dave said to Vince when he had gotten hold of himself again. ThePretty Lisa Cabot was a fishing boat that had washed up on the shore of neighboring Smack Island in the nineteentwenties with one dead crewman sprawled over the forward hold and the other five men gone. “How many times do you think Hanratty heard that one, up n down this part of the coast?”
“Oh, I dunno, how many places do you judge he stopped before he got here, dear?” Vince countered, and a moment later the two men were off again, bellowing laughter, Vince slapping has bony knee while Dave whacked the side of one plump thigh.
Stephanie watched them, frowning—not angry, not amused herself (well…a little), just trying to understand the source of their howling good humor. She herself had thought the story of thePretty Lisa Cabot good enough for at least one in a series of eight articles on, tada, Unexplained Mysteries of New England, but she was neither stupid nor insensitive; she’d been perfectly aware that Mr.Hanratty hadn’t thought it was good enough. And yes, she’d known from his face that he’d heard it before in hisGlobe funded wanderings up and down the coast between Boston and MooseLook, and probably more than once.
Vince and Dave nodded when she advanced this idea. “Ayup,” Dave said. “Hanratty may be from away, but that doesn’t make him lazy or stupid.
“So you guys have been on the job for over fifty years, and in all that time you’venever come across a real unexplained mystery? Can that be true?”
Dave Bowie looked shocked. “We never said that!”
“Gorry, you werethere!” Vince declared, equally scandalized.
For a moment they managed to hold these expressions, but when Stephanie McCann only continued to look from one to the other, prim as the schoolmarm in a John Ford Western, they couldn’t go on. First Vince Teague’s mouth began to quiver at one corner, and then Dave Bowie’s eye began to twitch. They might still have been all right, but then they made the mistake of looking right at each other and a moment later they were laughing like the world’s oldest pair of kids.
3
“You were the one who told him about thePretty Lisa,” Dave said to Vince when he had gotten hold of himself again. ThePretty Lisa Cabot was a fishing boat that had washed up on the shore of neighboring Smack Island in the nineteentwenties with one dead crewman sprawled over the forward hold and the other five men gone. “How many times do you think Hanratty heard that one, up n down this part of the coast?”
“Oh, I dunno, how many places do you judge he stopped before he got here, dear?” Vince countered, and a moment later the two men were off again, bellowing laughter, Vince slapping has bony knee while Dave whacked the side of one plump thigh.
Stephanie watched them, frowning—not angry, not amused herself (well…a little), just trying to understand the source of their howling good humor. She herself had thought the story of thePretty Lisa Cabot good enough for at least one in a series of eight articles on, tada, Unexplained Mysteries of New England, but she was neither stupid nor insensitive; she’d been perfectly aware that Mr.Hanratty hadn’t thought it was good enough. And yes, she’d known from his face that he’d heard it before in hisGlobe funded wanderings up and down the coast between Boston and MooseLook, and probably more than once.
Vince and Dave nodded when she advanced this idea. “Ayup,” Dave said. “Hanratty may be from away, but that doesn’t make him lazy or stupid.