Murder in the Navy by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

9

She stood before the full-length mirror in her room, not wanting to awaken her roommate and not yet wanting to go to bed.

She looked at herself as if she were meeting the reflection for the first time, and she felt rather idiotic about the sudden bursting feeling within her.

She had never met anyone like Chuck Masters before, never in all her life.

She’d been born on a farm in Minnesota, the proverbial farmer’s daughter, except that her father was a strict, God-fearing man who wouldn’t have allowed a salesman within four acres of his property. She could still remember the wheat fields, even now far away from them, the slender rods of grain swaying on the afternoon breeze, the sky a solid mass of blue beyond it, the sun glaring in the sky overhead. She had loved to walk in the wheat when she was a young girl, her head almost covered by the swaying golden wands.

She was a quiet, introverted child, Jean Dvorak. She loved the farm animals, and her favorite stories were those in which animals figured largely. She had never liked boys much. There was a nice boy living on the neighboring farm, a boy called Sven. He would often come to visit with his father, and he’d hop down from the wagon and they would race over the fields together, barefoot, laughing at the sun. This was when they were both very young, before she fully realized there was a difference between boys and girls.

When she was twelve, and her breasts began to pucker with adolescence, her mother explained what was happening to her. She could still remember her mother quite clearly, her hair as golden as the wheat fields, her eyes as blue as the sky beyond. Her mother was a gentle woman who put up with the harsh ways of her father patiently, and she remembered now the extreme sense of loss she’d felt when her mother died. They had laid her to rest in the rich Minnesota earth, and she had wept silently, and her heart had gone out then to the woman who had been her friend all her life.

She had three brothers and no sisters, and with her mother gone, there was no one to tell her things any more. Sven would still come over with his father, but he had begun to notice her as a girl now, and when he leaped down from the wagon bed, he would stand around and foolishly worry the ground with his big toe.

She preferred her books to Sven.

She went on to high school, and she was considered a quiet, studious girl. She was asked to join a sorority, but she refused. She was asked out often, but she rarely accepted dates, even though the boys never stopped trying. There was something exceptionally appealing about her dignified good looks, and she could have been the belle of the school had she tried, but she did not try.

Her mother had died of cancer, and the cruel injustice of her death had remained with Jean for a long while afterward.

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