Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz

Author:John Burnham Schwartz [Schwartz, John Burnham]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Crime, Thriller
ISBN: 9780307427465
Google: X1cucTg0yxkC
Amazon: B005RZB6XI
Publisher: Constable
Published: 1998-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

Around the little oblong green, this time in reverse. White church, white houses. The white heat of morning. All of it a strange reminder now of the blank white light in the empty refrigerator at home: nothing for Emma’s breakfast again this morning. I saw the hand-lettered sign for Krause’s General Store and pulled in.

Paul Krause stood behind the burnished wood counter, talking to gossipy, bilious old Mrs. Briggs, the school principal’s mother, and ringing up her goods. He paused mid-sentence when he noticed me come in, his mostly bald head swinging in my direction and then quickly retreating. Mrs. Briggs followed his initial look, her ossified neck forcing her body to turn a full hundred and eighty degrees to get me in view. She was not by nature as diplomatic as Paul Krause, nor as genial, and my sudden appearance caused her to emit a breathy “Oh!” of surprise.

“Morning, Ethan,” Paul said, with an unmistakable gentleness.

I nodded. “Morning, Paul.” I hurried to the back of the store to avoid any contact with Mrs. Briggs.

There were five short aisles of canned goods, boxes of cereal, plastic bottles of shampoo. Along the back, beside the refrigerator and freezer, twenty- and fifty-pound bags of flour and sugar were piled three feet high. A pair of buck’s antlers decorated the wall—taken, Paul had once told me, by a much younger version of himself. He had a pot belly now. He swept the place daily, kept it clean. He talked patiently with the Mrs. Briggses of the world. I’d never understood how he made any money, though it was not my business. Chain supermarkets had long ago come to Winsted and other towns.

The door opened. Mrs. Briggs shot a last carnivorous look in my direction and departed. I carried a dozen eggs, a loaf of oatmeal bread, a box of Bisquick, and a glass bottle of Vermont maple syrup up to the counter, where Paul rang them up on the old-fashioned register with the round indented keys and the white-backed number cards that popped, ringing, into the window like so many jack-in-the-boxes. He paused before punching up the total. “Anything else, Ethan?”

We made eye contact. For some reason, I thought about how I’d touched Ruth Wheldon’s hands. I turned and looked back over the small store, dark with wood and smelling of flour. “Nothing I remember,” I said.

He nodded. He didn’t tell me he knew what I meant. He punched in the total and I paid and thanked him and went out.

I was reaching for the car door when my peripheral vision filled with a shape and color that made the breath die in my throat and my head snap up in the direction of the road: it was there, passing right by me. Four doors, dark blue, a reflecting midnight blue. A man driving. I dropped the bag of groceries. It landed on the pavement at my feet with a sickening crash, eggs and syrup blown to smithereens. I saw the neat chrome

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.