The Poison Tree
Kelly, Erin
Vendu par Mystery Cove Book Shop, Hulls Cove, ME, Etats-Unis
Vendeur AbeBooks depuis 19 juillet 1998
Ancien(s) ou d'occasion - Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1 disponible(s)
Ajouter au panierVendu par Mystery Cove Book Shop, Hulls Cove, ME, Etats-Unis
Vendeur AbeBooks depuis 19 juillet 1998
Quantité disponible : 1 disponible(s)
Ajouter au panierFine in fine Dust Jacket. Author's debut psychological thriller.
N° de réf. du vendeur 135199
I let the telephone fall from my hand. Panic first cripples and then revives me. My fingertips tingle as they feel their way around the coffee table, scrabbling first for my car keys and then for my cell phone. I seem to have eight limbs as I try to get dressed in the dark, pulling on my coat and a pair of oversize sheepskin boots that I usually wear as slippers. At the threshold I hesitate for a second, then rush back to my desk and fumble in the drawer for my passport and a credit card that I keep for emergencies. I pull the door behind me in silence, although blood roars and rushes in my ears. With shaking hands I double-lock it: whether to keep someone in or to keep someone out, I can’t know yet.
Outside, I tiptoe, but there is a crack and a squelch as I flatten a snail beneath my sole, and when I tread in a puddle by the gate, cold water seeps through the soft suede and licks unpleasantly at my bare toes.
In the dark interior of the car I turn the key in the ignition and wince as the air blows icy cold, dispersing the fluffy clouds of my breath. My hands are so cold they feel wet; I am relieved to find a pair of woolen gloves bundled in my left pocket. Before put ting them on, I use my cell phone to cover the last caller’s tracks. I call the house phone, wait for the click of connection, and hang up before it has a chance to ring. The windshield is opaque with frost and I do not have time to wait for the heaters to defog the glass. I wipe a porthole in the passenger window and squint back into the dark recess of the bedroom window. If he had heard me, the light would be on by now. He would be silhouetted at the window, mouthing my name. Would that stop me? Would anything?
The car is pointed directly at the front of the house. If I turn the headlights on, they will shine into the window, so with no beams to guide me and only a smeared handprint of visibility through the windows, I pull out into the road. Only when I have guessed my way to the end of our lane do I switch on the full beam. The countryside is frosted and stark. Naked hedgerows cast eerie shapes in front of me and the high banks of the narrow road throw up shadows that take human form. The dead, the missing, and the missed surround me now, passive spirits who have become active ghosts. I am afraid to glance behind. They pursue me as I drive aggressively, suicidally, mounting the grass verge when I take a blind bend much too fast. The seatbelt digs into the flesh between my breasts as I make an emergency stop to avoid hitting the truck that suddenly looms in front of me. It’s a filthy vehicle of indeterminate color, tools loose in the back, moving so slowly that the driver must be drunk. I have no option but to slow to a crawl behind him.
I ought to use this enforced pause for rational thought. But there is nothing rational about this situation. I am driving alone in pajamas and wet, clammy boots on a country lane in the middle of the night. Nobody knows where I am or why. I had only been thinking of the others, but for the first time it strikes me that my own safety might be compromised if I continue.
A glance at my speedometer tells me that we are traveling at twelve miles an hour. I toot and flash, but by the cold blue glow in his cab I see that he is making a phone call. I map the road ahead in my mind. I have driven it so often that I know every pothole, kink, and curve. I take a deep breath, crunch the gears, and plunge blindly into the passing place I calculate is just to my right. The driver of a black car coming in the opposite direction has had the same idea and we skim each other as we pass, with a sickening screech of metal on metal. I accelerate. Let him chase me if he wants to make something of it. My left-hand mirror is wrenched from its casing and falls to dangle lifelessly at the side from a lone wire, like a severed limb attached to its body by a single vein. The retreating driver sounds his horn angrily, the Doppler effect making it drop a forlorn semitone as it continues in the direction of my house. The truck is between us and it is too late to turn and see if the driver was alone or carrying a passenger, if it was a regular car or a taxi.
I pick up my crazy pace. Only a speed camera, predicted by a luminous sign, persuades my foot to the brake. On the borders of the town the scrubby roadside edges give way to narrow pavements and trees thin out to accommodate houses, a pub, a gas station. Lampposts appear, imitation Victorian globes like a parade of tiny moons, and I realize with a corresponding lucidity that this is it. The event I have been expecting and dreading for a third of my life is finally here.
It suddenly feels very hot inside the car. My hands are sweating inside my gloves, my eyes are dry, and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I have given up so much and done so many terrible things already for the sake of my family that I can only keep going. I do not know what is going to happen to us. I am frightened, but I feel strong. I have the strength of a woman who has everything to lose.
1
I try to see the city through his eyes. It has been only ten years, but London has changed. Will he notice the subtle developments of the last decade? Does he register the lack of telephone boxes or the proliferation of Polish grocers? What about the plugged-in pedestrians with white wires connecting their ears to their pockets? The red circles on the road that welcome us into and usher us out of the congestion zone? I’m dying to know what he is thinking. His eyes, though, are fixed on the sycamore pods and leaves stuck under the windshield wipers. Running commentary has never been his style, but this silence is unnerving.
Alice is talking enough for the three of us, a high-pitched stream of consciousness that spills from the backseat. She has made this journey from southeast London to our home on the Suffolk coast four times a year, every year of her life. She loves traveling home through town, preferring to inch through dirty streets rather than cruise around the highway, even though it adds hours onto our journey. I always save this route for a special treat, when her behavior throughout our visit has been particularly good, or when she and Rex have found saying good-bye harder than usual. Sometimes I drive through town when I need to think, knowing that Alice’s nose will remain pressed against the glass as the car crawls from suburb to inner city to suburb again, that the questions she asks will be about what that man is selling or what that building is, rather than another discussion about why Daddy has to live so far away.
But this afternoon’s detour isn’t at Alice’s request. As we creep along Holloway Road, her favorite part of the journey, her focus is inside the car. She does not seem to mind her demotion from the front seat to the back. She ignores the Caribbean barbershop she loves to wave at and the metallic, space-age university building we saw being built, panel by shiny blue panel. We even pass the grimy cell phone store that holds such a strange fascination for her without the usual argument about when she will be old enough for her own telephone. We stop at a red light and with a click and a giggle she slides out of her seatbelt and squeezes between the driver and passenger seats. Her twiggy fingers weave in and out of Rex’s hair, tugging it, massaging his scalp, shampooing it and revealing silver threads around his ears and temples. She shoots out rapid-fire questions one after the other without waiting for answers.
“Will you take me to school when I go back next week? Will you drive Mum’s car or are we going to have two? Lara’s mum and dad have a car each but she still walks to school. Don’t you think—oh my God, you can come swimming now! What’s your best stroke? Mine’s front crawl. Will you take me swimming?”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” says Rex, and Alice kisses the top of his head. Her knees fold forward and nudge the gearshift while an elbow knocks against my head as I try to negotiate the Archway traffic circle. I shout at her when I had sworn I wouldn’t, not today. She shrugs off my scolding. The car swings to the left as I take the exit for the Great North Road. Rex crosses his legs, folds his arms, and shifts in his seat. He knows where I’m going. Perhaps he was expecting it. Perhaps, like me, he needs this one last visit to the past before we can build our future.
Archway Road is unusually clear, and the three of us cruise underneath the bridge in the long, low autumn dazzle. The neighborhood has been gentrified in the decade since we lived here. We pass a designer baby boutique where a thrift store used to be. The liquor store that would sell us two bottles of nasty wine for five pounds, even at three in the morning, has now been upgraded to a wine merchant, and even the old pubs and restaurants look cleaner and brighter than I remember them: more plate glass, fewer metal shutters. But Archway still has some way to go, I think, as I swerve to avoid chunks of glass exploded from a bus stop window and scattered across the street like ice cubes.
Neither of us has been here for over a decade but I can still drive this street, anticipate those lights, make these gear changes, on autopilot. I could do it with my eyes shut. For a reckless second, I’m tempted to try, to close my eyes and lock the wheel on a right curve. But I make the double turn into Queenswood Lane wide-eyed and unblinking. The noise of the city falls away as we enter the secret sliver of wildwood, where the ancient trees muffle the sirens and the screeches of the street and the half-hidden houses occupy a dark green private universe, cushioned by money as much as by trunk and bough and leaf. I drive carefully between the expensive cars, their side-view mirrors tucked into their bodies in case someone unfamiliar with the road drives too quickly and knocks into one. But I am more familiar with this lane than any other road, including the one I grew up on and the one I live on now. It’s the setting for most of my memories and all of my nightmares. I know every old brick wall, every bump in the road, every lamppost. The 1860s apartment block with its Italianate walled garden still sits alongside that glass-and-concrete bubble, someone’s vision of the future from the 1960s that would never make it past the conservation society today. Stern Victorian town houses tower over a pastel-colored fairy-tale mansion. Their windows glower down at us.
I deliberately don’t look toward the last house, the place where everything happened, before the street surrenders to the trees. I focus on the road as the leafy tunnel swallows this car for the first time and park with the house behind me, telling Alice that Mummy and Daddy need to stretch their legs. She tumbles out of the car and skips into the trees, her tracksuit a flash of pink through half-undressed branches. The little red lights in the heels of her sneakers wink at us like tiny eyes.
“Don’t go too far!” I call. We watch as she drags her feet through the fallen leaves, tracing letters with her toes, staining the hem of her trousers with flakes of wet bark and leaf mold. She doesn’t know it, but she’s playing yards away from the spot where she was conceived. Rex speaks first.
“It’s got to be done, I suppose.” He circles the car to open my door. I get out and point the key at the car, and it locks with a pow-pow noise. Rex raises an eyebrow. “Very swish,” he says, taking the key from me and examining it as though it contains an entire album of high-energy dance tracks. I close my eyes to make the turn, and when I open them, there it is. Exactly where we left it, I think—although where could it have gone? The four-story town house surrounded not by cars and concrete but by lime and plane and birch and oak; half stucco, half gray brick, it really belongs on the end of a terrace in Islington or Hackney. Its incongruity is one of the things that always made its presence on the edge of the forest so magical. It has changed, of course. It looks naked, cleaner and more metropolitan than ever now that someone has pulled down the dark green ivy that covered all of the side wall and half the front one and found its way in through the windows in the summertime. The creamy stucco gleams, not a single peel or crack in the paint. It looks innocent. But then, so do I.
The flaked black paint on the front door has been replaced by flawless turquoise gloss, and the golden lion door knocker gleams. The steep front steps—formerly a death trap of long-dead herbs tufting out of broken terra-cotta pots, lone roller skates, empty wine bottles, and never-to-be-read free local newspapers—have also been restored, and instead the door is flanked by two perfectly symmetrical bay trees with twisted stems in aluminum pots. Six recycling boxes are stacked neatly and discreetly behind a magnolia tree in the front garden. Instead of the nonworking bell pull which no one ever bothered with, there are six buzzers. The first time I ever came here, I spent ten minutes looking for just such a row of doorbells bearing different names. It didn’t occur to me that people my age could live in the whole of this building rather than occupy an apartment within it. I don’t need to get any closer to know how the place has changed on the inside. Without peering through the white-shuttered windows, I know exactly how the interiors of these apartments will look: coir or sisal carpeting, because the battered floorboards were beyond restoration even for the most dedicated property developer. The black and white hall will have been renovated, an original feature that will have added value to the house price. It was in terrible condition when we lived there, and afterward, there was that terrible stain.
There will be magnolia walls with flat-screen television sets flush against them, stainless steel kitchens, each boxy white bedroom with its own frosted-glass bathroom. It had been sold, but not until a long time after the police and the press had gone. The redevelopment had begun as soon as the yellow incident tape had been taken down and the cameras and reporters had moved on. Only then did the real estate agents begin to throng the house. I had often imagined the swarm of suits trampling polystyrene and paper coffee cups discarded by reporters, looking beyond the building’s grisly history, seeing only the rare opportunity to sell a sensitively converted character property in a highly desirable location, situated seconds from the Tube and on the edge of the historic Queen’s Wood.
The violent physical reaction I was half-expecting—a swoon, or a full faint, or even vomiting—doesn’t come. Rex too is calm, indecipherable, and it’s he who has the most, and the most gruesome, memories of this place. It was his home for twenty-four years and mine for only one summer. Alice breaks the reverie, dropping five feet from a tree I hadn’t noticed her climb, bored now, asking Rex for a can of Coke because she knows I’ll say no. I shrug and let him decide. Tonight, we’ll sit down and establish some ground rules for dealing with Alice before she becomes hopelessly, irretrievably spoiled. But today, I’ll let Rex play the indulgent father. One day won’t hurt.
She gets her drink, but not from the n...
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
Visitez la page d’accueil du vendeur
All Major Credit Cards, Paypal, check or money order.
Si vous êtes un consommateur, vous pouvez vous rétracter du présent contrat dans les conditions indiquées ci-dessous. Etre un consommateur signifie être une personne physique qui agit à des fins qui n'entrent pas dans le cadre de son activité commerciale, industrielle, artisanale ou libérale.
Informations standardisées sur la rétractation
Droit de rétractation:
Vous avez le droit de vous rétracter du présent contrat sans donner de motif dans un délai de quatorze jours.
Pour exercer le droit de rétractation, vous devez nous Mystery Cove Book Shop, P O Box 75, 1 Dewey St, 04644, Hulls Cove, Maine, U.S.A., 1 2072884665, notifier votre décision de rétractation du présent contrat au moyen d'une déclaration dénuée d'ambiguïté (par exemple, lettre envoyée par la poste, télécopie ou courrier électronique). Vous pouvez utiliser le modèle de formulaire de rétractation mais ce n'est pas obligatoire. Vous pouvez également remplir et transmettre une déclaration claire à cette fin sur notre site internet à «Vos commandes» dans «Votre compte». Si vous utilisez cette option, nous vous enverrons sans délai un accusé de réception de la rétractation sur un support durable (par exemple, par courriel).
Pour que le délai de rétractation soit respecté, il suffit que vous transmettiez votre communication relative à l'exercice du droit de rétractation avant l'expiration du délai de rétractation.
Effets de la rétractation :
En cas de rétractation de votre part du présent contrat, nous vous rembourserons tous les paiements reçus de vous, y compris les frais de livraison (à l'exception des frais supplémentaires découlant du fait que vous avez choisi, le cas échéant, un mode de livraison autre que le mode moins coûteux de livraison standard proposé par nous) sans retard excessif et, en tout état de cause, au plus tard quatorze jours à compter du jour où nous sommes informés de votre décision de rétractation du présent contrat. Nous procéderons au remboursement en utilisant le même moyen de paiement que celui que vous aurez utilisé pour la transaction initiale, sauf si vous convenez expressément d'un moyen différent; en tout état de cause, ce remboursement n'occasionnera pas de frais pour vous.
Nous pouvons différer le remboursement jusqu'à ce que nous ayons reçu le bien ou jusqu'à ce que vous ayez fourni une preuve d'expédition du bien, la date retenue étant celle du premier de ces faits.
Vous devrez renvoyer ou rendre le bien, à Mystery Cove Book Shop, 12 Amory Lane, 04609, Bar Harbor, Maine, U.S.A., 1 2072884665, sans retard excessif et, en tout état de cause, au plus tard quatorze jours après que vous nous aurez communiqué votre décision de rétractation du présent contrat. Ce délai est réputé respecté si vous renvoyez le bien avant l'expiration du délai de quatorze jours. Vous devrez prendre en charge les frais directs de renvoi du bien. Votre responsabilité n'est engagée qu'à l'égard de la dépréciation du bien résultant de manipulations autres que celles nécessaires pour établir la nature, les caractéristiques et le bon fonctionnement de ce bien.
Exceptions au droit de rétractation
Le droit de rétractation ne s'applique pas à :
Formulaire de rétractation
(A compléter et renvoyer seulement si vous souhaitez-vous rétracter du présent contrat)
A l'attention de : (Mystery Cove Book Shop, P O Box 75, 1 Dewey St, 04644, Hulls Cove, Maine, U.S.A., 1 2072884665)
Je vous notifie par la présente ma rétractation du contrat portant sur la vente des produits suivants :
numéro de commande :
Commandé le/reçu le :
Mon nom et mon adresse :
Signature (seulement si ce formulaire est notifié en version papier) :
Date
Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required.
| Quantité commandée | 5 à 14 jours ouvrés | 3 à 6 jours ouvrés |
|---|---|---|
| Premier article | EUR 4.34 | EUR 8.68 |
Les délais de livraison sont fixés par les vendeurs et varient en fonction du transporteur et du lieu. Les commandes transitant par les douanes peuvent être retardées et les acheteurs sont responsables de tous les droits ou frais associés. Les vendeurs peuvent vous contacter au sujet de frais supplémentaires afin de couvrir toute augmentation des coûts d'expédition de vos articles.