The Doll 45（文稿）end

英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

Chapter 45
DALLAS, TEXAS
FIVE MONTHS LATER
A quarter of a mile of gravel separated the blacktop county road from Bradford’s front door; a quarter of a mile between foyer and mailbox.
For the most part, the distance was meaningless. He wasn’t home often enough to worry about collecting the mail— Felecia did that for him, and anything urgent was sent to Capstone’s office.
But today he was home, and so Bradford swung the truck off the blacktop, along the shoulder, to collect what lay within the box and spare Felecia the trip.
Paper gripped between his fingers, he tossed the stack onto the passenger’s seat,
and not until he was around the back of the house, parked in the garage and leaning over to collect the meager bounty of inserts and magazines, flyers and envelopes, did he catch sight of the handwriting that stopped his breath cold.
One leg already outside the truck, he reversed, sat back down, and stared at the envelope: plain, white, and from both the shape and the stamp clearly not from the U.S.
There was no return address, but his own name and address were written in an unmistakable print that quickened his pulse and set his fingers shaking.
Bradford tore into the side of the envelope with his teeth— enough to get a finger into the crease and slit the edge open. Inside was a single sheet of paper.
A newspaper clipping in a foreign language, printed in a script he didn’t understand— most probably Cyrillic, although for which country, he wasn’t sure— and he didn’t care, didn’t need to know.
Because although the words were meaningless, the accompanying photograph, in all its newspaper-quality graininess, told him everything.
Charred and gutted, with only enough of the hull left intact to keep from tipping below the waterline, a very large yacht listed off some Mediterranean-looking coastline.
Bradford stared at the clipping a long while, smile widening the longer he sat, happy in a way that defied words, until finally he laughed out loud.