Bad Things (28 page)

a hundred times.”

“Didn’t know her any better than that?”

“No, of course not.” He was trying to bluster but there wasn’t

enough force behind it.

“Do you normally drink alcohol at that time of the morning? You

don’t look the type.”

“I . . . I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. Business matters.”

“I see. Was it business matters that took you to Hope Memorial

yesterday?”

He stared at me. “What?”

“I was visiting someone there. As I was driving out, I noticed

you driving in. Odd thing is I saw Jassie Cornell in the hospital a few

minutes before.”

“I’d like you to go now.”

“I’m sure. But one more thing. Before Jassie killed herself, she did

something else. You know what that was?”

He looked at me, his face strained. “I really don’t know why you

think—”

“She put her hands into the outlet from the coffee machine. She

put them under a jet of superheated steam and held them there until

B A D T H I N G S 195

they started to blister. I was fi fteen feet away and I swear I could smell

the skin burning. Strange, huh?”

He swallowed heavily, eyes turning glassy.

“You’ve got a nice wife,” I said. “Maybe too nice. I know how that

goes.”

“You need to get off my property,” he said. “Now. Or I’m calling

the police.”

“They’re still busy back at the coffee shop. Could be a while be-

fore they got to you. Whereas I’m already here.” I let that settle for a

moment. “But you’re right. I’m imposing on your time.”

Just before I got into my car I looked back. He hadn’t moved.

“One more thing,” I said. “The family that used to live in that

house down the road?”

He waited, and said nothing.

“That was me. It was my son who died.”

I could see him swallow from ten feet away.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread any more rumors,” I said.

“Because that kind of thing cuts both ways. Do you understand what

I’m saying?”

He nodded, barely.

I was sitting at the end of the jetty over Murdo Pond when it began

to rain, starting as a mist that coalesced between the trees, seeping

down out of the higher ground, gradually solidifying into droplets.

When these fell on the surface of the lake they seemed to disappear,

as if the water was so heavy and thick it absorbed them.

I had been on the grounds of our old house for over an hour,

smoking one cigarette after another. It was late afternoon now. The

temperature had already dropped fi ve degrees and showed no sign of

stopping. It wasn’t going to rain for long. If this kept up, it would turn

to snow. My coat was in the car. I was shivering. Little of this was due

to the cold, however, though I could feel it seeping up through the

196 Michael Marshall

jetty from the water, could almost see it gathering across the lake’s

surface.

As I sat there, I had been thinking about faces.

First, the face I had watched in the rearview mirror, as I drove

away from the house farther up the road from our old house.

Then Jassie’s, just before she threw herself toward the window

and out of this world.

I know that if you fasten upon a mental image for too long, es-

pecially a memory, you can start to believe strange things about it.

The image can morph, reshaped by the mind considering it, creating

something that feels like reality but lies somewhere outside, strad-

dling the gray zone between the world and what you believe about it.

I know, too, that we fi nd patterns where there are none. Nonetheless

I believed I knew what I had seen.

In the face of the man, pure fear. The horror of a man who has

done something wrong, and knows it.

In the face of the girl who was now lying on a table somewhere,

coldly indifferent to the desultory conversation of men and women

whose job it was to deface her body in preparation for stowing it safely

underground, I had seen something that was far harder to name. I

knew, however, where I had seen it before, and I no longer felt dismis-

sive of the things Ellen had tried to tell me concerning how Gerry

had looked when he died.

I knew that what I’d seen in Jassie Cornell’s face was similar to the

memory of Scott’s last expression, an image I had turned over in my

mind so many, many times in the nights of the last three years.

We can never get inside the heads of others. The best we can do

is read what’s on the outside. I believed nonetheless that whatever had

been going through the waitress’s mind in her last moments had been

very similar to what must have been going through Scott’s, when he

stood very close to where I now sat, when he had stared over my

shoulder as if everything he felt he’d learned in four years had sud-

B A D T H I N G S 197

denly been undermined and he had glimpsed some vile truth about

creation and everyone in it.

I didn’t know what tied these three things together. It could have

been coincidence that Gerry Robertson had a heart attack, just before

it seemed likely he was going to acquiesce to his wife’s desire for a

family. It might not.

The detail of what had occurred between the blue-haired barista

and the man with the big house and three cars was occluded to me, too,

and the cause of Scott’s death was as much a mystery to me as it ever

had been—except for the fact that I now thought I knew of two other

people who had died in similar ways, and except for the fact that a word

Ellen had used more than once kept running through my head.

Punishment
.

Punishment for a man who might have been about to compro-

mise the fi nancial position of his children. Punishment for a slick,

middle-aged guy who had been taking a drink alone in the middle of

the morning.

And maybe punishment for someone else, too.

I stood up, hearing my joints creak against the cold, feeling old and

alone. There were other things I wanted to ask Ellen now, but I couldn’t

raise her on the phone. I had sat for as long as I could without doing

something. The sight of the lake had become oppressive, and I walked

quickly past my old house without even giving it a second glance.

There were two men I needed to talk to.

As I strapped myself into the driver’s seat, my phone rang. I hoped it

would be Ellen fi nally returning a call. It wasn’t.

“Hey,” I said briskly. “This really isn’t a good time.”

She was crying. Hard, with the hitching notes you rarely hear in

someone who isn’t a child.

“Becki, slow down. What’s the problem?”

198 Michael Marshall

In the twenty-four hours since we’d spoken, and since I’d wired

her ten thousand dollars out of my divorce settlement, Kyle had man-

aged to excel himself. Some guys are always prone to open the doors

that others are too smart to even fi nd. Kyle seemed like he aspired to

actually kicking them down.

Instead of using the cash to pay his debt and bring his life back to

earth, he had tried to double up by buying
more
drugs, this time from a crew up in Astoria. They sold him the drugs. They followed him

down an alley. They took the drugs back. Since then Kyle had been

drowning his sorrows in a series of local bars, fueled by the remains

of his original drug stake, bankrolled by the last of my money. He was

beginning to show signs of unpredictability and violence. At the pres-

ent time he hadn’t slept for three days, and Becki presented this state

of mind as a mitigating factor for the decisions he’d made.

I listened to this and didn’t feel much about it. Everyone always

thinks they’re bigger than drugs—rock stars with training wheels,

hard-eyed corner boys or homemakers with a scrip from their physi-

cian. Drugs watches for a while with amused indulgence, then takes

them outside and kicks their ass. Angry though I was with Kyle, it

was not my job to stand in the way of the appointment he was mak-

ing with fate. There’s a point past which you’re no longer talking to

the person, but the drug, and everyone sounds the same in that state

because the drug is eerie and vicious and amoral and utterly beyond

human ken.

Then I caught another sound in among the sniffl es, and started

paying attention again.

“Becki, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said quickly, but I knew what I’d heard. The wince of

someone in physical discomfort.

She didn’t want to tell me, but I got it out. Last night, probably

about the time I’d been around the back of the motel staring at scratch

marks on the wall, Becki had been woken from anxious sleep by the

sound of someone ringing the entry buzzer. She assumed it was Kyle

B A D T H I N G S 199

fi nally coming back to earth, and jumped out of bed to give him plenty

of grief and a hug, in that order, or most probably at the same time.

But it wasn’t her boyfriend.

They wanted Kyle to get the message as soon as he eventually

walked in the door, which is why the main attention had been to

Becki’s face. They hadn’t done the obvious thing two men could have

done, but only, by the sound of it, because they were professionals. In

the longer term this would be a bad thing.

I found myself calm, but not in a good way. Calm like a sheet of

ice forming across a cold, deep lake.

“Does Kyle know about this?”

“I told him on the phone this morning.”

“So why isn’t he home with you right now?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Pack a bag and go stay with your father,” I said.

“Are you crazy? I can’t let him see me like this.”

“You don’t go today, he may not see you again.”

“John, I look like I fell down the stairs on my face. Dad sees this,

and
he’s
going to break Kyle’s neck himself.”

“That’s his right.”

“John, I can’t let him see—”

“Becki, just
do it
.” She was crying again now. “I’m stunned these

people gave you a pass last night. It won’t happen again. Go. Take

anything you value. Do
not
leave anything with your parents’ address, their phone number, or yours. Make sure you’re not being followed

when you leave. Do not go back.”

“I . . . I just don’t know . . .”

“Becki, I can only help you if you let me. Tell me you’re going to

do what I say. Promise me.”

She said she would.

“When you get to your dad’s house, call Kyle.”

“He’s not picking up since this morning. Since I told him about . . .

what happened.”

200 Michael Marshall

“So leave him a message. Say you’ve spoken to me. Tell him the

money can be straightened out, but I regard you as a friend I would

do a great deal to protect. Explain that if he doesn’t call me right

away, then I’ll be talking to him more seriously than he can possibly

imagine. Make sure you stress the word
talking.
He will understand

what I mean.”

I could hear her sniffi ng, rubbing her eyes, trying to get her shit

together. I could almost see her looking around the apartment and

taking inventory of what she cared enough about to take.

“I’ll tell him. Okay.”

“Get out of that place,” I repeated, more gently. “Now. You don’t

live there anymore.”

“I will.” She hesitated. “Do you mean that? That you would do a

lot to—”

“Becki, I’ve got to go.”

I closed the phone and drove out onto the road.

The first thing I did was drive back to Black Ridge and the sheriff’s

department. He kept me waiting forty minutes.

He listened to my account of Jassie’s death without making any

notes, then thanked me for my time. I asked him if he knew anything

about the current whereabouts of Ellen Robertson. He said that he

did not. I asked him what he thought
he
would do, where he would

go, if he had just suffered a car accident and the people who were

supposed to care about her had meanwhile turned her house upside

down. He informed me that I was incorrect in my interpretation of

the events.

“What do those people actually have to do, to get the cops to stop

turning a blind eye?”

“Something concrete,” he said. “Something that can be investi-

gated.”

B A D T H I N G S 201

“The sheet on Ellen’s past, the past they’ve evidently been tortur-

ing her over. Not enough?”

“I’ll remind you that I never saw it.”

“I hope you’re not calling me a liar.”

“No, though it would be within my rights to consider it. With no

piece of paper, there’s nothing I can do. You burned it. And you could

argue, given Ms. Zaituc—assuming that’s who she is—is under sus-

picion of murder in Europe, the Robertsons are exercising kindness

by not turning her in.”

“I guess you could argue that. Assuming your tongue wasn’t
so
far

up that family’s ass that you could still use it for intelligible speech.”

“Mr. Henderson, I’m going to make this simple for you.” He

pulled a sheet of paper out of the tray of the inkjet printer, which sat

in a stand to one side of his desk. “Let’s call this Black Ridge.”

He took a pen and drew a black cross bang in the middle. “That’s