Bad Things (29 page)

the family,” he said. Then he a made smaller cross down by the bot-

tom edge of the paper. “That’s me.” He set the lid of the pen upright

on the paper, almost halfway between the two crosses. “And that’s

you.”

“You lost me.”

He lifted one side of the piece of paper with his fi nger. The lid

toppled, slid off the piece of paper, across the desk, and onto the fl oor.

“Any clearer?”

“You missed your vocation,” I said. “Schools all over the country

are crying out for that kind of expositional talent.”

“This is precisely what my job is about. Explaining things. Over

and over. To people who don’t seem capable of getting it the fi rst

time.” He looked coldly at me. “There’s a community here, Mr.

Henderson. You’re not a part of it—which I know you get was the

point of the little demonstration. I am. The Robertsons, too, along

with a bunch of other people, many of whose families have been here

a very long time. The
right
thing is sometimes about maintaining

202 Michael Marshall

the status quo, especially if it’s been in place for a lot longer than any

one person within it has been alive. As a policeman, I have to work

in straight lines, and there’s nothing here points in the direction of

action against Brooke or Cory.”

He shrugged. I looked back at him, knowing that ultimately he

was right.

“And perhaps, at the risk of stretching the metaphor a little far,

you should now consider ways of voluntarily taking yourself off the

local desktop. Now. Air travel, for example.”

I stood. “Two things for you to consider in turn. First, if your son

dies in a place, you stop being a tourist there.”

“I didn’t mean . . .”

I picked up the piece of paper on his desk, tore it in half, and

dropped the pieces in the trash.

“And I’ll leave the interpretation of that as an exercise for the

student.”

C H A P T E R 2 7

She banged on the back door. Banged hard. Then, though she knew

there’d be no point, went back around the front and hollered and

hammered again. Nothing. Either out, or not answering to anyone.

Kristina gave it two more minutes and then walked backward

across the lot. Looked back toward the building, just in case a cur-

tain twitched. It didn’t, and it wouldn’t. Her mother wouldn’t be

hiding from her. She just wasn’t there.

She turned and stormed away down the road. She had to go to

work. The faces of the people she passed on the street were turned

away. From her, from one another, from everything. It was getting

dark and the cold was coming out of the woods like a rolling mist.

Some of Black Ridge’s residents were hurrying home merely to get

warm—but that wasn’t all it was. People understood it was coming

time to be indoors. People know these things.

And in a way, so what, she’d witnessed this kind of bullshit

all her life—the portion spent in Black Ridge, at least. But that

had felt different. It had been business as usual, the ways things had just always been. Maybe she only felt guilty now because she’d

thought cruel thoughts about the dead girl’s waistline, but if so,

that was enough.

204 Michael Marshall

People are real, and what you do to them is real, too.
Whoever
you

think you are.

She heard it happen, felt it all the way from her apartment on the

other side of town. She’d been trying to read a novel, as a distraction

from the nice-but-dumb thoughts she’d found herself annoyingly

prey to over the last forty-eight hours.

Then, suddenly—
bang
. The sensation was so violent that she

reared back from the book as if someone had shouted at her.

And it was gone.

She blinked, looked around the room. The music on the stereo

seemed distant for two seconds, went silent, and then popped back

up, as if she’d swallowed and cleared her ears in a plane coming down

to land.

Half an hour later she heard the report on the local radio news.

The coffee shop on Kelly Street. A girl. Dead. The sheriff inter-

viewed, saying she had an accident with the Gaggia machine, then

tripped, out of her mind with pain, and took a bad fall.

Kristina knew it was more than that. There is meaning in all

circumstance, and the things we dismiss as accidents are sometimes

merely the actions of things we don’t understand. Life is a long down-

hill slalom around these events, in the dark, before you suddenly hit

the wall at the bottom. The things we call tragedies are when the

forces around us really get off a good one.

And when they do, it’s
loud
.

The talk on the radio rolled straight over Jassie Cornell’s death

to other local concerns—another strip-mall closing, cuts in road-

maintenance budgets, job losses, the usual Black Ridge dirge—

sealing the event in the past, where it needn’t bother anyone anymore.

That was the way it went, and it was seeing and understanding this

B A D T H I N G S 205

that had eventually sent Kristina halfway around the world—to fi nd,

of course, that it was exactly the same everywhere else.

People turned their back to the truth, even if it meant walking

around in circles all their lives. In any real town, a place with a heart,

people know what’s happening without having to vocalize it. No one

points out the elephant in the room. There must be deniability, lest

you wind up with little local diffi culties. Outsiders point the fi nger

once in a while, open the box, and towns people who’ve tolerated the

arrangement (and benefi ted from it in their secret, impulse-driven

lives) suddenly decide that having schlepped all this way from the

old countries, they don’t want to be under the thumb again. Things

are said. Accusations made. People hang, burn, or drown. So . . .
shh
.

But everybody knows, just as they know which parts of town to avoid

after dark, which noises in the night you get out of bed to investigate,

and those you steadfastly ignore.

John knew it, too, she believed.

She thought that at some level he was beginning to sense things

did not work here like they did elsewhere. Hence him still being here,

and she knew he
was
still here in town, because she’d heard about his car breaking down across from the salon that morning. Plus, she just

knew.

Hence the dumb thoughts.

She worried that he might be starting to think he was under-

standing the lay of the land, but getting it the wrong way around.

She was adept at reading people—it came with the territory, whether

you liked it or not—and she already knew he was a man who was

not going to back down, even if that meant marching hard and fast

in the wrong direction. It wasn’t good for him here, and yet here he

still was.

Here
she
was, too—and she was beginning to wonder if she

knew why.

You can fi ght turning into your mom all you like, but in the end

you discover it may never have been negotiable.

206 Michael Marshall

Later, in between her shifts, she went out onto the street and tried

her mother’s cell again. There was no reply. It was kind of fucked up,

she realized, that it didn’t occur to her to be concerned by this.

It’s a strange position to grow up in, knowing you never have to

worry about your mother’s well-being. You carry these things with

you. If there was anything she had managed to learn in her time away,

it was that
you’re never away
. Wherever you are, you’re there, as the poor blue-haired corpse would doubtless have said. The soil you run

over as a child becomes a part of you just as much as it does that of any

plant. Jassie Cornell doubtless never consumed anything that wasn’t

USDA-certifi ed organic, in case some badness got uploaded into her

pristine (albeit pudgy) frame. Why should it be any different with less

tangible taints? With the qualities that fl oated over the earth and in

between the trees, that gave the winds their color and determined

how people felt when they woke in the shade of these mountains?

Why would anyone—apart from brittle-brained scientists—imagine

that you don’t absorb those, too?

Kristina believed she knew the answer to one question now, at

least, and it was making her feel sick and heavy and weary and sad.

This
was why she was back here. She’d never been away. Never had,

never could, never would.

The trees in these woods were not trees. They were bars in a cell.

The evening shift started in half an hour. Was there anything she

could achieve in that time? Probably not. So she should just head back

over to Kelly, try to use the walk to calm down.

Was there anything she could do
after
that?

She felt suddenly anxious and afraid, bowed over with the real-

ization that she was a girl who really should have listened in class;

stricken with the knowledge that the only person who could help was

the one she absolutely couldn’t ask, the same woman who’d wanted

nothing more than to teach her all of these things in the fi rst place.

B A D T H I N G S 207

Who’d started the process, taken her daughter on a drive, and then

been fi rmly shoved away. For a few months before she came home

to Black Ridge, Kristina had been plagued by terrible dreams, and a

therapist had told her they were driven by denial, and that no mat-

ter how much you try not to think of, say, a red cross, that’s what

you see in the back of your head. The only solution is to think posi-

tively of something else. Fine advice unless the red crosses run in

your blood.

When you start to feel afraid for no reason, it is a sure sign that

things you cannot see are on the move. When they begin to stir, all

you can do is run.

The only question is whether you run away, or toward.

C H A P T E R 2 8

I parked thirty yards down the street, a long residential curve on the

north side of town. Though the houses were of good size the area

looked sparse: one of several Black Ridge residential developments

from the 1970s and 1980s that never really took off. I chose a posi-

tion that was distant from a streetlight so as to look like just another

slumbering vehicle. It was getting even colder, but I sat it out.

After two hours I saw a car sweep up the road and park a little

way ahead. A large fi gure emerged with an armful of fi les. He went

inside the house and I gave it another ten minutes.

Then I walked over, up the path, and rang the doorbell. After a

minute or so the door was opened.

“Hey, Bill,” I said.

“Jesus, hey,” he said. He grinned, but he looked tired. “Come

on in.”

A few minutes later I had a beer in my hand and so did he. It appeared

to be his second since he’d gotten home, which was going some.

The countertop and table in the kitchen were covered in open fi les.

The sink was empty and clean but for a lone spatula. A garbage bag

B A D T H I N G S 209

near the back door looked to be full of the former cardboard homes

of take-out pizza. This reminded me I hadn’t gotten a call from Kyle

in the several hours since I’d spoken to Becki, but that was low on my

priorities right now.

“Busy?”

“Always,” he said. “You know the law—she’s a demanding mis-

tress. But what was that you always used to say? Without love and

work there is neurosis?”

“Koestler,” I said, thinking it was odd the things people remem-

bered about you, that however much you tried to be someone in

particular you might always be defi ned by acts that had been unin-

tentional.

I followed Bill into the living room. There were fi les all over

the place here, too, even on the lid of the piano up against the wall.

Otherwise it was tidy, though there was dust on the bookshelves.

Guys are good with tidy. Dust always seems to elude them.

“Tonight’s not good,” Bill said apologetically, “If heading out for

that drink was what you had in mind. Got a big case on Monday,

medical, expert witnesses up the wazoo. Need a clear head tomorrow

to prepare, not least because I still have no real clue what my client’s

problem is.”

“That’s fi ne,” I said, watching him take a large swallow of his

beer. “I’m really just stopping by.”

“How come you’re even still in the area? Thought it was a fl yby.”

“Turning out more complicated than I thought.”

“You going to tell me how?”

“Maybe.”

“Mysterious.”

Though we’d mainly socialized in bars down in Yakima, near the

offi ce, I’d been to Bill’s house often enough in the past. I knew the

house rules. I got out my cigarettes and pointed in the direction of

the French windows.

He nodded. “Sure. You ready for another?”

210 Michael Marshall

He joined me outside a few minutes later, holding two more bot-

tles. We drank for a while in silence.

“You’ve lived around here a long time, right?”

“Spent some years here as a kid,” he said. “Been here pretty much

since the army. Why?”