Bad Things (34 page)

“Yes?”

“It can’t be left any longer.”

“I said I’ll call him, Brooke. This morning. Before I go out.”

“I’m not talking about the pool.”

He put his knife down. “I’ve told you. I’m not going to—”

“I meant on a larger scale.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He fi nally raised his head to look at her. “Do you have something

in particular in mind?”

“It’s already under way.”

He nodded slowly, distantly, reminding her forcefully of their

father. Cory never mentioned him now, nor the manner of his de-

mise. They had been close, or at least closer than Gerry and Brooke

had ever been. His death was the fi rst thing that had ever come be-

B A D T H I N G S 243

tween them, and sat there like another silence, but one that didn’t

seem to erode.

“You know I trust you in these matters,” he said, dabbing at his

mouth with a napkin.

“Yes.”

Trust, or hand over all responsibility to? For a moment Brooke

missed her grandfather so much that it hurt like a toothache. Her

mother, too. Even Dad, that silly fond old man. Anyone whose pres-

ence would take some of the weight off her shoulders, prevent the

world from always being so very quiet: another body to warm a house

now home only to the faint clatter of silverware, and china, the mut-

ter of nonfi ction television in this tidy lair of the nearly middle-aged,

forward movement all but stopped. Like everything else in this town,

running out of steam, turning into a photograph.

Unless someone did something.

Her brother stood, hesitated for a moment, looking out at the

woods.

“Yes,” he said, more fi rmly. “Yes, I can feel you’re right. You’ll tell

me what you want me to do?”

“I will. Don’t go far today. See if your friend will eat lunch here

instead.”

Cory walked slowly out into the hallway, leaving her alone at the

table with a plate of congealed hollandaise.

When Clarisse came to clear the dishes, Brooke looked up. “I

think you could take this afternoon off,” she told her. “And tomor-

row morning. In fact, why not stay with your daughter for a couple of

days? Take a little break. You deserve it.”

“Yes, Miss Brooke.”

After breakfast she went back up to her private sitting room. She sat

on the couch and considered the web of things. She thought through

how matters would need to be done, working the web of and-then-

244 Michael Marshall

and-then-if-then. You can plan all you like, however, and she had, but

still you had to be open to the moment, to leave space for the gods to

walk through the room.

Eventually she got up and went to the middle section of the draw-

ers which lined the side of the room. She used the key on the chain

around her neck to open one of them, and withdraw evidence.

Then she picked up the phone, and called a policeman.

“It’s today,” she said.

Afterward she went down to the kitchen and picked a few things out

of the fridge. She put them in a small plastic lunch box—where it had

come from, she had no idea—and carried this with her as she left the

house.

After a short drive she parked, got out, walked to a house, and

unlocked a door. She opened it a little, squatted down, and slid the

lunch box across the fl oor into the darkness beyond.

“We’re going to move you a little later,” she said. “After that there

will be no more food.”

The people in the dark said nothing, though Brooke heard the

sound of quiet crying.

“I’m sorry it had to be this way. You were invited to make it easier,

after all.”

“Fuck you, Brooke,” said a weary voice, in the dark.

Brooke relocked the door, and walked back to her car. She did

not turn when a sudden breeze ran through the trees, causing a harsh

whisper of leaves as loud as a human voice.

But she knew what caused it, and was glad.

C H A P T E R 3 3

Next morning I walked back into the motel parking lot to see Becki

banging on my room door.

“Where the fuck have you been?” she said furiously, as soon

as I was within earshot. “I need the bathroom key, and I need it

now
.”

“Use mine,” I said, handing her one of the coffees I had bought,

along with a small paper bag. She looked inside and saw the tooth-

brush, shampoo, and other toiletries I’d picked up, and her face

softened.

“We can’t just leave him in there,” she said.

I unlocked my door. “Right now I can’t think of a better place for

him to be. He has access to water. Sooner or later he’ll get hungry,

at which point we may be able to talk sensibly with him. Until then

I’m in no hurry for him to become an active factor in my life.”

I reached into my jeans pocket, pulled out her bathroom key,

and dropped it into the paper bag. “It’s your call.”

She thought a moment.

“It can wait,” she said, with half a smile. “Not sure he’s ever seen

this time in the morning anyhow.”

246 Michael Marshall

I told her to stay indoors once she’d showered, and went and got in

my car. It was time to leave town. Ellen still wasn’t returning my

calls, but there were two other things I wanted to do before I left.

I turned out of the lot and headed toward the main road through

town. I found myself slowing outside the motel I’d seen in my dream:

the one I’d lived in for a while, and also the place I’d used to meet

Jenny Raines. That’s all Black Ridge had been to me before a few days

ago. The place of assignations. Charged with a toxic blend of pleasure

and guilt, therefore—guilt which had writhed and reproduced after

Scott’s death, forging a fake connection in my head to the worst thing

that had ever happened to me.

Since I’d woken that morning, my thoughts had kept coming back

to Bill. A good guy, an old friend, next to whom I’d walked in uni-

form patrolling towns and deserts in a place where no one wanted us

and where being someone’s friend meant being their shield. Who’d

invited me into his life again years afterward, encouraging his father

to fi nd me a position and a salary a very recently qualifi ed attorney

would have never received otherwise. I have a feeling Bill even intro-

duced us to the Realtor from whom we bought our house, though I’m

not sure.

And how had I repaid him? By becoming as bad a thing in his life

as anyone or anything had ever been to me. I never did anything to

him directly, of course—but that’s not how bad things work. They’re

dark and slippery, always just out of sight, operating at a remove that’s

hard to foresee and impossible to fi ght.

I called Bill’s offi ce and was told he wasn’t there. I recalled him

saying he had a big case coming up, and seeing the number of fi les

spread around his house, I considered it likely he was working from

home. I did a U-turn and drove back the way I’d come.

B A D T H I N G S 247

Bill wasn’t at home, either. I waited, then knocked again and walked

back halfway down the path to look for evidence he was inside and

electing not to see me. There was none. I turned away, unsure what

to do. It was too cold to hang around on the porch.

I went back to the car and sat in it. I tried the old cell-phone

number I had for him, but it dead-ended in silence. It struck me that,

despite talking up the notion of a drink when we’d met on the street

on my fi rst day here, Bill hadn’t gone out of his way to ensure we

could actually get in contact. I’d been too caught up in avoiding a

further meeting to realize he might have been doing the same. Might

the kinder and more adult thing just be to leave the guy alone, rather

than assuaging my own guilt by forcing him to look once more inside

a box he’d tried to glue shut? Kristina had told me to just get over it,

and it could be she was right.

Or was that sloping away my responsibilities, as I’d turned my

back on Tyler and most everything else? Didn’t I owe Bill the oppor-

tunity to call me an asshole to my face? Would it ever be over without

that? I remembered evenings soon after Carol and I had moved to the

area. Bluff, pleasant gatherings with the Raineses and their neigh-

bors, dinner parties where the men are in good shape but pompous,

the women mild and thickening, and both are far duller than they

have any need to be; which start with the guests paying court to the

hosts’ most extroverted child, last a couple of hours with each couple

gently carping at each other (except for the pair whose problems are

too serious for such sport, and who therefore appear to be basking

in rather formal perfection)—and eventually dissolve, abruptly, when

someone has to leave early because their babysitter has exploded.

Except Bill and Jenny never had any kids. And now, neither did I.

Lives get tangled, until you look down in your hands and cannot fol-

low the string for all the knots. I decided I’d wait it out a little longer

in the hope of loosening at least one of them.

248 Michael Marshall

Sometime later I heard a knocking on the window, and looked up to

see Bill standing by the car. He had a fat lip and a mild black eye. He

looked tired.

I wound the window down.

“You planning some kind of ninja stealth attack?” he asked. “If

so, you suck.”

“I came to apologize.”

“For what? Sleeping with my wife or fucking up my house? Not

to mention face. Nothing a client likes more than a lawyer who looks

like he lost a bar fi ght.”

“All of the above.”

He looked down at me for a moment, then turned and walked

slowly toward his house.

The walls of his hallway looked more bare than they had, but

the mess had been tidied away. I leaned against one of the kitchen

counters while Bill made coffee, feeling about as awkward as I had in

my life.

“She’s in Boulder,” he said eventually.

“Back home?”

“Sure you two must have done at least
some
talking,” he said drily.

“Which case, you know she was from Philadelphia.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Left fi ve months ago,” he said, handing me a coffee. “Which was

frankly a relief. She’d gotten to the point of being hard to live with.”

“Hard how?”

“Down all the time. I mean, really,
really
down. Stopped going

out, stopped making her jewelry, stopped doing anything except

staring out the window at the woods. Running around some inner

wheel, tidying the house and then tidying it again. She’s with some

guy now. I hope he’s doing a better job than me, though Christ knows

I tried.”

“When did you fi nd out?”

“About you two? Only a couple weeks before she left. Things had

B A D T H I N G S 249

been getting brittle. Eventually you came up in conversation, mostly

as further evidence that I was so dumb and preoccupied with work

that I couldn’t see what was happening right under my own nose.

Which I guess is fair, as I’d had no clue what you’d been up to. Of

course I
did
think of you as a friend, so I wasn’t braced for incoming from your direction.”

“Bill, I didn’t do it to you.”

“Yeah, you did,” he said. He was looking me straight in the eye

and for a moment the air between us was tense and clear. “Who
else

did you think she was married to?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, subsiding. “I did a very bad thing, and I’m

sorry.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want from me? If you’d been here the day I found

out, then yeah, I might have gone old school on you. Now? I have

slept on it many times, John. It’s done. It’s your problem, not mine.”

“You seemed less sanguine about it last night.”

“Yeah, and look what that got me.” He sighed. “That only hap-

pened because you were implying that I might have hurt her, which

was too fucking much.”

“I was kind of mixed up.”

“Understood. But I’m
not
anymore, John. And I don’t want to

burst your bubble but you weren’t the only one, okay? After you left

town there was at least one other guy. Not that it seemed to make her

any happier.”

For an instant this information actually stung, and I realized that

if you have woken up next to someone but once, you are never truly

disconnected again. Then I laughed, briefl y, and shook my head.

“My point exactly,” Bill said.

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, but stood drinking cof-

fee in vague attitudes of cautious affability.

“So what are you doing these days?”

250 Michael Marshall

“I’m a waiter,” I said, daring him to make something of it.

“Good deal. The world needs waiters. I imagine you carry a very

effi cient plate. That what you’re going back to?”

“Yes.”

“Today?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Sounds like a good one.”

“I’m very glad you approve.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We’re not going down that road again,

are we? It’s just, my fi sts hurt enough as it is.”

I smiled. “No, we’re not.”

And that seemed to be that. Bill turned toward the hallway, and I