Bad Things (9 page)

“Didn’t do anything. Just talked to a couple guys.”

“Yeah, right. ‘Talked’ to them.”

48 Michael Marshall

“That’s how I remember it.”

“But you didn’t even know what they were going to be like. You

just walked right in and let rip.”

“I’d asked what your impression of them was.”

“But I could have fucked up. Got it wrong. It’s been known to

happen, right?”

“It all turned out fi ne, Kyle.”

“But—”

“What does Becki think about this?”

“She thinks you helped us out, and we should leave it at that and

go on like it never happened.”

“You could do worse than listen to Becki, on this and pretty much

everything else. She’s a good person to have in your life. You’re a

lucky guy.”

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “I know that.”

“Of course, being lucky can sometimes be a total pain in the ass.

It’s one of life’s major trade-offs.”

He thought about this, smiled, and drifted back toward the oven.

Half an hour later a cheerful English couple rolled up, got bounced

by Ted on account of being falling-down drunk, and that was pretty

much it for the night. We shut up early, a little after nine o’clock.

I shared a joint with Kyle on deck as he waited for Becki, and then

I started for home.

I got home bare minutes before all the water in creation started drop-

ping out of the sky. I rolled the canopy down over the deck and took

a beer and a cigarette out to watch it coming down, listening to wood

and canvas taking it like a barrage of incoming small arms fi re. But I

knew I was just killing time.

I went indoors when I fi nished the beer. As I opened the laptop I

realized it was possible this might be the night when I would be
glad

to only receive messages from shysters and pill pushers, leavened with

B A D T H I N G S 49

the revolving aftereffects of viruses unleashed on the world by kids

who didn’t realize how frustrated they were at not being able to make

genuine contact with the world, in the shape of a proper kiss with a

real live girl.

I hit the key combination, and waited.

They were there, these e-mail shadows of the void, with their

usual empty offers and demands.

But that wasn’t all.

C H A P T E R 7

The message was short.

If I don t answer please leave a message. We need to talk.

Ellen Robertson

And there was a phone number.

I was thrown by this, and stared at the digits as if they were a

door marked danger. An e-mail address says that if you type some-

thing to this person, they will (barring server crash, overzealous

spam fi lters, or random strangeness) get it pretty soon. At some

undetermined point in the future they will read it, and at a time

subsequent to that, they may reply. It is time and chance-buffered

communication. A phone number is different. It’s old school. If you

call a phone number there’s a real chance you’re suddenly going to

be talking to a real person, in real time.

The e-mail had been sent at 7:12. The clock on the laptop said it

was now 10:24. Was that too late to call? Did I care? If this person

was determined to throw a hand grenade into my life, did she have

the right to choose the terms of my reaction? The digits changed to

B A D T H I N G S 51

25, and then 26. The longer I thought about it, the later it was going

to get. I picked up my phone and dialed.

It rang fi ve or six times, and then picked up.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

“This is John Henderson,” I said.

There was silence for three, maybe four seconds. “I’ll call you

back,” the woman muttered, the words running into one. Then the

line went dead.

I grabbed my cigarettes and went out onto the deck. I couldn’t sit,

so I stood, watching the rain.

And waited.

I don’t smoke inside anymore, or drink alcohol under a roof. It’s one

of the ways I’ve learned to stop myself from doing things all the time.

I’d had two cigarettes out on the deck before the phone buzzed in my

hand.

“Yes,” I said, heading quickly back indoors, away from the noise

of the storm.

“I’ve only got a couple of minutes,” the woman’s voice said. It

sounded as though she was walking.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Ellen Robertson.”

“I got that. But—”

“I need your help.”

“What do you mean, ‘help’?”

She paused. “I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I think the same thing’s going to happen to me.”

“Look, I’ve got no idea what you think you know about—”

“I live near Black Ridge,” she continued calmly, as if I hadn’t spo-

ken at all. “Twenty miles from where you used to live.”

52 Michael Marshall

For a moment this derailed me, but then I thought—so what?

What happened was in the local papers. Available from district li-

braries, and doubtless on the Internet.

“So?”

“Wait a moment,” she said.

Again I heard a noise like the swishing of a coat worn by someone

who was walking quickly. It lasted maybe twenty seconds, and then I

heard her breathing harder, her mouth back at the phone.

“I have to go,” she said, and the quality of her voice had changed.

She sounded apprehensive, nervous. Maybe more than that. “I’m

sorry, but—”

“Look,” I said, fi nding a tone of voice I hadn’t used in a long time,

except perhaps to Kyle the night before. “I don’t know who the hell

you are. You’re telling me things that don’t make sense.”

“I’m the one who needs
help,
” she said, her voice abruptly strong

again—too fi rm, as if held right up against the brink of hysteria.

“There’s no one who’s going to believe except maybe you, and now

I realize you won’t either. I thought perhaps you knew but evidently

you don’t and I can’t risk e-mailing again because he’s scanning the

Wi-Fi now. If I tell you on the phone you’re going to think I’m crazy

and—”

She stopped suddenly. There were two seconds of nothing. Then

she said “Good-bye,” very quickly, and I was listening to the roaring

silence of a dead line.

The obvious thing was to call right back, but the “good-bye” had been

smeared, as if the phone had been jerked from her mouth on its way

to being stuffed in a pocket. I could pretend she was a lunatic trying

to take advantage of me in a way I hadn’t yet determined, but I know

how people sound when they’re scared and freaked out. By the end of

the call, the woman I’d been talking to was at least one of these, pos-

sibly both. I couldn’t just throw a ringing phone into her world.

B A D T H I N G S 53

It sounded like an e-mail wouldn’t be a good idea either. The

idea that “he”—whoever “he” was supposed to be, a husband presum-

ably—was pulling her messages out of the ether sounded paranoid

(it’s not as easy as people think), but an e-mail is an irrevocable act.

Call someone, and if the wrong voice appears at the end of the line

you can claim a wrong number or put the phone straight down and

take your chances with caller ID. Once an e-mail’s sent, it’s gone. It

paints what you’ve said on the wall and no amount of scrubbing will

get it off again.

“Fuck,”
I shouted. It was the loudest sound the house had heard

since I’d been living there. I had no idea I was going to shout before

the sound had already echoed fl atly off the walls. I did not like to hear

a noise that loud coming from inside me.

I stuffed the phone in my jeans pocket and stormed out onto the

deck, down the external stairs, and along the walkway over the dune.

It was still raining, but I didn’t know where else to go, or what else

to do.

At eight the next morning I called the restaurant. It rang and rang.

I gave up, tried again half an hour later. Finally I heard it being

picked up.

“Pelican?” An unfamiliar voice.

“Who’s that?”

“Eduardo.” The cook sounded cautious. Addressing the public

didn’t come under his brief. “Who is it, please?”

“It’s John,” I said. “I need you to fi nd something on the com-

puter.”

“I don’t know,” he said, doubtful again. “I don’t think Ted is happy

if I was fooling around on there.”

“There’s no reason for him to hear about it.”

“I don’t know computers.”

I forced myself to keep a level tone. “Eduardo, it’s no big deal.

54 Michael Marshall

I’ll tell you exactly what to do. I just need to get a number off the

database.”

“Whose number?”

“Becki’s.”

“Ah, it’s easy,” he said, sounding much happier. “She print it off,

leave it here, after the burglary. Everybody’s is here. Is okay.”

“Great,” I said, relieved at not having to lean any heavier on him.

“Give me hers, and while you’re at it, Ted’s home phone, too.”

He recited them, slowly and painstakingly. I thanked him, and

was halfway to putting the phone down before he asked something.

“You okay?”

“I’m fi ne,” I said.

I called Becki fi rst. I wasn’t banking on her to be up, certainly

not to sound so businesslike at that time of the morning. She listened

without interruption, and immediately agreed to the two things I

asked of her. So fi nally I called Ted.

“Don’t tell me it’s happened again,” he said straightaway.

“Nothing’s wrong with the restaurant. I’m at home.”

“So . . .”

I told him that I would be gone a day, maybe two. That Becki had

agreed to cover for me on the fl oor, if reservations merited it. The

truth was they probably wouldn’t.

Ted listened as I laid it out for him. “What’s this about?” he asked

fi nally.

“Family business,” I said.

“Didn’t realize you even had one. A family, I mean.”

“Well, I did,” I said. “I do.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“I appreciate it, but no.”

“You let me know if that changes.”

He was being kind but I wanted this over with. “I will, Ted. It’s

no big deal. Just, it has to be now.”

B A D T H I N G S 55

“I hear what you’re saying,” he said.

I’d packed a small bag and locked the place down half an hour

later, and ten minutes after that Becki arrived to drive me over to

Portland.

I was on a plane at 12:40, business class, which is all I’d been able to

get at short notice. I spent the bulk of the fl ight staring at the back of

the seat in front, trying to concentrate on how strange it felt to be in

the air again. I’d fl own a lot in the past. For work, and longer ago for

other reasons and under different circumstances and in planes that

did not offer hot beverages. Sitting on the fl ight to Yakima, I realized

it must be the fi rst time I’d been on an aircraft in over three years.

Yet my hands strapped me in without conscious thought. I passed

my eyes dutifully over the laminated “let’s pretend a crash isn’t going

to fi nish us all in a shrieking fi reball of death” sheet, and accepted a

coffee from the stewardess with the frequent fl ier’s casual indiffer-

ence.

The distance between then and now is always far shorter than

you think. By the time the plane had reached its cruising height, I was

cradled in the past’s unyielding embrace, and listening as it told me

the same old story again.

That I’d once had a son, and he died.

C H A P T E R 8

Kristina watched through the coffee-store window as her mother

started walking up Kelly Street back toward her lair. She took a

deep breath, and let it out very slowly.

Children, huh. Again. For God’s
sake
.

It was actually kind of amazing how her mom kept going on

about it—“amazing” in the limited sense of “unbelievably annoying.”

It was her sole subject matter, apparently. She never pitched in about

her daughter not having a husband, or a boyfriend . . . but a
child
—

that was the only story in town. As if
she’d
been this perfect Earth

Mother fi gure, a
Good Housekeeping
bake-and-nurture paragon, and

was just dying to see the maternal genius bearing fruit into the next

generation. As if the whole of male-kind was a sideshow or distrac-

tion, the unending line of women the only thing that ever mattered

(because a grand
daughter
was what her mom wanted, let’s face it,

not just any fl avor of grandchild)—and her own not-much-lamented

husband had not been father to someone who’d loved him.

As if she honestly didn’t realize there had been occasions when

her own daughter had fervently—though unsuccessfully—wished

her dead.

B A D T H I N G S 57

She ordered more coffee. Might as well. Her shift didn’t start until

fi ve, so why not while away another fair-trade, kind-to-all-God’s-

creatures hot beverage, savoring the rich pageant of a Black Ridge

afternoon?

After a few minutes a car trundled past, its tires making sticky

sounds on the wet surface. A little later, a different car went by in the

other direction. Hold the front fucking page.

Five minutes after that a girl whom she’d known back in school