Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  I established that’s where Ellen was headed by shouting the question out the car window to the paramedics, and hoped it was a sign that—despite the blood that had covered most of her face and sweater—she hadn’t cracked her head or spine or too obviously mashed up her insides.

  The traffic was messed up again on the other side of the accident, and it took me a while to find a way of cutting back around the far side of Cle Elum and then taking the back route past the top end of Black Ridge—passing not far from Bill Raines’s house, which made me feel guilty. I checked at the desk in the hospital when I eventually got there, describing myself as a friend, and learned she was being patched up. That was the term used, which reassured me.

  I retreated to the parking lot to wait, and was leaning against the hood of my rental when I saw a large car come in from the other end. It parked on the right and both doors opened at once.

  Cory Robertson got out of the passenger side. A woman of about his height and not dissimilar age, wearing a smart black pantsuit, got out of the other. They walked off toward the main doors virtually in step.

  I decided I’d go check on Ellen’s progress again.

  When I came out of the elevator on the second floor I saw Cory in imperious discussion with the nurse, presumably having been told the same as me, which was that visitors were not welcome, and unlikely to be for an hour or more.

  I hung back to watch, admiring the steely implacability of the woman behind the desk. If our country is ever in danger of invasion all we need do is man our coastline with medical receptionists, and no one could ever pass. When Cory finally turned and walked away, exasperated, I decided I might as well kill two birds with one stone.

  I stepped out of the corridor, giving them plenty of time to see my approach. The woman paid no attention. Cory Robertson glanced away, then quickly back again.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting a friend,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I thought . . . you were just passing through.”

  “Circumstances change.”

  I turned to the woman. Though I’d never seen her before their car pulled into the lot outside, the family resemblance was marked. While Cory’s face had already started to sag, however, this woman’s remained sharp, her body lean with the form that comes from spending a good deal of time on the tennis court you own and swimming in your own pool. There was a tiny key on a thin gold chain around her neck.

  “Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m John Henderson. But you know that, of course.”

  She didn’t shake, or make the slightest movement toward doing so. She merely looked at me with what appeared to be mild amusement.

  Cory looked confused. “You said your name was Ted something.”

  “I lied.”

  “So who the hell are you?”

  “Aren’t you two comparing notes? Your sister seemed to know exactly who I was when she called my motel room in the middle of the night.”

  I saw the penny drop.

  “You entered our house under false pretenses, sir,” Cory said, sounding about three times his age.

  “Guilty. And you said the other house on your property was empty, whereas the ‘tenant’ was there all the time.”

  “And why would you care?”

  A husky voice said: “Because he’s screwing her, of course.”

  I stared at Brooke. “Excuse me?”

  She smiled with what appeared to be genuine warmth. “Well, it’s been a few months, Cory. I’m sure our resident Eastern European fuckbunny must be needing her holes plugged again by now.”

  I was incapable of responding to this.

  Brooke tilted her head on one side. “Tell me, Mr. Henderson. Does the fact she’s a murderess add a certain something? Does it impart a special frisson?”

  “Not here,” Cory told her mildly. “Evidently it will be some time before we can pay a visit to our poor friend. I suggest we come back later.”

  “Good idea, little bro,” his sister said. “I’m sure we’ll meet again,” she added to me, and winked. “I’ll look forward to it, handsome.” And then the two of them walked away.

  Forty minutes later a harassed-looking doctor came out to say I could visit with Ellen briefly. I was directed to a side room where she lay propped up in bed, staring out of the window at the clouds gathering outside. After I’d stood in the center of the room for perhaps a minute, she turned her head.

  “Are they here?”

  “No,” I said. “Assuming you mean Cory and Brooke. They were, but they left.”

  “You met her?”

  “I guess,” I said. “We had an encounter, certainly.”

  I walked over to the bed. The side of her face was extensively bandaged, heavy bruising already creeping out from underneath it. “Are you okay?”

  She shrugged.

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Twenty stitches.”

  “I saw the car. I’m amazed it wasn’t a lot worse.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “You don’t seem surprised that I’m here.”

  “The nurse told me a man was waiting. Didn’t sound like Cory. There’s no one else it could be.”

  “Were you trying to do something this morning?”

  She glanced down at her hands. “No,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed her. “Though maybe I should have been. Maybe it would just be quicker that way.”

  “Ellen, what’s going on?”

  “I told you. I tried to.”

  I went around the bed to the window side and sat down in the chair.

  “Tell me again,” I said.

  It had started, she said, the day after the funeral. Until then the Robertsons had appeared to treat her with compassion, as if she were one of them. Of course they hadn’t been aware until that point that their father’s will stipulated Ellen be allowed to remain on the property for as long as she wanted. Once that wish had become known, things changed.

  At first, Brooke and Cory had simply stopped talking to her, or registering her existence. If they passed her on the grounds, or on the streets of Black Ridge, they behaved as if she wasn’t there—and it was this that had caused Ellen to start spending time in other places, like Sheffer, where she had eventually overheard the conversation relating to Scott’s death. The maid who’d previously cleaned Ellen’s house stopped doing so. The Wi-Fi that had extended across the property stopped working, suddenly requiring a password that Ellen did not know—but then, twenty-four hours later, worked without one again: around the time she began to suspect that Cory (whose business concerns included IT installations in local firms) was in a position to spy on her communications with the outside world. If Ellen tried to phone the Robertsons, the call was not answered. When she knocked on the door of the house, apparently no one was ever in.

  When it became clear that a freeze-out was not going to be enough to dislodge her, matters began to escalate. Mail stopped arriving at her house. There had never been much, but her mother wrote once in a while, and these letters stopped arriving—along with the bills and mail-order catalogs that make you feel connected to the world. After trouble with a credit-card company over nonpayment of a statement that had never arrived, she had to switch to paying everything online.

  “I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Ellen said.

  But I could imagine. The trivial supports us. You think you’re withstanding the crisis and then one morning you discover there’s no bread in the kitchen or you don’t like your shoes and next thing you’re smashing your forehead against the wall and crying as if you’ll never stop.

  Meanwhile, other things started to happen.

  There would be knocks on her door in the middle of the night. The first few times, she went down—to find no one there. By the fifth or sixth occasion she began to find this ridiculous, and stopped going down—until she noticed one morning that things seemed to be missing from the downstairs rooms, or at least to have been moved—as
if whoever had knocked and received no answer had then used a key to enter the premises. The missing objects weren’t even things you might believe they would wish to regain possession of, or not always. A couple of minor heirlooms went, certainly, but also a side table Ellen had bought for five bucks at a yard sale, and a battered saucepan, and finally all of the soaps from the main bathroom—which was on the same level as the bedroom in which Ellen slept.

  So she started getting up again when she heard the knocks, and running downstairs, shouting furiously at whichever Robertson must be playing this stupid game.

  But still they were never there, and still things continued to disappear.

  One night Ellen tested it. She watched television until eleven, and then switched the TV off—along with all of the house lights. She didn’t go to bed, however, but sat on the floor in the hallway, wrapped in a blanket, and waited. She kept watch throughout the night, using coffees and cigarettes and magazines.

  At nearly two A.M. there was a sudden banging on the door— terrifyingly loud, with no warning and coming from nowhere. She didn’t answer it. She stayed crouched on the floor, a kitchen knife ready in her hand, waiting for it to be unlocked and opened.

  It was not, however, and she stayed that way until finally it began to get light again outside.

  She trudged upstairs just after seven, feeling obscurely triumphant, as if she had managed to turn the tide in her direction.

  Her toothbrush was missing, however, and though she spent two hours turning the house upside down, it never turned up.

  You can always buy a new toothbrush, and she did. But when she locked the door of her house that night she no longer felt the place was hers, or that she lived there alone. The fact that all windows and other points of access were secured only made the feeling more acute.

  The knocks on the front door continued. After a time sounds began to come from the window of her bedroom, too. And from inside her closet, and underneath the bed, or so she thought. Never loud enough to be provably more than the shifting of fittings or floorboards in response to fluctuations in temperature—which the house seemed increasingly prone to—but enough to keep her awake night after night. Milk bought from the market in the afternoon turned brackish and sour by midevening—unless it was the water that was at fault, or the new brand of coffee she drank in order that every cup not remind her of the specific brew that she and Gerry had always favored.

  Then had come the night when, just before going to bed, she had momentarily lifted one of the bedroom blinds, which she now kept permanently drawn, and seen a large black bird hanging over the pond.

  It had seemed to hover in place, unmoved by the strong winds swirling down and around, whistling through the trees. Then it was gone, but then she heard the sound of something moving away into the trees. Something larger.

  Ellen yanked the blinds shut, and spent the night perched on the end of her bed. That’s when, according to her, she knew.

  “Knew what?” I asked.

  “It was a strige,” she whispered, not sounding like she was from Boston at all.

  “A what?”

  She turned to stare out of the window.

  The thing about grief is that there is no telling what it will do to you.

  It comes from so deep a well that it is capable of bending reality—or, at least, of mangling how the afflicted perceive the world. I had felt or heard or seen things that I knew full well I could not have done. A face glimpsed in the street or playground, a happy shout from two streets away that sounds so familiar you cannot believe it might have come from a stranger—until you run desperately to see, and find that it has issued from a child who looks nothing like yours. Death opens a wound which is so raw that you may find yourself jamming the squarest of pegs into the roundest of holes, attempting to heal the breach in a universe that now feels horrific and broken.

  I had heard Scott’s shout. I had seen the face of my mother, who had been dead for ten years. But, of course, I actually had heard or seen neither.

  Now was not the time to tell Ellen this. She would work it out soon enough, I hoped, and I know from experience that you will never alter someone’s belief system by direct confrontation with contrary evidence. Faith is the opposite of proof.

  So I asked her a question instead. “Brooke called you a murderer,” I said. “Why would she say that?”

  “She says I hurt their father. That he died because of me. That’s why they’re punishing me.”

  “The coroner’s report was black and white. A heart attack, like you said.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I get around. So why are they harassing you?”

  “They don’t believe it.”

  “How do you know, if they’re not talking to you?”

  “Because three weeks ago, she did. I was on Kelly Street, I was . . . I was thinking of going into that bar, the Mountain View. Just to be somewhere, you know, to have someone to talk to. But then suddenly Brooke’s there in front of me, and she just lost it.”

  “How?”

  “She started shouting at me in front of the other people—people I used to know, who used to talk to me when Gerry was alive, and who just walked around us as if it wasn’t happening. How I’d pay for what I’d done. And since then everything has felt even worse. I can’t think straight. Everything’s getting louder, all the time.”

  “Ellen, there’s nothing left for you here. So why don’t you leave? Start again somewhere else.”

  “Like you did? After what happened to your son?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did that work? You ran away. What did you find? You can’t just leave. If you try, it just comes with you. It comes with you inside.”

  “This ‘strige' this is something from home? A Romanian thing?”

  She nodded irritably.

  “So how could it be here? In America?”

  She looked at me as if I was very stupid indeed. “In Romania we also have things called abore,” she said. “And munte, and also noapte. It’s very strange, but it turns out you have them here, too.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Trees. Mountains. And night.”

  I was losing patience. “Your English is very good, Ellen. So what would we call a strige here? The nearest equivalent?”

  She cocked her head and looked straight back at me. “A witch. Okay?”

  I breathed out heavily and leaned back in the chair, considered again telling her about faces glimpsed and sounds heard, but knew it wouldn’t work. In her position my grip on reality might be tenuous, too—assuming I would be sober enough to have views on anything at all.

  “You think I’m crazy, yes?”

  “No,” I said. “I think it’s a great shame that Gerry Robertson should die so soon after finding a woman who loved him as much as you did. And still do.”

  “You think that’s all this is? Everything I’ve told you?”

  “I’m going now,” I said, standing. “But I’ve got to ask one thing. If what you think is happening is real, what bearing does it have on me, or on Scott? Why would anyone have wanted to harm me?”

  I don’t know,” she said. “Unless you’re being punished, too.”

  “What for?”

  She smiled coldly. “That’s for you to know, right? Tell me, what did you do?”

  I told her to get some rest, and walked out of the room. When I was halfway down the corridor I heard her shout after me.

  “What did you do?”

  CHAPTER 21

  I told the nurse at the station that Ms. Robertson had requested no further visitors be admitted without checking with her first. The woman agreed with the confidence of one who knew this was a function she could perform, and take satisfaction in.

  On my way to the elevator I passed a door that was half open, and glimpsed a girl sitting on the edge of a bed. It was the bluehaired waitress from the Write Sisters. Her face was wet, and she was staring down at the floor. I
hesitated, decided it was none of my business. Then took a step toward the door anyway.

  “Are you okay?”

  Either she didn’t hear me or agreed that her problems were not my concern.

  Cory and Brooke’s car was gone from the parking lot. I was tempted to drive straight to their house to continue our conversation. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, however, and once in a while that’s enough to stop me doing something.

  There was a police car sitting in the same row as mine, and as I drew closer I saw that Deputy Greene, the cop I’d encountered behind the desk at the department in Black Ridge, was sitting inside. He wound down his window.

  “What are you doing here, sir?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “I don’t think the sheriff would appreciate you interfering in other people’s business.”

  I walked over to his car. “Is that message from you, or from him?”

  “Does that matter?” He looked up at me, his calm, bland eyes striking against the pale fleshiness of his face. “I’d just listen, is all.” He started up his car, and drove slowly out of the lot, probably not realizing that I’d dismissed him from my mind before he even made it to the road.

  When I turned my phone back on I saw I had voice mail. I listened to it, forced into a smile by a combination of gratitude, bewilderment, and foul language I would have believed impossible within the constraints of the English language.

  I sent a text message in return, saying:

  We’ll talk repayment later. Meantime, make sure it gets to whom it’s supposed to. TODAY. And keep your boyfriend on a tight fucking leash until I get back.

  I sent it to Becki’s cell phone, then got in the car and headed back toward Black Ridge. As I turned out of the lot onto the main road I passed a car I recognized, heading into the hospital lot—the dark green SUV that had pulled up alongside me on my first day in town, just before I visited my old house. The same man was inside.