Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  She had stared at it, gripping her father’s hand, knowing she was seeing something wrong, that animals shouldn’t look like that.

  No animal.

  Not even her.

  Nearly thirty years later, but feeling no older, she pushed herself back from the door lock. Again. It was just before two in the morning. She had been there an hour and a half.

  Because it wasn’t even the first set of sixty-four.

  There had been nothing since the man in the library. No more calls. No more notes. She didn’t think that meant they had gone away. She had not called the police. A nonthreatening phone call and a photo she could have taken herself would add up to squat in their eyes, and generate nothing but scorn or, even worse, pity. You’d think a single parent would evoke concern as a first reaction, but that’s not the way it goes. Especially not a woman.

  Why would a woman in her thirties be living alone in the first place, unless there was something wrong with her? Unless she’d proven too difficult and strange for a man to live with?

  The letters on the chalkboard wouldn’t have made any difference, even if she hadn’t furiously scrubbed them off—before realizing that was an unbelievably dumb thing to do.

  As soon as she had something concrete then of course she’d go to the cops. But for now it was a case of hanging tough. Not panicking. Holding the chaos at bay, as she had for nearly three years with no help from anyone. Staying put and asking nothing of anyone other than herself. Sometimes help from others comes at too high a cost.

  She of all people knew that.

  She forced herself to walk backward down the hallway. She was only able to do this by promising the gods she wasn’t pretending to believe the door was actually locked, just taking time out before restarting the process. Beginning again, with renewed dedication and rigor. It seemed like the lightbulb in the ceiling was flickering as she passed beneath it, but that was just tiredness. Just the headache that stretched from ear to ear. Just. . .

  . . . oh, who was she kidding.

  The fucking bulb was flickering.

  Even Tyler had noticed it, on the way to bed, hours before. She’d told him it just meant the bulb was about to blow, which caused some confusion as he was only familiar with the concept of blowing in relation to birthday candles. So their bedtime story was all about a lucky lightbulb called Leroy, who lived in a lovely house with a mommy and her little boy, whose birthday it was tonight and so he was getting ready to blow out all the candles on his cake, and tra la la.

  Tyler was sleeping now, but judging by the last couple of nights he’d wake up soon rather than later. Her normally sound sleeper was suddenly all over the place again. And what could that mean, if not. . .

  The bulb was flickering. The drawers in the kitchen felt stiff, and a little too hard to pull out. It was darker under the chairs than it should be.

  Were these things true anywhere except in her own mind? She’d never been sure. Except for the bulb. That had to be real, unless Tyler was only in her mind, too, and that was a road she wasn’t going down, not now, not tonight, not ever.

  Of course, it could be that the bulb really was just about to give up the ghost. Could be.

  But that didn’t make any difference. The last days had been like falling into a shaft whose infinite depth—the better for falling down, my dear—did not negate the certain knowledge of sharpened stakes at the bottom. The only way to stop yourself toppling is to dig yourself in. Any way, any how.

  She stood in the kitchen and knew her feet were still moving but didn’t know how to stop them. Movement was now their natural state, as a heart knew nothing but how to beat. Unless you stopped it, of course, but all the knives in the kitchen had been wrapped tightly in a towel and stowed way in back of the yard, as of yesterday afternoon. There had been a time when . . . but that time wasn’t now. She’d got through that period and it wasn’t her fault it was happening again. She’d done everything she could, built her walls, and then John had fucked things up. By calling her? Or merely by going there, going back?

  She didn’t know. Rationally, she believed the former. You could sit and chew that one over with a therapist (assuming you could afford one) and he’d nod sagely and make notes, and say he could see how it could have redirected her attention to a bottomless grief she’d never expunged, and charge you a hundred bucks, happy he’d been of service.

  But she knew what she believed. What her faith told her. After all, hadn’t this all started before John called? She thought it had, that things had stopped being where she expected them to be in the supermarket, that she had woken feeling as if she had been half smothered in the night . . . before he called. When he was already up there, but she hadn’t even known about it.

  Because of course, there had been the other phone call, from a woman Carol had known since she was small. She could blame John all she liked, but that game was getting old. She could hate him for what happened then, but not for what was happening now.

  Either way, it had to stop.

  It had to stop for good and all. No running, no hiding, and certainly no doing what other people wanted her to do. In the meantime, the lock could go fuck itself. If she stayed up all night, then it didn’t have to be locked, did it.

  Ha.

  Ten minutes later, armed with a warm robe and a large pot of strong coffee, she sat at the kitchen table with a big book of very difficult Sudoku puzzles. All she had to do was wait until the sunlight, look sane when Rona came to collect Tyler, and work out what to do next. Everything is easier when it’s light. Rays of light are bars in the cage which protects us from what’s outside. A little, anyway. Most of the time.

  Anything else she had to do?

  Oh yes—not lose her mind. That’s right.

  She was halfway through the third puzzle when she heard the soft sound of a window being broken at the back of the house.

  CHAPTER 24

  The first thing I did next morning was go to the office. The owner was in place, behind the counter.

  “Looks like you’re a keeper,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Unless you’re headed out today? I just meant you’re staying longer than you thought.”

  I was watching her face, and looked for—but did not find— signs that this observation was loaded.

  “It’s a nice town,” I said.

  “It surely is.”

  “You been here long?”

  “All my life.”

  I nodded, keen to get back to my real reason for being here. “Your dog,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Where does he sleep? At night. Does he have a kennel?”

  She laughed. “Hell no. I tried it, when he was a puppy. Used to howl like, well, I already said I was told he was half wolf. That’s what he sounded like then, for sure.”

  “So now?”

  She jerked her head, indicating the area behind the office. “Takes up three-quarters of my bed—on a good night. Why?”

  “Thought I heard something around the back last night. Wondered if it could have been him.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well, can’t think what that might have been. Years back, a bear, maybe. Maybe. But no one’s seen one of those near town in a coon’s age. I mean, like, forever.”

  “Probably just the wind, I guess.”

  “Most likely. Got up fierce as hell last night. Keep you awake?”

  “Something did.”

  The car wouldn’t start.

  I walked over to Kelly Street right after talking to Marie, with a simple goal—driving straight to the Robertson house—but when I got in the car and turned the key, nothing happened.

  I got back out and stared at it furiously, which is about the sharpest tool in my car-fixing armory. My father had known how to do that stuff but I’d failed to pick up any of those skills, and modern vehicles are in any event less responsive to being optimistically tackled with a monkey wrench. I did open the hood to see if there was any obvious si
gn of tampering, but saw nothing I could understand (like, say, a missing engine), and felt dumb for even looking.

  In the end I stomped across to the Write Sisters, thinking I might as well be warm while I waited for someone to come fix the fucking car. A server I hadn’t seen before was watching me as I walked in. “Problem with your car?”

  “Won’t start.”

  “Funny. Melanie had the same thing. Personally I don’t drive,” she added. “It’s bad for the planet.”

  “Right. I keep forgetting. Though, given I live in Oregon, I guess I’ve got a little more carbon to burn this week, realistically.”

  “But that’s the thing,” she told me earnestly. “People shouldn’t do all this moving around. We’re meant to live as part of our environment—love it, nurture it, return to it. That’s how we should live.”

  “Oh yes?” I said tightly. “And what would happen then? How would it change things?”

  “I don’t know. I just think it’s a good idea.”

  “Americano,” I said. “With milk.”

  While she brought my drink into being—using, presumably, coffee beans from the plantation out back and milk from the cow hunkered upstairs—I talked to the rental company and eventually got the sense something might happen about my car at some point.

  When the coffee arrived I looked up.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You said someone had the same problem with their car? It wouldn’t start?”

  “Melanie. From the salon? She actually lives only two minutes away, so she leaves her car on the street here virtually the entire time. She was here, first thing, supposed to go off and drum up a cake for her daughter’s birthday, she’s twelve in a couple days, unbelievably, but the thing wouldn’t start. She’s waiting for Brian Jackson to arrive, if you need someone to look at yours.”

  “Brian being a mechanic?”

  She nodded, looking disapproving.

  “Can I have this to go?”

  As she poured the coffee into a disposable cup I remembered something. “The other girl who works here. Blue hair?”

  “Jassie Cornell?”

  “Is she okay?”

  The girl looked at me quizzically.

  “She didn’t look so good last time I saw her.”

  “Well, funny thing,” the girl admitted. “I wasn’t even supposed to be working this morning, but she didn’t show up yet.”

  “Maybe her car punked out on her, too.”

  “Yeah, right. Like she’d drive. She’s a hard-core vegan.”

  I smiled as if she had said something I could understand, took the cardboard cup, and went back outside onto the street.

  Fifteen minutes later a guy arrived in a white truck and parked close to the hair salon. He went in and came back out a minute later holding some keys.

  I sat on the bench and watched the guy—Brian, I assumed— climb into a blue Ford and fiddle around for a while, then get back out and pop the hood. Meanwhile I worked through most of a granola bar from the café, which this morning tasted stale and bitter. The mechanic spent quite a while bent over the car’s innards without provoking anything that sounded like a harbinger of successful internal combustion.

  In the end I went over.

  “Any idea what the problem is?”

  “Not a clue.” He looked around, still bent over the engine. “I know you?”

  “Got a car on the other side of the street, won’t start either.”

  “One of those days. You got someone coming for it?”

  “I do.”

  “Huh.” He straightened, looking pained. “Hope he has better luck. Maybe the immobilizer’s blitzed or something. Guess I’m going to have to tow it back to the shop.”

  He went back and climbed in the car to let the brake off. Stuck the key back in the ignition, and gave it a turn for the sake of it. The car started.

  He switched it off, turned the key again. The engine fired back into life immediately.

  He and I looked at each other. “Huh,” he said, again.

  I waited until he’d delivered the news that Melanie’s vehicle seemed to be working once more, declined payment, and drove away in his truck. Then I walked over to my own car, unlocked the door, and got in. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. The car started.

  “Huh,” I said.

  It began three or four hundred yards from the turnoff. At first I didn’t notice except to think that whichever local business sponsored the cleanup of this stretch of mountain highway wasn’t getting their PR dollars’ worth. Once it grew from occasional scraps of paper to include a few widely spread items of clothing, I realized something in particular must have happened. Perhaps a suitcase coming loose from a roof rack, spreading its cargo to the winds, unnoticed by the driver.

  And then I saw a flash of purple, and pulled over.

  I left the engine running as I walked across the road to what I’d seen caught in a strip of crimson dogwood on the other side. I knew what it was before I’d even picked it up, recognizing it from a couple of days before. The sweater was sodden, soaked by the overnight rains. There was something odd about the way it smelled, over and above the unattractive odor of wet wool. Something sweet. Further articles of clothing were dotted down the slope toward the creek far below, caught in the branches of trees.

  As I drove the remainder of the distance I saw other objects, including two small, battered suitcases, but I no longer believed they or the rest of the debris had fallen from a car. No one would have packed a small wooden table in a suitcase, and yet one was strewn along the side of the road, smashed to matchwood, along with fragments of several ornaments and the remains of a framed wedding photograph.

  I parked outside the gate and leaned on the entry buzzer, hard. After a pause, the gates opened. I probably should have thought about the fact that no one tried to stop me entering, but I was angry, and I did not.

  Brooke Robertson was standing outside the main house. She was dressed again in a black pantsuit, the legs flapping noisily in the wind.

  “Good morning, Mr. Henderson,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “It may not stay that way.”

  “How thrilling.”

  Pieces of clothing lay strewn around the lawn, including a blouse I recognized from the first time I’d met Ellen, in the Mountain View. The door of her house was hanging open.

  I turned back to the woman in front of me. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Really.”

  She smiled. “You look tired. Problems sleeping? I find a bout of moderately savage sex is the best solution. Doubtless you’re familiar with that approach?”

  “Not having someone call your motel room through the night would help.”

  “I’m sure I have—”

  “—no idea what I mean. You bet. You’re kind of limited, aren’t you, when it comes to understanding what other people say.”

  “I don’t listen much of the time. One so seldom hears anything of interest. Especially from men of your type. Action is your forte, I should have thought.”

  She said this in a way I did not care for, and I took a step toward her, knowing and not caring that I was close to behaving in ways I should not.

  “How about you concentrate just this once, Brooke, and—”

  I heard someone call my name, and saw Brooke was looking calmly over my shoulder toward Ellen’s house. I turned to see Cory Robertson walking across the lawn toward us. Beside him was Sheriff Pierce, holding a pale blue shirt in one hand.

  “Standing kind of close there,” the sheriff said to me, when they reached us. “Wouldn’t like to think there was an altercation taking place. Especially after the conversation you and I had last night.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “My job.”

  “Did Ellen call you?”

  He looked puzzled. “Well, no. Of course not.”

  “S
omething strange occurred here last night,” Cory said. “The sheriff is here to investigate.”

  “Odd? Yeah. You let yourself into Ellen’s house and trashed her belongings. Spread them half a mile down the road. Why? Do you think she deserves that?”

  “That’s not what happened,” Cory said.

  I turned to Pierce. “Are you really going to let these people get away with this?”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” he said. “Not all the stuff you see belongs to Ellen.” He held up a man’s striped business shirt.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” Cory said, taking his shirt from the policeman, “but my sister and I spent last night with friends in Yakima. When we returned this morning, the doors to both houses were open, and, well . . .”

  He gestured around the lawn.

  “Bullshit,” I said. The three of them looked at me like parents and a teacher who had all just witnessed inappropriate behavior, and weren’t sure whose responsibility it was to upbraid me for it.

  “So who’s supposed to have done this?” I said. “Ellen? By mind control, from the hospital?”

  “Much closer than that,” Brooke said.

  I could almost feel her smile on the back of my neck, but didn’t give her the satisfaction of turning.

  “Ellen’s not in the hospital anymore,” Pierce said, after a pause. “She checked herself out yesterday evening. Nobody knows where she is right now.”

  “Unless, of course . . . you do,” Brooke murmured.

  I stared at Pierce.

  “The door to the house she has been living in was opened with a key,” he said. “Cory and Brooke’s place was forced.”

  “A subterfuge the average eight-year-old could have dreamed up,” I said. “And given what’s happened here, shouldn’t you care just a little bit about where Ellen Robertson is?”

  He ignored me. “I’ll get this logged,” he told Cory. “Anything else, you phone me.”

  Cory nodded. He looked so calm, so magnanimous in his forgiveness of the regrettable behavior of others, that I wanted to punch him in the face.