Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  “What do those people actually have to do, to get the cops to stop turning a blind eye?”

  “Something concrete,” he said. “Something that can be investigated.”

  “The sheet on Ellen’s past, the past they’ve evidently been torturing her over. Not enough?”

  “I’ll remind you that I never saw it.”

  “I hope you’re not calling me a liar.”

  “No, though it would be within my rights to consider it. With no piece of paper, there’s nothing I can do. You burned it. And you could argue, given Ms. Zaituc—assuming that’s who she is—is under suspicion of murder in Europe, the Robertsons are exercising kindness by not turning her in.”

  “I guess you could argue that. Assuming your tongue wasn’t so far up that family’s ass that you could still use it for intelligible speech.”

  “Mr. Henderson, I’m going to make this simple for you.” He pulled a sheet of paper out of the tray of the inkjet printer, which sat in a stand to one side of his desk. “Let’s call this Black Ridge.”

  He took a pen and drew a black cross bang in the middle. “That’s the family,” he said. Then he a made smaller cross down by the bottom 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 finger. The lid toppled, slid off the piece of paper, across the desk, and onto the floor. “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 first 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 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.”

  CHAPTER 27

  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 curtain 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.

  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 interviewed, 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 downhill 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 that had eventually sent Kristina halfway around the world—to find, 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 difficulties. Outsiders point the finger once in a while, open the box, and townspeople who’ve tolerated the arrangement (and benefited 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 understanding 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 fight turning into your mom all you like, but in the end you discover it may never have been negotiable.

  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 th
at 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-certified 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 floated 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 realization 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 first place.

  Who’d started the process, taken her daughter on a drive, and then been firmly 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 matter 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 positively 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.

  CHAPTER 28

  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 position 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 figure emerged with an armful of files. 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 files. The sink was empty and clean but for a lone spatula. A garbage bag 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 mistress. 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 remembered about you, that however much you tried to be someone in particular you might always be defined by acts that had been unintentional.

  I followed Bill into the living room. There were files 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 fine,” 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 flyby.”

  “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 office, 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?”

  He joined me outside a few minutes later, holding two more bottles. 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?”

  “You know the Robertsons?”

  “Well, yeah. I met Gerry a few times, on business. We used to represent his firm.”

  “What about the current generation?”

  “Sure. Brooke and Cory. Why?”

  “Gerry’s second wife was in an accident yesterday,” I said.

  He frowned. “Really? What was her name, Helen?”

  “Ellen.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I don’t really know that, either,” I said.

  It was full dark now and the light coming out of the house lit Bill’s face harshly, revealing lines where there had been nothing but fine young skin when I had first known him, ten years before Scott had been born. I’m sure he saw the same thing in me.

  “You going to explain that?”

  “Do I need to?”

  He took a long swallow and looked away down the yard, a space that was open about not being the haunt of children. “Depends what you want from me,” he said. “If it’s legal advice, then yeah, kinda.”

  “Probably not legal,” I said.

  “Then what?”

  “I met with Ellen a couple times over the last few days. That’s who I was hoping to hook up with, the day I ran into you down in Black Ridge.”

  “Met with her . . . why?”

  “Long story. She got in contact with me. The point is she’s convinced she’s in some kind of danger.”

  “From whom?”

  “Brooke. Cory, too, probably.”

  “Cory’s the kind of guy you could lay out with one slap. Brooke . . . yeah, I could see her unnerving someone.”

  “She’s unnerved Ellen pretty bad.”

  “I’m kinda not following you,” Bill said, and downed the rest of his beer. “They should make this shit in bigger bottles. One more?” While he was gone I stepped back into the living room. There was a pair of shoes under one of the side tables. A tie, too, hanging over the back of a chair. There would come a point, not soon, but eventually, when files and folders would be the dominant furnishing.

  Bill wandered back into view, two bottles in one of his large hands. He paused to glance down at a file on the table. I took a deep breath. “Jen really out of town?”

  He looked up. “She’s really out of town.”

  “How far out?”

  “What’s it to you, John?”

  “House just feels a little empty, is all.”

  He looked at the floor. “Things have been a little rocky lately, since you ask. We’re undergoing a period of domestic reorganization right now.”

  “I’d probably better not drink that beer after all,” I said. “I’m dr
iving.”

  “Responsible guy. Well, next time you’re passing through town, give me a little more notice, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He walked me out into the hallway. A couple yards short of his front door, I half turned.

  “She’s okay, though, right?”

  “Who?”

  “Jenny.”

  “She’s fine, John. Nice of you to ask. But she’s fine. Right as Raines.”

  “That’s good,” I said, but I could not smile at another of his habitual jokes. I looked at him and something hooded and flat in his eyes made me fear that Bill’s wife was not fine, and that harm might have been done to her.

  Unfortunately, whatever channel opened in the ether evidently operated in both directions. He blinked, just once, otherwise standing very still.

  The first punch nearly took me out of the game right there. It came up low and hard and though I started to turn it landed heavily and it was all I could do not to go straight over onto my back. Instead I staggered sideways into the wall.

  I crouched just in time, getting under Bill’s second lunge and managing to partially turn him toward the door.

  I stepped back up the hallway, but not far. I didn’t want to get backed in that direction, farther into the house. I didn’t want Bill to be able to get around me, either, because I was sure somewhere in the building would be a gun. So when he came charging toward me I went hard straight back at him. I got his shirt in his hand and he hit me in the gut so hard I lost all my breath. He put his hands up around my neck, and I snapped my head forward to hammer down onto his nose. There were smashing sounds, as arms and shoulders and heads cracked into things on the walls, pictures coming down along with an ornamental bookcase, spreading glass and broken pottery over the floor and our clothes. He looked like he was going down but then came up even stronger and knocked my head back against the wall so hard that for an instant everything was white.