Bad Things Read online

  FOR STEPHEN JONES

  Who knows the darkest parts of the woods

  —and the path from there to the pub

  It is the practice of evil, and hence, in a sense, the inhuman, that is the distinctive mark of the human in the animal kingdom.

  JEAN BAUDRILLARD

  Cool Memories V

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  It is a beautiful afternoon in late summer, and there...

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Ted came and found me a little after seven. I...

  Chapter 2

  Within thirty seconds we realized we had squat to say...

  Chapter 3

  Next morning started with a walk up the beach, carrying...

  Chapter 4

  What can you do, when things start to fall apart?

  Chapter 5

  It was a busy night in the restaurant. I didn’t...

  Chapter 6

  I saw the sun come up the next morning, though...

  Chapter 7

  The message was short...

  Chapter 8

  Kristina watched through the coffee-store window as her mother started...

  Chapter 9

  We touched down a little after three o’clock. Driving up...

  Chapter 10

  When I was a hundred yards short of the gate...

  Chapter 11

  I got to the Mountain View a little after eight...

  Chapter 12

  I turned on my stool so she could see my...

  Chapter 13

  You live in a place, and you create it, and...

  Chapter 14

  The next morning was bright and clear—unlike my head, having...

  Chapter 15

  On the way back to the motel I tried calling...

  Chapter 16

  We sat on opposite sides of a table. She was...

  Chapter 17

  When you work in a library you often see people...

  PART 2

  Chapter 18

  By midafternoon I was in a truly heinous mood. Phone...

  Chapter 19

  There was no sign of life in the motel office...

  Chapter 20

  They took her to the county hospital, Hope Memorial. I...

  Chapter 21

  I told the nurse at the station that Ms. Robertson...

  Chapter 22

  I left the car on Kelly and made my way...

  Chapter 23

  Sixty-two times. Sixty-three...

  Chapter 24

  The first thing I did next morning was go to...

  Chapter 25

  “Where the hell are you?”

  Chapter 26

  All I had to go on was the man’s throwaway...

  Chapter 27

  She banged on the back door. Banged hard. Then, though...

  Chapter 28

  I parked thirty yards down the street, a long residential...

  Chapter 29

  There was a stage in Scott’s development when he’d begun...

  Chapter 30

  I squatted down by the side of the car, awkwardly...

  Chapter 31

  She could have stolen a car. She possessed that skill,...

  PART 3

  Chapter 32

  Brooke swam from seven until seven-thirty, fast, methodical laps up...

  Chapter 33

  Next morning I walked back into the motel parking lot...

  Chapter 34

  About halfway back to the motel I became aware that...

  Chapter 35

  For a moment I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, couldn’t...

  Chapter 36

  When Kristina had got back to her apartment just before...

  Chapter 37

  I was lying on my side. The back of my...

  Chapter 38

  She said she had felt uneasy since lunchtime that day,...

  Chapter 39

  Finally, just when she believed her head was going to...

  Chapter 40

  Ten minutes later I ran back upstairs. By now it...

  Chapter 41

  When I made it to the end of the driveway...

  Chapter 42

  Bill was waiting on his porch when I pulled up,...

  Chapter 43

  I’d been for leaving Becki and Kyle at Bill’s, obviously,...

  Chapter 44

  “Christ,” Bill said, quietly. “What’s all this?”

  Chapter 45

  As soon as I got among the trees I dodged...

  Chapter 46

  I kicked off with everything I had. As I reached...

  Chapter 47

  A year ago, before any of this happened, I remembered...

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Michael Marshall

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  It is a beautiful afternoon in late summer, and there is a man standing on the deck of a house in the woods a fifteen-minute drive from Roslyn, a nice, small town in Washington State. It is a fine house, structured around oak beams and river rock and possessed of both cozy lateral spaces and cathedral ceilings where it counts. The deck is wide and deep, wrapping around the whole of the raised first story, and points out over a slope where a woman sits in a rustic wooden chair, the product of semilocal artisanship. She is holding a baby who is nine months old and, at the moment, miraculously, peaceably quiet. The house and the five acres around it cost a little under two million dollars, and the man is happy to own it, and happy to be standing there. He has spent much of the day in his study, despite the fact it is a Saturday, but that’s okay because it is precisely this willingness to work evenings and weekends that puts you in a house like this and confers the kind of life you may live in it. You reap, after all, what you sow.

  The deck has a fine view toward a very large, wooded lake the locals call Murdo Pond, sixty yards away down the wooded slope, and a little of which—the portion that lies within his property lines—the man guesses he owns, too, if you can be said to own a lake. He is wearing a denim shirt and khaki shorts, and in his hand is a tall, cold glass of beer, an unusual occurrence, as he seldom drinks at home—or much at all, unless business demands its shortcut to con-viviality—but which feels deserved and appropriate now: what else do we strive for, after all, if not for such an indulgence, on the deck of such a house, at the end of such a day?

  He can see that his wife is without a drink, and knows she would probably like one, and will in a short while call down to ask if he can fetch her something. But for a few minutes longer he stands there, feeling more or less at one with the world, or as close to that state as possible given the complexities of quotidian existence and the intransigence of people and situations and things. Just then a breeze floats across the deck, bringing with it the faint, spicy smell of turning leaves, and for a moment the world is better still. Then it has gone, and it is time to move on.

  The man opens his mouth to ask of his wife what she’d like to drink, but then pauses, and frowns.

  “Where’s Scott?” he says.

  His wife looks up, a little startled, having been unaware of his presence on the deck.

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “Working?”

  “I mean, indoors.”

  He turns and looks back through wide-open doors into the living room. Though there is evidence of his four-year-old son’s passing— toys and books spread across the floor as if in the wake of a tiny hurricane—the boy is not visible.

  The man goes back inside the house and walks through it. Not quickl
y yet, but purposefully. His son is not in his room, or the kitchen, or the den. Nor is he hunkered down in the stretch of corridor near the main entrance on the other side of the house, a nonspace that the boy has colonized and where he is sometimes to be found frowning in concentration over a self-imposed task of evident fascination but no clear purpose.

  The man returns through the house and out onto the deck, and by now he’s moving a little more quickly.

  His wife is standing, the baby in her arms.

  “Isn’t he there?”

  The man doesn’t answer, judging his speed will answer the question. It does, and she turns to scan her eyes around the lawns, and into the woods. He meanwhile heads around to the far right extent of the deck. No sign of the boy from up there. He walks back to the other end and patters down the cedar steps.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, looking flustered. He realizes briefly how tired she is. The baby, Scott’s little brother, is still not sleeping through the night, and will only accept small hours’ comfort from his mother. “About half an hour ago?” she decides. “Before I came out. He was in, you know, that place where he sits.”

  He nods quickly, calls Scott’s name again, glances back again toward the house. His son still does not emerge onto the balcony. His wife does not seem overly concerned, and the man is not sure why he does feel anxious. Scott is a self-contained child, happy to entertain himself for long periods, to sit reading or playing or drawing without requiring an adult within earshot. He occasionally goes for walks around the house, too—though he keeps to the paths and doesn’t stray deeper into the woods. He is a good child, occasionally boisterous, but mindful of rules.

  So where is he?

  Leaving his wife irresolute in the middle of the lawn, the man heads around the side of the house and trots down the nearest of the ornamental walkways that lead into the woods and toward the remains of the old cabin there, noticing the path could do with a sweep.

  He peers into the trees, calls out. He cannot see his son, and the call again receives no answer. Only when he turns back toward the house does he finally spot him.

  Scott is standing fifty yards away, down at the lake.

  Though the family is not the boating kind, the house came with a small structure for storing watercraft. Next to this emerges a wooden jetty that protrudes sixty feet out into Murdo Pond, to where the water runs very deep. His son is standing at the end of this.

  Right at the very end.

  The man shouts his wife’s name and starts to run. She sees where he is headed and starts to walk jerkily in the same direction, confused, as her view of the jetty is obscured by a copse of trees that stand out dark against water that is glinting white in the late afternoon sun.

  When she finally sees her son, she screams, but still Scott doesn’t react.

  The man doesn’t understand why she screams. Their boy is a strong swimmer. They would hardly live so close by a large body of water otherwise, even though the lake always feels far too cold for recreational swimming, even in summer. But he doesn’t understand why he is sprinting, either, leaving the path and cutting straight through the trees, pushing through undergrowth heedless of the scratches, shouting his son’s name.

  Apart from the sounds he and his wife are making, the world seems utterly silent and heavy and still, as if it has become an inanimate stage for this moment, as if the leaves on the trees, the lapping of the lake’s waters, the progress of worms within the earth, has halted.

  When he reaches the jetty the man stops running. He doesn’t want to startle the boy.

  “Scott,” he says, trying to keep his voice level.

  There is no response. The boy stands with his feet neatly together, his arms by his sides. His head is lowered slightly, chin pointing down toward his chest, as if he is studying something in or just above the surface of the water, thirty feet beyond the end of the jetty.

  The man takes a step onto the wooden surface.

  His wife arrives, the baby now mewling in her arms, and he holds his hand up to forestall another shout from her.

  “Scott, sweetie,” she says instead, with commendable evenness. “What are you doing?”

  The man is starting to relax, a little. Their son’s whereabouts are now known, after all. Even if he fell, he can swim. But other parts of the man’s soul, held closer to his core, are twisted up and clamping tighter with each second that passes. Why is Scott not responding? Why is he just standing there?

  The low panic the man feels has little to do with questions even such as these, however. It is merely present, in his guts, as if that soft breeze followed him down off the deck and through the woods, and has now grabbed his stomach like a fist, squeezing harder and harder. He thinks he can smell something now, too, as if a bubble of gas has come up to the surface of the water, releasing something dark and rich and sweet. He takes another step down the jetty.

  “Scott,” he says, firmly. “It’s okay if you want to look in the lake. But take a step back, yeah?”

  The man is relieved when his son does just that.

  The boy takes a pace backward, and finally turns. He does this in several small steps, as if confused to find himself where he is, and taking ostensive care.

  There is something wrong with the boy’s face.

  It takes his father a moment to realize that it’s not physical, rather that the expression on it is one he has never seen there before. A kind of confusion, of utter dislocation. “Scott—what’s wrong?”

  The boy’s face clears, and he looks up at his father.

  “Daddy?” he says, as if very surprised. “Why . . .”

  “Yes, of course it’s Daddy,” the man says. He starts to walk slowly toward Scott, the hairs raising on the back of his neck, though the temperature around the lake seems to have jumped twenty degrees. “Look, I don’t know what—”

  But then the boy’s mouth slowly opens, as he stares past or through his father, back toward the end of the jetty, at the woods. The look is so direct that his mother turns to glance back that way, too, not knowing what to expect.

  “No,” the boy says. “No. ”

  The first time he says it quietly. The second time is far louder. His expression changes again, too, in a way both parents will remember for the rest of their lives, turning in a moment from a face they know better than their own to a mask of dismay and heartbreak that is horrifying to see on a child.

  “What’s . . .”

  And then he shouts, “Run, Daddy. Run!”

  The man starts to run toward him. He can hear his wife running, too. But the boy topples sideways before they can get to him, falling awkwardly over the deck and flipping with slow grace down into the water.

  The man is on the jetty in the last of the afternoon light. He stands with his child in his arms.

  The police are there. A young one, and an older one, soon followed by many more. Four hours later the coroner will tell the police, and then the parents, that it was not the fall into the water, nor to the deck, nor even anything before that, which did it.

  The boy just died.

  PART 1

  It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion.

  RICHARD BRAUTIGAN,

  An Unfortunate Woman

  CHAPTER 1

  Ted came and found me a little after seven. I was behind the bar, assisting with a backlog of beer orders for the patrons out on deck while they waited to be seated. The Pelican’s seasonal drinks station is tiny, an area in front of an opening in the wall through to the outside, and Mazy and I were moving around it with the grace of two old farts trying to reverse mobile homes into the same parking space. There’s barely room for one, let alone two, but though Mazy is cute and cool and has as many piercings and tattoos as any young person could wish for, she’s a little slow when it comes to
grinding out margaritas and cold Budweisers and Diet Cokes, extra ice, no lime. I don’t know what it is about the ocean, and sand, but it makes people want margaritas. Even in Oregon, in September.

  “Can’t get hold of the little asshole,” Ted muttered. His face was red and hot, and thinning gray hair was sticking to his pate, though the air-conditioning was working just fine. “You mind?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  I finished the order I was on and then headed through the main area of the restaurant, where old John Prine songs played quietly in the background and the ocean looked gray and cool through the big windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.

  The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy, however, and I’d been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.

  The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sitting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-fired oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fish. His wife thought he’d got it wrong but she believed that about everything he did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn’t prepared to take it as the final word. Ted is a decent guy but how he’s managed to stay afloat in the restaurant business for so long is miraculous. A rambling shack overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out to the sea—and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it takes its name—the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively as to become one of those places you go back to because you went there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young, or, well, just because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.