Bad Things Page 11

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  “So was Romania.”

  So I told her. My teens were scrappy and I went into the army at twenty to get away from a life I could see tangling badly in front of me. Did five years and came out without having been shot and with only a few stitches here and there. I left soon after I met Carol, and joined the Secret Service instead, which I figured would at least keep me in the country most of the time. The service, despite the flashy, look-at-me name, is somewhere between grunt-level fed and bodyguard, and basically involves a lot of standing around. I was in it for two years, during which time I at no point met the president, the vice president, or got shot. After that I moved to the side, after being invited to work for an intelligence department tangentially allied to Homeland Security. During those years I additionally studied for a law degree during evenings and weekends. I started this when my wife got pregnant the first time and I realized there was soon going to come a point where I didn’t want to be around guns every day or have my whereabouts and safety governed by forces outside my control.

  I left and joined a small, old law firm in Yakima owned by the father of an old army buddy—Bill Raines, also working there by then—and did okay. They had bread and butter clients coming out of their ears and it wasn’t hard to bill enough hours to get comfortable. I worked mainly in offices, taking depositions and processing other discovery work, support functions for people like Bill, and only occasionally got to stare someone in the eye and dare them to take on me, our client, and the firm. Mostly they didn’t rise, and when they did, usually they lost and generally they took it well—though the odd thing was I nearly did get shot one afternoon by opposing council, who it turned out had a major cocaine problem and was, moreover, a poor loser.

  In general, however, it was a decent, quiet, respectable life. It should have stayed that way, with me eventually making partner and becoming fat and excessively knowledgeable about wine. It would have, but for a single afternoon.

  I stopped there, having already said far more than I had intended. Ellen listened well, with eyes that laid you open without seeming to pry.

  She thought about what I’d said, and then she started to talk.

  They met in Paris, where they shared a table out of necessity outside the Café de Flore on a busy spring afternoon—two strangers touring the Saint-Germain hotspots, ticking the box of one of the cafés where pioneering existentialists had moodily sipped café crèmes. She was personal assistant to an executive in a bank in Boston. Robertson was on his fourth annual trip outside the U.S. after the death of his wife, and still finding it hard to enjoy himself. Gerry had been a financial director down in Yakima before retiring in his midfifties, and so they had things to talk about, kind of. They found things, anyway. They also arranged to meet for coffee the next day, and then dinner that evening, and after that. . .

  As I listened, I decided Kristina had probably been right about something else. When Ellen talked about how she and Gerry kept the relationship going, via phone and e-mail and weekends away, how he’d proposed to her in New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of his wife’s death—and his reason for choosing that date, putting his past to bed in open view, rather than denying it—and how it had felt when she’d finally moved in with him to the house I’d seen earlier that morning, I had little doubt this was a woman who had felt deeply, and that the feeling had been reciprocated. Why not? Naturally there are differences between people whose ages differ by ten, twenty, or even thirty years (or so one would hope, if the older party has been paying attention to life in the meantime)—but probably far less than those which exist between a child of four and one of two. Being neither old nor young necessarily implies you’re a fool.

  There followed four years of happy domesticity and platinum-club international travel, the only blight on which had been, predictably, Gerry’s children. This had not taken the obvious form, however. Cory and Brooke Robertson welcomed the newcomer to the family compound, had been friendly to the point, apparently, of near suffocation. This confused Ellen until she realized they were treating her as if she were another sibling. Of course she didn’t expect them to deal with someone of their own age as a meaningful stepmother, but neither was she prepared to accept the role of a late-arrival sister who just happened to share a house (and bed) with their dad.

  After a discussion with Brooke in which she’d made it clear that was not the lay of the land, there had been a distancing, but—Ellen felt—no more than was appropriate. Life went on, with a family dinner together in the big house every Sunday.

  “So what was the argument about?” I asked.

  She looked confused.

  “Last night you said you and Gerry had a fight,” I said. “The day he died.”

  She stubbed the cigarette on the picnic table’s surface and flicked it away into the trees. “Children. But not his children.”

  “You wanted a child?”

  “It had been going on six months. Actually, nine—since the night of our fourth anniversary, that was the first bust-up. I’m, well, I told you. I’m thirty-four.” She held a finger up and jerked it from side to side. “Tick tock, tick tock.”

  “Could he have produced more children?”

  “Oh, I think so. Gerry was a vigorous man.”

  “Good for him. But a little old to cheerfully contemplate three A.M. bottle feeds. Especially when he’d been through it all thirty-odd years before.”

  She glared at me, in my temporary capacity as representative of all male-kind. “But he never said. When we got married, he never said, ‘We can have no children.’ We never had big fights about it, but . . . it was coming up more and more.”

  I could imagine, having been married. I was familiar with the process of relentless female advocacy. Aware, too, of the male counterweapons of bluff inattentiveness and circumvention, and how they do nothing but make a situation worse. “So—that day?”

  “It came up, it went the same as always. He went off for his run. I stomped around the house for a while and then got on with something else. It . . . it really wasn’t such a big fight.”

  Her chin twitched, and she stared down at the table. I had spent many nights telling myself that Scott and I had been on good terms in what had turned out to be his last days, that when I’d read him a bedtime story the night before he died it had been with pleasure, and not a sense of duty, and so I knew what her body language meant.

  “Better you were still having the fights,” I offered. “It gets to the point where you’re not talking, that’s when you’re screwed.”

  She looked back up, and smiled a little. I smiled back, but sat looking at her like a man who wasn’t going to say anything else without incentive.

  “It was his face,” she said. “That’s why I called you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He looked like they say your boy did, when he died.”

  The coroner’s report on Gerry Robertson was straightforward. Being fit for his age and that the family had no prior history of cardiovascular problems didn’t, sadly, amount to much.

  “Two weeks after he was buried,” Ellen said, “I was in Sheffer. I don’t know why, I can’t remember. Probably just to be somewhere. I was trying to eat some lunch. And I heard someone talking about ‘the Henderson house.’ And what happened there.”

  I swore, annoyed that my life had evidently become such a touchstone for local gossip. “Was it a guy in his fifties? Expensive-looking glasses?”

  She frowned. “No. A woman. Why?”

  “Never mind. And?”

  “This woman was saying she’d heard it from one of the policemen who was there, a guy called Phil.”

  I nodded. I remembered Phil Corliss, from the Black Ridge Police Department. He and his boss had been first on the scene after Scott died, but eventually ceded control to the larger Cle Elum Police Department. Of all the cops who’d turned up that day, and over the rest of the week, Corliss was the only one I never thought was
trying to work out how or why I’d caused harm to my son. No one asked, and none seemed like they truly felt me or Carol should be thrown in the back of a police car and worked over in a windowless room, but all except Corliss looked as though the thought had crossed their minds. Corliss and his boss, in fact—who was there too briefly for me to log his name.

  “The woman said Phil had told her something about the way . . . look, are you—”

  “I’m fine. Just say whatever you’ve been building up to. My patience is not infinite.”

  “The deputy said your boy’s face looked strange. When he saw the body. Like he had been scared?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So . . . I went to the library and I got out the newspapers from back then. I read what happened. And it made me start to think.”

  “I still don’t get—”

  “Gerry didn’t have a heart attack,” Ellen said. “My father, he had a heart attack. I was fourteen, I was there. He said he felt strange. Then he was fine for a few hours, but I saw him frowning and touching his arm, like this.” She rubbed her right hand up and down her left arm, quite roughly. “He stopped, but said he felt sick. He was okay for one more hour. Then he was rubbing his arm again, and he moved it up to his chest. But still he said he was fine. He got up to get some indigestion tablets and it was as if his left leg gave way. He slipped down onto one knee, crooked. He started to say something—and I saw that he knew what was happening. He knew he was having a heart attack. With Gerry it wasn’t like that.”

  “So how was it?”

  “I said his name. He turned and smiled at me—and it was a lovely smile, and it said the fight didn’t matter. I was about to say something nice to him when I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was looking through me, back to where the trees start. He looked confused. It was like he smelled funny, too, not like his sweat usually did. And he stared at me like he’d never seen me before in his life, and I made him scared.”

  She abruptly reached into her purse and pulled something out. “I have a picture,” she said.

  “You took a photograph?”

  “Later. They left me alone with him.”

  She held the picture out. I saw the harshly lit face of a man in his sixties, with soft features and thinning gray hair. His eyes were closed and he looked dead. Nothing more.

  “It had changed,” she said defensively.

  I felt furiously let down. “Well, yeah, Ellen. Facial expressions don’t just freeze on people’s faces forever. Christ, are you kidding me?”

  “It wasn’t just his face, anyway,” she said quickly. “It was what he said.”

  “And what did he say, Ellen?”

  “He said ‘What the hell . . . Who are you?’ and I turned to see where he was looking. It was sunny and bright and you could see all the way to the trees but there wasn’t anything there, except, you know, the trees behind the main house. And so I turned back to him, to ask what he was talking about, but . . . he was dead.”

  “So he had a stroke, or the CVA cut off the blood to his brain, and his vision got skewed.”

  “Is that what happened to Scott?”

  “I don’t know why you think you know what happened to my son,” I said, angered at her use of his name. “In the newspaper it just reported that he died. So what makes you think—”

  “The woman in the café was telling this other person that the policeman had said your son died looking scared. Thats how Gerry looked. Thats what disappeared from his face. He saw something, and it made him die. The coroner smoothed his skin out to hide it. So no one would know.”

  I was staring at her now. “Ellen, that’s just . . . nonsense.”

  “Someone did something to Gerry,” she insisted. “And now they’re trying to do it to me.”

  “Do what, Ellen?”

  “They’re watching me all the time. They’re in my house at night. They follow me everywhere, and hide when I turn around.”

  “Who? Cory and Brooke?”

  “No. It’s not them.”

  “Are you sure? Someone from that house called me. How else did they get the number except off your phone—which says they’ve been snooping around your house. And who else did you mean when you said someone was intercepting your e-mails?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Cory is doing that. They want me to leave the house. But it’s not just them. It’s someone else. They’re trying to punish me for Gerry dying—for something I didn't do.”

  “Who?” I said. I was close to shouting now. “Who do you think is doing this?”

  She muttered something, a word I didn’t quite catch. It sounded like “trigger.”

  “What did you say?”

  She made a noise of angry disgust, got up, and stormed away toward her car. By the time I’d caught up with her she’d already yanked the door open.

  “Ellen,” I said. “Listen to me. You need help. Seriously. The death of someone you love can do strange things to your head. Believe me, I know.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she shouted, eyes bright with anger or tears.

  Then she slammed the door and drove away.

  I walked back to the table to retrieve my cigarettes, and wound up sitting down and smoking another. I was disappointed and relieved. Relieved to have gotten to the bottom of what the woman felt she had to tell me. Disappointed that it was meaningless bullshit.

  I was angry with her, too. I hadn’t been honest with Carol when we’d spoken. I hadn’t chosen to go up to the house. I had many times in the last several years reaffirmed in my head a clear decision to never go anywhere near the house or this area again. I wouldn’t have done it at all if Ellen Robertson hadn’t got in contact. Ever since I had been back in the Northwest I had felt my new life fading, as if the distance between then and now was being eroded—and the visit to the house had been the start of this. The last twenty-four hours had been a dumb and dangerous waste of time, and it was time to go back to the future.

  I slipped my cigarette butt into the pack, as had been my habit even before the health nazis redefined smoking as akin to mass homicide. In doing so I remembered how Ellen had flicked hers away, and got up to go look for it. I wasn’t really expecting to find it, but moved more by a self-righteous annoyance that took littering as additional evidence of her being a stupid bitch.

  I traced the likely trajectory across the grass and into the trees, realizing as I did so that this had been the area where I’d first glimpsed her when I arrived. And there, close to a lichen-spangled rock, was a fresh butt. I picked it up and was about to stomp back out again when something caught my eye.

  I hesitated, then walked a few yards farther into the trees. What covered the ground there—as you would expect, in these kinds of woods at this time of year—was a mixture. Fallen leaves in a hundred shades of brown, grasses turning more gray than green, widely spread rocks with patches of verdant moss.

  There was also, however, a collection of twigs and small branches, covering an area approximately three feet square. I looked up, and confirmed that the trees around me were pretty much exclusively firs. Trees of a type, in other words, that would be unlikely to drop material of this kind. There were alders and silver and paper birch within vision, yes, but none just here.

  Humans have pattern-forming minds, and this can sometimes be misleading. As I stood looking down at a random collection of fallen objects, I nonetheless thought, for a moment, that they looked almost as if they formed a shape—one which I couldn’t quite discern. It just didn’t looked entirely random.

  There was something else, too. A faint odor. Earthy, but with a high, sweeter note, as if some small creature had died in the vicinity.

  A bird cawed suddenly nearby, making me jump. I realized I was staring at a scattering of autumn debris, and felt a fool. I swept my foot in an arcing kick through the twigs, spreading them over a ten-foot radius, and walked back to the car. It
was time to go home.

  CHAPTER 17

  When you work in a library you often see people who look familiar.

  The book hounds who get through two or three novels a day, and are constantly ferrying their treasure troves in and out. The young women who know they’re less short-tempered mothers in public, and bring their children to play in the kids’ area with its heavily battered plastic toys. Men looking for work, or at least presenting themselves that way, drifting through entire days in the company of newspapers or nonfiction written by people who lucked into financial success and are now compounding their good fortune through bestselling books entitled Ten Reasons Why You Suck, and I Don't.

  But Carol didn’t think the man she had become aware of this morning was any of these things.

  He wasn’t there when she arrived at ten-thirty—she was pretty sure, though she’d still been flustered by the call from her exhusband. Talking to John had been the absolute last thing she’d expected that morning, and hearing he was over in Black Ridge had thrown her completely. She’d spent a soothing period tidying—it was amazing how people who employed the classification system to find books seemed to believe it dispensable when it came to putting them back—and using the computer to run up a poster for a reading group.

  When she looked up from printing out a draft she glimpsed a man in the nonfiction stacks. She noticed he was thickset, with flecks of gray amid his short dark hair, but no more than that.

  She didn’t think anything of it until, an hour later and with the phone call largely behind her, she realized the man was still in the library, now over where the new fiction was laid out. Again she saw him only briefly, from behind, as she trundled a cart of returned books over toward the children’s section.

  An hour was not an exceptional length of time to spend in a library. Many spent longer, but most of these fitted into the recognizable tribes. When she had joined the library Carol had been subjected to a rather long orientation lecture from Miss Williams (currently at the dentist, thank God). Miss Williams’s worldview was characterized by a high level of mistrust—of pretty much everyone, but notably of those who might be using the library “inappropriately.” Who used the restrooms without putting in a reasonable stretch perusing books; who were here because it was warm; and most of all the people Miss Williams called “watchers.” Men who cruised the stacks, pulling out a volume occasionally and leafing through it, but whose gaze always seemed to be somewhere else—on a woman in another section, bending over to get something from a lower shelf; on one of the young mothers, leaning forward to assist her child without considering the effect this might have on the front of her blouse.