Bad Things Read online

  My mind, however, was elsewhere.

  It was midafternoon by then and I realized I was hungry. I thought I was, anyhow, though when I started looking for somewhere to eat I found none held any appeal. In the end I came to rest in the street opposite the motel in which I had spent several weeks holed up, trying to drink my way through pain and unhappiness. After two nights’ bad sleep my eyes and brain felt desiccated, and for half an hour I did nothing but sit.

  People meanwhile came and went from the motel. Others walked past on the street. Cars went by, and clouds moved overhead. It rained for a little while, stopped, and then started again. Slowly it began to get colder. I finally realized that the feeling in my guts was the beginnings of low-level panic. Over what, I wasn’t sure. I found myself staring at the door to room number 4 of the motel, and after a time it almost felt as if I was trapped inside, that the world outside that room had become a vast room in itself, one from which I might not find an escape. I knew what this feeling meant, though it had been a long time since I had felt overwhelmed by it. I knew what it signified when your body begins to feel it is locked inside a place where there are no doors, as if you are being buried alive. I knew also that the Mountain View Tavern was comfortable, and that they had a beer on draft that I liked.

  Instead I drove to the coffee shop on Kelly and sat staring out of the window, trying to work out what there was to learn from what else Ellen had told me, if anything. I was confident that her toothbrush was somewhere in her house, and that a distracted mind—she had been clinically distracted every time I’d met her—could lose track of how quickly she was getting through a bar of soap. The other objects would have been taken by the Robertsons, as she initially thought, or simply lost in the undertow of domestic life.

  What she needed was counseling, to move away and start again. To find her own Marion Beach.

  Instead she had Cory and Brooke, and that made me angry. I was beginning to see in her something of the person who—a similar length of time after someone he cared about had died—had battened himself into a motel room and made a decent attempt at driving at the wall. Despite her denial, I suspected the incident on the pass this morning had not been wholly accidental, and that Ellen was close to walking off the edge of her own cliff. If someone had been around to push me at the time, it was likely I wouldn’t still be alive.

  There was a quiet knocking sound, and I looked up to see Kristina standing outside the coffee shop, tapping on the window. Though just as black and semikempt, her hair looked longer, inexplicably.

  She winked, waved hello and good-bye in one motion, and then turned to walk across the road toward where she worked. I made my coffee last as long as I could, but eventually I paid for it, went outside, and headed in the same direction.

  The bar was pretty crowded and I was served by some other guy. It was half an hour before Kristina swung by my seat at the window to clean up my ashtray. She made a face as she dumped the butts into the can she was carrying.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  She shook her head.

  “Funny. You look like a smoker. And I mean that as a compliment.”

  “Used to,” she said. “When I lived here before. I gave it up when I left. With other things.”

  “Drugs? Alcohol? Polite conversation?”

  “All of the above. I heard about Ellen. She okay?”

  “Banged up some. Though why would you be assuming I’d know?”

  “I just heard you were kind of close, that’s all. I didn’t—”

  “But you saw us in here together the other night,” I persisted. “Did we look like an item?”

  “Not really.”

  “Yet forty-eight hours later we’re picking out china and booking a string quartet?”

  “Look, whatever, okay? It’s really none of my business. You want another beer, or what?”

  I said I did, and stared out of the window until she returned with it. She was set to leave straightaway, but I held up my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I would like to know why you think there’s something going on.”

  “I don’t, necessarily,” she said. “And I honestly don’t give a crap. I mean, really, truly. But I was having extensions done across the road this afternoon and I heard someone saying how it was nice Ellen was turning the corner. Finding someone new to hang with, that kind of thing. Even though it’s only been four months, blah blah blah.”

  I kept my voice level. “Was it Brooke Robertson?”

  “I don’t want to get involved. It’s a small town, people talk. Other people listen. That’s all.”

  “By all means listen to what that woman says,” I told her. “But don’t believe it. I think there’s something wrong with her.”

  “Could be, could be. But I’m wondering if the whole you-and-me-talking thing is really working out. Ratings are mixed.”

  “I’m sorry about before. Again.”

  “Copy that. But I’m going to leave now. Find a customer with more polished social skills.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard, even in here.” I waited until she’d started to turn, and added, “You actually pay someone to make your hair look that way?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me and walked off.

  Four beers later I had an idea—which is seldom a good way to start a sentence—and stepped outside the bar to make a call. I got the number from directory assistance and asked to be put through.

  “Pierce,” said a voice, after a short interval.

  “It’s John Henderson.”

  “You in a bar?”

  “No, outside one. You’ve got good hearing.”

  “Yes, I do. I talked to Deputy Corliss, if that’s why you’re calling. He won’t do it again. He’s also been asked to instruct his sister to be more discreet.”

  “Thank you. But that’s not it. I wanted to ask you a favor.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The woman I told you about—Gerry Robertson’s ex-wife? She was involved in an accident today.”

  “I heard.”

  “I visited her in the hospital. It sounds like Brooke and Cory Robertson are making life tough for her. I wondered whether someone in local law enforcement might have a conversation with them, expressing a hope that a bereaved woman is getting the support she needs at this time.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing that falls within our remit,” Pierce said. “Sorry.”

  “Me, too. Would it be easier if the Robertsons weren’t such a big deal around here?”

  “I don’t like the implications of that question.”

  “Then I apologize. And I guess I’ll have that conversation with them instead.”

  “I don’t think that would be wise.”

  “A polite discussion between responsible adults wouldn’t be any of your business, thankfully.”

  “Mr. Henderson . . .” He sighed. “Look, I spoke with someone who witnessed the accident this morning. He was talking it up all over Harry’s, and I asked him to keep it down.”

  “People have a real impulse to share information around here,” I said. “Almost a compulsion.”

  “That’s because it’s a real place. You want stony silence and nobody-gives-a-shit, go over the mountains. This old guy—and I’ve known him for a long time, he was a friend of my father and he’s not a person prone to exaggeration—was headed in the opposite direction and saw the whole thing. He said Ellen’s car was veering erratically as it came up the hill, so much that he slowed and pulled over as far as he could. The car kept coming, not fast but all over the place, and he saw Ms. Robertson inside, gripping the wheel, shaking her head back and forth. Like she was on drugs, he said.”

  “I’m sure the admitting ER doctor has a toxicology report that you should have no problem getting—”

  “Jesus, I know that,” Pierce said testily. “I made the call, and she was clean. Chemically. But mentally? Does that sound normal to you? Driving on a wet mountain road throwing your head a
ll over the place?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then she suddenly stared straight ahead, and the car went off the road and into the mountainside.”

  I didn’t say anything. Through the window of the bar I saw Kristina hove in view, realize I was absent but still had beer in my glass, and wander off again.

  “So, yes, could be your friend needs a little help—”

  “She not my ‘friend,’ for the love of God. That’s something else that—”

  He overrode me. “But I don’t think the Robertsons are her real problem, and anyone who tried to take it up with them would be causing a nuisance that would come under my jurisdiction. As a misdemeanor. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Excellent. Good night, and safe flight home.”

  I snapped the phone shut and shoved it into my pocket. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, realizing it was midevening and cold and I still hadn’t eaten that day.

  I went back inside and ordered another beer, though the fire in my head had gone out. I drank it slowly, as the bar started to empty, sitting at the counter and knocking it back and forth with Kristina. Miraculously, we managed not to argue about anything.

  CHAPTER 22

  I left the car on Kelly and made my way back to the motel on foot.

  I would have done this wherever I was, but as I walked through the town I realized I was also doing it for another reason. I wondered whether someone might have observed me in the bar, counted the beers, and when they saw me get in a car, make a call to Pierce or one of his deputies. Who would have done that? I had no idea. Neither Robertson had been propping up the counter alongside me, keeping a tally, waiting for me to go over the limit. I didn’t think the bar staff was in their thrall, either, certainly not Kristina, who didn’t give the impression of being easy to boss around. The whole idea was dumb, and it annoyed me to be giving head space to it. I walked all the same.

  The streets were quiet, and though it was only ten o’clock pretty much every dwelling I passed was dark enough to seem like it housed the dead. It wasn’t raining, for once, and the sky was clear and blue black, but the wind was beginning to pick up.

  When I opened the door to my motel room I found something had been pushed underneath. A thin brown package.

  I picked it up, turning to look back across the lot. I’d seen no one on the way in, but would there really be no one on hand, to check I’d received this message, whatever it turned out to be?

  I went inside and opened the envelope. It contained a single sheet of paper, two-thirds covered with type, a low-quality photograph reproduced at the bottom. The text concerned the murder in Berlin in October 1995 of a man called Peter Ridenhauer, found dead in his apartment from multiple stab wounds. Ridenhauer had been under long-term investigation for sex trafficking: enticing or coercing women with promises of reputable and highly paid work in upmarket European countries, then taking possession of their passports before forcing the girls to become involved in prostitution—usually easing the transition by causing them to be addicted to heroin, which he supplied. Some eventually limped home years later, many overdosed or disappeared, all could be expected to undergo twelve or more clients a day, many of whom had tastes that could not be slaked in the company of more voluntary working girls. The primary suspect in Ridenhauer’s death—a girl formerly under his control, glimpsed entering his apartment with him on the evening of the murder— disappeared from Germany very soon afterward, and though the case remained open it didn’t seem anyone was in a great hurry to solve it.

  The suspect’s name was Ilena Zaituc. The attached photograph showed, without much doubt, a younger version of the woman I’d visited in the hospital that morning.

  My hands were trembling as I opened the door and walked back out into the parking lot. I stood in the middle and held the piece of paper up.

  “Mistake,” I said, getting my lighter out.

  I didn’t shout, but I said it loud and clear, and though my voice felt guttural in my throat I knew the sound would carry. “If this is supposed to make me think worse of her, it doesn’t.”

  I held the lighter up to the document, and set fire to it. When it had caught, I let go, and the wind took it, flipping it away and up into the air. The flame dodged and jerked like some tiny, fierce spirit.

  I thought I heard a noise then, back in the trees on the other side of the road. It could have been a laugh, or a bird, or perhaps just a branch cracking in the gathering wind. I took a few paces in its direction, and held my arms out wide and to my sides.

  “Be my guest,” I said, and my voice did not sound like my own. But nothing happened.

  I considered calling Pierce but knew no good would come of it. I thought about going to pay a visit on the Robertsons, but knew that now—full of alcohol—was not the time. Who knows how long they’d been saving this information about Ellen, without doing the obvious thing. If they’d simply wanted to be rid of her, they would have turned her in. Therefore they wanted something else. This wasn’t about the shortest route to a desired conclusion. Ellen was right. This was about punishment, delivered slowly, and only when they considered the time was right. Harassment, in other words. Making the most of discomfort. Extracting the full value from pulling out the pins of someone’s life, one by one. I felt they should be dealt with in the same way.

  But then, when I realized what I was thinking, I tried to turn from the idea as you would try to turn from reaching for that next drink, the one you know will jam the cellar door so wide you’ll have all the excuse you need to fall right in. So instead I sat in the motel room in the dark, working through pot after pot of bad coffee, past the point where I hoped I would not be too hungover the next day, until I eventually fell asleep.

  And woke again, three or four hours later.

  The room was pitch-black. My head was thick and throbbing with caffeine and waning alcohol, and I felt rusty with dehydration. I seemed stuck to the chair, turned to wood or stone, unable to move.

  Eventually I dragged myself to the bed but there was too much noise to get back to sleep. The wind was howling outside now, the roof drumming with rain. These sounds were at least constant, however, something that might in time slip below the threshold of awareness. What I could not ignore was the branches once again clacking and scraping against the back of the motel.

  I got up and stumbled to the door. When I unlocked it and turned the handle, the wind blew it back in at me, wrenching my wrist hard enough to make me cry out.

  I went outside and made my way down to the end of the block, then around the corner, keeping under the eaves as much as possible, but still getting quickly soaked. I made the turn around the back of the hotel, knowing the irrational fury I was feeling had little to do with windblown branches, but there was nothing else I could take it out on right now—that there were some motherfucking twigs that had scratched their last tonight.

  I hunched my way along until I was close to where the back of my room should be. I was only going to tackle that stretch. Other residents could do their own brute-force horticulture. But when I raised my head, I stopped.

  I was standing with one foot braced on the concrete base that ran the length of the building, the other on the muddy grass. Ahead of me, on my left, was the run of the back of the motel building. To the right was the beginnings of the woods.

  In between was a distance of about five feet.

  I stood staring at this until I was absolutely sure I was seeing what I thought I was. Though the wind was whipping them back and forth, and at least as strong as it had been anytime since I’d been in Black Ridge, branches from these trees could not have been scraping against the back of my room. They couldn’t reach.

  Not tonight, nor on any other night.

  And yet, I saw as I bent closer, something had evidently made contact with the shingle cladding. There were marks in the wood there. Evidently fresh, from the last few days, as the inner wood they ha
d revealed remained bright and clean. Scratch marks. Some short, others a foot or so long and going every which way. There was no actual shape to them that I could make out, but they reminded me of the arrangement of twigs and branches I’d seen on the forest floor the day before.

  I turned and looked into the woods. With only the dim lights from the top of the motel roof shining on them, you couldn’t see past the first ranks of trees. This turned the forest into something like a black mirror, into which it seemed all too possible you might be able to step.

  Then I heard the sound of a phone ringing through the motel wall. The phone in my room.

  I hesitated, but turned from the forest and hurried back around to the front side of the motel, slipping and nearly falling in the puddles. The phone stopped ringing just as I got back into my room.

  It rang again, however, two minutes later. I grabbed the handset.

  “Brooke,” I said thickly. “You don’t want to do this.”

  But there was no one there. The phone rang again at hourly intervals throughout the night, and there was no one there then, either, just a fault on the line that sounded like someone shouting short words from a very long distance.

  CHAPTER 23

  Sixty-two times. Sixty-three.

  Sixty-four.

  Standing in the freezing hallway, wearing only panties and a bra. Shivering, her feet moving back and forward in little steps, Carol knew exactly where she’d seen movement like this before. In a zoo, in the long-ago late 1970s, a poor zoo, a Guantánamo for mammals. A lone bear, its coat matted, in a cage that was too small and didn’t look as though it had been cleaned in a long, long while. On the way out, her dad complained. He gave the people at the gate merry hell. He may even have written a letter when they got home—he had said he would, and he generally carried through. But it was too late by then. Carol had already seen the bear, up on its hind legs, hanging on to the rusted chain-link fence, its feet moving back and forth in small, old-person shuffles, back and forward, forward and back. A bear lost in internal darkness, a bear having an endless, slow-motion panic attack.