Bad Things Read online

  Ellen meanwhile stared at the prone body with nothing more than a look of blank resignation.

  The woman who’d screamed was mired just outside on the sidewalk, hands fluttering by her sides, evidently unable to move.

  I walked quickly out to her. “What happened?”

  The woman didn’t seem to grasp what I was asking until I gently took hold of her shoulders and asked again. “What happened in there?”

  “I was just asking her if she was okay,” the woman said defensively, staring back into the café, studiously keeping her eyes away from the broken window. “I hadn’t been in for a couple days and Jassie’s usually so friendly and everything, and I thought she looked tired, or like she’d lost weight or something, so I just asked if she was okay and she didn’t say anything and then I saw that she was—”

  She stopped, and looked at me. “Who are you? Do I even know you?”

  I could hear the sound of a police siren, approaching fast. People were starting to come out of other businesses and onto the sidewalk now, slowly, heads tilted, as if approaching a box they’d been told they should not open but were unable to resist. More people were coming out of the café now, too, milling around outside. On the opposite side of the street I saw two people come out of the Mountain View, a young bartender and an older man in a dark roll-neck sweater— whom I recognized.

  The bartender acted like most of the other people did. The other guy, however, jerked forward, as if he was going to throw up right there on the street. Then he turned and walked stiff-legged and fast in the opposite direction, not looking back, his hands held up in front of his face.

  By the time I’d got back into the café, Ellen had disappeared. A cop car came swinging around the corner and into Kelly Street. It stopped with a screech outside and the sheriff and Deputy Greene got out.

  The deputy stared at the window of the coffee shop with distaste. “Holy crap.”

  The sheriff assessed the situation with a long sweep of his eyes, and then spotted me. As Greene started to clear people out of the way, Pierce strode over to where I was standing.

  He spoke clearly and quietly. “I want you to get out of here, now. Otherwise I’m going to arrest you. Do you understand?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Does it look like it?”

  It did not. “I saw that girl at the hospital,” I said, nonetheless. “Jassie. The day Ellen Robertson had her accident. She was sitting by herself in a room, with tears running down her face.”

  Another police car came tearing around the corner. Pierce glanced outside as two more cops jumped out. I recognized one of them as the deputy Phil I’d briefly met three years before. I could hear another siren in the distance now, presumably paramedics.

  “Your observation is noted,” he said. “Now get out of this town or I swear to God you’ll regret it.”

  I stepped back. “You’re welcome to it.”

  He glared at me a moment longer, as if considering saying something else, but then turned to deal with the chaos unfolding behind him in the street.

  CHAPTER 26

  All I had to go on was the man’s throwaway of living a mile up the road. I rejected a turn half a mile past our old house, and paused at another a little farther along the other side of the road, but didn’t see the vehicle I was looking for. A delayed reaction to what had just happened in the coffee shop was making my movements strange and jerky.

  Two minutes later I came upon a driveway on the right, and turned straight up it past a mailbox with the name Collins neatly stenciled on the side. It occurred to me Carol and I had never driven up the road this far in all the time we had lived here, and I couldn’t imagine why. Sure, the area was full of interesting stuff to look at and all of it lay in other directions, but it still seemed odd. I guess there are some roads you don’t go down until something outside your control takes you there. The drive curled around to the right before eventually leading to a circle outside a recently constructed house, twice as large and half as appealing as ours had been. Lined up in front of a small, faux-barnlike structure were a compact, a station wagon, and the dark green SUV. A car for every occasion. I parked where I was blocking all three.

  I rang the bell and the front door opened after a couple of minutes.

  The man I’d seen outside the Mountain View had managed to pull it together in the last forty minutes, and probably looked fine to the outside world, including the wife and kids I could hear hooting and laughing in some room beyond the hallway.

  He was halfway into a good-neighborly smile before his face froze.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t know if you remember me?” I left a beat before continuing. “We met a few days ago, outside that house for sale, a mile down the road?”

  “Right,” he said stiffly, knowing this was not the last time he’d seen me, and that I knew it, too. “Of course.”

  “Richard, who is it?”

  A woman came out of the kitchen and beamed in our direction. She was whip-thin, around the same age as her husband, and looked like someone who was well disposed to the world in general.

  “Beginning to think I might be taking the property down the road seriously,” I said, smiling at her but still talking to him. “Wanted to ask a couple of questions about the area, before I get the family up to take a look.”

  “What kind of questions?” Collins said.

  “Come in, come in,” his wife insisted, coming closer. “Coffee’s just made.”

  “That’s very kind, ma’am, but I’m real short on time. Just a quick word is all I need.”

  She rolled her eyes as if this was another of those funny things that happened to her all the time, and retreated cheerfully back into the house.

  I stepped back from the front door and indicated for the man to follow me.

  “What do you want?” the man said quietly.

  “A word with you. And I’m not leaving without it.”

  He followed me halfway to where my car was parked, and then stopped. “This is far enough.”

  “You want to tell me what happened back in Black Ridge?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I saw you on Kelly Street. You come out of the bar when you hear a commotion—and you’re close enough to see the color of the hair of the girl who’s just smashed her head through a plate-glass window. Instead of staring or turning away, you run, run exactly like a guy who’s trying to look like that’s not what he’s doing. Thafs what I’m talking about.”

  “It was . . . well, it was very upsetting.”

  “Generically, or personally? Did you know Jassie?”

  “No. Well, I knew her by sight, of course. I’ve had coffee in there a hundred times.”

  “Didn’t know her any better than that?”

  “No, of course not.” He was trying to bluster but there wasn’t enough force behind it.

  “Do you normally drink alcohol at that time of the morning? You don’t look the type.”

  “I . . . I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. Business matters.”

  “I see. Was it business matters that took you to Hope Memorial yesterday?”

  He stared at me. “What?”

  “I was visiting someone there. As I was driving out, I noticed you driving in. Odd thing is I saw Jassie Cornell in the hospital a few minutes before.”

  “I’d like you to go now.”

  “I’m sure. But one more thing. Before Jassie killed herself, she did something else. You know what that was?”

  He looked at me, his face strained. “I really don’t know why you think—”

  “She put her hands into the outlet from the coffee machine. She put them under a jet of superheated steam and held them there until they started to blister. I was fifteen feet away and I swear I could smell the skin burning. Strange, huh?”

  He swallowed heavily, eyes turning glassy.

  “You’ve got a nice wife,” I said. “Maybe too nice. I know how that goes.
”

  “You need to get off my property,” he said. “Now. Or I’m calling the police.”

  “They’re still busy back at the coffee shop. Could be a while before they got to you. Whereas I’m already here.” I let that settle for a moment. “But you’re right. I’m imposing on your time.”

  Just before I got into my car I looked back. He hadn’t moved. “One more thing,” I said. “The family that used to live in that house down the road?”

  He waited, and said nothing.

  “That was me. It was my son who died.”

  I could see him swallow from ten feet away.

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread any more rumors,” I said. “Because that kind of thing cuts both ways. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He nodded, barely.

  I was sitting at the end of the jetty over Murdo Pond when it began to rain, starting as a mist that coalesced between the trees, seeping down out of the higher ground, gradually solidifying into droplets. When these fell on the surface of the lake they seemed to disappear, as if the water was so heavy and thick it absorbed them.

  I had been on the grounds of our old house for over an hour, smoking one cigarette after another. It was late afternoon now. The temperature had already dropped five degrees and showed no sign of stopping. It wasn’t going to rain for long. If this kept up, it would turn to snow. My coat was in the car. I was shivering. Little of this was due to the cold, however, though I could feel it seeping up through the jetty from the water, could almost see it gathering across the lake’s surface.

  As I sat there, I had been thinking about faces.

  First, the face I had watched in the rearview mirror, as I drove away from the house farther up the road from our old house.

  Then Jassie’s, just before she threw herself toward the window and out of this world.

  I know that if you fasten upon a mental image for too long, especially a memory, you can start to believe strange things about it. The image can morph, reshaped by the mind considering it, creating something that feels like reality but lies somewhere outside, straddling the gray zone between the world and what you believe about it. I know, too, that we find patterns where there are none. Nonetheless I believed I knew what I had seen.

  In the face of the man, pure fear. The horror of a man who has done something wrong, and knows it.

  In the face of the girl who was now lying on a table somewhere, coldly indifferent to the desultory conversation of men and women whose job it was to deface her body in preparation for stowing it safely underground, I had seen something that was far harder to name. I knew, however, where I had seen it before, and I no longer felt dismissive of the things Ellen had tried to tell me concerning how Gerry had looked when he died.

  I knew that what I’d seen in Jassie Cornell’s face was similar to the memory of Scott’s last expression, an image I had turned over in my mind so many, many times in the nights of the last three years.

  We can never get inside the heads of others. The best we can do is read what’s on the outside. I believed nonetheless that whatever had been going through the waitress’s mind in her last moments had been very similar to what must have been going through Scott’s, when he stood very close to where I now sat, when he had stared over my shoulder as if everything he felt he’d learned in four years had suddenly been undermined and he had glimpsed some vile truth about creation and everyone in it.

  I didn’t know what tied these three things together. It could have been coincidence that Gerry Robertson had a heart attack, just before it seemed likely he was going to acquiesce to his wife’s desire for a family. It might not.

  The detail of what had occurred between the blue-haired barista and the man with the big house and three cars was occluded to me, too, and the cause of Scott’s death was as much a mystery to me as it ever had been—except for the fact that I now thought I knew of two other people who had died in similar ways, and except for the fact that a word Ellen had used more than once kept running through my head.

  Punishment.

  Punishment for a man who might have been about to compromise the financial position of his children. Punishment for a slick, middle-aged guy who had been taking a drink alone in the middle of the morning.

  And maybe punishment for someone else, too.

  I stood up, hearing my joints creak against the cold, feeling old and alone. There were other things I wanted to ask Ellen now, but I couldn’t raise her on the phone. I had sat for as long as I could without doing something. The sight of the lake had become oppressive, and I walked quickly past my old house without even giving it a second glance.

  There were two men I needed to talk to.

  As I strapped myself into the driver’s seat, my phone rang. I hoped it would be Ellen finally returning a call. It wasn’t.

  “Hey,” I said briskly. “This really isn’t a good time.”

  She was crying. Hard, with the hitching notes you rarely hear in someone who isn’t a child.

  “Becki, slow down. What’s the problem?”

  In the twenty-four hours since we’d spoken, and since I’d wired her ten thousand dollars out of my divorce settlement, Kyle had managed to excel himself. Some guys are always prone to open the doors that others are too smart to even find. Kyle seemed like he aspired to actually kicking them down.

  Instead of using the cash to pay his debt and bring his life back to earth, he had tried to double up by buying more drugs, this time from a crew up in Astoria. They sold him the drugs. They followed him down an alley. They took the drugs back. Since then Kyle had been drowning his sorrows in a series of local bars, fueled by the remains of his original drug stake, bankrolled by the last of my money. He was beginning to show signs of unpredictability and violence. At the present time he hadn’t slept for three days, and Becki presented this state of mind as a mitigating factor for the decisions he’d made.

  I listened to this and didn’t feel much about it. Everyone always thinks they’re bigger than drugs—rock stars with training wheels, hard-eyed corner boys or homemakers with a scrip from their physician. Drugs watches for a while with amused indulgence, then takes them outside and kicks their ass. Angry though I was with Kyle, it was not my job to stand in the way of the appointment he was making with fate. There’s a point past which you’re no longer talking to the person, but the drug, and everyone sounds the same in that state because the drug is eerie and vicious and amoral and utterly beyond human ken.

  Then I caught another sound in among the sniffles, and started paying attention again.

  “Becki, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said quickly, but I knew what I’d heard. The wince of someone in physical discomfort.

  She didn’t want to tell me, but I got it out. Last night, probably about the time I’d been around the back of the motel staring at scratch marks on the wall, Becki had been woken from anxious sleep by the sound of someone ringing the entry buzzer. She assumed it was Kyle finally coming back to earth, and jumped out of bed to give him plenty of grief and a hug, in that order, or most probably at the same time. But it wasn’t her boyfriend.

  They wanted Kyle to get the message as soon as he eventually walked in the door, which is why the main attention had been to Becki’s face. They hadn’t done the obvious thing two men could have done, but only, by the sound of it, because they were professionals. In the longer term this would be a bad thing.

  I found myself calm, but not in a good way. Calm like a sheet of ice forming across a cold, deep lake.

  “Does Kyle know about this?”

  “I told him on the phone this morning.”

  “So why isn’t he home with you right now?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Pack a bag and go stay with your father,” I said.

  “Are you crazy? I can’t let him see me like this.”

  “You don’t go today, he may not see you again.”

  “John, I look like I fell down the
stairs on my face. Dad sees this, and he’s going to break Kyle’s neck himself.”

  “That’s his right.”

  “John, I can’t let him see—”

  “Becki, just do it.” She was crying again now. “I’m stunned these people gave you a pass last night. It won’t happen again. Go. Take anything you value. Do not leave anything with your parents’ address, their phone number, or yours. Make sure you’re not being followed when you leave. Do not go back.”

  “I . . . I just don’t know . . .”

  “Becki, I can only help you if you let me. Tell me you’re going to do what I say. Promise me.”

  She said she would.

  “When you get to your dad’s house, call Kyle.”

  “He’s not picking up since this morning. Since I told him about . . . what happened.”

  “So leave him a message. Say you’ve spoken to me. Tell him the money can be straightened out, but I regard you as a friend I would do a great deal to protect. Explain that if he doesn’t call me right away, then I’ll be talking to him more seriously than he can possibly imagine. Make sure you stress the word talking. He will understand what I mean.”

  I could hear her sniffing, rubbing her eyes, trying to get her shit together. I could almost see her looking around the apartment and taking inventory of what she cared enough about to take.

  “I’ll tell him. Okay.”

  “Get out of that place,” I repeated, more gently. “Now. You don’t live there anymore.”

  “I will.” She hesitated. “Do you mean that? That you would do a lot to—”

  “Becki, I’ve got to go.”

  I closed the phone and drove out onto the road.

  The first thing I did was drive back to Black Ridge and the sheriff’s department. He kept me waiting forty minutes.

  He listened to my account of Jassie’s death without making any notes, then thanked me for my time. I asked him if he knew anything about the current whereabouts of Ellen Robertson. He said that he did not. I asked him what he thought he would do, where he would go, if he had just suffered a car accident and the people who were supposed to care about her had meanwhile turned her house upside down. He informed me that I was incorrect in my interpretation of the events.