Bad Things Read online

  But really, what would she do with those objects? Take them out once in a while and shed dry tears over them? Use them to remind herself of the way things no longer were? She wasn’t twenty-one anymore, either, and no amount of wailing would bring that back, either.

  There’s only one piece of baggage you can never really do without. Ellen lifted the right arm of hers and turned the key in the ignition.

  As she drove out through the quiet town she heard her phone beeping in her pocket. John Henderson, perhaps, trying again, as he had several times that afternoon. She had nothing to say to him. Seeing him in the coffee shop, after Jassie Cornell had killed herself, had been like watching a child getting ready to march off to war clutching a stick as a pretend rifle. She’d told him as much as she could without coming right out and saying it. If he didn’t get it, there wasn’t anything more she could do. She regretted getting in contact with him, pulling him up here, trying to deflect her doom into him with the pattern she’d been taught. There was nothing she could do about those things, either. As Gerry said, on one of the long nights where they had talked through her bad times, his arms around her and her face running with tears: The past is like an asshole ex-boyfriend, Ilena. Change your number, and just don’t ever talk to him again.

  If it wasn’t John calling, then it was one of the others, and she certainly had nothing left to say to them. She put some music on the radio instead.

  She drove past the end of Kelly Street without a second glance. A couple of hundred yards farther up the road, about half a mile short of the beginning of the real forest, the radio faded, and then cut out. Soon afterward the car started to cough, too, and judder, and then died. She steered calmly onto the side of the road.

  She waited patiently, turning the key once every three minutes. Eventually it started again. Things got like this sometimes, around here. Little things, never big enough to make a fuss about. Signs that the place itself was shifting in its sleep, and might be about to wake up. All the more reason to get the hell out.

  As she pulled back onto the road she thought she heard something in the backseat of the car. She knew that if she looked around, it would very likely be Gerry sitting in the back there, or the thing that looked like him. He had followed her from the hospital. She had seen him on the street after the horror with the girl in the coffee shop. He had been walking slowly along the other side, his head turning to keep his eyes on her.

  If she looked in the backseat now the face she would see would have the same look in its eyes, and she knew the story it told wasn’t true. Gerry hadn’t hated her. He had loved her.

  That knowledge was the one thing she was determined to take with her out of this place. It was the sole possession they couldn’t take from her.

  And so she didn’t turn around, but put her foot firmly down on the pedal, and set off down the road into the forest.

  She got less than twenty miles.

  She didn’t notice the headlights behind her. She had been crying, and it had taken all her concentration to keep herself going straight and safe along the dark forest road.

  There was the sound of a car accelerating past her, in the other lane.

  She jumped, startled, and wiped her sleeve across her eyes. It was a long way to Seattle. She had to keep her shit together. Probably just as well the other car had given her a little shock. She’d concentrate better now, put the radio back on, try to think forward. There was no need to think about the past tonight. She would have plenty of time to regret that at leisure.

  But once the car had gone forty yards past, it suddenly cut back into her lane.

  She jammed her foot on the brakes, skidding thirty feet. She was thrown hard into the belt, and then thudded back into her seat.

  She moved fast, shifting the car into reverse, but as she wrenched around in her seat she realized another car had come up behind and was blocking that way, too.

  There was nowhere to go, and so she turned back around and took her hands off the wheel.

  A man got out of the car in front, a silhouette in her headlights. She watched as he walked back along the road.

  When he reached her car he rapped gently on her window.

  She lowered it. The policeman looked gravely down at her. “What’s up, Ellen?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I did what I was asked.”

  “Yeah, kinda. But this afternoon you were saying things that you shouldn’t have said.”

  She looked up at him. He shrugged. “Someone heard you. You knew what the deal was.”

  “But I did what I was told,” she said. “I’m done. You have to let me go now.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “She was never going to let me leave, was she?”

  He still didn’t answer, just opened her car door. Before his hand fell on her, Ilena managed to turn her head to look into the backseat of the car.

  Gerry wasn’t there. There was nothing there.

  Nothing left anywhere anymore.

  PART 3

  Once we have taken Evil into ourselves, it no longer insists that we believe in it.

  FRANZ KAFKA,

  The Zurau Aphorisms

  CHAPTER 32

  Brooke swam from seven until seven-thirty, fast, methodical laps up and down the covered pool at the rear of the house. Then dressed in her suite, blow-dried her hair, and selected a pair of good shoes. Carefully, as if the day ahead held a wedding, or a funeral. Because one never knows—it might.

  Cory was already at the breakfast table when she arrived, halfway through an eggs Benedict. He rarely ate more than cereal. He must be hungry. She realized, as she sat, that she was hungry, too. The air felt very thin today, short on sustenance, as if the land had exhaled overnight and was waiting for a reason to breathe in again.

  When Clarisse appeared at her elbow with a pot of Earl Grey tea, Brooke asked for the same as her brother. Who meanwhile kept eating. Small, neat mouthfuls.

  “Good evening?” she asked eventually.

  Another mouthful went in, was chewed, swallowed.

  “Very pleasant,” he said. “She’s very . . . nice.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head.

  Her plate arrived and they ate in silence. In between mouthfuls she looked out of the window, watching the trees sway at the edge of the property. The house was warm, but it looked cold outside. The sky above was a weather report with only one story to tell.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  “Upward and onward.”

  “So what are your plans for the day?”

  “As yet unfinalized. You?”

  “Yakima for lunch.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  She didn’t believe him, and he knew it. “One of the pumps in the pool isn’t working properly.”

  “I’ll give Randy a call.”

  Clarisse reappeared to freshen their teapots, and to dispense further portions of silence. Brooke ate hers slowly. Cory moved on to toast, spreading it thinly with butter, back and forth, forth and back. “Cory?”

  “Yes?”

  “It can’t be left any longer.”

  “I said I’ll call him, Brooke. This morning. Before I go out.”

  “I’m not talking about the pool.”

  He put his knife down. “I’ve told you. I’m not going to—”

  “I meant on a larger scale.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He finally raised his head to look at her. “Do you have something in particular in mind?”

  “It’s already under way.”

  He nodded slowly, distantly, reminding her forcefully of their father. Cory never mentioned him now, nor the manner of his demise. They had been close, or at least closer than Gerry and Brooke had ever been. His death was the first thing that had ever come between them, and sat there like another silence, but one that didn’
t seem to erode.

  “You know I trust you in these matters,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.

  “Yes.”

  Trust, or hand over all responsibility to? For a moment Brooke missed her grandfather so much that it hurt like a toothache. Her mother, too. Even Dad, that silly fond old man. Anyone whose presence would take some of the weight off her shoulders, prevent the world from always being so very quiet: another body to warm a house now home only to the faint clatter of silverware, and china, the mutter of nonfiction television in this tidy lair of the nearly middle-aged, forward movement all but stopped. Like everything else in this town, running out of steam, turning into a photograph.

  Unless someone did something.

  Her brother stood, hesitated for a moment, looking out at the woods.

  “Yes,” he said, more firmly. “Yes, I can feel you’re right. You’ll tell me what you want me to do?”

  “I will. Don’t go far today. See if your friend will eat lunch here instead.”

  Cory walked slowly out into the hallway, leaving her alone at the table with a plate of congealed hollandaise.

  When Clarisse came to clear the dishes, Brooke looked up. “I think you could take this afternoon off,” she told her. “And tomorrow morning. In fact, why not stay with your daughter for a couple of days? Take a little break. You deserve it.”

  “Yes, Miss Brooke.”

  After breakfast she went back up to her private sitting room. She sat on the couch and considered the web of things. She thought through how matters would need to be done, working the web of and-then-and-then-if-then. You can plan all you like, however, and she had, but still you had to be open to the moment, to leave space for the gods to walk through the room.

  Eventually she got up and went to the middle section of the drawers which lined the side of the room. She used the key on the chain around her neck to open one of them, and withdraw evidence.

  Then she picked up the phone, and called a policeman.

  “It’s today,” she said.

  Afterward she went down to the kitchen and picked a few things out of the fridge. She put them in a small plastic lunch box—where it had come from, she had no idea—and carried this with her as she left the house.

  After a short drive she parked, got out, walked to a house, and unlocked a door. She opened it a little, squatted down, and slid the lunch box across the floor into the darkness beyond.

  “We’re going to move you a little later,” she said. “After that there will be no more food.”

  The people in the dark said nothing, though Brooke heard the sound of quiet crying.

  “I’m sorry it had to be this way. You were invited to make it easier, after all.”

  “Fuck you, Brooke,” said a weary voice, in the dark.

  Brooke relocked the door, and walked back to her car. She did not turn when a sudden breeze ran through the trees, causing a harsh whisper of leaves as loud as a human voice.

  But she knew what caused it, and was glad.

  CHAPTER 33

  Next morning I walked back into the motel parking lot to see Becki banging on my room door.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” she said furiously, as soon as I was within earshot. “I need the bathroom key, and I need it now.”

  “Use mine,” I said, handing her one of the coffees I had bought, along with a small paper bag. She looked inside and saw the toothbrush, shampoo, and other toiletries I’d picked up, and her face softened.

  “We can’t just leave him in there,” she said.

  I unlocked my door. “Right now I can’t think of a better place for him to be. He has access to water. Sooner or later he’ll get hungry, at which point we may be able to talk sensibly with him. Until then I’m in no hurry for him to become an active factor in my life.”

  I reached into my jeans pocket, pulled out her bathroom key, and dropped it into the paper bag. “It’s your call.”

  She thought a moment.

  “It can wait,” she said, with half a smile. “Not sure he’s ever seen this time in the morning anyhow.”

  I told her to stay indoors once she’d showered, and went and got in my car. It was time to leave town. Ellen still wasn’t returning my calls, but there were two other things I wanted to do before I left.

  I turned out of the lot and headed toward the main road through town. I found myself slowing outside the motel I’d seen in my dream: the one I’d lived in for a while, and also the place I’d used to meet Jenny Raines. That’s all Black Ridge had been to me before a few days ago. The place of assignations. Charged with a toxic blend of pleasure and guilt, therefore—guilt which had writhed and reproduced after Scott’s death, forging a fake connection in my head to the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

  Since I’d woken that morning, my thoughts had kept coming back to Bill. A good guy, an old friend, next to whom I’d walked in uniform patrolling towns and deserts in a place where no one wanted us and where being someone’s friend meant being their shield. Who’d invited me into his life again years afterward, encouraging his father to find me a position and a salary a very recently qualified attorney would have never received otherwise. I have a feeling Bill even introduced us to the Realtor from whom we bought our house, though I’m not sure.

  And how had I repaid him? By becoming as bad a thing in his life as anyone or anything had ever been to me. I never did anything to him directly, of course—but that’s not how bad things work. They’re dark and slippery, always just out of sight, operating at a remove that’s hard to foresee and impossible to fight.

  I called Bill’s office and was told he wasn’t there. I recalled him saying he had a big case coming up, and seeing the number of files spread around his house, I considered it likely he was working from home. I did a U-turn and drove back the way I’d come.

  Bill wasn’t at home, either. I waited, then knocked again and walked back halfway down the path to look for evidence he was inside and electing not to see me. There was none. I turned away, unsure what to do. It was too cold to hang around on the porch.

  I went back to the car and sat in it. I tried the old cell-phone number I had for him, but it dead-ended in silence. It struck me that, despite talking up the notion of a drink when we’d met on the street on my first day here, Bill hadn’t gone out of his way to ensure we could actually get in contact. I’d been too caught up in avoiding a further meeting to realize he might have been doing the same. Might the kinder and more adult thing just be to leave the guy alone, rather than assuaging my own guilt by forcing him to look once more inside a box he’d tried to glue shut? Kristina had told me to just get over it, and it could be she was right.

  Or was that sloping away my responsibilities, as I’d turned my back on Tyler and most everything else? Didn’t I owe Bill the opportunity to call me an asshole to my face? Would it ever be over without that? I remembered evenings soon after Carol and I had moved to the area. Bluff, pleasant gatherings with the Raineses and their neighbors, dinner parties where the men are in good shape but pompous, the women mild and thickening, and both are far duller than they have any need to be; which start with the guests paying court to the hosts’ most extroverted child, last a couple of hours with each couple gently carping at each other (except for the pair whose problems are too serious for such sport, and who therefore appear to be basking in rather formal perfection)—and eventually dissolve, abruptly, when someone has to leave early because their babysitter has exploded.

  Except Bill and Jenny never had any kids. And now, neither did I. Lives get tangled, until you look down in your hands and cannot follow the string for all the knots. I decided I’d wait it out a little longer in the hope of loosening at least one of them.

  Sometime later I heard a knocking on the window, and looked up to see Bill standing by the car. He had a fat lip and a mild black eye. He looked tired.

  I wound the window down.

  “You planning some kind of ninja stealth attack?” he
asked. “If so, you suck.”

  “I came to apologize.”

  “For what? Sleeping with my wife or fucking up my house? Not to mention face. Nothing a client likes more than a lawyer who looks like he lost a bar fight.”

  “All of the above.”

  He looked down at me for a moment, then turned and walked slowly toward his house.

  The walls of his hallway looked more bare than they had, but the mess had been tidied away. I leaned against one of the kitchen counters while Bill made coffee, feeling about as awkward as I had in my life.

  “She’s in Boulder,” he said eventually.

  “Back home?”

  “Sure you two must have done at least some talking,” he said drily. “Which case, you know she was from Philadelphia.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Left five months ago,” he said, handing me a coffee. “Which was frankly a relief. She’d gotten to the point of being hard to live with.”

  “Hard how?”

  “Down all the time. I mean, really, really down. Stopped going out, stopped making her jewelry, stopped doing anything except staring out the window at the woods. Running around some inner wheel, tidying the house and then tidying it again. She’s with some guy now. I hope he’s doing a better job than me, though Christ knows I tried.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “About you two? Only a couple weeks before she left. Things had been getting brittle. Eventually you came up in conversation, mostly as further evidence that I was so dumb and preoccupied with work that I couldn’t see what was happening right under my own nose. Which I guess is fair, as I’d had no clue what you’d been up to. Of course I did think of you as a friend, so I wasn’t braced for incoming from your direction.”

  “Bill, I didn’t do it to you.”