Bad Things Read online

I know Ted toys with the idea of shutting down completely for the off-season, but the cost of that pizza oven still pecks away at him, and so he does not.

  I returned to Oregon with Becki and Kyle to find a state of crisis. The night I wound up in Murdo Pond had seen the local police being called out to the Pelican, to try to catch someone who was trying to set fire to it. On the back of this, Ted found out what Kyle had done, and went biblical, forbidding him from seeing his daughter. I expected Becki to put up a fight but it seemed she’d had enough of Kyle, too. Turns out when Bill had left them at the Robertson house to follow me into the woods that night, Kyle just ran away, abandoning her.

  She threw him out, but Kyle didn’t get it. He didn’t seem to get any of it. He didn’t understand that Becki was no longer his girl, that he no longer had a job. He tried once more to get into the drug industry. He quickly found his level, that of consumer.

  The situation has since been resolved. The restaurant ticks over during the quiet season, and Ted is letting Eduardo have his head with a few novel items on the menu, as an experiment. Becki has a new boyfriend and is now e-mailing me convincingly about going back to college, this time to study for a business degree—so she can come back and franchise the living daylights out of the Pelican.

  Stranger things have happened.

  I have also been in regular contact with Carol, by e-mail and once by phone. She put Tyler on the line, at my request. We did not have a lot to say to each other, but I tried, and will keep doing so. Whether I’ll ever be a real father to him I have no idea. You do what you do and wait and see how it turns out, and by then it’s all but done.

  Carol still swears that the service she paid Brooke Robertson to broker wasn’t supposed to act against me, and I believe her. She wanted no more than to make Jenny uncomfortable and sad, but as soon as you unleash bad things into the world you lose control. They have their own agendas and demands, bigger and more powerful than any individual can comprehend. The last thing Carol wanted was for harm to come to Scott, but he was the most valued thing in the life of the man with whom another woman had committed her punishable sin.

  And so something happened, because.

  We try to blame others for our misfortunes, point fingers, to seek mitigation for our actions in the behavior, creed, or color of strangers, but two plus two never equals five. Sometimes it doesn’t even make four. Often you’ve just got two of one thing, and two of another, and they cannot be combined to create anything meaningful at all.

  I cannot explain all of the things that happened while I was in Black Ridge, but I know why they occurred. They happened because of me.

  Carol is lighter as a result of this calculation. I am heavier. That is fair.

  I understand some of the rest a little better now, too. Have parts of a story, at least, put together from talking to Carol and one other person.

  I believe Brooke caused something to be set upon her father, after he confided in her that he was going to accede to Ellen’s wishes and start a new family. I’m sure she told herself she was doing it to preserve the legacy of her forefathers, and that Ellen’s demands were forcing her hand, but I suspect the real reason was far more personal than that. For I have also been told how the story about Brooke got mangled in its way into school legend: that she came to this teacher one night, brimful of adolescent love, and he had sex with her against her will, and the secret and incompetent abortion that followed destroyed any chance of her ever having children—that she might even have died, were it not for the intervention of Marie Hayes.

  Cory had been the Robertsons’ last chance of continuing their bloodline stewardship of Black Ridge, but he was no longer capable of that or anything else by the end of the night at Murdo Pond. Their influence is over, unless what his sister did to herself at the end completed the fate begun by the deaths of their father and mother. Brooke knew what she was doing, and her will was strong. What she felt for Black Ridge was, I suspect, as close to love as she was capable of, and so it is possible that enough blood has been spilled, for the time being, to re-mark the forest’s tracks with the dead.

  The Robertsons were a family, too, after all, and now they are gone.

  Every time I think of the name Murdo Pond now I kick myself for not realizing what it had come from, but they had hidden the history well. Soon after arriving in NYC I managed to find a one-line reference to a woman called Bridget Hayes, in Fort and Reznikoff’s History of Witchcraft in New England, acquired through the Strand bookstore’s rare-books service. She was tried in Murraytown, Massachusetts, in 1693—and acquitted on the basis of character references from key locals, including the Evans and Kelly clans. The Robertsons were not cited in the court reports, though records demonstrate there was a prominent family of that name in town at that time. They also show these four families leaving together for the West, nearly two hundred years later. This event is noted in the slim volume of Murraytown history I subsequently found through AbeBooks, though the author doesn’t speculate as to why three prosperous families should leave for the unpredictable frontier, taking with them a lowly dairy farmer and his red-haired wife, whose surname was also Hayes.

  The book was creditably thorough in most other ways, including specifying the number of children in each family. The Kellys had two when they left Massachusetts. It is possible they had another en route, I suppose, but unlikely it would have had time to grow to the size of the third child I believe I glimpsed with them.

  I think, or perhaps I hope, that was Scott.

  I do not like to think of him being lonely in those woods, and while Ellen could have made the pattern of branches and twigs on the forest floor near the picnic area, I don’t think she made the marks on the back of my motel-room wall. I like to believe that Scott’s spirit was attempting to deflect the forces that live in those woods, not onto me, but away: making signs that I have come to realize bear a strong resemblance to the arrangement of the streets in Black Ridge. I have subsequently seen the pattern in other places, too, or something like it, including in photographs I found online of cave paintings and ceremonial designs in Europe. I have wondered whether those prehistoric engravings were not maps after all, but attempts to ward off creatures our ancestors could feel but not see.

  Or perhaps, in some cases, to pay homage to them.

  To tap into their power.

  I’ve also wondered whether Brooke was telling the truth about one thing, at least, and that it was not her who had called my motel room during the night after I found the marks on the back of the motel. When I think back now, it seems to me that the noise I heard on the line could have been that of a child, trying to call out from a very long distance.

  Naturally I have no explanation for how that could be, but one morning recently I took down the small pottery vase that had been on my shelf and walked over to the East River Park. I waited until there was no one in sight and then poured Scott’s remains into the water. In a vase—or a lake—you can become trapped. From here I hoped his ashes would make it to the sea.

  Switch survived. He refused to accept his colleague’s portion of the money I had promised them, though he did take twenty-five.

  Two weeks before I left Marion Beach I took a drive over to Portland early one evening. Kyle was in the passenger seat. I had tracked him down in Astoria, crashed out on the couch of one of his remaining friends. In previous weeks he had made persistent attempts to visit Becki, accosting her on the street, increasingly aggressively. He simply wouldn’t leave her alone, seeming to believe that if he could bend her to his will, then the rest of the world would fall back into place, too.

  So I made a deal with him. I told him that he was going to come with me to Portland. There I would straighten out his problems, using more of my money if necessary, after which I would drive him to the airport and pay for a ticket to anywhere in the USA. In return, he’d leave Ted’s daughter the fuck alone.

  He perched on the couch and twitched and sniffed and eventually agreed, perhaps
sensing that the deal I was offering was the best the world had left to give.

  When we got to Portland I left him in a bar sucking back Bacardi and walked a couple of blocks to where I’d agreed to meet representatives of the gang from whom he’d originally bought his drugs—guys I’d made contact with through a number Switch had given me. There were three men waiting. I explained I would like them to no longer pose a threat to Ted, his business, or his daughter, and outlined the nature of the deal I was proposing.

  They stepped back to discuss it, and then the shortest of them—it generally is, for some reason—came forward again.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And then it’s finished?”

  “Said okay. Don’t push it.”

  I smiled. He eye-fucked me hard but then blinked, and turned his head away, as if he had caught a faint but potent smell coming down the street, or in the air, or from the man he was facing.

  Something dry and sweet.

  “Yeah,” he said more quietly. “We’re good.”

  So I told them which bar Kyle was sitting in, and went back to my car and drove home.

  Bill also survived—though it was touch and go for a while—and is now as hale as ever. Apparently Black Ridge has seen a small upswing in its fortunes recently, with three new businesses opening in the last few months. Bill dropped by on a layover a few months ago and we went out and got world-changingly drunk on his client’s tab. He brought the news that he’d spoken to Jenny again, and she seemed happier. He has even lent her a little money to start her own jewelry business down in Colorado.

  The capacity of some people for goodness never ceases to astound me, though I hope someday it will.

  A few weeks later I had another visitor.

  It was supposed to just be dinner. It had become impossible for her to remain in her hometown, and she already had an airline ticket for Europe. She wound up not using it, and Kristina Hayes now holds down the bar at the Adriatico instead. Fights and bad language have declined to zero since she took charge, and the owner thinks she’s the best thing since sliced bread. He may be right.

  Some nights I lie in bed next to her and wait for sleep, fitting together the missing parts. I try to work out whether Brooke put Ellen up to contacting me in the first place, with the promise of deflecting her doom and burying her past, and then reneged on the deal. Something Ellen said the last time I saw her alive—a remark about how she had not been good—makes me suspect that might have been the case. If so, I don’t blame her. You do what you have to in order to protect those you love, including yourself.

  I try also to guess at what point Brooke decided to put in place the sacrifice of another family into what had afterward been dubbed Murder Pond. The gap between Scott’s death and what happened five months ago makes me hope his death at least was accidental, and only recently did Brooke conceive of finishing what his death had started, thus recharging the town that the original sacrifice of the Kelly family had brought into life, over a hundred years before.

  Kristina says she doesn’t know, and it probably doesn’t matter. Every day we die a little, and that is one form of sacrifice, but our worlds and situations demand more of us than that. That’s part of why I made the deal over Kyle, but the truth is that time only moves in one direction. You cannot go back and unmake your actions or unsay your words. The best you can do is try to make sure the bad things push you in better directions in the future.

  Or failing that, pass them on.

  One last memory I have of Scott is this. He must have been about three, and he was trying to climb onto the kitchen counter, something he had been instructed not to do. It was high enough that he could have hurt himself badly if he fell to the floor, which was tiled. Carol and I sometimes left knives in the sink, too, and he would easily have been able to reach them from up there.

  The counter was forbidden territory, therefore, but Scott was at an age when there are no such places—especially if a cookie jar awaits the intrepid and the brave. I was doing something at the time, most likely making coffee, and though I was vaguely aware of him using a chair to scale his way upward, I hadn’t yet gotten around to telling him to stop.

  I heard a smashing sound. I turned to see a glass was now on the floor, broken into many pieces. I knew the glass had been standing on the counter, just where Scott’s hand now lay. Scott knew that, too, but he did what we all do.

  “Daddy,” he said earnestly, “it wasn’t me.”

  A week ago I returned from trawling bookstores in the afternoon to find Kristina on the sidewalk, a few doors down from our building. She was carrying a brown paper bag and had evidently been returning from a grocery run when she got buttonholed by an elderly neighbor. That happens from time to time in our street, and it’s one of the nice things about living here, assuming you have a high tolerance for repetition.

  But as I got closer I realized this didn’t look like a case of being told of how much better/worse/largely the same it had been around here in days of yore. The woman was white-haired, small and thin, and we’d exchanged cagey nods in the street before. She was Polish, I think. Many of the older residents of the neighborhood seem a little wary of Kristina, but not this one. She was standing right up close, and speaking quickly, in a low tone.

  When she saw me approaching she suddenly stopped talking.

  “It’s okay,” Kristina said. “He knows.”

  The old woman glared dubiously at me, then back up at Kristina.

  “I know where it lives,” she whispered. “Not far from here. I can show you.”

  Kristina was polite, and in the end the woman walked away. But I know she’s been back.

  Will Kristina be able to resist forever? I doubt it. You are who you are, and you’ll end up doing what you do.

  That’s just the way it is.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my editors, Jane Johnson and Jennifer Brehl, for helping me find the wood among these trees; to my agents, Ralph Vicinanza and Jonny Geller; to Lisa Gallagher and Amanda Ridout for their support; to Carolyn Marino for her help over the last couple of years; and to the memory of Jean Baudrillard, for a decade of inspiration.

  And for the hundredth year running, the award for Greatest Patience in the Face of an Author goes to . . . Paula, my wife.

  About the Author

  MICHAEL MARSHALL is a screenwriter and the internationally bestselling author of The Intruders and the acclaimed trilogy of The Straw Men,The Upright Man, and Blood of Angels. He lives in London.

  www.michaelmarshallsmith.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL MARSHALL

  The Intruders

  Blood of Angels

  The Upright Man

  The Straw Men

  Credits

  Designed by Lisa Stokes

  Jacket design by Mary Schuck

  Jacket photo collage: boy © Adrian Myers/ Corbis;

  dock © John Swallow/ Corbis

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  BAD THINGS. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Marshall Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-187544-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publ
isher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900 Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com