Bad Things Read online

  There wasn’t even much spam and I was already moving away before I realized a final message had just come in.

  Subject line: !! INTERRUPTED!!

  I swore, wishing I hadn’t checked. Now I had no choice but to read it. Staying on my feet, I clicked on the e-mail and watched as it came up on screen.

  Please email me.

  I know what happened to your son.

  CHAPTER 6

  I saw the sun come up the next morning, though I hadn’t been awake for all that time.

  For an hour after reading the e-mail I’d alternated between the laptop and the deck, trying to work out what to do. My first impulse was to throw the e-mail away, empty the trash, and pretend it had never happened.

  But I couldn’t just erase it. After a while I understood this, and had to work out what to do instead. The first question was how this person had got my e-mail address. This address in particular, in fact, as I have several. My main, and most current, which receives nothing but infrequent missives from my ex-wife. Then a Gmail address, set up for a specific purpose and not even checked in three years, but which presumably/maybe still existed. Finally a corporate addresses, legacy of a place I once worked. It had become a dead line long ago, but had evidently never been actually deactivated.

  The e-mail had come into this last one. The person sending it had either known or found out I had once been associated with the company in question. It was a she, presumably, though I couldn’t take that for granted—you can be anyone you want on the Net. It didn’t look as though this person was calling upon previous acquaintanceship, and I had no recollection of the name. I typed it into a Web search engine and found the usual randomers on their own or other people’s personal sites, a few others on the staff lists or minutes of libraries and Girl Scout troops, and a handful referenced on genealogical sites.

  In the end I did the only thing I could think of. I hit reply and typed:

  Who are you?

  I looked at this for a while, unable for once to even hear the surf, aware only of the low, churning feeling in my stomach. Should I send it, or not? For the moment I still had the option of walking away, not checking my mail, carrying on as I had.

  But eventually I pressed send, and then stood up and went outside.

  I drank glass after glass of bottled water, sitting out on the deck, going back in to check the mail every fifteen minutes. It was very late. I knew there was little chance that a reply, were it ever to be forthcoming, was going to arrive tonight. But however different they may be in reality, we carry into e-mail conversations a vestige of the expectations implicit in the more old-fashioned kind. We think that if we say something, then the other guy will say something right back.

  She (or he) did not.

  At three o’clock I locked the doors and turned the computer off. As I undressed I realized that, however it might feel during the day, the year was turning. The room felt cold.

  I got into a bed that seemed very wide and lay listening to the blood in my ears, and trying to remember nothing, until I was no longer myself.

  No reply at dawn, nor by midmorning, nor four-thirty, when I changed into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly celebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to have been anyhow, and John wouldn’t be staying open on Sunday evenings much longer. The season was done.

  As I walked, I talked myself down. The e-mail was likely just the work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you’ve sent an e-mail like that, and it’s real? You expect a reply, and then you get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don’t give them the chance to wriggle off again.

  So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the first place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it stick, and move on.

  Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It’s also enough to work out that you’re not in the best of moods. I was one of the first to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up. Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him and two of the other cooks—which was pleasant enough but also kind of weird to do after all this time, as if I’d slipped into a parallel but not-very-different existence. Eduardo’s English was decent but the others’ wasn’t, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.

  As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised, to see Becki’s car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival a good forty minutes ahead of service. I watched him head into the restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver’s seat of the car.

  She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay with her after all. Also that I’d probably seen the end of my nascent pizza-making career, at least for now.

  We got a reasonable sitting for the early-bird slot, but after that it went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed to drown out the music playing in the background. Ted sent Mazy home after an hour. The rest of the staff floated like abandoned sailboats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower and heavier and more purple outside.

  “Gonna be a big one,” said a voice. “Like, kaboom.”

  I turned to see Kyle standing behind me. He had strong opinions on the weather, evidently. We looked out at the clouds together for a while.

  “You okay?” I asked eventually.

  He nodded. Could be my imagination, but he actually looked a little older than he had the day before, albeit somewhat wired. He glanced around, and spoke more quietly.

  “Working on closing out the . . . you know,” he said. “And then, well, I heard what you said. And Becki has sure as hell told me the same thing.” He looked down. “Thanks, by the way. I didn’t say that last night, and I should of.”

  “You’d had a bad day,” I said.

  It was quiet for a while, but I knew he had something else to say. Eventually he got to it.

  “So how come you know how to do . . . that stuff?”

  “Didn’t do anything. Just talked to a couple guys.”

  “Yeah, right. ‘Talked’ to them.”

  “That’s how I remember it.”

  “But you didn’t even know what they were going to be like. You just walked right in and let rip.”

  “I’d asked what your impression of them was.”

  “But I could have fucked up. Got it wrong. It’s been known to happen, right?”

  “It all turned out fine, Kyle.”

  “But—”

  “What does Becki think about this?”

  “She thinks you helped us out, and we should leave it at that and go on like it never happened.”

  “You could do worse than listen to Becki, on this and pretty much everything else. She’s a good person to have in your life. You’re a lucky guy.”

  “Yeah,” he said wearily. “I know that.”

  “Of course, being lucky can sometimes be a total pain in the ass. It’s one of life’s major trade-offs.”

  He thought about this, smiled, and drifted back toward the oven. Half an hour later a cheerful English couple rolled up, got bounced by Ted on account of being falling-down drunk, and that was pretty much it for the night. We shut up early, a little after nine o’clock.
r />   I shared a joint with Kyle on deck as he waited for Becki, and then I started for home.

  I got home bare minutes before all the water in creation started dropping out of the sky. I rolled the canopy down over the deck and took a beer and a cigarette out to watch it coming down, listening to wood and canvas taking it like a barrage of incoming small arms fire. But I knew I was just killing time.

  I went indoors when I finished the beer. As I opened the laptop I realized it was possible this might be the night when I would be glad to only receive messages from shysters and pill pushers, leavened with the revolving aftereffects of viruses unleashed on the world by kids who didn’t realize how frustrated they were at not being able to make genuine contact with the world, in the shape of a proper kiss with a real live girl.

  I hit the key combination, and waited.

  They were there, these e-mail shadows of the void, with their usual empty offers and demands.

  But that wasn’t all.

  CHAPTER 7

  The message was short.

  If I don’t answer please leave a message. We need to talk.

  Ellen Robertson

  And there was a phone number.

  I was thrown by this, and stared at the digits as if they were a door marked danger. An e-mail address says that if you type something to this person, they will (barring server crash, overzealous spam filters, or random strangeness) get it pretty soon. At some undetermined point in the future they will read it, and at a time subsequent to that, they may reply. It is time and chance-buffered communication. A phone number is different. It’s old school. If you call a phone number there’s a real chance you’re suddenly going to be talking to a real person, in real time.

  The e-mail had been sent at 7:12. The clock on the laptop said it was now 10:24. Was that too late to call? Did I care? If this person was determined to throw a hand grenade into my life, did she have the right to choose the terms of my reaction? The digits changed to 25, and then 26. The longer I thought about it, the later it was going to get. I picked up my phone and dialed.

  It rang five or six times, and then picked up.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice.

  “This is John Henderson,” I said.

  There was silence for three, maybe four seconds. “I’ll call you back,” the woman muttered, the words running into one. Then the line went dead.

  I grabbed my cigarettes and went out onto the deck. I couldn’t sit, so I stood, watching the rain.

  And waited.

  I don’t smoke inside anymore, or drink alcohol under a roof. It’s one of the ways I’ve learned to stop myself from doing things all the time. I’d had two cigarettes out on the deck before the phone buzzed in my hand.

  “Yes,” I said, heading quickly back indoors, away from the noise of the storm.

  “I’ve only got a couple of minutes,” the woman’s voice said. It sounded as though she was walking.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Ellen Robertson.”

  “I got that. But—”

  “I need your help.”

  “What do you mean, ‘help’?”

  She paused. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “I think the same thing’s going to happen to me.”

  “Look, I’ve got no idea what you think you know about—”

  “I live near Black Ridge,” she continued calmly, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Twenty miles from where you used to live.”

  For a moment this derailed me, but then I thought—so what? What happened was in the local papers. Available from district libraries, and doubtless on the Internet.

  “So?”

  “Wait a moment,” she said.

  Again I heard a noise like the swishing of a coat worn by someone who was walking quickly. It lasted maybe twenty seconds, and then I heard her breathing harder, her mouth back at the phone.

  “I have to go,” she said, and the quality of her voice had changed. She sounded apprehensive, nervous. Maybe more than that. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Look,” I said, finding a tone of voice I hadn’t used in a long time, except perhaps to Kyle the night before. “I don’t know who the hell you are. You’re telling me things that don’t make sense.”

  “I’m the one who needs help,” she said, her voice abruptly strong again—too firm, as if held right up against the brink of hysteria. “There’s no one who’s going to believe except maybe you, and now I realize you won’t either. I thought perhaps you knew but evidently you don’t and I can’t risk e-mailing again because he’s scanning the Wi-Fi now. If I tell you on the phone you’re going to think I’m crazy and—”

  She stopped suddenly. There were two seconds of nothing. Then she said “Good-bye,” very quickly, and I was listening to the roaring silence of a dead line.

  The obvious thing was to call right back, but the “good-bye” had been smeared, as if the phone had been jerked from her mouth on its way to being stuffed in a pocket. I could pretend she was a lunatic trying to take advantage of me in a way I hadn’t yet determined, but I know how people sound when they’re scared and freaked out. By the end of the call, the woman I’d been talking to was at least one of these, possibly both. I couldn’t just throw a ringing phone into her world.

  It sounded like an e-mail wouldn’t be a good idea either. The idea that “he”—whoever “he” was supposed to be, a husband presumably—was pulling her messages out of the ether sounded paranoid (it’s not as easy as people think), but an e-mail is an irrevocable act. Call someone, and if the wrong voice appears at the end of the line you can claim a wrong number or put the phone straight down and take your chances with caller ID. Once an e-mail’s sent, it’s gone. It paints what you’ve said on the wall and no amount of scrubbing will get it off again.

  “Fuck,” I shouted. It was the loudest sound the house had heard since I’d been living there. I had no idea I was going to shout before the sound had already echoed flatly off the walls. I did not like to hear a noise that loud coming from inside me.

  I stuffed the phone in my jeans pocket and stormed out onto the deck, down the external stairs, and along the walkway over the dune. It was still raining, but I didn’t know where else to go, or what else to do.

  At eight the next morning I called the restaurant. It rang and rang.

  I gave up, tried again half an hour later. Finally I heard it being picked up.

  “Pelican?” An unfamiliar voice.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Eduardo.” The cook sounded cautious. Addressing the public didn’t come under his brief. “Who is it, please?”

  “It’s John,” I said. “I need you to find something on the computer.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, doubtful again. “I don’t think Ted is happy if I was fooling around on there.”

  “There’s no reason for him to hear about it.”

  “I don’t know computers.”

  I forced myself to keep a level tone. “Eduardo, it’s no big deal. I’ll tell you exactly what to do. I just need to get a number off the database.”

  “Whose number?”

  “Becki’s.”

  “Ah, it’s easy,” he said, sounding much happier. “She print it off, leave it here, after the burglary. Everybody’s is here. Is okay.”

  “Great,” I said, relieved at not having to lean any heavier on him. “Give me hers, and while you’re at it, Ted’s home phone, too.”

  He recited them, slowly and painstakingly. I thanked him, and was halfway to putting the phone down before he asked something. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  I called Becki first. I wasn’t banking on her to be up, certainly not to sound so businesslike at that time of the morning. She listened without interruption, and immediately agreed to the two things I asked of her. So finally I called Ted.

  “Don’t tell me it’s happened again,” he said straightaway. “Nothing’s wrong with the restaurant. I�
��m at home.”

  “So . . .”

  I told him that I would be gone a day, maybe two. That Becki had agreed to cover for me on the floor, if reservations merited it. The truth was they probably wouldn’t.

  Ted listened as I laid it out for him. “What’s this about?” he asked finally.

  “Family business,” I said.

  “Didn’t realize you even had one. A family, I mean.”

  “Well, I did,” I said. “I do.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “I appreciate it, but no.”

  “You let me know if that changes.”

  He was being kind but I wanted this over with. “I will, Ted. It’s no big deal. Just, it has to be now.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he said.

  I’d packed a small bag and locked the place down half an hour later, and ten minutes after that Becki arrived to drive me over to Portland.

  I was on a plane at 12:40, business class, which is all I’d been able to get at short notice. I spent the bulk of the flight staring at the back of the seat in front, trying to concentrate on how strange it felt to be in the air again. I’d flown a lot in the past. For work, and longer ago for other reasons and under different circumstances and in planes that did not offer hot beverages. Sitting on the flight to Yakima, I realized it must be the first time I’d been on an aircraft in over three years.

  Yet my hands strapped me in without conscious thought. I passed my eyes dutifully over the laminated “let’s pretend a crash isn’t going to finish us all in a shrieking fireball of death” sheet, and accepted a coffee from the stewardess with the frequent flier’s casual indifference.

  The distance between then and now is always far shorter than you think. By the time the plane had reached its cruising height, I was cradled in the past’s unyielding embrace, and listening as it told me the same old story again.

  That I’d once had a son, and he died.

  CHAPTER 8

  Kristina watched through the coffee-store window as her mother started walking up Kelly Street back toward her lair. She took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.