Bad Things Read online

  As a result I drank even more, to get through the listening periods, and the hangovers got worse and more frequent, and my willingness to listen decreased yet further. It came to the point where she would be talking all the time we were together, knowing I wasn’t listening but unwilling to stop, unable to understand that I was coming to hate her for filling the world with noise that made it impossible for me to start healing in silence. Consequently we began to spend less and less time together, and I started missing more and more of her narrative—until I realized I had lost track of whatever story she was trying to tell: and then finally came to understand that I was no longer even a part of it.

  I got this, in the end, when she left. Of all the things she tried to say, that was the one that got through. It was four months after Scott had died. I woke one weekend morning, late, in a house that felt empty and too quiet. I lurched around in my robe until it became clear that significant things were missing: principally, my wife and remaining child. Eventually I found a letter propped up on the desk in my study. It boiled down to: The world is broken, you're fucked up, and I’m out of here.

  In the next six weeks I did what we should have done long before—something Carol had tried to make me do many times. I sold the house. I sent her three-quarters of the proceeds, once the loan and other expenses had been paid. Half for her, a quarter for Tyler. An odd name for a child, I’d always felt, but it was not my choice. He had been a while in arriving, and was Carol’s son from before birth, somehow announcing this to us from the womb. I would have loved him nonetheless, but it was Scott who had been my son. I did not feel like a father anymore, and had failed at pretending otherwise.

  The last time Carol and I met was on the six-month anniversary of what happened. We met in a restaurant equidistant between Renton, where she was living (close to her brother, over on the Seattle side of the Cascades), and Black Ridge, in which I currently had that motel room. Carol looked tired and drawn. Tyler seemed to have no strong reaction to my having been absent, nor to me being there again. I learned that he was sleeping through the night now, however—having started almost immediately after he and his mother left the house. Carol and I had been married for a little under seven years, and apart for only a month. Yet on that afternoon the proportions seemed reversed, and it was clear neither of us was looking for a reconciliation.

  “Are you still drinking?” she asked. Her hands were, possibly without her being aware of it, organizing the table’s silverware into neat lines.

  “No,” I lied. I was actually drinking less concertedly by then, as if the demon knew it had done its job and was ready to go spread hell in someone else’s life. But the position felt precarious, and I did not want to endanger my progress by getting into it with Carol. By leaving she had made it my problem, not hers, and it would be another six months before I felt the boss of it again.

  She raised her chin, and I knew she understood both what the truth was and what it signified. That was okay. It was even nice, for a moment, to feel married and known. It was about the only thing that made me feel that way. In the old days there would have been a smile in her eyes. Now they looked dark and sad and old.

  Twenty minutes later we stood and kissed each other drily on the cheek. I haven’t seen her or Tyler since. Maybe there was more she could have done, or said. I fell short in those and other ways, too. Though we had been a good couple when times were fair, we had no idea how to deal with each other when they were not. We’d tried therapy. The problem is that marriage is a language—an oral one, with no tradition of writing. Once you begin to codify it, it starts to die. There’s a lot of sleight of hand in relationships, too, and talking excavates all the tricks. It’s a hell of a risk, assuming you’ll still want to watch the magician, and live that life, once you know how all the gags are done.

  It had been a fair-weather partnership, perhaps, and the weather had turned very bad indeed. That evening, in fact, when I sat outside in a plastic chair and did nothing but stare into the motel’s empty swimming pool for three hours, getting more and more shit-faced, it seemed like the sky had become a thick blanket of storm cloud that would never, ever lift. I eventually passed out in the chair, waking just after four, when rain started falling on me.

  The next day I checked out of the motel. I drove for a couple months with no destination, trying to overlay the past with sights and sounds. Eventually I wound up in Oregon. It’s a place with a loose texture. You can sink into it and live out some kind of life without other people bothering you a great deal. I kept drinking for a while longer. Then I stopped, and had gone to sleep instead.

  By nine-thirty I was beginning to get irritable. I was drinking slowly but had still sunk enough for it to start to feel like old times, and not in a good way. The street outside looked cold and empty, and the bar wasn’t exactly cozy, either.

  “Another?”

  I looked up to see the bar woman leaning on the counter six feet away, looking out of the window with a local’s calm indifference.

  “I guess,” I said. “But tell me, where do you have to stand, exactly, to get the mountain view?”

  “Outside,” she said, turning to me. I realized there was something cold in her gaze, too, as if reflecting the weather outside. “Plus you have to crane your neck a little, or else walk down to the crossroads. Why? You going to sue us over the name?”

  “I’m John,” I said, and put out my hand.

  She shook it, smartly, a single up and down. Her hand was large and dry. “Kristina. I’ll get you that beer. Hey—wait up. This your date?”

  I looked out the window. All the businesses on the other side were closed for the night, bar the pizza place, and the streetlamps on Kelly strove for historical authenticity rather than the provision of illumination. A figure stood on the boardwalk under one of these.

  “I don’t know,” I said, without thinking.

  “Yeah, it can be that way with old friends.”

  “For God’s sake.” I shook my head, mortified. “What is this stuff I’m drinking?”

  “Truth juice. Beware.” She grinned and headed back to get my beer.

  I watched the woman on the opposite side of the street. She didn’t move for a couple of minutes, but then started to make her way over.

  By the time she made the sidewalk I had no doubt this was the person I’d come to meet.

  CHAPTER 12

  I turned on my stool so she could see my face when she came in.

  “Ellen?”

  She didn’t reply, didn’t even look my way, but came straight over to the next stool. Then changed her mind, moved to a table in the center of the room. I took a deep breath, went over, and sat on the other side of it.

  “This isn’t a good place,” she said.

  She didn’t unbutton her coat. Her voice was as it had been on the phone, clipped and very precise. She was of medium build, with glossy blond hair, brown eyes, and the kind of cheekbones and neat, symmetrical features that cosmetics companies like to use to promote their wares. Her own makeup was well applied and either Black Ridge had a better hair salon than I would have credited or she had it cut elsewhere. She looked maybe thirty.

  “Seems pleasant enough,” I said. “Didn’t spot a Hilton anywhere in town, otherwise I would have—”

  “For me, I mean,” she said irritably.

  “So let’s go somewhere else.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have long.”

  Just then Kristina arrived with my beer. “Getcha?” she asked, with a brief smile. Ellen shook her head.

  “So let’s start with that,” I said, when we were alone again. “The I-can’t-speak and I-haven’t-got-long routine, and sitting away from the window in case a passerby sees you. What’s up with that? You were the one who got in contact with me, remember.”

  Before she answered, she reached across the table and picked up my beer. Took a sip and replaced it neatly on the bar mat. I found this annoying.

  “I’m in a difficul
t position,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My husband died four months ago,” she continued, negating all the assumptions I’d just made.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She smiled quickly, in the way you do when someone expresses a condolence that, while polite, is too generic to make any difference.

  “He was not an unwealthy man.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “He has family in the area.”

  Each moment I spent in this woman’s company made me less convinced she had anything of interest to tell me. But I realized she perhaps wasn’t doling the information out this slowly for the sake of it, or at least not solely. Her hands were twisted together, the knuckles white. I took a swallow of my beer and put it down in the middle of the table. She noticed this but did not reach for it right away.

  “How not unwealthy was your husband, exactly?”

  “Eighteen million dollars,” she said, matter-of-fact. “Not including the house. So it’s not like he was Bill Gates. But we had a prenup anyway. No one’s arguing with how the money was distributed, well, except that I got any at all, but that was Gerry’s choice and there was nothing they could do about it, and we were married for four years.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  She looked thrown. “Boston. Why?”

  “So how did you meet Mr. Robertson?”

  “On vacation. What is it to you?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Right now it doesn’t seem like any of this bears relevance to me. So if the money’s not the issue, then what is?”

  “I think I’m in danger.”

  “You said. You also brought up the death of my son, which made me fly a distance to be here. I’d like to believe I didn’t waste a few hundred dollars and a lot of time. So far that isn’t happening.”

  “Something happened,” she said. “To Gerry.”

  “He died.”

  “Yes, he did” she said, as if I’d implied otherwise.

  “How did it happen?”

  “He’d been out for a run. He ran six miles every afternoon, starting around four o’clock. About twenty past five I thought, ‘That’s strange, he’s usually back by now,’ and so I went out onto the porch and . . . there he was, in the chair he often sat in after he was done. But usually he’d call out, you know, say he was back. I thought ‘whatever’ and was on my way back inside and then I thought it was strange that he hadn’t said something, because he must have heard me come out. We’d had . . . we had a fight, earlier in the day. It was no big deal, but I wanted to make sure things were okay. So I went back to where he was sitting. He was drinking from a bottle of water. He looked hot, and, you know, puffed up, like he’d run farther or faster than usual. But he turned and saw me coming, and he started to smile. Then . . .”

  She held her hands up in the air in a gesture that reminded me of the one Ted had made, when trying to convey the degree of damage the restaurant had suffered. How much damage? Enough. Too much. “Heart attack?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I was. However irrelevant this woman’s problems, there are those who have lost someone they care about, and those who have not. If you have, then you understand that the people who die drag us along for the ride, as if tied to the back of their hearse by a rope. Ask someone who has lost their mother how they feel about Thanksgiving. But one day you realize that you’re still alive, and you pour someone else’s gravy over your turkey and are thankful there’s any at all. If you want to stay sane, anyhow.

  “Are you okay?”

  I realized I’d been staring down at my hands, and glanced up to see Ellen looking at me. She seemed a little less tense than she had.

  “I’m fine. So . . .”

  “Not everyone believes that’s what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know” she said. “I loved Gerry. We were happy.”

  “How much did you get?”

  She looked annoyed at the question. “Two million dollars. Is that enough?”

  I shrugged. Enough to kill someone for? Yes. But as people will whack one another over sneakers or an iPod, there’s an argument that adding zeros doesn’t constitute motivation. Money is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for murder, and two million dollars is not as much as it sounds.

  “Ellen,” I said firmly. My beer was almost done and so was I. “I came up here because—”

  “It’s the house,” she said.

  “The house?” I said, confused. Part of my head was still processing having revisited my own property, and for a moment I thought that’s what she was talking about. “Your house? What about it?”

  “It’s part of a compound, three houses, around a pond,” she said. “They’re old, but they were remodeled by some big-name architect, I forget who. It’s off the road to Roslyn and Sheffer. Gerry and I lived in the second-biggest house. The caretakers have the tiny one, Gerry’s children have the other. He was married before. She died ten years ago. I didn’t get the house in the will because the place has been in the family forever, but I’m allowed to stay there as long as I wish. Gerry was very clear about that. It’s there in black and white.”

  “Why do you want to?”

  “Because I like it here,” she said. “And . . . I’ve had times in my life when I got pushed around pretty hard. It’s not happening again. But since Gerry died, it’s not right anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Actually, I will have a drink after all.”

  I looked up, but Kristina wasn’t in view. Just as I got to my feet to go to the bar, my phone started buzzing. I pulled it out, expecting to see Becki’s name on the screen. The caller had rung off, however, and I didn’t recognize the number in the log.

  “Who was that?”

  Ellen was looking up at me. I laughed, disconcerted again by her presumptuousness.

  “I have no idea.”

  Then it rang again. The same number flashed up. I was about to accept the call when Ellen grabbed my hand and twisted it so she could see the screen.

  I’ve never seen someone go white before. Maybe it didn’t even happen, in a literal sense. But what took place to her face is what people mean when they use the phrase. She stumbled to her feet, started to say something, but then just left.

  She was out of the bar before I really knew what was happening, and by the time I’d got to the street, she was gone away around some corner I couldn’t find.

  When I got back inside the bar the people in the corners were talking to their companions or looking into their beer. Kristina was back behind the counter.

  “Something you said?”

  I glared at her. “Kind of an obvious joke, wasn’t that?”

  She stared straight back at me, and I noticed the color of her eyes properly for the first time, a pale green shading to gray, like mountain rock glimpsed through a layer of lichen.

  “You look like someone who’s fraternized with a few barkeeps in his time,” she said. “So you’ll know we work from a limited script. You ready to pay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t. “It’s been a long day, and I’m tired and pissed off. None of these problems are yours, naturally.”

  “Best kind,” she said, slightly less frostily. “You want another beer, or what?”

  I nodded and she poured it out.

  “So—Ellen just upped and went, huh?”

  “You know her?”

  “Not really. Used to come in here once in a while, with Gerry Robertson.”

  “Her husband.”

  “Right.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “No. Definitely not. They were a cute couple. I mean, kind of a May-to-December deal, well, October maybe, he was early sixties, but they were tight. Gerry wasn’t a dumb guy, either.”

  She sounded sincere, but there was something she wasn’t saying. “And? But?”

  “Are you,
like, a private detective or something?”

  “No. I’m a waiter.”

  She laughed. “Really.”

  “Really. You got some plates of food in back, I’ll be happy to carry them around to prove it.”

  “We don’t do food anymore. Not since the last couple deaths.”

  I laughed, and for a moment it seemed like we caught each other’s eye, though that sometimes happens when you’ve had a couple too many beers. “So what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Well, just about what you said earlier. Even though it wasn’t true. About being an old friend?”

  “What about it?”

  “I got the impression there were no old friends with that one. That where she was before Black Ridge was her business. If you see what I mean.”

  I did, though I wasn’t sure what difference it made to anything, or whether I cared. I finished my beer and went out into the dark, where it was cold and getting colder, and you could smell the coming rain.

  It was only when I was putting my phone on to charge in my motel room that I noticed a new icon on its screen. Someone had left a message.

  I’d walked quickly from the Mountain View, and knew—as the phone had been in my coat pocket—it was possible I’d failed to notice an incoming call from Ellen. That didn’t mean I wanted to hear what she had to say. It had taken fifteen minutes to walk back, enough to decide that tomorrow was going to find me on a plane back to Portland, perhaps—just perhaps—via a diversion over the mountains to Renton. If Carol would consent to meet, that was, and wasn’t freaked out by my suddenly appearing in her near neighborhood after three years. Maybe that wouldn’t happen, but I was looking for ways to make the trip up here seem less like a dumb idea.

  In any event, it seemed unlikely that anything Ellen had to say would derail the decision to cut my losses and go. So I might as well hear it.

  I retrieved the message, my thumb ready over the button that would delete it. It wasn’t Ellen, though it was a woman’s voice.