Bad Things (13 page)

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—hav-

ing 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 re-

versed, 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 signifi ed. 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

B A D T H I N G S 79

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

80 Michael Marshall

cold in her gaze, too, as if refl ecting 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 illumi-

nation. A fi gure 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, mortifi ed. “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.

C H A P T E R 1 2

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.”

82 Michael Marshall

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 diffi cult 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 con-

vinced she had anything of interest to tell me. But I realized she per-

haps 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 includ-

ing 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?”

B A D T H I N G S 83

“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 fl y 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, start-

ing around four o’clock. About twenty past fi ve 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 fi ght, 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

84 Michael Marshall

for the ride, as if tied to the back of their hearse by a rope. Ask some-

one 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 fi ne. 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 neces-

sary or suffi cient condition for murder, and two million dollars is not

as much as it sounds.

“Ellen,” I said fi rmly. 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 process-

ing 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

B A D T H I N G S 85

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 fl ashed 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.