Bad Things (18 page)

his sixties, with soft features and thinning gray hair. His eyes were

closed and he looked dead. Nothing more.

“It had changed,” she said defensively.

I felt furiously let down. “Well, yeah, Ellen. Facial expressions don’t

just freeze on people’s faces forever. Christ, are you
kidding
me?”

“It wasn’t just his face, anyway,” she said quickly. “It was what he

said
.”

“And what did he
say,
Ellen?”

“He said ‘What the
hell
. . . Who
are
you?’ and I turned to see where he was looking. It was sunny and bright and you could see all

the way to the trees but there wasn’t anything
there
, except, you know, the trees behind the main house. And so I turned back to him, to ask

what he was talking about, but . . . he was dead.”

“So he had a stroke, or the CVA cut off the blood to his brain, and

his vision got skewed.”

“Is that what happened to Scott?”

“I don’t know why you think you know what happened to my

son,” I said, angered at her use of his name. “In the newspaper it just

reported that he died. So what makes you think—”

“The woman in the café was telling this other person that the

policeman had said your son died looking scared.
That’s
how Gerry

looked.
That’s
what disappeared from his face. He saw something, and

it made him die. The coroner smoothed his skin out to hide it. So
no

one would know
.”

I was staring at her now. “Ellen, that’s just . . . nonsense.”

“Someone
did
something to Gerry,” she insisted. “And now they’re

trying to do it to me.”

“Do
what
, Ellen?”

B A D T H I N G S 117

“They’re watching me all the time. They’re in my house at night.

They follow me everywhere, and hide when I turn around.”

“
Who?
Cory and Brooke?”

“No. It’s not them.”

“Are you sure? Someone from that house called me. How else did

they get the number except off your phone—which says they’ve been

snooping around your house. And who else did you mean when you

said someone was intercepting your e-mails?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Cory is doing that. They want me to leave

the house. But it’s not just them. It’s someone else. They’re trying to

punish me for Gerry dying—for something
I didn’t do
.”

“Who?” I said. I was close to shouting now. “
Who
do you think

is doing this?”

She muttered something, a word I didn’t quite catch. It sounded

like “trigger.”

“What did you say?”

She made a noise of angry disgust, got up, and stormed away to-

ward her car. By the time I’d caught up with her she’d already yanked

the door open.

“Ellen,” I said. “Listen to me. You need help. Seriously. The death

of someone you love can do strange things to your head. Believe me,

I know.”

“You don’t know
anything,
” she shouted, eyes bright with anger

or tears.

Then she slammed the door and drove away.

I walked back to the table to retrieve my cigarettes, and wound up

sitting down and smoking another. I was disappointed and relieved.

Relieved to have gotten to the bottom of what the woman felt she had

to tell me. Disappointed that it was meaningless bullshit.

I was angry with her, too. I hadn’t been honest with Carol when

we’d spoken. I hadn’t chosen to go up to the house. I had many times

118 Michael Marshall

in the last several years reaffi rmed in my head a clear decision to

never go anywhere near the house or this area again. I wouldn’t have

done it at all if Ellen Robertson hadn’t got in contact. Ever since I

had been back in the Northwest I had felt my new life fading, as if the

distance between then and now was being eroded—and the visit to

the house had been the start of this. The last twenty-four hours had

been a dumb and dangerous waste of time, and it was time to go back

to the future.

I slipped my cigarette butt into the pack, as had been my habit

even before the health nazis redefi ned smoking as akin to mass homi-

cide. In doing so I remembered how Ellen had fl icked hers away, and

got up to go look for it. I wasn’t really expecting to fi nd it, but moved

more by a self-righ teous annoyance that took littering as additional

evidence of her being a stupid bitch.

I traced the likely trajectory across the grass and into the trees,

realizing as I did so that this had been the area where I’d fi rst glimpsed

her when I arrived. And there, close to a lichen-spangled rock, was a

fresh butt. I picked it up and was about to stomp back out again when

something caught my eye.

I hesitated, then walked a few yards farther into the trees. What

covered the ground there—as you would expect, in these kinds of

woods at this time of year—was a mixture. Fallen leaves in a hun-

dred shades of brown, grasses turning more gray than green, widely

spread rocks with patches of verdant moss.

There was also, however, a collection of twigs and small branches,

covering an area approximately three feet square. I looked up, and

confi rmed that the trees around me were pretty much exclusively fi rs.

Trees of a type, in other words, that would be unlikely to drop mate-

rial of this kind. There were alders and silver and paper birch within

vision, yes, but none just here.

Humans have pattern-forming minds, and this can sometimes be

misleading. As I stood looking down at a random collection of fallen

objects, I nonetheless thought, for a moment, that they looked almost

B A D T H I N G S 119

as if they formed a shape—one which I couldn’t quite discern. It just

didn’t looked entirely random.

There was something else, too. A faint odor. Earthy, but with a

high, sweeter note, as if some small creature had died in the vicinity.

A bird cawed suddenly nearby, making me jump. I realized I was

staring at a scattering of autumn debris, and felt a fool. I swept my

foot in an arcing kick through the twigs, spreading them over a ten-

foot radius, and walked back to the car. It was time to go home.

C H A P T E R 1 7

When you work in a library you often see people who look familiar.

The book hounds who get through two or three novels a day, and

are constantly ferrying their treasure troves in and out. The young

women who know they’re less short-tempered mothers in public,

and bring their children to play in the kids’ area with its heavily

battered plastic toys. Men looking for work, or at least presenting

themselves that way, drifting through entire days in the company of

newspapers or nonfi ction written by people who lucked into fi nan-

cial success and are now compounding their good fortune through

bestselling books entitled
Ten Reasons Why You Suck, and I Don’t.

But Carol didn’t think the man she had become aware of this

morning was any of these things.

He wasn’t there when she arrived at ten-thirty—she was pretty

sure, though she’d still been fl ustered by the call from her ex-

husband. Talking to John had been the absolute last thing she’d

expected that morning, and hearing he was over in Black Ridge had

thrown her completely. She’d spent a soothing period tidying—it

was amazing how people who employed the classifi cation system to

fi nd
books seemed to believe it dispensable when it came to putting

B A D T H I N G S 121

them back—and using the computer to run up a poster for a reading

group.

When she looked up from printing out a draft she glimpsed a

man in the nonfi ction stacks. She noticed he was thickset, with fl ecks

of gray amid his short dark hair, but no more than that.

She didn’t think anything of it until, an hour later and with the

phone call largely behind her, she realized the man was still in the li-

brary, now over where the new fi ction was laid out. Again she saw him

only briefl y, from behind, as she trundled a cart of returned books

over toward the children’s section.

An hour was not an exceptional length of time to spend in a li-

brary. Many spent longer, but most of these fi tted into the recogniz-

able tribes. When she had joined the library Carol had been subjected

to a rather long orientation lecture from Miss Williams (currently at

the dentist, thank God). Miss Williams’s worldview was character-

ized by a high level of mistrust—of pretty much everyone, but nota-

bly of those who might be using the library “inappropriately.” Who

used the restrooms without putting in a reasonable stretch perusing

books; who were here because it was warm; and most of all the people

Miss Williams called “watchers.” Men who cruised the stacks, pull-

ing out a volume occasionally and leafi ng through it, but whose gaze

always seemed to be somewhere else—on a woman in another sec-

tion, bending over to get something from a lower shelf; on one of the

young mothers, leaning forward to assist her child without consider-

ing the effect this might have on the front of her blouse.

Or, Miss Williams implied, sometimes on one of the children

themselves.

This man didn’t look like a watcher.

Carol didn’t once see his gaze drift. Either he’d sensed someone

was keeping an eye on him—though generally when that happened,

122 Michael Marshall

a watcher would absent himself from the library
very
swiftly—or he

was just a regular guy spending an unusual amount of a weekday

morning wandering around the books. Unemployed, on vacation, at

some other unknowable kind of loose end.

It was now that she was looking at him more closely that Carol

began to think she recognized him. She didn’t think it was from

Renton, however, and for just about the only time since she’d started

working there, she began to wish Miss Williams was around. Either

she’d already be on the man’s case, or Carol could point him out and

fade back to watch the fi reworks. There was supposed to be two mem-

bers of staff on duty at all times, but budget cuts blah blah blah, and

so today this was Carol’s problem and hers alone.

Assuming it
was
a problem, and she wasn’t just letting her imagi-

nation get away from her. She was starting to feel anxious. She didn’t

want to feel that way. Not in her place of work, an environment in

which she’d begun to feel comfortable and valued. She wasn’t actu-

ally alone, after all. There were three mothers over by the window, a

couple of guys over in nonfi ction, another sifting dispiritedly through

the help-wanted sections of the local papers.

Carol came out from the desk and headed over to where she’d last

seen the man, a cheerful offer of assistance forming confi dently on

her lips.

He wasn’t there.

She turned, confused. Two minutes ago, she’d seen the back of

his head and shoulders over here in Art (Oversize). Now he was gone.

He couldn’t have left the building. That would have meant going past

Carol at exactly the time when she’d been turning him over in her

mind. She didn’t get
that
wrapped up in her own thoughts. Not any-

more, anyhow. Not usually.

She backed out of Art and looked around. Couldn’t see anyone

but for the people she’d cataloged before deciding to come over to

this side. Except. . .

Yes. Over in the American History section, a pair of feet was vis-

B A D T H I N G S 123

ible beneath one of the half-height stacks, stuck out as if the owner

was sitting at the table there. Carol was beginning to get irritated

with herself now. So some guy had
so
little to do that he was making

a meal over visiting the library. Big deal. Maybe Miss Williams had a

case against these people, but she didn’t, surely? No.

And she wasn’t scared of them, either.

She walked quickly across the central atrium and into the stack

which led to the American History section. The guy was going to get

some goddamned help whether he wanted it or not.

She found him sitting to one side of the table and looking down

at his large, fl eshy hands, which were resting comfortably on his lap.

He wasn’t holding a book, and as soon as Carol realized this she un-

derstood she might have made a mistake.

“Can I help you?”

The man looked up. His eyes were the pale end of blue. He was

dressed casually, in jeans, a white shirt, and a dark jacket. He looked

too large for his clothes, and had the air of someone who was dressing

against type.

“Sir, is there anything I can help you with?”

Her voice sounded fi ne the second time, too. Strong, confi dent—

and loud enough to carry to other sections of the library.

“No, Carol, there’s nothing I want from you. Not here, any-

how.”

She stared at him. “How do you know my name?”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small envelope, pale

cream, the kind that holds greeting cards. He held this out toward

Carol, who saw the name Carol Henderson written on the outside in