Bad Things (40 page)

I went over to where Tyler was, and squatted down. I could hear

him shifting away as I approached, and sparked the lighter so he could

see my face.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“My mommy’s sad.”

B A D T H I N G S 291

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“She’s just sad,” I said. “Sometimes that’s how it is. Will you stay

and look after her?”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to look around.”

“But it’s too dark.”

“I know. But I used to live here. You . . . you did, too. You won’t

remember.”

“Mommy said I did. I was very smaller.”

“That’s right. Much smaller.” Looking down at this face, at the

face of someone who should have been my boy, was making me feel

dead. “Give your mom a hug now, okay?”

“Okay.”

I started by confi rming which room we were in. I’d assumed it

was the main living area, and I’d been correct. The much-vaunted ca-

thedral ceiling towered over where we’d been sitting. I believed Carol

when she said she’d already checked out the building, but I knew she

must have done it with a child in tow, and I thought there was no

harm in me looking again.

I didn’t know what to think about what Carol had said, and I didn’t

know how much longer we were going to be left here. I just wanted

to be doing. I needed to do something other than deal with the fact I

was in a house where I used to live, with a boy who was half mine and

a woman I had loved but now barely recognized—and who was either

crazy or telling me things I found hard to fi t into the world.

I started by tracing my way around all the walls along the front of

the building. I moved quickly and did not linger in any room, espe-

cially not my study. Every window was sealed tight, as I knew seeing

it from the outside on the fi rst day I’d been in Black Ridge. I was soon

back in the main area.

“Carol—how many of them are there?”

She didn’t say anything.

292 Michael Marshall

“Carol, I need to know.”

Her voice fl oated to me out of the dark, muffl ed by her arms.

“You really don’t get it, do you?”

I went back feeling my way along the walls. My point had been

that yes, I could break the glass of one of these windows, and then try

kicking out the boards. But they’d been nailed on hard, and it could

take a while and make a lot of noise. If there were people with weap-

ons outside, I’d get shot. I had no idea how many people had taken

me in the parking lot. Carol had said two guys had come for them in

Renton, but that didn’t mean that’s all there was.

It randomly struck me that without my phone I couldn’t receive

a call from the two guys looking for Kyle and Becki, and realized it

would have made sense to have got one of
their
numbers, had I not

been too preoccupied with hiding the fact I was half convinced they

were going to drop me right there in the road. Wasn’t anything I

could do about that now. About that or much else.

Everything was pretty fucked up.

I’d gone almost the whole way around the ground level, moving more

quickly as I realized what a waste of time it was, when I remembered

something I’d noticed from the outside, on my fi rst visit to the house

after coming up to Black Ridge.

I left the outside wall and felt my way across the middle toward

the side of the house that faced the driveway. This took me through

the area I’d once thought of as Scott’s domain, the nonspace in the

hall he used to colonize. I was glad it was dark. In the weeks in which

we’d remained in the house after he died, I’d gone to some trouble to

avoid passing through here. I didn’t want to be able to see it now.

“Carol, I’m going to go try something.”

There was no reply.

I went down the stairs to the lower level. It can’t actually have

been darker down there, but it seemed so. I felt my way past the room

B A D T H I N G S 293

that had served as Carol’s offi ce, then one that had been earmarked as

a den for the boys when they got big enough, and took a left off the

corridor into the utility area.

I knew this had been emptied and swept and scrubbed before we

left, but when I lit my lighter I still expected to see what I’d recalled

on my fi rst visit, shelves stacked with slices of life.

I let it go out again and saw something else, however—a very

faint sliver of light, coming from the corner of the window in the

small storage area at the end of the utility room. It would still take a

while, but at least this window had been started from the outside.

I navigated my way back up to the main room.

“I’m going to try to make a way out,” I told Carol.

“Rah rah for you.”

“Carol . . .”

Truth was I didn’t feel I had much to say to her. With every min-

ute that passed, the things she’d told me sank in a little further, and

while that didn’t mean I believed she’d done anything that had caused

Scott to die . . . I didn’t know what I felt for her, or about her.

I went back downstairs.

I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my arm. Planted my feet

and jabbed my elbow into the bottom of the windowpane. Nothing

happened the fi rst time, but on the second it broke. I froze, putting

my head close to the window and listening for sounds outside. I could

hear the wind, but nothing more.

I tapped my elbow again a couple of times higher up the pane,

using my foot to sweep the fallen glass to one side. Even in the dark

I felt as if I could almost see the fresher air seeping into the room. I

realized I had no idea what time it was, but from the shade of the line

of light at the bottom of the window, I guessed it was getting dark.

I couldn’t see where the nails had been banged into the frame, so I

just rapped my elbow around at regular intervals. Not much happened

294 Michael Marshall

in the way of movement. I couldn’t remember, hadn’t noticed when

I’d been outside, whether it had been secured with nails or screws. If

it was the latter then the boards weren’t going anywhere without be-

ing broken.

I grabbed hold of the frame on either side and placed my heel into

the bottom corner. I pushed against it. I thought it gave, a little.

There was still no noise from the outside apart from something

that sounded like rain.

I kept pushing with my foot, methodically.

C H A P T E R 3 9

Finally, just when she believed her head was going to burst, when

she felt like she was
actually going to go nuts,
Becki caught sight of somewhere she recognized.

She didn’t know how long she’d been running, lost in the streets

and the rain. Couldn’t understand how it had even
happened
. Okay,

the roads were at weird angles to one another, like no one had a

ruler when they built this place and just slashed out a design with

a knife, but it was a small town, hardly bigger than Marion Beach.

She’d driven up and down it the night before and she
knew
what a

sorry-ass little place it was and more or less how it fi tted together.

So how the hell couldn’t she fi nd her way?

How come every turn she took seemed to lead her down a street

of houses that looked exactly the same as the one she’d just left,

but somehow wasn’t? She was wasted, she knew that, exhausted and

freaked out like never before in her life, and maybe the dead woman

on the bed and the psycho maid had been a little too much—but it

seemed like once you were tangled in this place, it didn’t want you

to get out again.

Plus now John was gone.

The one guy who’d had her back through all the crap of the last

296 Michael Marshall

week had disappeared. She didn’t know for sure, but she feared that

the white truck she’d seen hammering out of the bank parking lot

might have had something to do with that.

She’d tried calling his cell phone, had tried again about every ten

minutes since, but there was no reply and that scared her even more.

Except for last night, when she gathered he’d had shit to deal with,

John
always
answered when she called. He was always there. For her,

for her dad, for whoever. If he wasn’t there now, it could only mean

bad things.

And there was the emptiness. It was only late afternoon, for God’s

sake, but it was like everyone had decided to call it a day already.

There was hardly
anyone
on the streets, on foot or in cars, and those few who remained seemed to be scurrying home as if jerked there

on long ropes. She tried calling out to a couple of them. Either they

didn’t hear, or they ignored her. Went inside, shut the door, good-

bye. The town hadn’t looked like a bundle of laughs the night before,

but at least it had seemed
open
. Right now it was as if it was going into hibernation, forever—as if Becki was some pet that had been caught

outside with a bad storm coming, whose owners had decided that be-

ing safe indoors was more important, and hell, they could always get

a new dog.

She tried John’s phone, again. Once more it just rang and rang.

She shoved her cell back into her jeans and started to walk, taking

one turn and then another onto a street she was
sure
she’d been down

before, but that’s when she saw the strip of familiar lights ahead, and

started to run.

As she came to the top of Kelly Street she was dismayed to see that

pretty much everything seemed to be shut here, too. An Irish bar—

shut. Burger place—shut. What was going
on
? Was it some local

fucking holiday she didn’t know about?

Where the hell
was
everybody?

B A D T H I N G S 297

Then fi nally she spotted someone. A real live person, halfway

down the street, near the pizza restaurant where John had material-

ized the night before. Someone was standing under an awning there

by themselves, smoking, not looking as if they were right about to

go hide someplace. For a wonderful moment Becki thought it might

even
be
John, but quickly realized the silhouette was far too thin, and had long hair.

She kept running anyway, and called out. Anyone was better than

nobody. The fi gure heard her shouting, and looked in her direction.

Becki realized who it was, and called out again.

“Wait,” she said, when she got closer, and saw that the woman was

looking at her like she was a lunatic. “Please, I saw you last night. You

were in the restaurant with him, right? You came out, and said you’d

paid, or something, and then went away? Remember?”

“You mean . . . John?”

“Yes! They’ve got him,” Becki said. “They’ve
got John
.”

“Who has?”

“I don’t
know
.” She started crying. Didn’t want to, but couldn’t

stop. “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING.”

The woman put a cold hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Just

tell—”

“It’s
not
okay. There’s a dead person in his room. Someone put it

there and there’s this maid who doesn’t seem to care, and is, just like,

insane
, and they left an envelope full of stuff and John saw it and then
he just took off
. I tried to keep up with him but I couldn’t, but I saw where he was headed and before I got there this truck came out and

when I got there he just wasn’t
there
.”

The woman didn’t look right. Not shocked, or freaked out. She

just looked sad. And odd.

“Look—are you
hearing
this?”

“Who was the dead person?”

“The dead . . . How the fuck would I know? I think . . . I think I

heard him say the name Ellen.” Becki wiped her eyes savagely with

298 Michael Marshall

the back of her fi sts, and looked directly at the woman’s pale, bony

face and sharp eyes. “Why don’t you look even
surprised
?”

“Forget about what’s back at the motel,” the woman said, drop-

ping her cigarette to the sidewalk. “Courtney’s lost. She won’t tell

anyone.”

“Lost? What are you talking about? She’s the maid. She’s right

fucking
there
.”

“I meant it differently. She won’t say anything. She can’t. Don’t

worry.”

“Are you
nuts
?”

The woman pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of her purse and

glanced at it.

“Have you tried to call John?”

“Yes, of course.”

The woman tried anyway, and got the same result as Becki had,

and
fi nally
started to look like the gravity of the situation was getting into her head.

She put her phone back into her jacket, her eyes over Becki’s

shoulder.

“Friends of yours?”

Becki turned, and saw that things had, unbelievably, gotten even

worse.

She started to back away, then realized she didn’t have it in her to run

anymore, especially when she saw there was someone already in the

back of the large, black GMC idling up the street toward them.

“No,” she said dully. “But they’ve got my boyfriend.”

The car pulled over to the curb and the passenger door opened.

A wiry black guy got out, a man Becki recognized all too well. The