Bad Things (17 page)

minutes as a test. Somebody’s tried to convince me you’re untrust-

worthy. I’d like to believe that isn’t true. So. Where are you from?”

“How did you know?”

“Got a good ear. Your accent is excellent but the more I hear it,

the more I realize the vowels are too rounded sometimes, and once

in a while your word choice is off. No one around here is going to

know the difference but I’ve spent time talking to someone who re-

ally does come from Boston.”

“And you’re an expert?”

I waited.

“Romania,” she said defi antly.

“But you’ve been here a long time?”

“Eight years. I was in England for a while before that, and

France, and now I live here. I, too, have a good ear. I wanted a

110 Michael Marshall

good job in America. So I took the trouble to work on my accent. My

French isn’t so bad, either.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-four. And that’s not a polite question in any language.”

I was surprised into a smile. “Okay,” I said. “Look. You’ve been

honest, and I’ll be the same. I’m sorry if you’re having a hard time

but this is the last conversation we’re going to have unless you give

me reason to believe you have information relating to the death of

my son.”

“What about you?” she said. “Where are
you
really from?”

“Newport Beach,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “California.”

“I don’t mean that.” She took one from my pack without asking,

and picked my lighter off the table. “It said in the newspaper you were

a lawyer.”

“Yes. I was.”

“But not always, I don’t think.”

“And now you’re the expert?”

She didn’t smile. Just waited, much as I had done, looking me

directly in the eye. She didn’t seem a whole lot like the woman I’d

met in the Mountain View Tavern, and I remembered what Kristina

had said.

“I was in the armed forces. Later, I was a lawyer. I did some other

things in between.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Like what? Listening closely to the way

people spoke, and what they said?”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“So was Romania.”

So I told her. My teens were scrappy and I went into the army at

twenty to get away from a life I could see tangling badly in front of

me. Did fi ve years and came out without having been shot and with

only a few stitches here and there. I left soon after I met Carol, and

joined the Secret Ser vice instead, which I fi gured would at least keep

me in the country most of the time. The ser vice, despite the fl ashy,

B A D T H I N G S 111

look-at-me name, is somewhere between grunt-level fed and body-

guard, and basically involves a lot of standing around. I was in it for

two years, during which time I at no point met the president, the

vice president, or got shot. After that I moved to the side, after being

invited to work for an intelligence department tangentially allied to

Homeland Security. During those years I additionally studied for a

law degree during evenings and weekends. I started this when my

wife got pregnant the fi rst time and I realized there was soon going to

come a point where I didn’t want to be around guns every day or have

my whereabouts and safety governed by forces outside my control.

I left and joined a small, old law fi rm in Yakima owned by the father

of an old army buddy—Bill Raines, also working there by then—and

did okay. They had bread and butter clients coming out of their ears

and it wasn’t hard to bill enough hours to get comfortable. I worked

mainly in offi ces, taking depositions and processing other discovery

work, support functions for people like Bill, and only occasionally

got to stare someone in the eye and dare them to take on me, our cli-

ent, and the fi rm. Mostly they didn’t rise, and when they did, usually

they lost and generally they took it well—though the odd thing was I

nearly
did
get shot one afternoon by opposing council, who it turned

out had a major cocaine problem and was, moreover, a poor loser.

In general, however, it was a decent, quiet, respectable life. It

should have stayed that way, with me eventually making partner and

becoming fat and excessively knowledgeable about wine. It would

have, but for a single afternoon.

I stopped there, having already said far more than I had intended.

Ellen listened well, with eyes that laid you open without seeming

to pry.

She thought about what I’d said, and then she started to talk.

They met in Paris, where they shared a table out of necessity outside

the Café de Flore on a busy spring afternoon—two strangers touring

112 Michael Marshall

the Saint-Germain hotspots, ticking the box of one of the cafés where

pioneering existentialists had moodily sipped café crèmes. She was

personal assistant to an executive in a bank in Boston. Robertson was

on his fourth annual trip outside the U.S. after the death of his wife,

and still fi nding it hard to enjoy himself. Gerry had been a fi nancial

director down in Yakima before retiring in his midfi fties, and so they

had things to talk about, kind of. They found things, anyway. They

also arranged to meet for coffee the next day, and then dinner that

evening, and after that. . .

As I listened, I decided Kristina had probably been right about

something else. When Ellen talked about how she and Gerry kept

the relationship going, via phone and e-mail and weekends away,

how he’d proposed to her in New Orleans on the fi fth anniversary of

his wife’s death—and his reason for choosing that date, putting his

past to bed in open view, rather than denying it—and how it had felt

when she’d fi nally moved in with him to the house I’d seen earlier that

morning, I had little doubt this was a woman who had felt deeply, and

that the feeling had been reciprocated. Why not? Naturally there are

differences between people whose ages differ by ten, twenty, or even

thirty years (or so one would hope, if the older party has been paying

attention to life in the meantime)—but probably far less than those

which exist between a child of four and one of two. Being neither old

nor young necessarily implies you’re a fool.

There followed four years of happy domesticity and platinum-

club international travel, the only blight on which had been, predict-

ably, Gerry’s children. This had not taken the obvious form, however.

Cory and Brooke Robertson welcomed the newcomer to the family

compound, had been friendly to the point, apparently, of near suf-

focation. This confused Ellen until she realized they were treating

her as if she were another sibling. Of course she didn’t expect them to

deal with someone of their own age as a meaningful stepmother, but

neither was she prepared to accept the role of a late-arrival sister who

just happened to share a house (and bed) with their dad.

B A D T H I N G S 113

After a discussion with Brooke in which she’d made it clear that

was not the lay of the land, there had been a distancing, but—Ellen

felt—no more than was appropriate. Life went on, with a family din-

ner together in the big house every Sunday.

“So what was the argument about?” I asked.

She looked confused.

“Last night you said you and Gerry had a fi ght,” I said. “The day

he died.”

She stubbed the cigarette on the picnic table’s surface and fl icked

it away into the trees. “Children. But not his children.”

“You wanted a child?”

“It had been going on six months. Actually, nine—since the night

of our fourth anniversary, that was the fi rst bust-up. I’m, well, I told

you. I’m thirty-four.” She held a fi nger up and jerked it from side to

side. “Tick tock, tick tock.”

“Could he have produced more children?”

“Oh, I think so. Gerry was a vigorous man.”

“Good for him. But a little old to cheerfully contemplate three

a.m. bottle feeds. Especially when he’d been through it all thirty-odd

years before.”

She glared at me, in my temporary capacity as representative of

all male-kind. “But he never
said
. When we got married, he never

said, ‘We can have no children.’ We never had
big
fi ghts about it,

but . . . it was coming up more and more.”

I could imagine, having been married. I was familiar with the

process of relentless female advocacy. Aware, too, of the male coun-

terweapons of bluff inattentiveness and circumvention, and how they

do nothing but make a situation worse. “So—that day?”

“It came up, it went the same as always. He went off for his run.

I stomped around the house for a while and then got on with some-

thing else. It . . . it really wasn’t such a big fi ght.”

Her chin twitched, and she stared down at the table. I had spent

many nights telling myself that Scott and I had been on good terms

114 Michael Marshall

in what had turned out to be his last days, that when I’d read him a

bedtime story the night before he died it had been with pleasure, and

not a sense of duty, and so I knew what her body language meant.

“Better you were still having the fi ghts,” I offered. “It gets to the

point where you’re
not
talking, that’s when you’re screwed.”

She looked back up, and smiled a little. I smiled back, but sat

looking at her like a man who wasn’t going to say anything else with-

out incentive.

“It was his face,” she said. “That’s why I called you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He looked like they say your boy did, when he died.”

The coroner’s report on Gerry Robertson was straightforward.

Being fi t for his age and that the family had no prior history of car-

diovascular problems didn’t, sadly, amount to much.

“Two weeks after he was buried,” Ellen said, “I was in Sheffer. I

don’t know why, I can’t remember. Probably just to be somewhere. I

was trying to eat some lunch. And I heard someone talking about ‘the

Henderson house.’ And what happened there.”

I swore, annoyed that my life had evidently become such a touch-

stone for local gossip. “Was it a guy in his fi fties? Expensive-looking

glasses?”

She frowned. “No. A woman. Why?”

“Never mind. And?”

“This woman was saying she’d heard it from one of the policemen

who was there, a guy called Phil.”

I nodded. I remembered Phil Corliss, from the Black Ridge

Police Department. He and his boss had been fi rst on the scene after

Scott died, but eventually ceded control to the larger Cle Elum Police

Department. Of all the cops who’d turned up that day, and over the

rest of the week, Corliss was the only one I never thought was trying

to work out how or why I’d caused harm to my son. No one asked,

and none seemed like they truly felt me or Carol should be thrown in

the back of a police car and worked over in a windowless room, but all

B A D T H I N G S 115

except Corliss looked as though the thought had crossed their minds.

Corliss and his boss, in fact—who was there too briefl y for me to log

his name.

“The woman said Phil had told her something about the way . . .

look, are you—”

“I’m fi ne. Just say whatever you’ve been building up to. My pa-

tience is not infi nite.”

“The deputy said your boy’s face looked strange. When he saw

the body. Like he had been scared?”

I didn’t say anything.

“So . . . I went to the library and I got out the newspapers from

back then. I read what happened. And it made me start to think.”

“I still don’t get—”

“Gerry didn’t have a heart attack,” Ellen said. “My father,
he
had a

heart attack. I was fourteen, I was there. He said he felt strange. Then

he was fi ne for a few hours, but I saw him frowning and touching his

arm, like this.” She rubbed her right hand up and down her left arm,

quite roughly. “He stopped, but said he felt sick. He was okay for one

more hour. Then he was rubbing his arm again, and he moved it up

to his chest. But still he said he was fi ne. He got up to get some indi-

gestion tablets and it was as if his left leg gave way. He slipped down

onto one knee, crooked. He started to say something—and I saw that

he knew what was happening. He
knew
he was having a heart attack.

With Gerry
it wasn’t like that
.”

“So how was it?”

“I said his name. He turned and smiled at me—and it was a lovely

smile, and it said the fi ght didn’t matter. I was about to say something

nice to him when I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was looking through me, back to where the trees start. He

looked confused. It was like he smelled funny, too, not like his sweat

usually did. And he stared at me like he’d never seen me before in his

life, and I made him scared.”

116 Michael Marshall

She abruptly reached into her purse and pulled something out. “I

have a picture,” she said.

“You took a
photograph
?”

“Later. They left me alone with him.”

She held the picture out. I saw the harshly lit face of a man in