Bad Things (27 page)

stead?”

Around the café, a few of the other patrons were not being very

subtle about lifting their eyes above the level of the local paper.

“Keep your voice down,” I said calmly. “Did Gerry know?”

She breathed out heavily. “Not in the beginning.”

“Not information you’re going to lead with. I can see that.”

“But I told him later. Before we were married.”

“Everything?”

“Things nobody should have to tell anyone. Especially a man

they love.”

“He didn’t care?”

“Of course he cared. He wanted to go back in time and fi nd the

men who’d done bad things to me. I told him time doesn’t work like

that, and I didn’t need protecting, but . . . from him I didn’t mind.

He did it without making it feel like he was taking anything away

from me. And the thing that happened in Berlin? He said he was

proud of me.”

“I would be, too.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said, suddenly distant again. “Lately, I have

not been so strong. Or so good.”

“What do you mean?”

B A D T H I N G S 187

“People always look after number one, right?”

It seemed for a moment as if she was going to say something else,

but she clammed up.

“This feeling you’ve had,” I said. “Of being watched, in danger.

Did you ever feel it before Gerry died?”

She shook her head. “I felt very sad sometimes, for no reason. It’s

why we had quite such a bad argument about the children thing, on

that day. I just . . . everything seemed to be going wrong. To feel as

if it was dying. And for a few days beforehand I also didn’t sleep very

well. But that’s not the same.”

She hesitated for a moment. “Did you understand those things I

was telling you in the hospital?”

“What do you mean, ‘understand’?”

“Did you understand that none of it really happened?”

I stared at her. “What do you mean? I thought you said it was a

witch.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. They make you believe things that

aren’t true. See things that aren’t there. Those things I said—they

didn’t really happen. None of them.”

I felt wrong-footed and dumb. If you’ve privately decided

someone’s deluded, then you want to be the person to tell them

that. “So . . .”

“It was in my head.” She hesitated, and then seemed to come to a

decision. “It was supposed to stop. But it hasn’t. I was stupid to believe

it would
ever
be taken off. That it even
could
. And yesterday evening . . .

I heard tapping on my window at the hospital.”

“Tapping?” I said, thinking of scratching sounds against the back

of my motel room. “What was it?”

“Gerry,” she said.

“Gerry?”

“He was perched on my windowsill. Outside. Like a big bird.”

I felt the skin of the back of my neck tighten.

188 Michael Marshall

“You know he wasn’t really there, right? And that you were on the

second fl oor of the building?”

She shrugged.

“What . . . was he doing?”

“He was looking in at me as if he had never loved me.” She glanced

away. “It’s why I had to leave the hospital. But it’s too late.”

“The day he died,” I said, trying to steer us back toward matters

I could comprehend. “Do you think he’d changed his mind about

something? You said that . . .”

But then there was a scream from behind us.

I turned to see a woman was backing away from the counter, star-

ing at the server behind it. The blue-haired girl was standing exactly

as she had been, hunched over the big coffee machine. But billows of

steam were coming out of it now. Far too much steam.

As the customer kept screaming, the girl slowly turned from the

machine. Her face was pure white. Her hands were bright red, held

out in front. When she came out from behind the counter you could

see the steam coming off them.

She looked sluggishly over at me as I got up and started toward

her.

I stopped, held up my hands to show I meant no harm. I remem-

bered her name—Jassie—and said it. She looked at me again, con-

fused, with a look of dislocation from everything around her.

“Why haven’t you got a
face
?” she said suddenly, backing away.

I don’t see how she could have mistaken my intentions, which

were simply to help, but her own features stretched into something

that must have been appalling to feel from within: her mouth falling

slack as if melting, eyes wide with utter distrust and horror, as if sud-

denly remembering that no one around her was real and everyone

meant her harm.

She tried to get away from me, not even in the direction of the

door, but stumbling toward the big picture window.

B A D T H I N G S 189

I want to believe that she tripped, but I don’t think that’s what

happened. She did collide heavily with one of the empty chairs—but

it wasn’t that which pitched her forward. She did it herself. She got to

within a yard of the big window and then threw herself headfi rst into

the glass. It shattered.

As her throat was borne down onto the jagged edge below, driven

by her momentum and weight, the window above collapsed into large,

vicious shards that sheered down into her back and neck and head and

smashed to oblivion into the fl oor around her.

It sounded like most of the world’s noises happening at once, and

then there was utter silence.

A few people got up immediately and ran out of the café. The rest

were frozen in place, staring at the remains of the window, the

beached shape straddling across the inside and outside, blood pooling

underneath it so fast it looked like fi lm speeded up. One arm and a leg

twitched briefl y, and for a moment it looked as through the girl was

trying to roll sideways, but then stillness came upon her body like a

rock sinking into water.

I’ve seen the moment of death often enough to know it—but evi-

dently you can recognize it fi rst time around. People started to cry

out then, to talk and shout. A couple got on their cell phones and

started barking at emergency operators.

Ellen meanwhile stared at the prone body with nothing more

than a look of blank resignation.

The woman who’d screamed was mired just outside on the side-

walk, hands fl uttering by her sides, evidently unable to move.

I walked quickly out to her. “What
happened
?”

The woman didn’t seem to grasp what I was asking until I

gently took hold of her shoulders and asked again. “What
happened

in there
?”

190 Michael Marshall

“I was just asking her if she was okay,” the woman said defensively,

staring back into the café, studiously keeping her eyes away from the

broken window. “I hadn’t been in for a couple days and Jassie’s usu-

ally so friendly and everything, and I thought she looked tired, or like

she’d lost weight or something, so I just asked if she was okay and she

didn’t say anything and then I saw that she was—”

She stopped, and looked at me. “Who are you? Do I even
know

you?”

I could hear the sound of a police siren, approaching fast. People

were starting to come out of other businesses and onto the sidewalk

now, slowly, heads tilted, as if approaching a box they’d been told they

should not open but were unable to resist. More people were coming

out of the café now, too, milling around outside. On the opposite

side of the street I saw two people come out of the Mountain View,

a young bartender and an older man in a dark roll-neck sweater—

whom I recognized.

The bartender acted like most of the other people did. The other

guy, however, jerked forward, as if he was going to throw up right there on the street. Then he turned and walked stiff-legged and fast

in the opposite direction, not looking back, his hands held up in front

of his face.

By the time I’d got back into the café, Ellen had disappeared. A

cop car came swinging around the corner and into Kelly Street. It

stopped with a screech outside and the sheriff and Deputy Greene

got out.

The deputy stared at the window of the coffee shop with distaste.

“Holy crap.”

The sheriff assessed the situation with a long sweep of his eyes,

and then spotted me. As Greene started to clear people out of the

way, Pierce strode over to where I was standing.

He spoke clearly and quietly. “I want you to get out of here, now.

Otherwise I’m going to arrest you. Do you understand?”

B A D T H I N G S 191

“Are you kidding me?”

“Does it look like it?”

It did not. “I saw that girl at the hospital,” I said, nonetheless.

“Jassie. The day Ellen Robertson had her accident. She was sitting by

herself in a room, with tears running down her face.”

Another police car came tearing around the corner. Pierce glanced

outside as two more cops jumped out. I recognized one of them as the

deputy Phil I’d briefl y met three years before. I could hear another

siren in the distance now, presumably paramedics.

“Your observation is noted,” he said. “Now get out of this town or

I swear to God you’ll regret it.”

I stepped back. “You’re welcome to it.”

He glared at me a moment longer, as if considering saying some-

thing else, but then turned to deal with the chaos unfolding behind

him in the street.

C H A P T E R 2 6

All I had to go on was the man’s throwaway of living a mile up the

road. I rejected a turn half a mile past our old house, and paused at

another a little farther along the other side of the road, but didn’t

see the vehicle I was looking for. A delayed reaction to what had just

happened in the coffee shop was making my movements strange

and jerky.

Two minutes later I came upon a driveway on the right, and

turned straight up it past a mailbox with the name Collins neatly

stenciled on the side. It occurred to me Carol and I had never driven

up the road this far in all the time we had lived here, and I couldn’t

imagine why. Sure, the area was full of interesting stuff to look at

and all of it lay in other directions, but it still seemed odd. I guess

there are some roads you don’t go down until something outside

your control takes you there. The drive curled around to the right

before eventually leading to a circle outside a recently constructed

house, twice as large and half as appealing as ours had been. Lined

up in front of a small, faux-barnlike structure were a compact, a

station wagon, and the dark green SUV. A car for every occasion. I

parked where I was blocking all three.

B A D T H I N G S 193

I rang the bell and the front door opened after a couple of min-

utes.

The man I’d seen outside the Mountain View had managed to

pull it together in the last forty minutes, and probably looked fi ne to

the outside world, including the wife and kids I could hear hooting

and laughing in some room beyond the hallway.

He was halfway into a good-neighborly smile before his face froze.

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t know if you remember me?” I left a beat be-

fore continuing. “We met a few days ago, outside that house for sale,

a mile down the road?”

“Right,” he said stiffl y, knowing this was not the last time he’d

seen me, and that I knew it, too. “Of course.”

“Richard, who is it?”

A woman came out of the kitchen and beamed in our direction.

She was whip-thin, around the same age as her husband, and looked

like someone who was well disposed to the world in general.

“Beginning to think I might be taking the property down the

road seriously,” I said, smiling at her but still talking to him. “Wanted

to ask a couple of questions about the area, before I get the family up

to take a look.”

“What kind of questions?” Collins said.

“Come in, come in,” his wife insisted, coming closer. “Coffee’s

just made.”

“That’s very kind, ma’am, but I’m real short on time. Just a quick

word is all I need.”

She rolled her eyes as if this was another of those funny things

that happened to her all the time, and retreated cheerfully back into

the house.

I stepped back from the front door and indicated for the man to

follow me.

“What do you want?” the man said quietly.

“A word with you. And I’m not leaving without it.”

194 Michael Marshall

He followed me halfway to where my car was parked, and then

stopped. “This is far enough.”

“You want to tell me what happened back in Black Ridge?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw you on Kelly Street. You come out of the bar when you

hear a commotion—and you’re close enough to see the color of the

hair of the girl who’s just smashed her head through a plate-glass

window. Instead of staring or turning away, you
run,
run exactly like a guy who’s trying to look like that’s not what he’s doing.
That’s
what I’m talking about.”

“It was . . . well, it was very upsetting.”

“Generically, or personally? Did you know Jassie?”

“No. Well, I knew her by sight, of course. I’ve had coffee in there