Bad Things (45 page)

wood, varnished and revarnished time and again. Others looked

more recently built, but as though they’d been designed to remain

in keeping with what had come before. As one progressed farther

toward the large window in the back of the room, however, the fi -

nal two columns of drawers were made of metal, more like safety-

deposit boxes.

They were about eighteen inches across, four inches tall, and

designed to be opened with a small key. All had small recessed han-

dles, and brass plates holding little labels. Each of these had what

appeared to be a surname on it, written by hand, some in ballpoint,

some in ink, those on the oldest-looking drawers very faded and in

a script that looked like copperplate.

Bill went up to one of the modern portions and yanked on a

handle. It didn’t budge. He tried a couple in other sections. Even

the ones in the oldest part had clearly been built to last. I started

332 Michael Marshall

looking through the names. The wall wasn’t arranged alphabetically,

which didn’t help. There was no obvious order at all, in fact, and some

of the oldest drawers bore labels in new-looking writing.

“What’s up?” Bill asked.

I shook my head, not really sure what I was looking for. We both

turned at the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, and had our

guns trained on the doorway in time to see Little D and Switch come

in. Both were soaked to the skin and looked spooked.

“Empty,” Switch said. “Like, cleaned out. No furniture, carpets,

nothing.”

I returned to the wall of drawers, started looking randomly among

them again. And fi nally I found a name I recognized.

Cornell
.

“And what the fuck is this smell everywhere?” Little D added,

shivering. “Something died?”

“Maybe. You got game with locks?”

“For sure.”

“See if you can open this,” I said, pointing at the drawer I’d just

found. He pulled out a ring of slim pieces of metal from his designer

jeans, looked closely at the small lock on the drawer.

“I think you got the wrong place after all,” Bill said to me. “There’s

nobody here, John. They sold you down the wrong road. What do

you want to do now?”

I shook my head, knowing we should be moving in some direc-

tion or other, and moving fast, but not knowing where it lay.

I looked at Switch. “You said it was a police pointed you in my

direction, right?” He nodded. “What did he look like?”

“Big guy.”

“Tall, or bulky?”

“Bulky.”

Not Pierce, then, which had been my immediate assumption.

More likely Greene, the deputy I’d just seen in the photo in Cory’s

room—who, I now remembered, had also been hanging around the

B A D T H I N G S 333

hospital the morning after Ellen had her accident. Whose daughter

was the maid at my motel, and who might (just) conceivably have let

him into a room to deposit a body there. What could she do about it,

after all? Call the police?

“What actually happened? How did it go?”

“He pull us over, wants to see my license, registration. I got those,

no doubt. So he’s, what you around here for, nigger? I tell him we

looking for a friend of ours, gone missing. He ask where he missing

from, and I say Oregon, young boy name of Kyle. I say what he look

like and that.”

“You told all this to a cop?”

Switch shrugged. “It all true. Just didn’t say we were here to kill

him. So the police gets helpful, says to look out for an older guy,

might know something, tells us what your car look like. He rolls out,

have a nice day. That’s all.”

“Try calling the Black Ridge Sheriff’s Department,” I told Bill.

“See if you can get hold of Pierce. Make like it’s trivial.”

“Thought he hung up on you already.”

“Maybe not.”

There was a click from the drawer Little D was fi ddling with. I

pulled the drawer open. It was empty. Then I spotted another name

two columns away.

Collins
.

“Try that one instead.”

D moved over and used the same tool, but couldn’t get anywhere

with it. I heard Bill talking to someone in the background. D switched

to another shim and eventually got the drawer open. He stepped back.

There was a manila envelope inside.

“Pierce is out,” Bill said. “Allegedly a message will be passed to

him.”

“Who’d you speak to?”

“Deputy Phil Corliss.”

“Then it probably will be. What did you tell him?”

334 Michael Marshall

“Not much. I didn’t get the sense I’d got the guy’s full attention.”

I took the envelope out, and opened it. Inside was a second enve-

lope, the kind you’d use to send a greeting card. It had been sealed,

opened, and then Scotch-taped shut again. I opened it. Inside was a

single hair. Held against the pure white of the envelope, you could

just tell it was blue at one end.

When I looked in the drawer again I saw I’d missed a piece of

paper that had been lying under the envelope. The sheet looked fresh

and new, as did the single line of text written on it:

2009 / sadness / directed at Jess C.

“Jesus,” I said softly, looking at the line through the letters at the

end. “Bill—look for the name Ransom.”

“Who?”

“Carol’s maiden name.”

He went hunting down the rows. I did the same, until I happened

upon one with the name Greene on it. I got Little D to open it.

“There going to be money in any of these?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

This drawer was hard to slide open, so stuffed was it with enve-

lopes. Items of clothing. A watch. Photos, some recent, some much

older-looking. On top of these lay three pieces of paper, stapled to-

gether, with perhaps thirty separate entries on each. Whoever kept

these records—Brooke, I assumed, though some of the older ones

were in a different hand—would be needing to start a new sheet soon.

Each line appeared to have a reference to a person, in the distinctive

style of two or more letters of a fi rst name, and then a single initial

for the last.

Near the top of the last page was an entry dated fi ve years be-

fore:

2004 / Lost / directed at Co. G

B A D T H I N G S 335

“Got it,” Bill said. “Ransom, C.”

I heard Little D move over to Bill and start fi ddling with the

lock, but I was fi xated by the piece of paper already in my hands. “Co.

G”—Courtney Greene? The daughter of the man whose drawer this

presumably was? A girl could certainly be said to seem “lost,” but not

in the usual ways. Not merely vague or doped or teenaged, but as if

she was barely there at all. Plus there had been the bizarre reaction

when I told her that I wouldn’t tell if she wouldn’t, when a different

personality had seemed to surface momentarily, as if the phrase had

cut through the fog she normally moved through to someone trapped

inside, who might have been offered little raises in her allowance,

down the years, to keep her mouth shut. Not to mention her apparent

acceptance of the unacceptable—a dead body in a motel room with a

nail sticking up out of its head.

If you really could visit a sadness upon someone, could you also

make another person lose themselves, become occluded to events in

the past or present? Could you make them forget things that had

happened in the night, and perhaps still continued? Could you cause

someone to become lost amid internal corridors to protect yourself?

Were there men who could do that to their own daughter, and

what might they owe the person who made it happen for them?

I was distracted by the lights in the room fl ickering. All of them.

A couple of quick blinks, then a second of blackness, and then all were

on again. I put the piece of paper back and moved over to the drawer

where Bill was standing. There was an envelope here, too. Inside it

was an old ballpoint pen with a clear plastic shaft, on which someone

had once written the name Paul in correction fl uid, and something

that looked like the cover of a long-ago exercise book.

There was a piece of the note paper, with four lines written on it

in two different hands:

1989: Mania (passion) / at Paul B.

1991: '' / at Robert S.

336 Michael Marshall

2004: Quickening / at self

2005: Sadness / at JR

Personal effects. Things that another human being’s hand or

mind had once touched, which could be made to stand in for them.

The pen looked like it had been lying in the drawer for a long, long

time—from 1989, presumably. The property, presumably, of a long-

ago Paul, whose eye a much younger Carol Ransom had wished to

attract; as the exercise book had likely belonged to another teenage

boy three years later? Boys now middle-aged and married to other

women, who probably didn’t even remember the girl who’d once gone

to these lengths in the hope of snaring their attention.

Unless, of course, they’d been doing the same thing themselves.

There were a lot of drawers in this room, after all.

Underneath the four entry lines, by itself, was something else. A

series of marks made on the paper, in pencil, almost random. Lines I’d

seen before, in more than one place since I’d been in Black Ridge. I re-

alized for the fi rst time, perhaps because whoever had put them on this

piece of paper had more of an understanding of what they were doing,

that three of the lines did look like a recognizable shape—like the stick

fi gure of a large, crooked man, or a dog, slashed across with lines.

Beneath that was another line written in ink:

Scott H [+++]

It took me a moment to realize the fi rst part must refer to a boy

called Scott Henderson.

“John—are you okay?”

I held out the piece of paper. He read it, and looked up slowly.

“That mean what I think it does?”

“The only other crossing out I’ve seen seems to refer to the girl

who died in Black Ridge yesterday.”

B A D T H I N G S 337

“No. I meant the pluses.”

I shrugged. It was hard to see them as meaning anything other

than one down, three to go. The idea was making it hard for me to

breathe.

“Something out there,” Little D said suddenly.

He was standing down at the end, by the window that stretched

across nearly the room’s full width.

Bill went to see. “What?”

“Thought I saw something way back. A light or something.”

I went over, too, and stuck my face close to the glass, shielding the

light out with my hands. “Bill—any idea what’s back there?”

“Never been here before. Woods, I’m guessing.”

We tramped quickly down the stairs together and back out the

front door.

“Is this snow?”

The rain had now gone through sleet and into something else.

Whether it was snow I wasn’t actually sure, but it was white and fall-

ing slowly and the world now sounded deadened. The awful smell had

abated somewhat with it, but it was still there, underneath.

I heard a shout and saw someone was running up the driveway.

“Becki,” I said. “What the
hell
are you doing?”

“People,” she said, panting, when she reached us. “I had to tell

you.”

“What do you mean?”

“A bunch of cars. We’re sitting there, and nothing passes, for ten

minutes. Then suddenly all these cars go by, and keep coming. Ten,

twenty of them?”

“Are they outside now?”

“No. They went straight by.”

That didn’t make any sense to me. If you continued on up the road

there was nothing until the turnoff that led to my old house, a couple

of miles away. Past that, another twenty miles to Roslyn or Sheffer.

338 Michael Marshall

“Where’s Kyle?”

“He wouldn’t get out of the car.”

Then we all heard it together. A scream, far distant, muffl ed. But

I knew where it had come from—the other side of the house. I also

knew who had cried out. Even if you have never before heard the

scream of someone you were married to, you recognize the sound.

And I had, of course. The day Scott died.

I started to run, heading for the left side of the building because

it was closest. I heard Bill shouting to me as they started to follow but

paid no attention. He’d been correct before, though in not quite the

right way. This hadn’t been a setup, but they’d left the house open and

lit it up to pull me in the wrong direction again and waste time.

That wasn’t going to happen now.

I came around the back of the house into a wide, deep lawn, be-

yond which the trees started in a rough semicircle. I slowed, trying

to see if there was any indication which direction would be best to go

in, some sign of a path, or the light that Little D thought he’d seen

from upstairs.

There wasn’t anything. The woods merely looked like a wall of

darkness into which you’d have to be out of your mind to run.

I was dimly aware of the sound of the others following around

the side of the house, but then I heard the fl at crack of a rifl e shot and

threw myself down onto the ground.