Bad Things. Michael Marshall
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a fair-weather partnership, perhaps, and the weather had turned very bad indeed. That evening, in fact, when I sat outside in a plastic chair and did nothing but stare into the motel's empty swimming pool for three hours, getting more and more shit-faced, it seemed like the sky had become a thick blanket of storm cloud that would never, ever lift. I eventually passed out in the chair, waking just after four, when rain started falling on me.
The next day I checked out of the motel. I drove for a couple of months with no destination, trying to overlay the past with sights and sounds. Eventually I wound up in Oregon. It's a place with a loose texture. You can sink into it and live out some kind of life without other people bothering you a great deal. I kept drinking for a while longer. Then I stopped, and had gone to sleep instead.
By nine-thirty I was beginning to get irritable. I was drinking slowly but had still sunk enough for it to start to feel like old times, and not in a good way. The street outside looked cold and empty, and the bar wasn't exactly cosy either.
‘Another?’
I looked up to see the barwoman leaning on the counter six feet away, looking out of the window with a local's calm indifference.
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘But tell me, where do you have to stand, exactly, to get the mountain view?’
‘Outside,’ she said, turning to me. I realized there was something cold in her gaze, too, as if reflecting the weather outside. ‘Plus you have to crane your neck a little, or else walk down to the crossroads. Why? You going to sue us over the name?’
‘I'm John,’ I said, and put out my hand.
She shook it, smartly, a single up and down. Her hand was large and dry. ‘Kristina. I'll get you that beer. Hey – wait up. This your date?’
I looked out the window. All the businesses on the other side were closed for the night, bar the pizza place, and the streetlamps on Kelly strove for historical authenticity rather than the provision of illumination. A figure stood on the boardwalk under one of these.
‘I don't know,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Yeah, it can be that way with old friends.’
‘For God's sake.’ I shook my head, mortified. ‘What is this stuff I'm drinking?’
‘Truth juice. Beware.’ She grinned and headed back to get my beer.
I watched the woman on the opposite side of the street. She didn't move for a couple of minutes, but then started to make her way over.
By the time she made the sidewalk I had no doubt this was the person I'd come to meet.
I turned on my stool so she could see my face when she came in. ‘Ellen?’
She didn't reply, didn't even look my way, but came straight over to the next stool. Then changed her mind, moved to a table in the centre of the room. I took a deep breath, went over and sat on the other side of it.
‘This isn't a good place,’ she said.
She didn't unbutton her coat. Her voice was as it had been on the phone, clipped and very precise. She was of medium build, with glossy blonde hair, brown eyes, and the kind of cheekbones and neat, symmetrical features that cosmetics companies like to use to promote their wares. Her own make-up was well applied, and either Black Ridge had a better hair salon than I would have credited or she had it cut elsewhere. She looked maybe thirty.
‘Seems pleasant enough,’ I said. ‘Didn't spot a Hilton anywhere in town, otherwise I would have—’
‘For me, I mean,’ she said, irritably.
‘So let's go somewhere else.’
She shook her head. ‘I don't have long.’
Just then Kristina arrived with my beer. ‘Getcha?’ she asked, with a brief smile. Ellen shook her head.
‘So let's start with that,’ I said, when we were alone again. ‘The I-can't-speak and I-haven't-got-long routine, and sitting away from the window in case a passer-by sees you. What's up with that? You were the one who got in contact with me, remember?’
Before she answered, she reached across the table and picked up my beer. Took a sip, and replaced it neatly on the bar mat. I found this annoying.
‘I'm in a difficult position,’ she said.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘My husband died four months ago,’ she continued, negating all the assumptions I'd just made.
‘I'm sorry to hear that.’
She smiled quickly, in the way you do when someone expresses a condolence that, while polite, is too generic to make any difference.
‘He was not an unwealthy man.’
‘Okay. So?’
‘He has family in the area.’
Each moment I spent in this woman's company made me less convinced she had anything of interest to tell me. But I realized she perhaps wasn't doling the information out this slowly for the sake of it, or at least not solely. Her hands were twisted together, the knuckles white. I took a swallow of my beer and put it down in the middle of the table. She noticed this but did not reach for it right away.
‘How “not unwealthy” was your husband, exactly?’
‘Eighteen million dollars,’ she said, matter-of-fact. ‘Not including the house. So it's not like he was Bill Gates. But we had a pre-nup anyway. No one's arguing with how the money was distributed, well, except that I got any at all, but that was Gerry's choice and there was nothing they could do about it, and we were married for four years.’
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
She looked thrown. ‘Boston. Why?’
‘So how did you meet Mr Robertson?’
‘On vacation. What is it to you?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Right now it doesn't seem like any of this bears relevance to me. So if the money's not the issue, then what is?’
‘I think I'm in danger.’
‘You said. You also brought up the death of my son, which made me fly a distance to be here. I'd like to believe I didn't waste a few hundred dollars and a lot of time. So far that isn't happening.’
‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘To Gerry.’
‘He died.’
‘Yes, he did,’ she said, as if I'd implied otherwise.
‘How did it happen?’
‘He'd been out for a run. He ran six miles every afternoon, starting around four o'clock. About twenty past five I thought, “That's strange, he's usually back by now”, and so I went out onto the porch and … there he was, in the chair he often sat in after he was done. But usually he'd call out, you know, say he was back. I thought “whatever” and was on my way back inside and then I thought it was strange that he hadn't said something, because he must have heard me come out. We'd had … we had a fight, earlier in the day. It was no big deal, but I wanted to make sure things were okay. So I went back to where he was sitting. He was drinking from a bottle of water. He looked hot, and, you know, puffed up, like he'd run further or faster than usual. But he turned and saw me coming, and he started to smile. Then …’
She held her hands up in the air in a gesture that reminded me of the one Ted had made, when trying to convey the degree of damage the restaurant had suffered. How much damage? Enough. Too much.
‘Heart attack?’
She nodded.
‘I'm