MICHAEL

MARSHALL

BAD THINGS

For Stephen Jones

Who knows the darkest parts of the woods – and the path from there to the pub.

It is the practice of evil, and hence, in a sense, the inhuman, that is the distinctive mark of the human in the animal kingdom.

Jean Baudrillard

Cool Memories V

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part 2

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part 3

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Acknowledgements

By Michael Marshall

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

It is a beautiful afternoon in late summer, and there is a man standing on the deck of a house in the woods a fifteen-minute drive from Roslyn – a nice, small town in Washington State. It is a fine house, structured around oak beams and river rock and possessed of both cosy lateral spaces and cathedral ceilings where it counts. The deck is wide and deep, wrapping around the whole of the raised first storey, and points out over a slope where a woman sits in a rustic wooden chair, the product of semi-local artisanship. She is holding a baby who is nine months old, and at the moment, miraculously, peaceably quiet. The house and the five acres around it cost a little under two million dollars, and the man is happy to own it, and happy to be standing there. He has spent much of the day in his study, despite the fact it is a Saturday, but that's okay because it is precisely this willingness to work evenings and weekends that puts you in a house like this and confers the kind of life you may live in it. You reap, after all, what you sow.

The deck has a good view toward a very large, wooded lake the locals call Murdo Pond, sixty yards away down the wooded slope, and a little of which – the portion that lies within his property lines – the man guesses he owns too, if you can be said to own a lake. He is wearing a denim shirt and khaki shorts, and in his hand is a tall, cold glass of beer, an unusual occurrence, as he seldom drinks at home – or much at all, unless business demands its shortcut to conviviality – but which feels deserved and appropriate now: what else do we strive for, after all, if not for such an indulgence, on the deck of such a house, at the end of such a day?

He can see that his wife is without a drink, and knows she would probably like one, and will in a short while call down to ask if he can fetch her something. But for a few minutes longer he stands there, feeling more or less at one with the world, or as close to that state as is possible given the complexities of quotidian existence and the intransigence of people and situations and things. Just then a breeze floats across the deck, bringing with it the faint, spicy smell of turning leaves, and for a moment the world is better still. Then it has gone, and it is time to move on.

The man opens his mouth to ask his wife what she'd like to drink, but then pauses, and frowns.

‘Where's Scott?’ he says.

His wife looks up, a little startled, having been unaware of his presence on the deck.

‘I thought he was with you.’

‘Working?’

‘I mean, indoors.’

He turns and looks back through wide-open doors into the living room. Though there is evidence of his four-year-old son's passing – toys and books spread across the floor as if in the wake of a tiny hurricane – the boy is not visible.

The man goes back inside the house and walks through it. Not quickly yet, but purposefully. His son is not in his room, or the kitchen, or the den. Nor is he hunkered down in the stretch of corridor near the main entrance on the other side of the house, a non-space which the boy has colonized and where he is sometimes to be found frowning in concentration over a self-imposed task of evident fascination but no clear purpose.

The man returns through the house and out onto the deck, and by now he's moving a little more quickly.

His wife is standing, the baby in her arms.

‘Isn't he there?’

The man doesn't answer, judging his speed will answer the question. It does, and she turns to scan her eyes around the lawns, and into the woods. He meanwhile heads round to the far right extent of the deck. No sign of the boy from up there. He walks back to the other end and patters down the cedar steps.

‘When did you last see him?’

‘I don't know,’ she says, looking flustered. He realizes briefly how tired she is. The baby, Scott's little brother, is still not sleeping through the night, and will only accept small hours' comfort from his mother. ‘About half an hour ago?’ she decides. ‘Before I came out. He was in, you know, that place where he sits.’

He nods quickly, calls Scott's name again, glances back toward the house. His son still does not emerge onto the balcony. His wife does not seem overly concerned, and the man is not sure why he does feel anxious. Scott is a self-contained child, happy to entertain himself for long periods, to sit reading or playing or drawing without requiring an adult within earshot. He occasionally goes for walks around the house, too – though he keeps to the paths and doesn't stray deeper into the woods. He is a good child, occasionally boisterous, but mindful of rules.

So where is he?

Leaving his wife irresolute in the middle of the lawn, the man heads around the side of the house and trots down the nearest of the ornamental walkways that lead into the woods and toward the remains of the old cabin there, noticing the path could do with a sweep. He peers into the trees, calls out. He cannot see his son, and the call again receives no answer. Only when he turns back toward the house does he finally spot him.

Scott is standing fifty yards away, down at the lake.

Though the family is not the boating kind, the house came with a small structure for storing water craft. Next to this emerges a wooden jetty which protrudes sixty feet out into Murdo Pond, to where the water runs very deep. His son is standing at the end of this.

Right at the very end.

The man shouts his wife's name and starts to run. She sees where he is headed and starts to walk jerkily in the same direction, confused, as her view of the jetty is obscured by a copse of trees which stand out dark against water that is glinting white in the late afternoon sun.

When she finally sees her son, she screams, but still Scott doesn't react.

The man doesn't understand why she screams. Their boy is a strong swimmer. They would hardly live so close by a large body of water otherwise, even though the lake always feels far too cold for recreational swimming, even in summer. But he doesn't understand why he is sprinting, either, leaving the path and cutting straight through the trees, pushing through undergrowth heedless of the scratches, shouting his son's name.

Apart from the sounds he and his wife are making, the world seems utterly silent and heavy and still, as if it has become an inanimate stage for this moment, as if the leaves on the trees, the lapping of the lake's waters, the progress of worms within the earth, has halted.

When he reaches the jetty the man stops running. He doesn't want to startle the boy.

‘Scott,’ he says, trying to keep his voice level.

There is no response. The boy stands with his feet neatly together, his arms by his side. His head is lowered slightly, chin pointing down toward his chest, as if he is studying something in or just above the surface of the water, thirty feet beyond the end of the jetty.

The man takes a step onto the wooden surface.

His wife arrives, the baby now mewling in her arms, and he holds his hand up to forestall another shout from her.

‘Scott, sweetie,’ she says instead, with commendable evenness. ‘What are you doing?’

The man is starting to relax, a little. Their son's whereabouts are now known, after all. Even if he fell, he can swim. But other parts of the man's soul, held closer to his core, are twisted up and clamping tighter with each second that passes. Why is Scott not responding? Why is he just standing there?

The low panic the man feels has little to do with questions even such as these, however. It is merely present, in his guts, as if that soft breeze followed him down off the deck and through the woods, and has now grabbed his stomach like a fist, squeezing harder and harder. He thinks he can smell something now, too, as if a bubble of gas has come up to the surface of the water, releasing something dark and rich and sweet. He takes another step down the jetty.

‘Scott,’ he says, firmly. ‘It's okay if you want to look in the lake. But take a step back, yeah?’

The man is relieved when his son does just that.

The boy takes a pace backward, and finally turns. He does this in several small steps, as if confused to find himself where he is, and taking ostensive care.

There is something wrong with the boy's face.

It takes his father a moment to realize that it's not physical, rather that the expression on it is one he has never seen there before. A kind of confusion, of utter dislocation. ‘Scott – what's wrong?’

The boy's face clears, and he looks up at his father.

‘Daddy?’ he says, as if very surprised. ‘Why…’

‘Yes, of course, it's Daddy,’ the man says. He starts to walk slowly toward Scott, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, though the temperature around the lake seems to have jumped twenty degrees. ‘Look, I don't know what—’

But then the boy's mouth slowly opens, as he stares past or through his father, back toward the end of the jetty, at the woods. The look is so direct that his mother turns to glance back that way too, not knowing what to expect.

‘No,’ the boy says. ‘No.’

The first time he says it quietly. The second time is far louder. His expression changes again, too, in a way both parents will remember for the rest of their lives, turning in a moment from a face they know better than their own to a mask of dismay and heartbreak that is horrifying to see on a child.

‘What's …’

And then he shouts. ‘Run, Daddy. Run!’

The man starts to run toward him. He can hear his wife running too. But the boy topples sideways before they can get to him, falling awkwardly over the deck and flipping with slow grace down into the water.

The man is on the jetty in the last of the afternoon light. He stands with his child in his arms.

The police are there. A young one, and an older one, soon followed by many more. Four hours later the coroner will tell the police, and then the parents, that it was not the fall into the water, nor to the deck, nor even anything before that, that did it.

The boy just died.

Part 1

It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion.

Richard Brautigan

An Unfortunate Woman

Chapter 1

Ted came and found me a little after seven. I was behind the bar, assisting with a backlog of beer orders for the patrons out on deck while they waited to be seated. The Pelican's seasonal drinks station is tiny, an area in front of an opening in the wall through to the outside, and Mazy and I were moving around it with the grace of two old farts trying to reverse mobile homes into the same parking space. There's barely room for one, let alone two, but though Mazy is cute and cool and has as many piercings and tattoos as any young person could wish for, she's a little slow when it comes to grinding out margaritas and cold Budweisers and Diet Cokes, extra ice, no lime. I don't know what it is about the ocean, and sand, but it makes people want margaritas. Even in Oregon, in September.

‘Can't get hold of the little asshole,’ Ted muttered. His face was red and hot, and thinning grey hair was sticking to his pate, though the air conditioning was working just fine. ‘You mind?’

‘No problem,’ I said.

I finished the order I was on and then headed through the main area of the restaurant, where old John Prine songs played quietly in the background and the ocean looked grey and cool through the big windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.

The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy, however, and I'd been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.

The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sitting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-fired oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fish. His wife thought he'd got it wrong but she believed that about everything he did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn't prepared to take it as the final word. Ted is a decent guy but how he's managed to stay afloat in the restaurant business for so long is a mystery. A rambling shack overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out to the sea – and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it takes its name – the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively as to become one of those places you go back to because you went there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young or, well, just because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.

I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place to do so. It wasn't my place to make the damned things, either, but over the last five months I'd sometimes wound up covering the station when Kyle, the official thin-base supremo, didn't make it in for the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the owner's youngest daughter (of five), a girl who went to a barely accredited college down in California to learn some strain of Human Resources bullshit but dropped out so fast that she bounced. She wound up back home not doing much except partying and smoking dope on the beach with a boyfriend who made pizza badly – the actual dough being forged by one of the back-room Ecuadorians in the morning – and couldn't even get his shit together to do that six nights a week. This drove Ted so insane that he couldn't even think about it (much less address the problem practically), and so Kyle was basically a fixture, regardless of how searching his exploration of the outer limits of being a pointless good-looking prick.

If he hadn't shown up by the time someone wanted pizza then I'd do the dough-spinning on his behalf, the other wait staff picking up the slack on the floor. I didn't mind. I'd found that I enjoyed smoothing the tomato sauce in meditative circles, judiciously adding mozzarella and basil and chunks of pepperoni or crayfish or pesto chicken, then hefting the peel to slide them toward the wood fire. I didn't emulate Kyle's policy of adding other ingredients at random – allegedly a form of ‘art’ (which he'd studied for about a week, at a place where they'll accept dogs if they bring the tuition fees), more likely a legacy of being stoned 24/7 – but stuck to the toppings as described, and so the response from the tables tended to be positive. My pizzas were more circular than Kyle's too, but that wasn't the point either. He was Kyle, the pizza guy. I was John, the waiter guy.

Not even the waiter, in fact, just a waiter, amongst several. Indefinite article man.

And that's alright by me.

Wonderboy finally rolled up an hour later, delivered in an open-top car that fishtailed around the lot and then disappeared again in a cloud of dust. He went to the locker room to change, and came out twitching.

‘Glad you could make it,’ I said, taking off the special pizza apron. I didn't care one way or the other about Kyle being late. I was merely following form. You don't let fellow toilers at the bottom of the food-production chain get away with any shit, or they'll be doing it all the time.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said, confused. ‘You know, like, it's my job.’

I didn't have an answer to that, so stepped out of his way and went back to waiting tables. I established what people wanted, and pushed the specials. I conveyed orders back to the kitchen, instigating the production of breaded shrimp and grilled swordfish and blackened mahi mahi, and the celebrated side salad with honey apple vinaigrette. I brought the results back to the table, along with drinks and bonhomie. I returned twice to check that everything was okay, and refresh their iced water. I accepted payment via cash, cheque, or credit card, and reciprocated with little mints and a postcard of the restaurant. I told people it had been great seeing them, and to drive safe, and wiped the table down in preparation for the next family or young couple or trio of wizened oldsters celebrating sixty years of mutual dislike.

After two cycles of this, the evening ended and we cleared the place up, and everyone started for home.

It was dark by then. Unusually humid too, the air like the breath of a big, hot dog who'd been drinking sea water all afternoon. I nodded goodbye as rusty cars piloted by other staff crunkled past me, on the way up the pebbled slip road from the Pelican's location, to turn left or right along Highway 101.

The cooks left jammed together into one low-slung and battered station wagon, the driver giving me a pro-forma eye-fuck as he passed. I assumed they all boarded together in some house up in Astoria or Seaside, saving money to send back home, but as I'd never spoken to any of them, I didn't actually know.

As I reached the highway I realized Kyle was a few yards behind me. I glanced back, surprised.

‘You walking somewhere?’

‘Yeah, right,’ he smirked. ‘Mission control's on the way. Big party up the road tonight. We're headed in your direction, if you want a ride.’

I hesitated. Normally I walked the two miles north. The other staff know this, and think I'm out of my mind. I look at their young, hopeful faces and consider asking what else I should be doing with the time, but I don't want to freak them out. I don't want to think of myself as not-young, either, but as a thirty-five year old amongst humans with training wheels, you can feel like the go-to guy for insider information on the formation of the tectonic plates.

The walk is pleasant enough. You head along the verge, the road on your right, the other side of which is twenty feet of scrubby grass and then rocky outcrops. On your left you pass the parking lots of very small, retro-style condos and resorts, three storey at most and rendered in pastel or white with accents in a variety of blues, called things like The Sandpiper and Waves and Trade Winds; or fifty-yard lots stretching to individual beach houses; or, for long stretches, just undergrowth and dunes.

But tonight my feet were tired and I wanted to be home, plus there's a difference between doing your own thing and merely looking unfriendly and perverse.

‘That'd be great,’ I said.

Chapter 2

Within thirty seconds we realized we had squat to say to each other outside the confines of the restaurant, and Kyle reached in his T-shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. He lit it, hesitated, then offered it to me. To be sociable, I took a hit. Pretty much immediately I could tell why his pizzas were so dreadful: if this was his standard toke, it was amazing the guy could even stand up. We hung in silence for ten minutes, passing the joint back and forth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Before long I was beginning to wish I'd walked. At least that way I could have headed over the dunes down to the beach, where the waves would have cut the humidity a little.

‘Gonna rain,’ Kyle said suddenly, as if someone had given him a prompt via an earpiece.

I nodded. ‘I'm thinking so.’

Five minutes later, thankfully, Becki's car came down the road as if hurled by a belligerent god. It decelerated within a shorter distance than I would have thought possible, though not without cost to the tyres.

‘Hey,’ she said, around a cigarette. ‘Walking Dude's going to accept a ride? Well. I'm honoured.’

I smiled. ‘Been a long day.’

‘Word, my liege. Hop in.’

I got in back and held on tight as she returned the vehicle to warp speed. Kyle seemed to know better than to try to talk to his woman while she was in charge of heavy machinery, and I followed his lead, enjoying the wind despite the significant G-forces that came with it.

The journey didn't take long at all. When we were a hundred yards from my destination, I tapped Becki on the shoulder. She wrenched her entire upper body around to see what I wanted.

‘What?’

‘Now,’ I shouted, ‘would be a good time to start slowing down.’

‘Gotcha.’

She wrestled the car to a halt and I vaulted out over the side. The radio was on before I had both feet on the ground. Becki waved with a backward flip of the hand, and then the car was hell and gone down the road.

This coast is very quiet at night. Once in a while a pickup will roar past, trailing music or a meaningless bellow or ejecting an empty beer can to bounce clattering down the road. But mostly it's only the rustle of the surf on the other side of the dunes, and by the time I get home, when I've walked, the evening in the restaurant feels like it might have happened yesterday, or the week before, or to someone else. Everything settles into one long chain of events with little to connect the days except the fact that that's what they do.

Finally I turned and walked up to the house. One of the older vacation homes along this stretch, it has wide, overgrown lots either side and consists of two interlocked wooden octagons, which must have seemed like a good idea to someone at some point – I'm guessing around 1973. In fact it just means there are more angles than usual for rain and sea air to work at – but it's got a good view and a walkway over the dunes down to the sand, and it costs me nothing. Not long after I came here I met a guy called Gary, in Ocean's, a bar half a mile down the road from the Pelican. He'd just gotten unmarried and was in Oregon trying to get his head together. One look told you he was becalmed on the internal sea of the recently divorced: distracted, only occasionally glancing at you directly enough to reveal the wild gaze of a captain alone on a lost ship, tied to the wheel and trying to stop its relentless spinning. Sometimes these men and women will lose control and you'll find them in bars drinking too loud and fast and with nothing like real merriment in their eyes; but mostly they simply hold on, bodies braced against the wind, gazing with a thousand-yard stare into what they assume must be their future.

It's a look I recognized. We bonded, bought each other beers, met up a few times before he shipped back east. Long and short of it is that I ended up being a kind of caretaker for his place, though it doesn't really need it. I stay there, leaving a light on once in a while and being seen in the yard, which presumably lessens the chances of some asshole breaking in. I patch the occasional leak in the roof, and am supposed to call Gary if the smaller octagon (which holds the two bedrooms) starts to sag any worse over the concrete pilings that hold it up on the dune. In heavy winds it's disconcertingly like being on an actual ship, but it'll hold for now. In theory I have to move out if he decides to come out to stay, but in two years that's never happened. I last spoke to him three months ago to get his okay on replacing a screen door, and he was living with a new woman back in Boston and sounded cautiously content. I guess the beach house is a part of Gary's past he's not ready to divest, an investment in a future some part of his heart has not yet quite written off. It'll happen, sooner or later, and then I guess I'll live somewhere else.

Once inside, I opened the big sliding windows and went out on the deck, belatedly realizing it was a Friday night. I'd known this before, of course, sort of. The restaurant's always livelier, regardless of the season – but Friday-is-busy is different to hey-it's-Friday! Or it used to be. Perhaps it was this that made me grab a couple of beers from the fridge; could also have been the half-joint floating around my system, coupled with a feeling of restlessness I'd had all day; or merely that I was home a little earlier than usual and Becki and Kyle had, without trying, made me feel about a million years old.

I decided I'd take the beers down onto the beach. A one-man Friday night, watching the waves, listening to the music of the spheres. Party on.

I walked to within a few yards of the sea and sat down on the sand. Looked up along the coast for a while, at the distant glow of windows in the darkness, listening to the sound of the waves coming up, and going back, as the sky grew lower and matt with gathering cloud.

I methodically drank my way through the first beer and felt calm, and empty, though not really at peace. To achieve that I would have needed to believe that I had a place in the world, instead of standing quietly to one side. I'd been in Oregon for nearly three years. Floating. Before the Pelican had been bar work up and down the coast, some odd jobs, plus periods working the door at nightclubs over in Portland. Service industry roustabout work, occupations that required little but the willingness to work cheaply, at night, and to risk occasional confrontations with one's fellow man. My possessions were limited to a few clothes, a laptop, and some books. I didn't even own a car any more, though I did have money in the bank. More than my co-workers would have imagined, I'm sure, but that's because all they know about me is I can hold my own in a busy service and produce approximately circular Italian food.

Finally it rained.

Irrevocably, and very hard, soaking me so quickly that there was no hurry to go inside. I sat out a little longer, as the rain bounced off the waves and pocked the sand. Eventually I finished the second beer and then stood up and started for home.

As Friday nights go, I couldn't claim this one had really caught fire.

Back inside I dried off and wandered into the living room. It was nearly two o'clock, but I couldn't seem to find my way to bed. I played on the web for a little while, the last refuge of the restless and clinically bored. As a last resort I checked my email – another of the existentially empty moments the Internet hands you on a plate.

Hey world, want to talk?

No? Well, maybe later.

Invitations to invest in Chinese industry, buy knock-off watches and stock up on Viagra. Some Barely Legal Teen Cuties had been in touch again, too. As was their custom, they were keen to spill the beans on how they'd got it on with their roommate or boss or a herd of broad-minded elk.

I declined the offers, also as usual, hoping they wouldn't be offended after the trouble they'd gone to for me, and me alone. I'd selected all the crap as a block and was about to throw it in the trash when a message near the bottom caught my eye.

The subject line said: PLEASE, PLEASE READ

Most likely more spam, of course. One of the Nigerian classics, perhaps, the wife/son/cat of a recently deceased oligarch who'd squirrelled away millions that some lucky randomer could have twenty per cent of, if they'd just send all their bank details to a stranger who'd spelt his own name three different ways in a single email.

If so, however, they'd titled it well. That combination of words is hard to ignore. I clicked on it, yawning, trying and failing to remember the last time I'd received a message from someone in particular. The email was short.

I know what happened

Nothing else. Not even a period at the end of the sentence. The name of the apparent sender of the email – Ellen Robertson – was not that of anyone I knew.

Just a piece of spam after all.

I hit delete and went to bed.

Chapter 3

Next morning started with a walk up the beach, carrying a big cup of coffee. I've done that every day since I've been living in Gary's house. Far as I'm concerned, if the beach is right there and you don't kick off the day by walking along it, then you should move the hell inland and make way for someone who understands what the coast is for.

I was up early, and the sands were even more deserted than usual. I passed a couple of guys optimistically waving fishing rods at the sea, and a few people like me. Lone men and women in shorts and loose shirts, tracing their ritual walkways, smiling briefly at strangers. Sometimes when the sun is bright and the world holds no shadows at all I imagine what it would be like to have a smaller set of footprints keeping pace with mine. But not often, and not that morning.

I walked further than usual, but it was still only eight-thirty when I got back to the house. There was already a message on the machine. It was from Ted.

‘Christ,’ he'd said, without preamble. ‘Look, I hate to call you like this. But could you come lend a hand? Someone's broken in. To the restaurant.’

His voice went muffled for a few moments, as he spoke brusquely to someone in the background.

Then he came back on, sounding even more pissed. ‘Look, maybe you're out for the day already, but if not—’

I picked up the handset and called him back.

Rather than wait for me to walk, Ted came down, arriving outside the house ten minutes later. It's always been evident where Becki acquired her driving style. Ted turned the pickup around in the road without any notable decrease in speed, and drew level with me. I was leaning against the post at the top of my drive, waiting, having a cigarette. I leaned down to talk through the open passenger window.

‘You need me to bring any tools?’

He shook his head. ‘Got a bunch in the storeroom. Going to have to go buy glass and wood, but I'll get on to that later. Fucking day this is gonna be.’

I climbed into the truck and just about got the door shut before he dropped his foot on the pedal.

‘When did you find it?’

Ted's face was even redder and more baggy-eyed than usual. ‘One of the cooks. Raul, I think. Got there at seven with the rest of the crew, called me right away.’

‘Which one's Raul?’

‘You got me. I think they're all called Raul.’

‘What happened to the alarm?’

‘Nothing. It went off like it was supposed to. It was still going when I got there.’

‘Isn't someone from the alarm company supposed to come check it out? Or phone you, at least?’

Ted looked embarrassed. ‘Stopped paying for that service a while back. It's eight hundred a year, and we've never needed it before.’

By now we were decelerating toward the right-hand turn off the highway.

‘How bad is the damage?’

Ted shrugged, raising both hands from the wheel in a gesture evoking the difficulty of describing degrees of misfortune, especially when however much ‘bad’ is still going to cause a day of fetching and form-filling and expense that a guy just doesn't fucking need.

‘It's not so terrible, I guess. I just don't get it. There's signs on all three doors – front, back, kitchen – saying no money's left on the premises overnight. So what the hell? Huh? What kind of fuckhead comes all the way over here in the middle of the night, just to screw up someone else's day?’

‘Maybe they didn't believe you about the money,’ I said. ‘Fuckheads can be strange like that.’

As the car slowed into the lot I saw Becki's car ‘parked’ down the end. ‘Don't tell me Kyle's here already?’

Ted laughed, and for a moment looked less harried and disappointed with mankind in general.

‘I had to call Becki to work out how to get your phone number off the database. I told her she didn't have to do anything, but she came right over.’

He pulled the pickup to come to rest next to his daughter's vehicle.

‘You called the cops, I assume?’

‘Been and gone. They sent their two best men, as I'm sure you can imagine. Not convinced either of them aced the “How to pretend you give a shit” course, though. And I've comped a lot of appetizers and drinks for both those assholes in the past.’

We got out and I followed Ted to the restaurant. He led me around the side to the back door, the one you'd enter if you'd been out on deck with a drink before coming in for dinner.

The remains of the external door there was hanging open, most of the panes broken. The slats that once held the glass in place lay in splinters on the floor. Becki was hunkered down in the short corridor beyond the doorway, working a dustpan and hand brush.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘It doesn't look so bad.’

‘Not any more,’ she said, straightening up. She'd evidently been at the job a while, and a couple of blonde hairs were stuck to her forehead. She looked pissed off. ‘The guys are still working in the back.’

I went through the second door – which had been more gently forced – and into the main area of the restaurant. The Pelican's register and reservations system runs on a newish Apple Mac with an external cash drawer. The latter had been unsuccessfully attacked with a chisel and/or crowbar. I looked at this for a while and then headed into the back, where the brigade was tidying the kitchen.

‘They messed it up some in here,’ Ted said, unnecessarily, as he joined me. It looked like one or two people had really made a meal of throwing things around. ‘And it seems like we got a machine missing.’

‘Juicer,’ confirmed one of the cooks – the guy who'd stared at me on the way out of the lot last night. He looked less moody now, and I could guess why. He and his fellow non-Americans would not have enjoyed the police visit earlier, most likely spending it on an extended cigarette break half a mile down the road. They would also be very aware of being high on most people's list of suspects – either for doing the job themselves, or passing the opportunity to an accomplice, along with the information that any alarm would go unanswered.

‘Kind of a dumb break-in,’ I said, directly to him. ‘I mean, everybody knows there's no cash left here, right?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ the cook said, nodding quickly. ‘We all know that. But some people, you know? They think it's fun, this kind of thing.’

‘Probably just kids,’ I said, looking past him to the anteroom off the side where staff changed and hung their coats. ‘Anyone lose anything out of there?’

‘Well, no,’ Ted said. ‘Nobody here in the middle of the night, right? The lockers were empty.’

‘Duh,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

I turned, and saw Becki standing out in the restaurant looking at me.

I have no formal training in fixing things, but common sense and good measuring will get most of the job done. My dad had game at that kind of thing, and I spent long periods as a child watching him. Ted and I measured the broken panes and the wood that needed replacing, he listened to my instructions for a couple more items, then drove off to get it all from a hardware store in Astoria. Meanwhile Becki headed out to get a replacement cash drawer from a supplier over in Portland that she'd tracked down on the Net.

Ted was gone well over an hour. I sat on deck and slowly drank a Diet Coke. I was feeling an itch at the back of my head, but didn't want to yield to it. I knew that if I was back at the beach house, however, as normal at this time of day, then I'd already have done so. I also knew it would have been dumb, however, and that it was a box in my head I didn't want to open. The smart tactic with actions that don't make sense is to not do them the first time. Otherwise, after that, why not do them again?

Nonetheless I found myself, ten minutes later, at the till computer. The web browser Becki had been using was still up on screen. I navigated to my Internet provider's site and checked my email, quickly, before I could change my mind and fail to yield to impulse. There was nothing there.

That was good. I wouldn't be checking again.

Eventually Ted got back with the materials and I started work. The external door had been pretty solid, and so kicking the panes out had badly splintered the frame around the lock. I levered the damaged side off under Ted's watchful eye.

‘You know what you're doing, right?’

‘Kinda,’ I said. ‘More than you do, anyhow.’

‘I get what you're saying,’ he said, and went inside.

I worked slowly but methodically, which is the best way of dealing with the subversive ranks of inanimate objects. Ted proved to have a thorough selection of tools, which helped, as did having gone through the process of figuring out how to replace Gary's screen door a few months back. Security and good sense dictated replacing the door with something more robust, but Ted was adamant it needed to look the way it had, for tradition's sake. I'd specified that he at least buy super-toughened glass, also some metal strips that I intended using to strengthen the off-the-rack door.

While I was working through that portion of the job, Becki returned. I was ready for a break from hammering and sawing so I went to give her a hand with the cash drawer, which was not light. In the end she let me carry it by myself, though she hovered encouragingly in the background and went off to fetch me a soda as a reward, while I levered it into position and bolted it in place.

She got sidetracked with some issue in the kitchen, and I was back at work on the door by the time she returned with a Dr Pepper stacked with ice.

She stood around for a while and watched me working, without saying anything.

‘That was a nice thing you did,’ she said, after maybe five minutes.

‘What's what?’

‘You know. Signalling to the cooks that you thought they didn't have anything to do with it.’

‘They didn't.’

I concentrated on manoeuvring a pane of glass, making sure it was bedded properly before screwing a piece of the metal brace-work securely into place. When I turned round, Becki was still looking at me, one eyebrow slightly raised.

I smiled. ‘What?’

‘You haven't always been a waiter, have you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But it's what I am now.’

She nodded slowly, and walked back inside.

* * *

Midway through the day, the guy from the kitchen brought out a plate of food. I hadn't asked for this, or expected it. It was very good, too, a selection of handmade empanada-style things filled with spicy shrimp and fish.

‘That was great,’ I said, when he came back for the plate. ‘You should get Ted to put those on the menu.’

The cook smiled, shrugged, and I guess I knew what he meant. I stuck out my hand. ‘John,’ I said.

He shook it. ‘Eduardo.’

‘Got the dough ready for the young maestro yet?’

He laughed, and went back inside.

It took over six hours, but eventually everything was done. By four o'clock I'd replaced the frames on inner and outer doors, and fixed the other damage. Becki had the register back up and running, something I was surprised she was capable of doing. Her entire demeanour during the day had been something of an eye-opener. I hadn't figured her for capable and businesslike. The guys in back had meanwhile returned the kitchen to its spotless and socked-away state.

Ted came on an inspection tour, pronounced it good, grabbed a couple of handfuls of beers and took them out on deck. We all sat together, Ted, Becki and me with the guys out of the kitchen – and Mazy too, when she wandered in as if fresh out of some flower-scented fairy realm – and drank slowly in the sun, which wasn't very warm, but still pleasant. Fairly soon Ted got his head around the fact that though more than one of the cooks was called Eduardo, none was actually called Raul.

After a while Becki got up and went and fetched some more beers. She dispersed them around the crew and then offered one to me. I looked at my watch, realized it was coming up on five. I'd been working in direct sunlight half the day and my shirt was sticking to my back.

‘I need to get back to my place to change,’ I said. ‘Pretty soon, in fact.’

‘I'll give you a ride,’ she said, as I stood up.

‘This is good of you,’ I said, as we walked together to her car. She didn't say anything.

She waited out on deck while I took a shower. As I came out into the living room, I saw she'd taken a beer from my fridge and was sitting drinking it, looking out to sea. I sat in the other chair.

‘Going to have to head back soon,’ I said.

She nodded, looking down at her hands. I offered her a cigarette, which she took, and we lit up and sat smoking in silence for a moment.

‘How much trouble is he in?’ I asked, eventually.

She glanced up. The skin around her eyes looked tight. ‘How did you know?’

‘Why steal a battered juicer and leave a computer? The mess in the kitchen was overdone, and the cash drawer looked like it was attacked by a chimp. No one came there last night looking for money. So where was it? In the locker room?’

She nodded.

‘Dope, or powder?’

‘Not dope.’

‘How much?’

‘About ten thousand dollars' worth.’ Her voice was very quiet.

‘Jesus, Becki. How stupid do you have to be, to stash that much cocaine in your father's restaurant?’

‘I didn't know it was there,’ she said, angrily. ‘This is Kyle's fucking thing.’

‘Kyle? How did he even get that much capital? Please don't tell me you gave it to him.’

‘He got a loan. From … some guys he knows.’

It was all I could do not to laugh. ‘Oh, smart move. So now he's royally fucked, owing not just the back end of drugs he no longer has to sell, but the money he used to buy them in the first place. Perfect.’

‘That about covers it.’ She breathed out heavily, drained the rest of her beer in one swallow. ‘And if you're thinking of getting heavy about drugs, I don't need to hear it.’

‘No, drugs are way cool,’ I said. ‘Moral imbeciles making fortunes from fucking up other people's lives, staying out of sight while wannabes like your idiot boyfriend take all the risks.’

‘Better get you back. Going to be a busy night.’

‘Take it I'm going to be on pizzas?’

She smiled briefly, crooked and sad, and I realized how much I liked her, and also how close she was to seeing her life veer down a bad track into the woods. ‘I'm not sure where he even is right now.’

We stood together.

‘And you can't just walk away from this?’

‘I love him,’ she said, in the way only twenty year olds can.

She drove me back to the restaurant, letting me out at the top of the access road.

‘Go find him,’ I said. ‘Get the names of anyone he might have told where he stashed his gear.’

She looked up at me. ‘And then?’

‘And then,’ I said. I tapped the car twice with the flat of my hand, and she drove away.

The front door to the restaurant was open, other front-of-house staff busily arranging chairs out on deck, but I walked around the other way and went in through the portal I'd spent most of the day replacing. I reached out as I walked through, and gave it a shove. It felt very firm.

There's something good about having rebuilt a door. It makes you feel like you've done something. It makes you believe things are fixable, even when you know that generally they are not.

Chapter 4

What can you do, when things start to fall apart? Let us count the ways …

Not panic, of course, that's the main thing. Once you start, it's impossible to stop. Panic is immune to debate, to analysis, to earnest and cognitively therapeutic bullet points. Panic isn't listening. Panic has no ears, only a voice. Panic is wildfire in the soul, vaulting the narrow paths of reason in search of fresh wood and brush on the other side, borne into every corner of the mind by the winds of anxiety.

Carol wasn't even sure when it had started, or why. The last couple of months had been good. For the first time she'd started to feel settled. The apartment began to feel like a home. She got a part-time job helping at the library under the dread Miss Williams, tidying chairs and putting up posters and helping organize reading groups. Work more suited to some game oldster or slack-jawed teen, admittedly, but gainful employment all the same. She walked to the library and back and yet still managed to put on a few pounds, having regained something of an appetite. She made acquaintances, even put tentative emotional down-payments on a couple of potential friends, and generally quit acting like someone in a Witness Protection Program.

Sometimes, she even just… forgot. That had been best of all, the times when she suddenly remembered – because it proved there had been a period, however short, when she had not.

At some point in the last few days this had started to change. She woke feeling as if she had sunk a couple of inches into the bed overnight. Instead of vigorously soaping herself in the shower she stood bowed under the water, noticing flecks of mildew between a pair of tiles and wondering how she could have missed them before, and if she'd get around to doing something about it – or if it would just get worse and worse until she was the kind of woman who had grubby tiles and nothing could be done about that or the state of the yard or her clothes or hair. Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through cracks in trivial maintenance, the things left undone. As soon as you realize how much there is to do to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.

It was better when she got out into the world, but still it felt as if her momentum was faltering. Books slipped from her hands, and she could not find things in stores. A bruise appeared on her hip from some minor collision she couldn't recall. Annoyingly, this reminded her of something her ex-husband used to say: that you can always tell when your mood is failing, because the world of objects turns mutinous, as if the growing storm in your head unsettles the lower ranks outside.

And then, three evenings before, she had found herself returning to the front door after locking it for the night.

She knew it was shut. She could see it was shut, that the bolt was drawn. She remembered doing it, for God's sake, could recall the chill of the chain's metal against her fingertips. That night, these memories were enough. The next, they were not, and she returned twice to make sure.

And last night she'd done it eight times, furiously, eyes wide as she watched herself draw and redraw the chain, turning the key in the lock until it wouldn't turn any further, over and over, before finally withdrawing it. It wouldn't be nine times tonight. That wasn't how counting worked. If it didn't stop now, it would escalate to sets of eight.

Sixteen times, twenty-four …

To understand how much a person can mistrust reality and themselves, you need to stand in a cold hallway, fighting back tears of self-hatred and frustration, as you watch your own hands check a simple bolt over twenty times.

She knew the walls of your skull were not a bastion. That thoughts could get in through the cracks, and did. That, in fact, if you felt in certain ways, it was a pretty sure sign they already had. The more she opened her mind to panic, the more likely she'd start slipping down that road again. So she wasn't going to panic.

Not yet.

These thoughts occupied her most of the way home from the library, under skies that were a smooth and unbroken grey. Once indoors she made a pot of strong coffee. She had an hour before he got back. Once he was home it would be easier. She'd have plenty to keep her mind off things. It also meant she wouldn't actually be able to do anything, however.

For a moment, thinking of Tyler, she felt a little better. Dinner could wait. Neither of them was a fussy eater. She could whip something up later. So …

She fetched her laptop from the living room and brought it to the kitchen table. When her browser was up she hesitated, hands over the keyboard.

She felt driven to do something, but… what?

She had thousands of words saved onto her hard disk, innumerable pdfs, two hundred bookmarked sites. The problem was none of the creators of these sites knew they were relevant. They were like people wandering the streets, blithely observing that portions of the sidewalk seemed to become white once in a while, without having the faintest understanding of snow. You needed to comprehend the system to place these reports in context. She did understand, had glimpsed it, at least. She was smart, too, though it seemed to her now that she'd never really capitalized on this.

There had been times when she'd experienced a glimpse of freedom, especially during the last couple of months. When it had occurred to her that the whole thing could be nonsense, a cloud on her vision that had never been more than a speck of dust in her eye. It didn't matter how many metaphors she conjured, however – and English had been one of her best subjects in high school; in the end, she knew she believed. Her faith was dark and unshakable. The knowledge did not make her feel better, and her faith didn't make her feel anything except afraid.

Faith/afraid: funny how similar the two words are. When we make ourselves believe things, how often is it just an attempt to hold back the fear?

She refocused on the screen, checking the sites with RSS feeds that automatically alerted her to additions, edits, new blog entries. Nothing. So she went for a trawl through some of her other bookmarks instead. Sites on mythology, folklore, local ephemera, anomalies. Still nothing.

Which made perfect sense. Her emotions didn't betoken a disturbance in the ether. She was not the micro-to the world's macrocosm, one half of a pathetic fallacy (God, high school English again!). It was personal. Each time she went looking and found nothing new, it diminished the comfort she'd once found there. What had previously made her feel that she was not alone, now increasingly confirmed that she was. So what next? When you know something's wrong, but not how or why, what exactly can you do?

Not panic. That's all.

* * *

Some time later she was roused by a knocking sound.

She blinked, realized the sound was someone knocking on the front door. Of course. She hauled herself up from the chair and trudged out of the kitchen. She was disquieted to realize that she'd spent at least some of the time in thoughts she believed had left her: the idea of killing herself.

She opened the front door to see Rona smiling at her, looking teenage and wholesome as all get-out.

‘Mommmeeeee!’ a voice shrieked from below, and she squatted down to let Tyler give her a hug. He gave good hugs. She straightened up with her son in her arms, and smiled broadly at his occasional sitter.

‘Thanks, honey,’ she said, as the four year old in her grasp wriggled for the door catch. Locks and light switches were catnip to this kid. Pockets of the world on which he could exert an influence, Carol supposed, first steps in controlling the chaos. She hoped he never learned how they could turn on you.

‘Oh, he's a peach,’ Rona said.

Her cheer was unassailable. Tyler's mother knew that, on occasion, her son was perfectly capable of not being a peach, but you'd never know it from Rona's reports. ‘So, Friday morning next, right?’

‘Yep,’ Carol said, her attention caught by the lock her son was manhandling. Thinking: I'll be seeing you later.

‘You … okay, Mrs Ransom?’

Carol looked round to see her neighbour's daughter looking at her curiously. ‘I'm great,’ she said with a big fake smile, and shut the door.

While she fixed him a small holding snack in the kitchen she submitted her son to a forensic interrogation as to how he had spent his day. You needed to extract this information quickly. What had happened at kindergarten seemed to become unreal or uninteresting within a couple of hours, as if events were ephemeral, and the past lost its charge like a battery. Carol envied this a great deal.

It appeared that he had ‘done things’ and that it had been ‘fine’.

They sat on the sofa together with a children's book – one perk of working at the library was an inexhaustible supply of these – and within fifteen minutes Carol felt herself relaxing. They could do that to you, sometimes, children. They were so much themselves that if you let yourself be pulled fully into their orbit, you could forget your own world for a time.

Then the phone rang. They looked up at it together. Their phone rang very seldom.

‘Someone's calling,’ Tyler said.

‘I know, sweetie.’ She got up and went over to the table, picked up the handset. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, my dear.’

It was a woman's voice.

Carol knew immediately who it was. It was a moment before she could say anything in reply, and it came out as a brittle whisper.

‘How did you get this number?’

‘A little bird told me. Time to come home,’ the woman said. ‘We can help.’

Carol put down the phone.

‘Who was that?’ her son asked.

‘Nobody, honey.’

‘Can nobody talk, then?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’

She asked him to count up the number of cows on the page of the book in front of him, and managed to walk to the bathroom and close the door before she threw up.

That night she checked the bolt thirty-two times when she went to bed, though she knew it was too late. Nobody was already inside the gates, and that's what panic actually was, she realized. It was the noise of the world whispering in your ear, when your life was ruled by something that wasn't there.

It was the sound of nobody talking, all the time.

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