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Authors: Michael Marshall

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“Okay,” he said.

“And then it’s fi nished?”

“Said okay. Don’t push it.”

I smiled. He eye-fucked me hard but then blinked, and turned his

head away, as if he had caught a faint but potent smell coming down

the street, or in the air, or from the man he was facing.

Something dry and sweet.

“Yeah,” he said more quietly. “We’re good.”

So I told them which bar Kyle was sitting in, and went back to my

car and drove home.

Bill also survived—though it was touch and go for a while—and is

now as hale as ever. Apparently Black Ridge has seen a small upswing

in its fortunes recently, with three new businesses opening in the

last few months. Bill dropped by on a layover a few months ago and

we went out and got world-changingly drunk on his client’s tab. He

brought the news that he’d spoken to Jenny again, and she seemed

happier. He has even lent her a little money to start her own jewelry

business down in Colorado.

The capacity of some people for goodness never ceases to astound

me, though I hope someday it will.

A few weeks later I had another visitor.

It was supposed to just be dinner. It had become impossible for

her to remain in her hometown, and she already had an airline ticket

B A D T H I N G S 369

for Europe. She wound up not using it, and Kristina Hayes now holds

down the bar at the Adriatico instead. Fights and bad language have

declined to zero since she took charge, and the owner thinks she’s the

best thing since sliced bread. He may be right.

Some nights I lie in bed next to her and wait for sleep, fi tting to-

gether the missing parts. I try to work out whether Brooke put Ellen

up to contacting me in the fi rst place, with the promise of defl ect-

ing her doom and burying her past, and then reneged on the deal.

Something Ellen said the last time I saw her alive—a remark about

how she had not been good—makes me suspect that might have been

the case. If so, I don’t blame her. You do what you have to in order to

protect those you love, including yourself.

I try also to guess at what point Brooke decided to put in place

the sacrifi ce of another family into what had afterward been dubbed

Murder Pond. The gap between Scott’s death and what happened fi ve

months ago makes me hope his death at least was accidental, and only

recently did Brooke conceive of fi nishing what his death had started,

thus recharging the town that the original sacrifi ce of the Kelly fam-

ily had brought into life, over a hundred years before.

Kristina says she doesn’t know, and it probably doesn’t matter.

Every day we die a little, and that is one form of sacrifi ce, but our

worlds and situations demand more of us than that. That’s part of

why I made the deal over Kyle, but the truth is that time only moves

in one direction. You cannot go back and unmake your actions or

unsay your words. The best you can do is try to make sure the bad

things push you in better directions in the future.

Or failing that, pass them on.

One last memory I have of Scott is this. He must have been about three, and he was trying to climb onto the kitchen counter, something he had been instructed not to do. It was high enough that he

370 Michael Marshall

could have hurt himself badly if he fell to the fl oor, which was tiled.

Carol and I sometimes left knives in the sink, too, and he would easily

have been able to reach them from up there.

The counter was forbidden territory, therefore, but Scott was at

an age when there are no such places—especially if a cookie jar awaits

the intrepid and the brave. I was doing something at the time, most

likely making coffee, and though I was vaguely aware of him using

a chair to scale his way upward, I hadn’t yet gotten around to telling

him to stop.

I heard a smashing sound. I turned to see a glass was now on the

fl oor, broken into many pieces. I knew the glass had been standing on

the counter, just where Scott’s hand now lay. Scott knew that, too, but

he did what we all do.

“Daddy,” he said earnestly, “it wasn’t me.”

A week ago I returned from trawling bookstores in the afternoon to

fi nd Kristina on the sidewalk, a few doors down from our building.

She was carrying a brown paper bag and had evidently been return-

ing from a grocery run when she got buttonholed by an elderly neigh-

bor. That happens from time to time in our street, and it’s one of the

nice things about living here, assuming you have a high tolerance for

repetition.

But as I got closer I realized this didn’t look like a case of being

told of how much better/worse/largely the same it had been around

here in days of yore. The woman was white-haired, small and thin,

and we’d exchanged cagey nods in the street before. She was Polish, I

think. Many of the older residents of the neighborhood seem a little

wary of Kristina, but not this one. She was standing right up close,

and speaking quickly, in a low tone.

When she saw me approaching she suddenly stopped talking.

“It’s okay,” Kristina said. “He knows.”

The old woman glared dubiously at me, then back up at Kristina.

B A D T H I N G S 371

“I know where it lives,” she whispered. “Not far from here. I can

show you.”

Kristina was polite, and in the end the woman walked away. But

I know she’s been back.

Will Kristina be able to resist forever? I doubt it. You are who you

are, and you’ll end up doing what you do.

That’s just the way it is.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Thank you to my editors, Jane Johnson and Jennifer Brehl, for

helping me fi nd the wood among these trees; to my agents,

Ralph Vicinanza and Jonny Geller; to Lisa Gallagher and

Amanda Ridout for their support; to Carolyn Marino for her

help over the last couple of years; and to the memory of Jean

Baudrillard, for a decade of inspiration.

And for the hundredth year running, the award for Greatest

Patience in the Face of an Author goes to . . . Paula, my wife.

About the Author

MICHAEL MARSHALL is a screenwriter and the

internationally bestselling author of The Intruders

and the acclaimed trilogy of The Straw Men,

The U
pright Man, and Blood of Angels. He lives

in London.

www.michaelmarshallsmith.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information

on your favorite HarperCollins author.

a lso by mich a el m a rsh a ll

The Intruders

Blood of Angels

The Upright Man

The Straw Men

Credits

Jacket design by Mary Schuck

Jacket photo collage: boy © Adrian Myers/ Corbis;

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are

drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental.

reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By

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Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader April 2009

ISBN 978-0-06-187544-1

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