Bad Intentions Read Free

went back into his bedroom and put on a T-shirt. He went over to the window and stared down at Dead Water, which lay there like a green and black mirror. Perhaps a layer of mud had already settled on Jon's skinny body and the divers would not find him with their flashlights. Jon was small and thin. Jon could be mistaken for a branch, a modest bump on the bottom.
    He snapped out of his trance and left the cabin, but collapsed on the two large stones which served as the front steps.
    Axel came outside.
    "Calm down," he said. "Jon had been ill for a long time. We could see it coming."
    Reilly remained sitting with his head buried in his hands, incapable of speech. He badly needed something to calm him down, but Axel had banned him from getting high until it was all over and done with. The expression "over and done with" echoed in his head as though they had committed a crime, as though they had personally pushed Jon out of the boat.
    "Of course I've wondered about it," Axel continued. "I don't mind admitting it. What do you think Jon did at the hospital? He had therapy and he talked. He talked for four weeks. He was encouraged to open up about everything, the most intimate things that tormented him, that had led to his breakdown. The truth would have come out sooner or later. It would have taken us with it and we wouldn't be sitting here by the water now. Do you hear what I'm saying?"
    "We don't know anything about what he did or how he would have handled it," Reilly said. "You're just guessing. People get through all sorts of things."
    Axel found a stick and began stabbing the ground in front of the steps.
    "There's unlikely to be much fuss made over this," he said. "Jon had been admitted to Ladegården Psychiatric Hospital with anxiety and depression and he was on medication. The police will soon join the dots. Meanwhile, we need to cherish our freedom."
    "If that freedom is a torment," Reilly said, "then it's not worth much. You don't feel pain like other people," he added.
    He sat there staring into the forest. From where he was sitting the black spruce trees looked dark and mysterious. The light fell through the treetops in long, slanted columns. A pine had keeled
over, roots spiking up dramatically amidst all the green like a claw. Then he spotted something between the trees, a flash of white. Axel followed his pointing hand.
    "Someone's there," Reilly said.
    "Oh, shut up," Axel replied.
    Reilly panicked.
    "What if someone saw us last night? There are bound to be more cabins up here, someone could have watched us through binoculars. It was a full moon."
    "The crows saw us," Axel said. "And they're bound to tell the magpies and the lapwings, and before you know it will be all over the forest."
    Reilly paced up and down on his long legs.
    "Something's moving," he stated. "In the heather over there, to the right of the pine. There's definitely something moving."
    They crossed the area in front of the cabin, passed some scrub and peered in between the pines. Reilly sped up and started to run, his long hair fluttering like a horse's mane. On the ground, at the foot of a pine, lay a dead cat. And next to the cat, four kittens. They too were dead, but a fifth was crawling through the heather trying to get away.
    Something happened to Philip Reilly. The sight of the helpless kitten moved him. He had never seen anything so small, so doomed as the tiny creature. The events of last night had shaken him and he melted like butter in the sun.
    "Have you seen it?" he said. "Poor thing."
    Axel watched in amazement as Reilly bent down and picked up the kitten, which was white with gray specks, with his big hands. From its toothless mouth a weak mewing could be heard. Its eyes were just about open, surprisingly blue, its tail a stump as thin as a piece of string.
    "I'll take him inside," Reilly said. "He needs something to eat."
    Axel snapped his fingers in front of his face to rouse him.
    "Listen," he said, "we have a lot of things to do.