The Binding (30 page)

Everything okay at work? Well, there you have it.
The line of inquiry he was pursuing with Becca’s case was not a normal one. It was bizarre. And he was not particularly comfortable with bizarre. Exhibit A: he’d admitted to Becca that nonrational forces were at work in her case. It shocked him now to remember that. He was so far into the deep weeds that it was beginning to scare him.

But there is no rational explanation for what’s happening here. If I work off the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
, Becca could end up hanging from a tree. I have to at least pursue this supernatural shit. If only to prove it wrong.

He pressed the bell. He wondered if Atkins was still here. Back in the ’90s, it had been his show. He did the tours, wrote the pamphlets, assembled the exhibits, and acquired whatever artifacts the locals brought in. He was Mr. Northam himself.

The glass in the door flashed and the door opened.

“Who’s that?”

There he was in the flesh. Wilbur Atkins, thin and tense with annoyance. The prescription in his frameless glasses was more intense, and the man’s blue eyes were freakishly magnified.

“Mr. Atkins, it’s Nat Thayer.”

“Nathaniel’s boy?”

“That’s right.”

Mr. Atkins stood regarding him in his glasses. “Need to use the bathroom? The Subway franchise across the square has a better one.”

“I had a few questions about the city. I was wondering if I
could pick your brain for a few minutes.”

Atkins blew out his breath. “We don’t open late on Sundays. Says so right here.” Atkins angled his arm out of the doorway and pointed at the
Opening Hours
sign.

So why are you here?
Nat thought. Then he remembered that the guy lived in a room upstairs.

“I just need to talk.”

Atkins regarded him through his lenses.

As if you have a lot of better things to do
, Nat thought.
Airing out the Revolutionary-era quilts or rearranging the tin soldiers in the Civil War case? You self-important old bastard.

“Well, I suppose.”

Atkins didn’t ask him to come in, just left the door ajar and walked into the coolness of the dark space.

Nat followed him in and pulled the door shut. The glass in the windows made a vibrating noise, and then he was inside, following Atkins’s footsteps toward a lighted room off to the left.

It was the Seagoing exhibit. The walls and ceilings were painted eggshell blue, as if you were sitting under the Atlantic Ocean, and the glass exhibit cases were filled with shells, huge fishing hooks, lobster traps, a wooden harpoon, a few doubloons—Nat’s mind filled out the inventory even before his eyes swept briefly along the cases and spotted the artifacts. It had been his favorite room in the museum as a boy, a tiny thread connecting him with Henry Morgan, Caribbean pirates, Captain Kidd, and treasure. In the corner was a tall wooden ship’s wheel. Nat frowned. He remembered it as being enormous, a gargantuan thing taller than himself, its handles as big as bananas. But now it looked small and quaint.

He noticed there was now a
Do Not Touch!
sign affixed to one of the spokes.

“I used to spin that thing,” Nat said.

“That’s why I had to put a sign on it,” Atkins said shortly.
“That came off the
Lady Contessa
, a frigate commanded by a Northam man for thirty years. Carried black powder to the Union forces that was used at Gettysburg, among other things. But it would be a pile of wooden boards if I let the likes of you touch it.”

Nat rolled his eyes. Atkins was picking nearsightedly through some carvings laid out above the glass case of foreign coins. He brought one up to his eye and turned it in the light. It looked like a gargoyle, a half-human creature with a human head, leering eyes, and a tongue, but the body of a shark.

“Scrimshaw?” Nat said. He was slightly proud of remembering the name.

Atkins grunted.

Good
, Nat thought.
That’s the end of the formalities.

“I wanted to ask you about West Africa.”

“What about it?”

“Do you know of any connection between Northam and Africa? Any travelers there, missionaries . . .”

Atkins put down the carving, and his glasses caught a glint of light. “Slave traders?” Atkins said.

“Them, too.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m interested, that’s all.”

Atkins gave him a
don’t you bullshit me
smile. “Don’t say? You woke up this morning with a sudden interest in the connection of the Atlantic slave trade to Northam?”

Atkins was enjoying this.

“You know, I get people in here asking questions about pirates from Northam and slavers, all kinds of things. Usually, they pretend that they’ve discovered a sudden interest in the history of western Massachusetts, but after a few minutes it’s usually revealed”—Atkins smiled, revealing a set of black-flecked dentures—“that there’s a question of inheritance. People wondering
if their ancestors stashed some bags of gold away. Or gossip.”

Atkins polished a rough spot on the gargoyle’s left ear. “But that’s not why you’re here?”

“Exactly. Pure historical interest.”

Atkins eyes looked like freshly peeled grapes, moist and quivering. “I don’t think so.”

“Is the information classified, Mr. Atkins? Are you working up a big slave-trading exhibit that’s going to blow the socks off Northam?” Nat hated to take that tone, but the man was annoying.

Atkins said nothing. He picked up another piece of bone-white carving and began cleaning it with a cloth. Nat waited him out. He knew the man couldn’t resist talking history, no matter what he pretended.

“There is no history to speak of,” the curator said finally, scratching at a grooved mouth in the scrimshaw. “The slave-trading families were in Boston and Salem.”

“What about missionaries?”

“Maybe one or two.”

“So no stories of, let’s say, massacres, for instance.”

“
Massacres?
”

“Yes. Massacres. Notorious crimes. I need to know about bad things that happened in Africa but started here.”

This was Nat’s working theory. If he accepted that there was some power at work in Northam, and that it had something to do with Becca’s being guided or enchanted or whatever you wanted to call it, and it was implicated in Walter Prescott’s death and Margaret Post’s, too, there had to be a reason that this force had chosen this place. Even if the
nzombe
idea was bunk, something had obviously returned to Northam with evil intent. Murders of specific individuals were the result of deep negative emotions. A need for revenge. Why else would these things be happening if some dark act hadn’t caused the city to become a target?

Atkins stood up, color rising in his face. “What the hell are
you talking about?”

“I need to know if there were any locals involved in anything . . . Opium smuggling. Slave buying. Spreading disease, like Lord Jeffrey Amherst giving blankets infected with smallpox to the natives.”

“That happened right here in Massachus—”

“I know where it happened. Hell, you told me the story yourself, during one of your tours.”

Atkins’s eyes watched Nat carefully.

“I want to know about stuff like that,” Nat continued. “Very bad things committed by Northam people in Africa. I have no goddamn idea what I’m looking for, which is why I came here.”

Nat slapped his hand down on the case. The rattling sound hung in the air as he stared at Atkins.

The old man looked away first and something in his face had altered. “West Africa?”

“That’s right.”

Atkins shook his head no, the thin jowls vibrating with the movement. “Nope, sorry, Dr. Thayer.”

“Nothing? And you would know of such things?”

“I would.”

Something in Atkins’s manner struck Nat as off. He’d gone polite, or at least civil.
Or maybe I’m just paranoid
, he thought.

Nat blew out a breath.

“You mind if I take a look around?”

Atkins gave him a smile. “Be my guest.”

Nat began strolling through the exhibit rooms, glancing into the tall glass cases. Something was bothering him, that same image that had been tugging at the back of his memory when he was doing outreach at city hall. A painting, a photo, something in a frame. Something stark, black-and-white. Powerful enough to
lodge in his memory banks and stay back there twenty years. The lines of it were waving from the back of his mind, and a chill spread across the line of his shoulders.

What was it he remembered? A boyhood thing? Was it here in the rooms?

Fifteen minutes later, he stepped over the lintel into the refracted blue light of the Seagoing room and glared at Atkins. The old man glanced up at him. “Find what you were looking for?”

“No.”

Atkins shrugged.

“I’ll be leaving now,” Nat said.

Atkins put the scrimshaw down and came padding after Nat. He took hold of the door after Nat had pulled it open.

“Dr. Thayer.”

Nat stopped and turned. Atkins was grinning, oddly. “I really would like to know why you ask.”

It was as if he wished to say something but only if the circumstances were right.

“It’s not an inheritance,” Nat said.

Mr. Atkins frowned. “I know that,” he said, his voice with a flat edge.

Nat wanted to tell Atkins. Maybe it would shake something loose. But Becca . . . he couldn’t.

“Just let me know if anything comes to you,” he said, and walked down the stairs to the path.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

N
at was sitting at his desk at the hospital the next morning, his forehead propped in the palm of his right hand. His skin looked pale, ashy. A lock of unwashed black hair had fallen over his fingers. The sounds of the hospital—the alarm of IV pumps, the chattering of nurses, and the occasional bark of manic laughter or cry of psychic pain—babbled outside his door.

I have to sleep better
, he said to himself.
I’m not thinking right.

The glow of his MacBook reflected Nat’s puzzled face. He had the Google home page open, but he’d completely forgotten what he was supposed to be searching for.

He was trying to remember something. Something he had to do.

What was it? It had to do with Becca, he remembered. Did he need to check on her history? No, something to do with numbers.

Numbers. What goddamn numbers?

“Got it,” he said. Fifty-two: 52 Garmin Street. The darkened house that Becca had visited on her catatonic tour of Northam.

He searched for
White Pages
, then hit on
Address & Neighbors
. He entered the street address into the little box, typed in
Northam, MA
and hit
Find
.

The result came back quickly:
Mark and Elizabeth Post
.

Nat stared at the screen for a moment, then clicked the little red button and the page disappeared.
How much do you want to bet that Mark and Elizabeth were Margaret Post’s parents?
He didn’t even bother to look any further. He knew it was true.

The Posts were staying at their Northam home while they
filled out the paperwork for claiming their daughter’s body, got her affairs in order, dealt with the college and their attorneys. And, no doubt, consulted with said attorneys on what was sure to be a monster lawsuit.

Nat hunched his shoulders as a ripple of sheer dread seemed to wash through him. Why had Becca gone to 52 Garmin Street while seemingly in a kind of trance? Why was she scouting the dead girl’s house?

Should he be getting a second opinion on all this? Should he bring Dr. Greene in, let her talk to Becca, walk it around a bit? But what could he say?
By the way, there’s the possibility that the girl has been hypnotized by, uh, you know,
some outside force
. Just thought I’d mention it
? Not only would they stare at him in shock and pity—as he himself would have only a couple weeks before—but they would immediately take Becca out of his care as well. They would diagnose her as delusional and possibly psychotic and put her on antidepressants and maybe a mood stabilizer. Lithium. Valproate. He knew exactly the course of treatment that would be followed. And it would mean Becca would sit in her room and talk very slowly about how her oatmeal was that morning.

If that didn’t work, they’d consider electroconvulsive therapy. A few rounds of ECT to shock her brain waves back into neat little rows. What if they determined that she had chopped her own bedroom door to bits, and was growing fond of sharp instruments? Straight into a state hospital for three days, minimum. Chapter 123, section 12, of the General Laws of Massachusetts: “Emergency restraint and hospitalization of persons posing risk of serious harm by reason of mental illness.” He’d used it on a few patients himself.

Wasn’t it better to work the case himself? Bringing in a colleague would be to leave Becca alone, defenseless. That he couldn’t do.

At least admit there were things here he couldn’t completely explain. Begin there. That was the only way to fully protect her.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

R
amona was watching one of those
Real Housewives
shows. It was a morning marathon, and she’d lost track of which city she was watching now: Was it Orange County or Beverly Hills? The people were definitely vulgar and very tan either way.

The fridge powered on with its sudden, seizing noise, and Ramona settled deeper into Zuela’s leather couch. The woman bought quality, Ramona thought. The phone rang every other day with
A1 Collections
on the caller ID or some other creditor looking for money, but that didn’t stop Zuela. Her TV was Sony—Ramona had tried in vain to convince her that Panasonic now made better electronics, but you couldn’t tell the woman anything. Sony had been king in the ’90s, when her tastes seemed to have frozen in place, and so Sony it was. The couch was probably from Macy’s. Her luggage was two pieces of leather Louis Vuitton. That was all she owned. Zuela could go to Russia in October and she’d fit every damn thing she needed in those two pieces. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t go.