The Binding (6 page)

John looked and saw a box of animal crackers on a shelf next to a Spanish dictionary with a torn white cover.

“She was killed on Tuesday. What day would this have been, Ms. Best?”

“Last Friday.”

John made a note.

“So I knocked on her door.”

He watched her. So easy to see when someone was telling the truth. They forget about you. They go back to the moment.

“And I heard something inside. I thought I heard Margaret talking to herself. Before I knocked. Over and over again.”

“Saying what?”

Ramona looked out the window down at the quad.

“I don’t want you to tell her parents that she was a crazy person.”

“I won’t.”

Ramona sighed. “She was saying . . .” Her eyes came up to his.
“ ‘I will not . . . submit.’ ”

John swallowed.

“To you?” he said finally.

Ramona shook her head.

“To someone in the room?”

Ramona shook her head again.

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw.”

Ramona’s eyes were slanted down to the floor, as if she didn’t want to witness again those things head-on, as if she wanted to keep them
there
, off to the side, safely away from her. She hugged her arms to her chest and shivered.

“I knocked and said, ‘It’s me, Ramona, you dumb cow, let me in.’ And then I heard her voice again, but I couldn’t make out the words. She was starting to freak me out. I tried the handle again, and when I looked down, I saw something in the doorway.”

John waited. Ramona Best wasn’t in this dorm room anymore; she had, for all intents and purposes, left her body and was
now seven days before, staring at something in Margaret Post’s doorway.

She said something. John leaned in.

“Excuse me?”

“
Salt.
”

“Salt?”

“She had poured a line of salt across the doorway.”

“Why?”

Ramona’s eyes went big. “Do I look like I know? What, all black people know ’bout potions and powders?”

John sat back, flustered. “No, no, no, it’s not that. I mean . . .” He collected his thoughts. “Did you ask her then about the salt?”

“I couldn’t. She opened the door. She was pale and she looked . . . out of it. And the door was open enough for me to see past her. There was no one else there. Whatever
it
was, it was in the room with her.”

John made a note. “So what happened next?”

“Nothing. She didn’t come out of that room for the next three days. Wouldn’t answer her phone or e-mails. Something had her scared to death.”

“But then, on January second, she went into town.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you know why?”

Head back and forth. No.

“Did she go into town often?”

“Once in a while. We would catch a movie at the Northam Twin. They have double features on Wednesday nights, old classics and oddball movies that the owner likes. A lot of students here go.”

John closed his notebook. “I get that you don’t know why she went to town. But what do you think? If you had to take a guess.”

Ramona hugged herself tighter, looking at the floor. “I’m sure
I don’t know. And furthermore, based on what happened, I don’t
want
to know.”

John took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair, tried on a friendly smile. “You graduate this year?” he said.

She looked at him warily. “Why?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“Yeah, well, cops don’t just ‘make conversation.’ ”

“I do.”

“Yes, I graduate this year.”

John nodded. “And you don’t want anything to mess that up?”

Ramona looked up, and he saw a kind of feral ambition in her eyes. And fear, too. “Nope,” she said.

He looked at her, his eyes steady. “I understand that.”

The young woman didn’t respond, but her eyes said enough:
Do you, Detective? Do you really?

CHAPTER SEVEN

N
at slept until eleven that Friday morning. Today was his day off in the flex schedule and his condo was nice and heated, so he lingered, staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic noises from the street outside. Finally, still dressed in a pair of shorts and a ratty T-shirt, he got up and rooted around in the cupboards until he found the pancake mix, added water, whipped up three extra-light flapjacks—he hated anything burned—and was relaxing with a large mug of tea, looking at the clouds raking over the top of Grant’s Hill, when the doorbell rang.

It was John Bailey, dressed in street clothes. His reddish-blond hair was tucked under a Red Sox cap, his growing belly slipped over a brown leather belt, and he was wearing a thin leather jacket for such a frigid day. The man was always warm.

“What’s up, stranger?” John said.

“Hey. Come on in. Pancakes?”

“Nah, I just had an Egg McMuffin. I’ll take some coffee, though.”

“You have to wait a few minutes then, as I need to make it.”

John walked in, nodding at the exposed brick hallway, the clean hardwood floors, and the minimalist leather furniture of the apartment. His broad farm-boy face still took it all in every time with mock wonder, though he’d been here a hundred times.

“Amazing,” he said. “Simply goddamn amazing.”

“Stop it, old man,” Nat said, affecting the accent of some English actor. “It’s just a little
pied-à-terre
.”

“I’ll never get my head around how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“This! You’re single. It’s eleven thirty a.m. and you’re just getting up. You bang broads and then never see them again. How do you do this?”

Nat laughed and lifted the bag of Starbucks Pike Place Roast to see how much was inside. Enough for a few cups. He poured out a heaping portion into the coffeemaker and went to sit on the leather couch facing the big picture window.

“How, old man? Absence of money,” he said.

“Yeah, right. That didn’t stop Leah.”

“You’re the one who proposed to her, dummy.”

John threw up his hands. “But she accepted. Why’d she do that? Bitch.”

“Well, she made up for it in the divorce settlement.”

John gave a big sigh.

“So what got into you last night?” Nat said, taking a long pull on his tea.

“Meaning?” John said, turning his beaming cop face toward Nat.

“The texts.”

“Huh?” John stared with complete incomprehension.

“Warning me to watch myself? General doom and gloom? Hello? The Northam Suicide Notes . . .”

“Ohhh, oh,
that
. Man, listen. I was just messing around. It had been a long day. And that Margaret Post case . . .” He blew out a breath. “Well . . . the whole department is spooked. Let me just say that.”

“Were there reports of someone prowling around?”

John gave Nat a quick sidelong glance, then looked away. It was the
I wish I could but I can’t
look that cops gave their friends.
You’re not part of the club, pal. Sorry.

“Come on, John, who’re you kidding?! What was it?”

“Nothing, really. False alarm.”

The smell of coffee was wafting out of the kitchen. John sniffed and a look of doglike anticipation came over his big face. “Ahhhhh. It’s ready, bro.”

Nat got up.

“Well, right after you texted,” Nat called from the kitchen, “I had a visitor.”

“No shit. Who?”

Nat didn’t answer. John twisted around and looked at him. Nat gave him the
I wish I could tell you
face right back.

“Awwww, don’t be a baby. Tell me.”

“Doctor-client confidentiality.”

“Horseshit.”

Nat came over and handed John the coffee, black, in a chipped mug.

“Actually, maybe we should talk about it. What do you know about Chase Prescott?”

The innocent look of anticipation on John’s face vanished and was replaced by horrified disgust. “Oh God. Dude, don’t even talk about that guy.”

“Why?”

“There are things . . . The whole family’s bad news.”

Nat sat down and stretched his legs out to the coffee table. “Drugs?”

“No, not drugs.”

“Domestics?”

John took a sip and leaned back into the leather with a sigh. “ ‘Domestics’? You sound like some old fart who listens to the police scanner for kicks.”

Nat raised his eyebrows.

John shook his head, once. “Not ‘domestics.’ ”

“Listen, John,” Nat said. “I need to know this. For reasons that are none of your concern. And don’t get ethical on me. It’s not like you.”

Actually, it was, but Nat liked to goad him anyway.

“Why do you want to know? Chase Prescott’s dead, and good fucking riddance. The only ones left are the father and the daughter.”

“How’d you know about that?”

John looked at Nat. “How’d
you
know about that?”

Nat shrugged. A game of chicken.

A school bus came lumbering up Grant Street, grinding gears as it climbed the hill’s steep gradient. It passed under the condo window and made a left onto Porter. John watched it go.

“All right. What if I told you that there’s been at least one violent death in that family every generation for the last hundred years?”

Either it was Nat’s imagination or the light in the room changed. He looked out at the mountain, and a thick patch of cloud was coming over, obscuring the sun.

“You’re kidding,” he said quietly.

John said nothing.

“Why haven’t I heard about it?” Nat said.

“My guess? Some of them were covered up. Your accidental drownings, or bad reactions to medicine. Nothing was accidental, believe me. But the family has money and friends in town. Or had. Once upon a time.”

It was worse than Nat thought. A hundred years of mental illness, no skipped generations? That was impressive. And scary.

“Were any of them treated?”

“What am I, the town historian?” John said.

“Whoa. Why are you getting all bent out of shape?”

“Sorry. Long night. Listen, all I know is department scuttlebutt. Cops talk. Certain houses in this town get bad reputations. And the word on the Prescotts is that the family is cursed and has been since, like, forever.”

“Any theories as to why?”

“Please don’t tell me you’re getting mixed up with them. Are you, Nat? I’m telling you, do not do that.”

“Uh-huh. I love it when you get all superstitious and then order me around, one right after the other. Asshole.”

John shook his head, turning his back toward the window. His shoulders slumped, and he looked worriedly at the hardwood floor. Nat watched him. It was so unusual for the guy to be depressed that it made Nat edgy just to see it. Finally, Nat leaned over and slapped John heartily on the back, leaving his arm draped around his best friend’s broad shoulders.

“What’s with you? Weird texts in the middle of the night, worrying about my health. Shoot me straight. Are you in love with me?”

“Shut up,” John said.

“You can tell me. It’ll be just between us girls. You should know that I have feelings for you, too.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” John said, and they both laughed, the odd tension dispelling for a moment. Nat was glad. If good yeoman John Bailey was tense, something wasn’t right with the world. John was Nat’s reservoir of positive feelings about humanity; if John ran empty on optimism, Nat felt everything around him might shrivel up and die.

His hand lingered on John’s shoulder, and he gripped his neck, giving him a crooked smile.

John laughed again. Nat dropped his hand.

“But I did get a call there once, at the Prescott residence,” John said, and now his voice was quiet.

“Yeah?”

John took a sip of coffee. “Yeah. Report of a prowler.”

“When?”

“After the oldest kid—what was his name?”

“William.”

John was about to go on, but turned to stare at Nat, sharp-
eyed. Nat only smiled. John continued: “Yeah, William. But this was before Chase went on his little killing spree. I was working nights, and it came in at the beginning of my shift. Eight o’clock.”

Nat watched him, expecting the punch line.
And when I looked through the window, I saw Maggie Voorhees sucking you off, Thayer.

But he looked at John’s face and somehow that wasn’t going to happen, that the story wouldn’t end in a joke or some anticlimax. Nat had the strange feeling—like last night, when he expected Prescott’s tale to turn out to be an elaborate hoax, but he’d recited one gruesome detail after another—that there was a pattern to the whole thing, one that insisted the grimmest possible option would always come true. The normal variation of life was missing. Everything would lead downward into darkness, remorselessly.

John had pulled up to the Prescott house in his patrol car, stopped in front, and climbed the wooden steps toward the house, which was perched up on a little embankment. The curtains in the windows downstairs and upstairs were pulled shut. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He’d knocked several times, then climbed down the porch stairs . . . when something made him turn quickly and look at the house again. He spotted a slight movement of the curtain in an upstairs window. Someone clearly had been looking out. John went and rang the bell again and pounded on the door, but without a reported emergency, he wasn’t authorized to break it down.

So he’d gone around back. The weeds along the sides of the house were grown over, and pricker bushes, as they called them in Northam, had grown over the flagstones leading to the backyard. He had to turn sideways and smash his way through with his flashlight. The backyard had been nice once, with a large veranda,
but the big oaks were dead, their bark gray, the towering branches leafless.

He’d found Chase Prescott back there, shirtless, dressed only in jeans. Chase was staring off into the elms—the property went back a good hundred yards. John called out to him, saying “Police!” but Chase never moved.

“I came up behind him,” John now said. “His chest was rising and falling and he was breathing hard. He seemed to be in a kind of trance, that’s how I’d describe it. I asked him if he’d called 911.

“He never turned. He was
listening
to something. When I got round in front of him, I saw that his chest and belly were covered with scratch marks.”