The Binding (7 page)

Nat frowned. Again the feeling came over him:
Nothing will turn out good again, nothing.

“Well, the only sound was the wind blowing through the tops of those dead oaks. But then I began to hear something else. Sounded like someone moaning, but far away. I couldn’t place it, and Chase Prescott was so out of it I thought he was tripping on—what’s that stuff? The Indians use it.”

“Peyote.”

“Yeah, Chase looked like what I imagined someone who’d just done a big dose of that was. No smell of liquor, no meth teeth.”

“The moaning,” Nat said. “Did you figure that out?”

A look of disgust passed over his face.

“Yeah. The dog.”

“A . . . Rottweiler.”

John looked over at Nat, his eyes a bit hooded, unsurprised now that Nat knew intimate details of the Prescott family’s life.

“Yeah. Chase raised Rottweilers. Loved ’em, as I found out later. He wasn’t so good with human beings, but he bought prime steak for the Rotts at Stop & Shop every Friday.”

“The dog had scratched up Chase.”

John nodded.

“Where was the dog?”

John looked out at Grant’s Hill.

“Buried.”

Nat’s eyes went wide.

“I followed the sound to a little mound with fresh dirt in it, near one of the oaks. Chase didn’t dig the hole deep enough. I stood over that mound, and I could hear the dog screaming for its life, the oxygen going. He’d buried it alive.”

John loved dogs. If his son, Charlie, hadn’t been allergic, Nat knew, he’d have two at least. Charlie had bigger problems than dog-hair allergies; he had Heller’s syndrome, which meant he couldn’t talk. His brain just didn’t work normally—there were hallucinations, loss of motor skills (very mild in Charlie’s case), and social impairment, which meant that Charlie had zero friends. Nat had studied the rare syndrome when Charlie was diagnosed, and found its mysteries, and its lack of any hope for a cure, intensely frustrating. Thank God the kid had avoided the worst symptoms of the disorder—the loss of bowel control and the low-functioning intelligence. But, with Heller’s, you don’t want to add allergies to the mix.

John went on: “I ran around the yard until I found a shovel leaning up against the back door. I was yelling at Chase the whole time to help me, but he just stood there, staring into the trees. I’d grabbed the shovel and ran back and dug the fucking thing out. Meanwhile, the little mound had gone quiet. I got down to what was an old apple crate he must have pulled up from the basement, and I knew the thing was dead. Had to be. No movement or nothing. Then I had to fill in the hole I just dug. And the whole time it was all I could do not to go over to Chase and brain him with the shovel.”

“He never moved?”

“Never. I didn’t bother calling the EMTs. I wanted to let him
suffer a little longer, to be honest. Found his jacket, put it on him, and put him in the back of my patrol car, took him to Mass Memorial for a psych evaluation. You weren’t there yet.”

He would have been at grad school in Boston. “What was the diagnosis?”

“When we got to the door, he had his head in his hands. Crying. Son of a bitch. He never gave a reason, but he checked out as normal and walked away three days later. Pled guilty to animal cruelty and served, I don’t know, I think he got two months.”

Nat picked up John’s near-empty cup and walked back to the kitchen. Animal cruelty, as any armchair psychiatrist knew these days, was a marker for early disturbances. But that’s in childhood, not when someone was in his late twenties, like Chase Prescott. Strange.

When he came back, John looked up expectantly.

“Quid pro quo?” Nat said as he sat down.

“Yeah, whatever that means.”

“It means I owe you some info, old man. So, yeah, Walter Prescott came to see me last night. Said his daughter, Becca, was showing some of the same signs Chase and her brother showed before they . . . went off the rails.”

John stared at Nat, his face puffy. “So you’re going over there.”

“Yeah.”

John looked out at the clouds. “Can I talk you out of it?”

Nat laughed. “Have you ever been able to talk me out of anything?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
t five thirty p.m., after saying good-bye to John earlier and getting some work done on his laptop, Nat got into his Saab 900 and headed toward the Shan. It had begun to snow, that kind of light windless squall where the flakes are falling so slowly and soundlessly that it really does seem like an enormous goose-down pillow is being shaken loose a mile up in the air.

Nat didn’t know the Shan well and had to use the Google Maps app to get to the address. The map showed the house fronting Endicott Street, with a large lot behind it, backed by a stream that ran diagonally across the back of the property. The houses nearby were widely spaced.

When the Irish had come to Northam in the mid- and late 1800s to work in the factories, they’d made the Shan their own. Many of the landed gentry who lived in the area had divided up their properties, sold out to the grimy-fingered men who would throw up the narrow houses for the immigrants, and left for Nat’s side of town, where they built even bigger houses. Only a few of the old-stock landowners had stayed put, and were more tied to the land than any Southern plantation owner, some with their own family graveyards on the property.

Nat went over Bogg’s Hill and the rusting railroad tracks that separated the Shan from Northam proper and immediately got lost. The blue Google Maps dot that tracked his car wandered through fields and across streams as if it had a mind of its own, and he had to pull over twice to figure out where the hell he was.
Finally, he asked a bunch of kids playing street hockey on the wet asphalt where he could find Endicott Street, and after giving him hard Irish stares, they pointed him in the right direction. He arrived in front of the house just shy of six p.m., as the early dusk was falling over the trees and the white snow-covered lawns.

As Nat pulled up, he saw the house rising against the black-furrowed storm clouds that were streaming west. It was an old, spiky Victorian, painted black and green, with a single turret coated in dark panels, like a malevolent Fabergé egg.
But houses can’t be malevolent
, Nat thought. It’s the relationship of the physical structure and its occupants that can press itself into the passerby’s mind. When one senses an air of decay, two-foot-high grass and broken windows, that tells you that maybe the children raised inside were treated with the same kind of neglect and violence. Or a house where the lawn edge is straight as a razor and there isn’t even a stray pebble out of place could indicate an overabundance of discipline.

Still, 96 Endicott did give off a whiff of something unclean, Nat realized as he walked up the path to the porch. Who paints a house black with green trim? Even the color that the Prescotts had chosen, that deep hue—Nat recognized it as what they called Dartmouth green—was the darkest on the market. It was picked by an owner who secretly wished to paint his house all black but knew that his neighbors will frown and whisper,
Do we have a devil worshipper in our midst?
, so he went with one degree above that with the darkest green in the hardware shop. Its light-sucking pigment made the looming mass of the house seem heavier and more massive against the sky as Nat climbed the steps. As he got to the top, he realized the porch and first floor were half hidden behind some spiky uncategorized trees that had started to grow wild.

The only other house visible on the street was a hundred
yards away.
Who called 911 to begin with?
Nat wondered, remembering John’s story about Chase Prescott.
Who could hear the dog screaming?

He rang the bell, and it seemed instantly that the double-wide door opened and a figure stood in the half darkness. Nat recognized the general shape of Walter Prescott, though the light was so bad his head was wrapped in a kind of gray murk.

“Mr. Prescott?”

“Yes?”

Prescott’s features slowly swam into view. He stood there, staring at Nat, as if he had no idea who the psychiatrist was but was too afraid to ask him to leave. The old man’s eyes darted uncertainly.

“It’s Dr. Thayer.”

Nothing.

“You asked me to come by?”

With this, Prescott’s eyes found Nat’s and stared at him in terror.

“To come by? Whatever for?”

Nat lowered his head, as if to say,
Are you serious, man?
“To talk to Becca. Your daughter?”

Prescott’s lips moved soundlessly, as if he was repeating to himself what Nat had just said, or translating it from some other language. Then he looked up.

“Oh, Dr.
Thayer
. Of course. Come in.”

Prescott pulled the door wide, and it swung back soundlessly. Nat walked into the echoing foyer, whose ceiling was lost above him in the gloom. There were no lights on in the first floor as far as he could see. The gleaming dark hardwoods of the foyer had patches of dusky light playing over them, illumination that came from a small stained glass window to the right of the door in the shape of a diamond. In front of Nat, there was a long hallway,
with only a few feet of floorboards visible before they merged into blackness. To his left, a stairway with an elaborately carved railing zigzagged up to the second floor.

“Are you feeling all right?” Nat said, turning to Prescott.

Prescott shuffled around Nat in halting steps and reached out to the front door. When he closed it, the resulting sound boomed through the foyer and into the house’s interior, a kind of sonic echo that revealed passageways Nat couldn’t even see in the dimmed light. He’d never heard a house sound so dead, as if there were no furniture, no stuffed leather to reflect the sound waves as they traveled through the darkness.

Nat heard locks slam shut and the screeching of metal. Prescott was sliding a large metal rod along its sleeve. He forced the head of it through a circular iron latch that was bolted to the black door frame. When Prescott was done, he turned to Nat, his yellow teeth visible.

“I . . . I just woke up. I was up all night last night.”

“Everything okay?”

Prescott was staring at Nat, who had the odd impression that the old man was afraid he was going to attack him, his entire body ready to flinch if Nat made any sudden gesture.

“We haven’t had visitors here since Chase . . .”

Nat waited. “Yes. Since Chase . . .”

“Since Chase . . .”

Prescott’s lips worked, and the eyes seemed to protrude even farther out of their sockets. He dropped his head quickly and whispered something to himself. It didn’t sound like
died
, but a word or two full of soft sibilants. Whatever it was, it seemed to end the thought adequately for him, because he immediately headed left toward the stairs.

“Can we get some light?” Nat said. “Don’t want to fall and break my neck. My insurance sucks.”

Nat heard, rather than actually witnessed, the old man stop.
Then Prescott came back out of the darkness and whispered to Nat, leaning over to make himself heard. “I don’t, usually.” His eyes were pleading.

“Can I ask why not?”

“It . . . attracts attention.”

“From
whom
?”

The old man smiled, as if Nat knew the answer. “Whoever might wish this place harm.”

With that, Prescott went for the stairs, passing beyond one ray of sunlight and disappearing into the darkness except for a pale smudge and the sound of his feet whisking up the few first steps. Nat stumbled after the ghostly figure.

His foot kicked on the bottom of the stairs, and the darkness rose up in front of his face as he pitched forward. He caught the railing with his right hand before the polished wood knocked out his front teeth, then straightened up, took a deep breath, and slowly brought his next foot up. He reached a wide landing after three slow steps, then turned right with the railing and started up again.

The darkness slowly thickened as Nat climbed the stairs. He could hear the sound of Prescott’s feet above him and then silence as the old man reached the top and moved off down the second-floor hallway into the interior of the house.

This is bananas
, Nat thought. It was as if the house were weighing on Prescott, as if he were afraid of the wood and glass that made it up.

Nat hurried after him, suddenly afraid to be left alone in that echoing, malevolent house. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw a light glowing dimly at the end of the hall. He started down it unsteadily, distance and depth seeming to have been altered in the murkiness. When he took a step, he wasn’t sure if he would land on a plank of wood or drop downward into the basement. As he shuffled on, the light ahead seeming to grow no
brighter, Nat felt ahead with his left hand. He could make out . . .
things
on the walls next to him, but he felt an urgency to get down the hall and only glanced once to his left. Through the dimness he perceived something, a paleness, welling up at him. He stopped and stared, and then the features came clear and it was a face, a chalky face with long, flaccid white cheeks and eyes that seemed blacker than the gloom. The eyes regarded him accusingly, and the face seemed to hang in the air, disembodied, no throat below it and only the hint of a hat perched above the severe brow.

A painting, of course, a family portrait of some kind, with a beady eye at the center that was not beautiful but recriminating, with some kind of white bonnet above it. Nat moved away uneasily from it and kept on toward the light and the profile of Prescott, head down, lost in his own thoughts.

Finally, after what seemed like a few minutes but could only realistically have been ten seconds, Nat was standing next to Prescott. The light fixture next to the old man’s face was screwed to the wall at about six feet, the glass yellowed and rimed with dirt.

“This is Becca’s room.”

“Well, let’s go in.”

Prescott shook his head. “I can’t.”

Nat looked at Prescott. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I can’t bear the way she looks at me. She claims she doesn’t know me, Dr. Thayer. If you ever have children, I hope you’ll never experience that look of . . . distaste. I find it unendurable.”