The Binding Read online

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nat 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 shoulde
r, 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.”

  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

  At 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 the
ir 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.