The Binding (3 page)

“Did he get treatment?”

“I made an appointment with a psychiatrist in Boston. A friend of the family. We were scheduled to drive up on Friday. On Thursday, William jumped off the Drammell Bridge.”

Nat had expected something dramatic, but in that little office, it was like a blow to the chest.

He stared for a moment. And then his mind rebelled.
Really?
The rain-swept night, the frightening text messages, the man facing the dark woods, and now the perfect little gothic ending. Was John Bailey outside the door, laughing? Was Walter Prescott just some cop buddy he’d sent in with this macabre story? He looked like an ex-cop. If that bastard John—

But one look at the old man stopped Nat’s thoughts dead. Prescott wasn’t faking anything. In fact, at that moment he looked like he would gladly slip his neck into an executioner’s noose. His neck muscles were strained, and his thin lips were twisted into a false smile that expressed the opposite of mischievous pleasure.

“I’m so sorry,” Nat said.

“And then the same thing happened with Ch—” Prescott said mechanically, his voice falling away.

Nat felt a small chill run through his blood.

“Were you going to say Chase?”

The old man met Nat’s gaze, and suddenly Nat understood.
Nat could feel fear seep into his bloodstream and shoot straight to his heart.
Jesus, he
is
the father of Chase Prescott.

But he had to make sure.

“This is the Chase Prescott who . . .”

Prescott looked down. “Go ahead and say it out loud.”

Nat’s face grew cold.

“Who shot those men in Williamstown.”

“And?”

Prescott seemed to enjoy dragging the details out of Nat. His eyes were lit up.
What pleasure could a man get from hearing about the people his son murdered?
Nat wondered.

“And then killed himself.”

“That’s right. That was my Chase. I knew you’d have heard
some
thing.”

Nat shrugged. His lack of empathy—his weakness at the comforting side of psychiatry, the bedside manner and all that—was showing. He knew it, and it didn’t bother him.

“Hard to avoid. It was very sad. I’m sorry.”

Eight more ticks of the clock.

“Can we—” Nat said, but the old man suddenly raised his head, interrupting.

“Do you know when the Prescotts first came to this area, Dr. Thayer?”

Nat waited.

“A few years before your family, I’d guess,” Prescott said.

This was the second-oldest Massachusetts game, after Old Yankee Social Call: When Did Your People Get Here? It bored Nat to death.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“If you look at that cornerstone in the northwest corner of the hall”—his voice boomed as he pointed, his finger shaking—“you’ll see the first one. Jacob Prescott. 1708.”

Nat didn’t bother following Prescott’s finger. “What happened to Chase?” he said instead.

The name stopped the old man’s rant. His hand dropped to the armchair as he swiveled back around, his body seeming to deflate.

“The same as my eldest son.”

“The insomnia, the night walking, banging his head?”

“Yes.”

“And the conviction you were not his father?”

“Yes. That always came last. Which is why I’m here.”

“And now Becca,” Nat said, the name strange on his lips. “She said the same thing to you?”

Prescott seemed visibly paler.

“This morning. It’s the final sign, Dr. Thayer.”

“We can get to that later. Why don’t you tell me about Chase in the meantime?”

Prescott came around to the front of the chair and sat. He closed his eyes. Four more ticks of the clock. He opened his eyes and began.

“One night back in 2010, about this time of year, I was asleep in my bedroom. It’s on the top floor of our house, three stories up. And I clearly remember that I was dreaming about Korea. I’d been there after the war, ’61 and ’62, a place called Pusan. Cold like you’ve never experienced, Dr. Thayer, colder than the worst winter night you ever lived through around these parts. Once, this Korean peasant came running out of his little hovel carrying some metal thing. I thought it was a bomb. I trained my gun on him and was about to blow his head off—there were saboteurs everywhere, even on the southern side—when I saw that he was carrying a pot. It was hot soup. I nearly killed the son of a bitch.” His eyes were fogged and distant. “Anyway, that night, in my dream, I could even hear the choppers that ferried in those MREs to us out in the field, or carried the officers back to base camp.”
His left hand made a little cutting motion into his right palm. “
Chop. Chop. Chop.
”

The hand continued cutting, but Prescott was silent, still far away. Finally, he snapped back from wherever he’d been.

“Anyway, when I woke up, I saw that the window in my room was open, the one facing back to the woods. The cold air was streaming in. The helicopter sounds were the snapping of the curtains.
How the hell did that get open?
I wondered, and I wrapped a blanket around me and got up to close it. I wasn’t three feet away when I saw the eyes.”

He stopped.

“Chase,” Nat said.

“Yes. Chase. Standing behind the curtains.”

“So, he’d opened the window.”

Prescott dropped his gaze.

Nat could put the rest together easily enough.
So that he could push you out, dear old Dad, when you got close enough.

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said, ‘Who are you in my father’s body?’ Chilling, I can tell you. Not just because of what he said, but because it was an echo of William’s words. The two boys had never sounded that much alike, but just then—”

Prescott gave a visible shudder.

“Chase was . . . stronger than William. A hellion to be honest. Drove a motorcycle that sounded like the coming of the Antichrist when he drove up the street. He raised Rottweilers in a little shed out back from our house. Now, we are not the kind of people who raise Rottweilers, Dr. Thayer. Setters, maybe, or Irish wolfhounds from a good northeastern breeder. But Chase was different. We butted heads, I can tell you. But that boy had grit! He was battling whatever was happening to him, and hard, too.”

They were far beyond any diagnoses now, Nat thought, deep
into Prescott’s grief-dimmed conception of psychiatry and madness. You don’t “battle” chemical imbalances or genetic tendencies.

“Do you understand, Dr. Thayer? William let it take him over, but Chase
fought
.”

“And then he went to Williamstown?”

Prescott winced. “Yes. He said he was going to visit a friend. I didn’t know of any friends he had there. I don’t know what drove him at the end. I didn’t recognize my son. The”—Prescott’s eyes locked on Nat’s—“
illness
had taken him.” The ghastly smile returned.

“You don’t think it was an illness, do you, Mr. Prescott?”

The eyes bore into Nat’s. “No, I do not. I think it was something much more insidious, Dr. Thayer. Much, um, older.”

“Like what?”

Prescott looked away. “I couldn’t say.”

Nat stood up and felt his back muscles ache. He hadn’t realized they’d tensed up until now. The wind seemed to attack the windowpane, and it rattled in its mortar.

“And now you believe your daughter is suffering from the same condition?”

“Yes. But with one difference.” Prescott leaned forward. “It . . . can’t . . . have . . . Becca.”

Prescott sat there, leaning over in his chair. He seemed to be transfixed again. His sick old eyes focused on the eggshell-blue paint of the office, and his lips moved slightly, though he said nothing.

“Mr. Prescott?” Nat said. “Mr.
Prescott
.”

The old man started, his hand rising as if he were grasping at the lip of a cliff’s edge to pull himself up.

“You need to bring Becca to Mass Memorial,” Nat said, enunciating clearly to cut through the man’s mental fog. “I have visiting hours there. I’ll speak with her, and we can get her the treatment she needs.”

“
No!
” Prescott yelled, startling Nat. His voice boomed down the hallway, and Nat heard the echo from the big stone room outside.
No, no, noooooooooo.

Prescott breathed heavily, and his throat worked. “If I let her out of my sight, the same thing will happen to her. Don’t you understand that? I won’t let her leave the house.”

Nat felt the time for gentleness had gone.

“Your sons committed suicide because they went untreated. If you want her to get better—”

“I’ve taken precautions, Dr. Thayer. Very careful precautions.”

Nat stared at the man. He had a vision of a young girl strapped to some kind of medieval halter, up in the attic, being fed slop from her father’s unsteady hand. In his present condition, Prescott seemed capable of almost anything.

“I hope you’re not telling me that you’re restraining her in any way. If you are—”

“I do what I please in my—”

“If you
are
,” Nat said, bearing down on the last word, “this becomes a police matter. Do you understand me?”

The old man stared at Nat like a stubborn child. Nat stared back. Finally, Prescott nodded.

“What do you want me to do for you and your daughter?” said Nat.

“Come and see her. Speak to her. Find out what has taken hold of her mind. Before it’s too late.”

Prescott was more cunning than he let on, Nat thought. Now that he’d hinted that Becca was locked up, Nat had to make sure the girl was okay.

“Today’s, what, Thursday?” Nat said with a sigh. “Will you be home tomorrow?”

Prescott stood up. “If I’m alive tomorrow, Dr. Thayer, I will be waiting for you at 96 Endicott Street.”

CHAPTER THREE

N
at watched Prescott leave on the little TV screen. The old man stepped outside, pulled on his hat, and stared at the woods for a full twenty seconds before starting away left and out of frame. He was heading to Endicott Street on the other side of the Raitliff Woods, the area known as the Shan. Short for Shantytown, a leftover from the waves of Irish immigration in the 1800s. Ancient history—there were some beautiful houses there now.

Nat glanced at the clock: 10:50 p.m. Just ten minutes to go.

Prescott’s story had unnerved him, he admitted to himself. Slightly. As a psychiatrist, he’d lost count of the competing symptoms Prescott’s children—and their father—were presenting. But his son Chase was clearly psychotic at the end. There was no doubt about that.

Nat remembered the murders two years before, the black-and-white photo of the bloodstained sidewalk on the front page of the
Northam News
. He even vaguely recalled the school photo of Chase that had accompanied the article. He had his face tilted back, like Marlon Brando in some ’50s motorcycle movie, with a thick, muscular neck the width of his head, a drift of dirty-blond hair over his face, a wash of stubble over a heavy jaw. Physically, he looked like any of the linemen Nat had shared the halls with at Northam High.

The difference, though, was the eyes. That and the viciousness of the crime was what had kept the picture alive deep in the recesses of Nat’s brain, and he briefly tried to summon the eyes
again. At first, he couldn’t bring Chase back. Couldn’t even remember what color the eyes had been. Then, with a rush of dread, the face came welling up from his memory like some sea creature surfacing from the depths. Chase Prescott had blue eyes like his father’s, but in his newspaper photo, they were filled with a kind of rapturous horror that had struck Nat as beyond strange even then, before he knew the full story. Chase looked like some nineteenth-century opium addict caught by a slumming photographer deep in some sordid den, staring at a vision of complete, engulfing terror, a demon rising six stories high, invisible to everyone but him—and Chase looked as though he welcomed it. Embraced it.

Can you be terrified and utterly joyful at the same time?

Monster of Northam
, read the headline, as Nat recalled.

Madness is not contagious
, he said to himself. Just because her brother was a psychotic didn’t mean that Becca had the same patterns. Maybe her father was a kind of Munchausen’s case, inducing madness in each of his children by turn. Maybe there was a good reason the children had stopped recognizing Prescott: because he had stopped acting like a father to them. But if Becca had one-quarter of what was in her brother Chase’s eyes, she might be doomed to life in one of the few remaining state institutions in Massachusetts.

As eleven p.m. finally rolled around, Nat picked up his briefcase and locked the office. The freezing rain had turned to thick flakes of snow. The moon had now risen, and the clouds that scudded across it looked pale blue with a core of dark, smudged gray. Nat walked fast, eager to get home to his warm condo and his bed. He remembered John’s text and dug in his pocket for his phone. He looked at the message on the screen.

Suicide: Too dark. Cold, cold, cold.

Not funny, old man. Not funny at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
n Friday morning, John Bailey drove along the twelve-foot red wall of Wartham College, its bricks glowing mellow in the midmorning light. John flicked the pages of his notebook while stealing glances at the road. Finding the right page, he noted something written there, then tossed the notebook onto the passenger seat. The name of the girl he was going to see was Ramona Best. She’d been BFFs with the dead girl, Margaret Post.

He wondered if Ramona knew how Margaret had died. God, he hoped not. Even though, as a proud townie, he was supposed to disdain Wartham, resent its airs and the privileged assholes who sent their daughters to it, he still felt protective of the young women who came from all over the world to study there. To know about how Margaret went out . . . Well, that wasn’t something any twenty-one-year-old should be burdened with.

The red wall sweeping by slowly on his right ran around the entire length of the campus, rising and falling with the hills like some Great Wall of Massachusetts. It had been built in the late 1800s, when industrialization hit the town and turned it from a stagecoach stop on the way to Boston or points west into a small, dirty, ambitious city. The Blackstone Canal that linked Worcester and Providence had provided the power, and the locals had remade themselves into entrepreneurs: making wire and manufacturing rifles. That’s what had transformed Northam from a little bumpkin town full of farmers and lawyers into a place of smokestacks and grime: wire and guns.