The Binding (39 page)

Finally, he pulled his gaze from the woods and went back to the door, pulled open the screen door, and gave the wood three hearty raps.

Silence. Then a shuffling. Like feet being dragged on a carpet.

Suddenly John heard a rasping noise as the handle of the
door was being slowly turned. It caught, and then the door swung open. John Bailey lowered his head and peered into the greenish gloom as the door was pulled back.

“Mrs. Godwin, is that you?”

She was standing by the open door, her hands down by her side. She was wearing a white cardigan, a rust-colored turtleneck, and rumpled khakis. She glanced past him out into the street, her eyes startled and fearful.

“Hi, it’s Detective Bailey. Can I come in?”

She said nothing, but turned and walked into the room.

“Now
she’s
gone off the fucking deep end?” Bailey muttered as he followed her inside.

The house smelled of . . . tomato soup. And stale, unwashed flesh.

John walked through the living room, with a stunted Christmas tree in the corner, pine needles dropped to the pomegranate-colored Oriental carpet. He found her in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, staring at the plastic roses in a delicate green vase that served as a centerpiece, as if she’d never seen the things before. A clock on the wall was clicking loudly into the musty air. The kitchen walls seemed to reflect the sound back so that either the ticking or its echo was always hanging in the room.

He sat down in a padded black-and-white chair, the corner of the table between them. There was a white plastic tablecloth with yellow flowers on it, and Mrs. Godwin rested her arms heavily on it.

“Mrs. Godwin, are you okay?” he said.

The woman looked in his direction as if there were no one sitting in his chair.

“Everything good?” he prompted her again.

She nodded once.

“Has anyone come to visit you?”

Her eyes shot up to look at John. “Visit?” she said worriedly.

“Yeah, your kids?” Shit, he didn’t know if they had kids in the
area. “Or neighbors? This can be a tough time.”

“No one’s come. No one needs to come.” There was a light in her eyes now.

“I came to talk about your husband.”

“Everything’s fine,” she said, and a smile spread across her dry lips.

“Fine? I believe you talked to Dr. Thayer . . .”

“Everything,” she said, turning to him with her dry, sagging face, “is fine.”

The clock was ticking, but he thought he heard another sound, a shuffling again. When he waited for the clock strike to fade, it was gone.

Mrs. Godwin watched him.

“No more sightings of your husband?”

Her eyes. They were that of a . . . a hardened person. One of the wiseasses he picked up for phoning in death threats to school or a homeless guy who’d been on the streets for years. A bully’s eyes, maybe.

Again, the sound. It seemed to be coming from the hallway that probably led to the bedrooms in the back of the house. He looked more closely. The hallway was in shadow, with waist-high wood paneling and mint-green paint above it. The only light was coming through the window in the kitchen, dank gray January sunlight. He could swear someone was shuffling, pacing, back there. But it was the barest whisper.

Her eyes followed his.

“Is there anyone else here, Mrs. Godwin?”

The eyelids drooped. “Here?” The smile again.

“In the house.”

Tock. Tick-tock. Tick.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

John studied her. She seemed to be waiting for a blow. She reached up and, with a finger, pulled the rust-colored turtleneck
away from her throat.

“Do you want me to check?” he said.

The house was still now, silent. John’s hand dropped to his lap and inched back toward his gun.

His mouth was dry. There was nowhere safe from the strangeness now. Not even this widow’s house.

The whispering sound again.

“No. Everything is fine.”

John felt his heart thump.

“Just give me the word and I’ll do a check.”

He needed her permission to search the house. But what would he do if he found Chuck Godwin hiding back there in a closet, his face all bashed up from the car accident? What would he do then?

Her eyes swung up to his.
Is this woman a prisoner?
he thought.
What’s keeping her here?

For a wild moment, he wanted out of the house. The image of Charlie flashed into his head. He had to get home, check on the boy. A crazy vision filled his mind: Charlie, his throat cut, trying to say something with the flap of severed pulpy flesh gushing little streams of blood, just like Margaret Post.

Her eyes were filled with an appeal.

“Mrs. Godwin?”

Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

“What is it?”

She swallowed. “No need.”

John sat there. The shuffling had not resumed.

Games. Someone is playing games.

“Is your husband in the house?”

Her look was dead, the eyes of a drowned woman, the eyes filming over from too long in the water.

“You need to leave now,” she said. “Please don’t come here again.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

N
at was walking toward the town square. The journal of Sergeant Godwin was back home, on the arm of the leather couch. He had to get away from it, to clear his head.

The cold assaulted him, sending drafts of frigid air up his pant legs and down the back of his neck. He shivered and increased his pace.

There could be no more doubt after reading the journal. The traveler was here, among them,
in
one of them, if the translator Joseph was right. The feeling of doom that had been lurking in the back of his mind—
Nothing will ever turn out good again
—was now front and center. The only redeeming thing was that his and Becca’s fates were now one. Their ancestors had bound them together, joined their hands in the darkness of the Haitian jungle.

It was as if she were with him now, as if the warmth he felt were coming partly from her touch. The almost physical discomfort he’d always felt when anyone tried to get close to him was gone—he wanted to be near Becca, and he felt that, out there in the ether, was a response from her.
Yes. Now.
He didn’t feel wild or reckless; he felt that he had something he wanted, at all costs, to protect.

He turned on State, choked with shoppers. Must be the post–New Year’s sales, thought Nat, merchants trying to stretch the holidays a couple of weeks. He passed a gaggle of Wartham students and an elderly couple who walked ahead of him with stooped, uncertain steps. Nat thought of Buenos Aires, of getting
away from this black hole of a city in winter. But now he wanted to escape with Becca. And forever.

Nat crossed over State toward the town square, the white steam of his breath blurring his vision. There were more shoppers, a scrum of teenagers weaving through the crowd. As Nat stepped up on the sidewalk, the crowd parted for a moment, and there, sitting on one of the green wrought iron benches at the edge of the park, was Becca Prescott, wrapped in a thick coat, the lower part of her face hidden by a big black-and-red scarf. Nat stopped. He wasn’t surprised or alarmed to see her, or even that he’d picked her out from the hundreds of people walking or resting on this busy square. His mood ticked upward, and he strode toward her, smiling.

She was crying, or had been.

“Becca?” he said, sitting next to her on the bench.

“Yes?”

“Everything okay?”

She nodded her head, then again more vigorously.

“Yes. Yes, Nat?”

It was the first time she’d said his name without prompting. It sounded strange and wonderful to his ears.

“What happened?” he said, moving closer to her on the thin struts of the bench.

“I remembered,” she said, tears glittering in her eyes.

“You . . . What did you remember?”

Her gaze sharpened. Nat followed her eyes and saw only Hartigan’s liquor store across the street and the long wool coats of Northam citizens striding past it, mixed in with the bright down jackets of the Wartham girls.

“I saw my brother. Chase.”

Nat frowned. “You saw him
here
?”

“No,” she said, laughing. God, he’d never heard her really laugh before, he thought; never heard this light rill escaping so
naturally from her mouth. “Chase is dead. I know that. What I remembered was him giving me a ride on his shoulders when I was just eight or nine. I
saw
it, Nat.”

“Okay.”

“We were walking down State Street. That’s why I had to come out and look at it again. We were right there”—she pointed with her finger just to the left of Hartigan Liquors’s front window, stocked with bottles of every color—“and it was Easter time and I was wearing a new kelly green dress, and Chase wanted to carry me on his shoulders. To show me off, he said. My father . . .”

She turned to face him. Nat studied her brown eyes, as clear and as happy as he’d ever seen them.
Could she have been released?
he thought.
Could she be free from the thing that haunted her?

“Walter Prescott, my
father
.” And another tear escaped her eye, but Nat saw that she was crying for happiness.

“Exactly,” Nat said. “Your father.”

“My father said to Chase: ‘If you think you’re strong enough.’ And Chase let out this little laugh, like,
Are you kidding me?
And he lifted me up.” Becca slowly raised her hand and touched it to the side of her arm. “I could feel it, Nat. I could feel the pressure of his hand. Just a minute ago. I remembered it like it had just happened.”

Nat shook his head. “That’s . . . terrific.”

“And he picked me up and we walked down there.” She pointed to Mrs. Cathay’s Ice Cream Shoppe, which had been on the corner of State and Prince forever. It had four-foot cardboard candy canes pasted to the doorway, along with lots of silver tinsel and a smattering of blue Christmas decorations left over from the holidays. Nat smiled.

Her mouth fell open slightly. “My father called it promenading. We were
promenading down State Street
. And I had a mint
chocolate chip, a child’s size. It cost a dollar twenty-five, and my father paid.”

“Sugar cone or regular?”

She laughed again. “Sugar. Who would eat a regular?”

Nat laughed, and she joined in. Her hand reached for his. “I know they’re dead, but now they’re mine again. I miss them, but missing them is so much better than . . .” A dark cloud seemed to pass across her face. “Nat, maybe I didn’t die. I’m here with you, right?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “Pinch me.”

He did, on her thigh. The touch sent a shock of pleasure up his arm.

“Ow!” she yelped, and the bright laughter made her cheeks bunch and spilled the tears in her eyes out sideways.

Maybe I was all wrong
, Nat thought.
Maybe everything will be okay.

But then he remembered Captain Markham and the names of the squadron and he looked away.

“I have to bring you home,” he said.

“No!” she said, her voice burbling with suppressed laughter. “Let’s get ice cream. Cherry vanilla for me.”

Her cheeks were reddened by the cold and the tips of her ears. She seemed, finally, to feel as young as she was. Nineteen. She looked nineteen for the first time.

“Okay. Ice cream. Then home.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

a
fter he dropped Becca at her house and checked the perimeter, Nat headed back to town, to the grocery store near his condo—who knew you still had to shop for orange juice and coffee when the world was falling apart? he thought. After he’d finished his shopping, he drove to the Northam Museum to have a talk with Atkins. It took longer than he expected, and he didn’t emerge from the museum entrance until after one p.m. As he emerged, his eyes fell on a stack of the
Northam News
piled in a plastic display case. He picked a copy off the stack
. Disappearance of Lawyer Mystifies Officials
, read the headline.

There were now two people and one corpse missing. The body of Chuck Godwin, the lawyer whose widow had come to visit Nat, had disappeared. Elizabeth Dyer, that unpleasant woman he’d met at the morgue, hadn’t been to work in two days. And another morgue employee, Jimmy Stearns, was AWOL, though there seemed to be less concern about him. Judging by his address in a bleak part of the Shan, Nat guessed that Jimmy’s friends didn’t have the attention span or the clout to get the city to notice the man’s disappearance. But Elizabeth Dyer had been someone of substance and, more than that, a woman who hadn’t missed a day of work in three solid years.

Blood had been found at the morgue where the two worked, and there were fears that Stearns had kidnapped—or killed—his fellow employee, then disappeared. The chances that they’d “run off together,” as one police spokesman put it, seemed low. “We don’t know what happened, we just want to talk with them,” the
cop had told the newspaper. Their credit cards and ATM cards hadn’t been used; Elizabeth’s car was still parked in the morgue parking lot. Odd. There was no connection made to the Margaret Post case, though it had to be on people’s minds. There was far too much violence happening in Northam, relative to its size. It was starting to sound like Hartford or Boston.

There was a separate story on the Post murder. Her parents were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer, with the city chipping in an additional $25,000. A Northam PD spokesman was quoted as saying the investigation was ongoing and that no persons of interest had yet been identified. The city was clearly desperate to be seen as taking the case seriously. Nat guessed the $25,000 was just the beginning.

Nat looked up and down the snowy street, almost empty of pedestrians. Three Wartham students were hurrying home to their dorms, bags tucked under their arms, their chins tucked deep in blue-and-white scarves, the school colors.

Nat pulled out his phone, thumbed to the recent calls, and hit a name.