The Binding

by E. Z. Rinsky

  “When she came in in person I couldn’t say no. But I ignored the emails . . . I . . . I was pretty sure she was on drugs.”

  I nod.

  “So any way you could check that email?” I ask. “Tell us her last name?”

  Elaine sighs and pulls out her phone.

  “Who knows if I still have it . . .” she says, scrolling. “You’re lucky I never delete emails . . . let’s see. Carlson. Becky Carlson. That’s her new last name. Don’t have any info besides that. But at least a few years ago she lived in Pueblo, about an hour drive south of here.”

  I exhale with relief. Feel like a dentist after a successful extraction.

  “Thanks so much for your time.” I stand up and tap Courtney on the shoulder. “Let’s go, we got what we need,” I tell him.

  Courtney waves good-bye.

  “Thanks to both of you for your time.”

  “Help her if you can,” Elaine says, still sitting. “But please be gentle. She’s already been in more pain than I can imagine.”

  Courtney drives while I search for Becky Carlson on his phone. We’ve done this drive before, five years ago. Drove straight from Denver International Airport through Colorado Springs, through Pueblo, right to Beulah—a nothing town with under a thousand people. The landscape outside seems unfamiliar though; whether that’s because I was drinking so heavily last time, or because last time it was winter. Guess I could down a couple Miller Lites as an experiment, see if that brings things into focus.

  “Sampson keeps calling,” I tell Courtney. “Not as frequently, but twelve times today already.”

  “If you accidentally pick up, theoretically he could track us by cell tower pings. Text him to stop calling us. That we agreed to bring them to him by four on Friday.”

  I send the text.

  Please stop calling. We agreed to bring books by four on Friday. We’ll call you if anything changes.

  That seems to work, for the moment. According to the white pages site there are three Carlsons that live in Pueblo: R, Sam and L. Only Sam has an address listed.

  “R could be Rebecca . . .” I say out loud. “Or Sam could be her husband.”

  “Try calling R first,” Courtney orders.

  “Call? And say what? Just wondering if you’re the girl whose whole family was murdered twenty years ago? Wanna grab a soft serve? Let’s check out the one with the address first. Maybe Sam is her husband.”

  “I don’t want to waste time,” he says. “I want to drive back to the red house after this. See if Oliver’s been back there since.”

  I reach into Courtney’s bag and pull out the GPS tracker. The chip hasn’t moved.

  “Pretty sure if he’d been there he would have taken Rico.”

  “If you have a better lead, I’m open to suggestions.”

  Pueblo starts looking vaguely familiar once we pull off the highway. It’s a blue-collar city, built around a now-defunct steel mill. Lot of foreclosed homes, trailer parks, fast food drive-throughs, as well as a disproportionate number of gun stores and marijuana dispensaries.

  Without explicitly admitting that Courtney’s right, I dial the number for R Carlson. Rings six times.

  “Hello . . . ?”

  I’m almost sure it’s her immediately. The surprise in her voice tells me this phone rarely rings: few relatives and friends. And I think Elaine was right: hoarseness, exhaustion, long drawn out syllables likely indicative of drug use.

  I summon my gentlest, least threatening voice and decide to say everything like it’s a question. To more perceptive people, it’s an annoying conversational tic, but the subliminal uncertainty you project often puts unstable personalities at ease.

  “Hello? Becky?”

  “Who . . . is this?”

  I give Courtney a thumbs-up. If her name wasn’t Becky she would have said so.

  “My name is Andrew? I’m calling from FedEx in Colorado Springs? We have a package here addressed for Becky Carlson, with a phone number, but what must be the wrong address, because we’ve had three failed deliveries. We’ll hold it for you for a week if you want to come pick it up. Otherwise we’ll have to return to sender?”

  Short pause.

  “Package?”

  “Looks like a warehouse—probably something you ordered from Amazon or something, and just mistyped your address. Anyway like I said, you can come pick it up from our central office in Colorado Springs? We’re on 53 East—”

  “I actually live in Pueblo now . . . I must have put in an old address . . . without thinking.”

  I feel guilty. This is too easy.

  This poor girl.

  “Ohhh,” I say. “Wow, yeah that’s quite a drive. Listen, I can probably get another delivery attempt sent out tomorrow. What’s your new address?”

  “Um. 157 Mesa Road, apartment 4J. 80241.”

  “157 Mesa,” I repeat, as I jot it down. “4J. 80241. Got it. I’ll get that sent out to you ASAP. Have a great day.”

  “Okay.”

  I hang up and immediately type the address into Google maps. We’re only seventeen minutes away.

  “Stop at a bakery on the way,” I say. “Gonna have to be delicate with this one.”

  157 Mesa Road is part of a huge low-income apartment complex. Dozens of identical white stucco buildings that must contain at least 300 units. This colony makes me only slightly less sad than the prison we were in this morning. We drive around the winding parking lot for ten minutes before finding 157. That phone number was her landline—could tell by the sound of her picking up the receiver—and every lost minute makes me nervous that Becky has left home. As soon as Courtney parks, I grab the pink paper bag filled with baked goods and we slam the doors shut, start up the outdoor staircase.

  “I don’t want to lie to her about who we are, or what we want,” Courtney says. “It’s too dirty.”

  “Just hope she doesn’t slam the door in our face,” I say, huffing as we climb.

  “If she does, she does,” he says.

  I have a fresh sheen of sweat on my forehead by the time we reach 4J, on the fourth-floor landing. I take a deep breath, and ring the bell. Hear a chime go off inside. Nothing. I’m about to ring again, but Courtney stills my hand.

  “Don’t look desperate,” he says. Runs a hand back through his buzzed hair, which leaves it unchanged.

  Slow footsteps inside. Peephole goes dark, but I pretend like I don’t notice. Just stand there, hands clasped in front of me, trying to look as uncreepy as possible.

  Door opens in, but she keeps the chain on. It’s pretty dark inside, can’t see much besides a single wary eye and a pale, extremely thin arm.

  “Yeah?” she asks. She has the voice of someone who smokes a few packs a day, but it could also just be exhaustion.

  Most people would make the connection between our sudden arrival and the FedEx call a half hour ago—but she’s obviously not super with it.

  “I’m Frank,” I say, “And this is Courtney. We . . .” I sigh, it’s a sudden relief to not have to lie anymore. “We need your help, Becky.”

  “Who . . . are you?”

  I blink. Think of the best way to answer that.

  “Oliver Vicks escaped from Saddleback Correctional Facility. We’re private investigators who are looking for him, and need your help.”

  I’m not sure what effect I expected that name to have on her. Maybe to faint, or cry . . . instead she makes a sound that’s like a whimper, but more primal. A yelp almost, like a dog might make if you stepped on his paw. But she doesn’t budge from her post at the door. If I had to guess, based on the dilation of her single eye and the way her weight suddenly shifts, pushing the door halfway closed, I’d say she is unable to even formulate a response verbally.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to think about anything related to this,” I say. “But if we could just come in and talk to you for even ten minutes, it could really help us in tracking him down.”

  She’s so overwhelmed, I think, that she can�
��t even process what’s happening. We have to appeal to her on some kind of very primitive level. Luckily I anticipated this.

  “We brought you something to eat,” I say, and hold up the pink bag. “Carrot cake, croissants and muffins.”

  She makes a sound like “Mfgh” . . . Her voice is horribly dry.

  The door suddenly slams shut. I bite my lip. Then hear the chain clink, slide, and then the door pulls open to reveal Becky Carlson.

  It takes all my willpower to force a smile, and not to stare. The skin of her face is chalk-white and flaky. Reminds me of an ancient piece of limestone left out and exposed to the elements for a thousand years. Blond hair is so thin and splotchy that you can see her white scalp in several places. She has loose skin around her neck, the kind you find on eighty-year-old women; it’s so wrinkled and saggy that it’s almost like a chicken wattle. It’s sickening to think she’s younger than me. She’s so thin that even her extra small T-shirt is swimming on her.

  But despite all this, I can believe that she used to be beautiful. Her eyes are still a rich blue, and if you squint—imagine her with okay skin—you can form a rough picture of what she must have looked like at seventeen, when she smiled as she took your order.

  “C’mon,” she rasps and gestures for us to enter. As I step across the threshold I’m physically jarred by the smell. Something like rotten meat or rancid cabbage . . . layer upon layer of odor. A pastiche of the worst kind of smells that combine to form an unequivocal note of decay.

  The lights are all off, curtains drawn shut. We follow her across wall-to-wall carpeting littered with orange peels, empty Chinese food containers, clothes, magazines, soda cans, to a blue futon that, judging by the way she collapses onto it—less sits on than allows herself to be swallowed—is a central figure in her life. The only other place to sit is on a low glass table cluttered with cigarette butts and food stains. I clear enough space to sit down on the table, Courtney takes one look at it and remains standing. His hands are jammed as deep into his pockets as they’ll go, and he’s struggling, and failing, to keep the discomfort off his face.

  There’s an open kitchen to our right. A mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, and the faucet dripping slowly. Two interior doors, both open. One to the bathroom—which I pray I won’t have to visit—and one to a bedroom with a bare mattress on the floor. There’s an ancient, bulky TV on the floor facing the futon, a cathode ray tube—haven’t seen a TV like this for at least fifteen years. Jeopardy is on, at low volume.

  I put the bag from the bakery at the feet of Becky’s futon, and she leans forward, picks a croissant out and devours it in a frenzy that makes the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.

  When she finishes, I say: “So Becky, we were hoping we could ask you some questions.”

  “Okay,” she says. She opens her mouth for a stilted inhalation, and I catch a glance of her teeth for the first time. Many are missing. That and the strips of charred foil littered on the floor make a pretty convincing case for heroin smoking.

  I think, with a horrible twinge of guilt, She actually might be more responsive if we encouraged her to smoke now . . .

  “So that night. If you can—”

  “I knew you’d come,” she says abruptly. “I knew you’d come looking for Sophnot.”

  Courtney goes rigid. I crack my knuckles.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “He told me.”

  I swallow.

  “Oliver Vicks told you? You’ve seen him? Has he come here?”

  Her pale blue eyes narrow. “No . . .” she says. “Maybe it was a dream. Is he dead?”

  My head is swimming a little from the smell. It’s entirely conceivable, I think, that she could be mistaking dreams and reality. It’s hard to know exactly which of her bizarre threads to follow . . . Oliver is clearly not dead, but better to let her keep talking than correct her.

  “What else—whether it was a dream, or what—what else did he tell you?”

  “Lots of things.”

  Without looking, she reaches a ghostly thin hand back into the pink bag and extracts a second croissant.

  “Can you just tell us one thing?” Courtney says, the first time he’s spoken since we came in here.

  “Mmm . . .” She thinks for a moment as she tears apart the croissant like a hyena digging into an antelope. “About triangles,” she says. “About Pythagoras . . . what did he say about triangles?”

  Courtney raises an eyebrow. I lean in, figure I must have misheard, but Courtney—still standing—halts me with a hand on my shoulder.

  “That if one angle is ninety degrees,” he says, “then the length of the hypotenuse squared is equal to the squared sums of the other two shorter sides.”

  “That’s right,” she says, nodding, encouraged. Through a mouthful of mangled white pastry she adds: “Always—right?”

  “Yes,” responds Courtney. “Always.”

  “So . . .” She’s suddenly energized, whether from the calories or the topic I can’t say, but I find her change in demeanor frightening. Reminds me of a limp marionette being manipulated, jerked around by an unsteady hand, or a corpse suddenly sitting upright during his own funeral and grinning. “Can God create a right triangle that doesn’t obey that law?”

  I’m overcome with a sense of unreality. I’m getting a bit used to the smell, and the darkness. I imagine that this apartment is all that exists in the world, and that beyond these walls is an utter void which I remember only as some distant dream.

  “I don’t know,” replies Courtney. “Yes, I guess. He’s God. He can do anything.”

  “Wrong.” Becky laughs, a raspy sound that makes me shudder. “He could, but it would require a complete undoing of this world. God restricted himself in order to create the world—this is a simple example. He said, ‘In this world, there can be no right triangles that don’t follow this rule.’ It was a fact long before Pythagoras discovered it.”

  I’m not sure I’m entirely following, but Courtney seems to be. This is not what I expected from this interview . . .

  “But Sophnot,” she says. “He drew a triangle that didn’t follow the rule.”

  “But you just said—” I start.

  “And the triangle was empty. Really empty. There was no God in this triangle. It was outside his creation. Sophnot trapped God. Caught him in a contradiction.”

  She finishes her second croissant. I wonder when the last time she ate was.

  “You call him Sophnot,” I say slowly. “Did he call himself that when you knew him in the restaurant?”

  This question takes the wind out of her sails. Her hands drop to her sides, and she falls backwards into the welcoming cushions of the blue futon.

  “I, um . . .” she says, as she closes her eyes and nestles into the pillow.

  “So only in the ‘dreams’,” I venture. “That’s the only time you heard the name Sophnot?”

  “Mmm . . .” She opens her eyes, but they’re now looking somewhere far away. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the blue in her eyes—but I imagine she’s picturing herself on a sailboat, floating in the middle of a quiet sea. And for the first time since entering, I remember this is a real, breathing, living person, and my heart breaks for this victim, and fills with rage for the man who for twenty years has somehow been slowly torturing her, destroying her, until all that remains is this sallow husk.

  “I’m sure it’s very painful to think about, but do you have any idea why he did what he did?” I ask.

  “Did what?” she responds faintly.

  Courtney and I exchange a quick glance.

  This is definitely the right girl . . . right?

  “You used to work at the Rocky Mountain Bar and Grill in Colorado Springs, right?”

  “In another life,” she sighs. Her shoulder twitches.

  Courtney squats down on his haunches, puts his face close enough to her to engage, but not to threaten.

  “Becky,” he says. “Can you remember him ev
er telling you anything about his plans about the future? Maybe what he’d do after he got out of prison?”

  “No,” she says flatly.

  “Did he ever contact you, after the restaurant?” Courtney says. “Maybe in the last few years?”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Do you remember him ever saying anything about you being his queen?” I ask.

  The last word has a physical impact on her. She flinches like I made to slap her in the face. But then she closes her eyes again and, pulls her knees up onto the futon and tucks them to her chest.

  “Stop,” she says.

  “Becky . . .” I say. “I know we’re asking something very difficult of you, but if you could just search your memory . . . maybe he said something about the books?”

  She doesn’t respond, instead starts breathing fast, then her chest starts heaving. Her eyes go wide and she retches, spilling forward out of the futon onto the shag carpeting. She’s on her elbows, sticks her forehead into the filthy carpet and clasps her palms over the back of her head.

  “Becky?”

  Courtney tries to brush her shoulder and she recoils from his touch.

  “Don’t touch me!” she screams, looking up at him. “No, no . . .”

  Courtney gives me a helpless look. She buries her face back in the carpet and groans.

  Courtney points to the door. “Let’s go,” he whispers. “We’re just upsetting her.”

  I’m torn. Don’t want to upset her further, but also don’t feel like we’ve gotten anything concrete yet.

  “Becky—” I start.

  “Yes. He said I’d be his queen,” she says, her voice low and lucid. “He said he’d make me a palace. And that my brother . . . my little brother. Every week I have dreams where he shows me my brother again. He’s still there. He’s still alive.”

  I wince, thinking of the evidence we found contrary to this in the red house. Take a deep breath, and instantly regret it.

  “Becky, simple yes or no: Have you seen Oliver Vicks—in real life, not in a dream—since that night in the restaurant?”

  “I don’t know . . .” she whines, still crouched on the carpet. “I can’t tell what’s a dream and what’s real . . .”