The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  Elizabeth had allotted a full hour to read the magazine cover to cover. She began at the back, as she always did. There a trio of snarky critics picked photos of the worst-dressed celebrities of the week and ripped into their fashion choices. She studied them for a while (Nicole Kidman didn’t look that bad, she thought—I mean they obviously just wanted to include her), then paged ahead to the ads for awful products that she would never buy. Still, she liked to imagine being the kind of person who was confident and carefree enough to order spandex corsets without worrying about people finding out.

  Then the really meaty stories: the cheating boyfriends, pregnancy scandals, and drug addictions that were slowly being revealed in the lives of American starlets. These Elizabeth read thoroughly, no matter if she liked the person or not. The idea that many of these beautiful people were sliding toward disaster despite their money and their fame appealed to her.

  “Gosh, her?” she said, studying a full-page photo of an aging actress who’d apparently gotten hooked on meth. Elizabeth’s laugh was cut short when she heard a noise from the outside room. The cavernous storage room here had originally been a cellar for the county offices before it was turned into the sleek modern facility for the processing of bodies. It was big and its ceiling was arched like a medieval wine cellar. Between the stone walls and the stainless steel equipment, sound traveled well.

  Elizabeth stood up with uncertainty. It had been a low metallic sound, almost a screech. Her brow furrowed, and she came around the desk and walked to her door. She held the handle, her chin down, listening. Then she slowly pulled the door open.

  The room was empty, just as she’d left it when she walked in this afternoon. She was the only one on duty today, besides Jimmy Stearns and Claude, and they were out on a call. As Elizabeth stood in her open doorway, a metal echo vibrated in the air.

  She listened. Nothing else. The echo slowly seemed to shrink away behind the tables—blue and glinting in the overhead lights. She frowned and dropped her eyes back to the page she’d been reading.

  That sound again. Elizabeth Dyer made a face, placed the magazine down on its spread-out feature on the latest breakup of the 2010 Bachelor, got up from her desk chair, and strode toward her door.

  “Jimmy?” she called out as she pulled it open. “Claude?” Jimmy Stearns was the mortuary assistant, along with his partner, Claude Roke. Even in Northam, with its cratered economy, Claude represented the last scrapings of the barrel. He was a slob and a drunk who owed his job to the fact that his great-uncle was a county commissioner, and one in favor of nepotism even for the grungiest of his relatives.

  But Jimmy Stearns, tall, with sad blue eyes and a pathological shyness, she liked. He was considerate. And he did as he was told.

  Claude and Jimmy had taken the van out on a run forty minutes ago, and Elizabeth didn’t expect them back for another half hour. She hadn’t heard the van pull up.

  She yanked the door open. The room appeared to be normal. The metal shone blue in the emergency lighting that always kept the place half lit unless she hit the main switches. The body lockers were to the left, twenty of them, rarely all filled except during natural disasters or the last flu epidemic.

  Then she noticed one of them was ajar.

  From where she stood, Elizabeth could see an extra inch of black space between the locker door and the steel housing. Elizabeth began to walk over, the tapping of her feet echoing under the thick arched ceiling.

  She came up to the locker. Number 12B. A faint exhalation came from the one-inch gap between the opened door and the locker frame, air from the interior cooling system that kept the bodies from putrefying. The lockers were kept at a steady 35.6 degrees at all times, the smell of decomposition wafted away by the air purifiers connected to steel pipes running up the side of the building and venting above the roof. You rarely smelled death in the morgue, unless there was a body on the examining table. You could have twenty bodies in the lockers after a casino bus accident out on 95 and still have a very nice wine-and-cheese party in here. If she had anyone to invite, that is . . .

  The lights above her flickered once, then again. She looked up and saw that one of the fluorescents in the fixture above her was dying. She’d have to get Jimmy to replace it. The blinking threw the tables and the saws and utensils into grotesque shadows, ballooning and then shrinking back. There was only one other light on, near the big stainless steel sinks next to her office door.

  Elizabeth Dyer liked the dead, preferred them to most living people. But right now, she began to feel uneasy.

  The light suddenly sputtered out and the shadows expanded. Elizabeth spotted something out of the corner of her eye, just over her shoulder. Her heart went cold. The air continued hissing out of the open locker; it was as if someone were standing behind her, moving along as she walked. She felt dread course through her, and her heart began to beat violently.

  “Who’s there?” she said in a low voice.

  The light flicked back to life, and Elizabeth turned, her hand rising up to push the thing away.

  A black plastic coat hung on one of the poles next to the examination table.

  Claude. She was going to ream him several new orifices. He was supposed to collect the examination coats at the end of each day, but this one he’d left hanging on its hook. The lazy bastard.

  Her heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

  But how did the locker get open?

  She stared for a moment at 12B, the whisper of wind coming through the gap.

  She was reaching to pull it open fully when she heard the van’s engine growling near the middle window. She looked up and saw a shadow fall across the glass, and then the engine cut and two male voices struck up a conversation.

  They were back. Claude and Jimmy.

  Their voices gave her a little jolt of adrenaline. Afraid in her own workplace? Seeing ghosts in the corners? She didn’t want them seeing her spooked. She shoved 12B completely shut, the chunk sound ringing in the room and hanging there.

  Elizabeth strode back to her office and shut the door. She sat down at her desk and picked up Us magazine again. Despite her dim view of humanity, despite her loneliness and the fact that she had no friends who she could call and gossip about what Catherine Zeta-Jones was wearing—a green-and-black suit that she thought was hideous—she liked to save the beautiful pictures in the front of the magazine for last. It was like a little journey she took every week, from the public humiliations of the back pages through the ads for lonely people who sought salvation in a celebrity magazine, through the drug binges and sad dramas of the middle, until you finally stopped reading and just looked at gorgeous women splashing through the surf in St. Barts or the South of France.

  Elizabeth Dyer liked to end there. Gave you some hope.

  * * *

  Jimmy Stearns, the morgue assistant, knocked sharply on Elizabeth Dyer’s door and watched a shape—warped by the frosted, uneven glass—rise from the desk.

  Elizabeth pulled the door open.

  “Everything okay?” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, Jimmy. Thank you.”

  “Claude heard a loud noise, like a door slamming.”

  Elizabeth’s thin lips worked. “Everything’s fine,” she snapped. “Why don’t you tell Claude to worry about his duties? Like taking care of that coat.”

  Jimmy followed the woman’s spindly finger and spotted the coat. “I’ll get it.”

  “No, Jimmy, it’s Claude’s job. Please let him do it.”

  “I’d rather just get it done,” he said quietly. “Anyway, we got the body from the old folks’ home. Dr. Hobart’s in the parking lot. He’s going to do the autopsy on Walter Prescott now. He asked if the body was ready.”

  “Prescott? Now?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “That’s what the man said.”

  Elizabeth pushed past him, bunching up her cardigan swea
ter as if she were cold. She pulled out a locker, and there was the body of Walter Prescott, still in the clothes he’d been brought in with. Jimmy brought one of the rolling metal stretchers over and positioned it next to the locker.

  “Can you grab his feet?”

  “Sure thing,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy took hold of the bare ankles, lifting the man and setting him on the table. He could feel the rigor mortis getting ahold of the bones. The knees were beginning to lock. Made Jimmy’s job easier, but he still couldn’t get used to it. Some nights he woke up in his apartment in the Shan, and for that first second of consciousness, he’d be convinced his knees and elbows were frozen in place and he started to inhale for a good bloodcurdling scream before his elbows released and out came a big yelp of relief instead. But one of these days, he was convinced, his limbs would stay locked and he’d have a coronary right in his own damn bed.

  They hefted the body over to the stretcher, then rolled it to the first examination table and lifted again. Jimmy moved the stretcher away, and Elizabeth began to strip the body down. As Jimmy steered the stretcher to the far corner, he saw Dr. Hobart come through the door, all brisk and businesslike. He marched right over to the examining table and looked down at the body of Walter Prescott.

  “The police want this one quick.”

  Elizabeth blushed. “I’ll have him ready in five minutes,” she said.

  Jimmy watched. He was beginning to suspect Elizabeth had a secret crush on fat old Dr. Hobart. She acted like a Waltham undergrad whenever he was around. Anything he wanted, he got, and lickety-split, too.

  “Why they want him so fast, Doc?” Jimmy said, leaning against the metal stretcher.

  Dr. Hobart looked over. “I’m sorry?”

  “I saw them cut him down from the tree the other night. Suicide, clear as day. But you said they want the report quick. They think someone strung the old boy up?”

  “Now why would you say that?” Elizabeth, now carrying a pair of dissecting scissors in her hand, was glaring at him.

  Dr. Hobart reached out a gloved hand and touched her shoulder. “That’s all right, Elizabeth.”

  Jimmy looked down. “It’s just that people talk, Doc, you know that. After the Margaret Post thing, I got strangers coming up to me, talking about things they heard, weird things happening around town.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Dr. Hobart said, nodding.

  “All I’m saying is that hangers and jumpers don’t usually get special treatment. Wondering if there’s something else going on.”

  Dr. Hobart smiled. “Nothing whatsoever. The Prescotts are an old family. They are—or they were—an important one.”

  “Until Chase, you mean,” Jimmy said, but without malice.

  “Well, that’s neither here nor there. But there’s nothing unusual about the case. At least not yet.”

  Jimmy frowned.

  Dr. Hobart bent over the body, the light catching the gold frames of his glasses as he examined the corpse. Elizabeth began to cut the man’s clothes away with the autopsy scissors.

  “And Mr. Stearns?” Hobart remarked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Please don’t go out on the streets broadcasting any . . . theories. We don’t want to get people riled up over nothing.”

  “Just like you say.”

  “Bag these up, please?” Elizabeth said. She’d finished undressing the body and was holding Prescott’s clothes up between her thumb and index finger. Jimmy walked over and took the collar of the jacket and held it firm between his index finger and thumb, then went toward the left corner where they kept the clear evidence bags.

  Dr. Hobart was murmuring something to Elizabeth. Jimmy heard the words “Margaret Post,” he was almost sure.

  Jimmy snatched up the bag quick and stuffed the clothes in, pretending to be absorbed in his work. He wandered back toward the examination table.

  “. . . the knife marks.”

  He passed Elizabeth and headed toward the little evidence locker where they kept personal articles for the next of kin. So the police did have some suspicions about old Prescott. He’d seen the little cuts in the back of Prescott’s shirt, the ones that looked like someone had been poking him hard with a knife. Maybe someone had put Walter up on that cooler and made him put his head into that noose.

  Was the old man’s death related to Margaret Post’s somehow? Were they going to compare the bodies?

  Jimmy got out a white label with adhesive on the back, peeled off the sticking paper, and stuck the label on the plastic bag holding Prescott’s clothes. He searched his pocket for a pen. He saw Elizabeth move toward the body lockers while Dr. Hobart was scrubbing up at the sink, getting ready for the autopsy, his sport coat laid across the back of one of the office chairs.

  Jimmy swore and bent down to see if there was a pen in one of the desk drawers. He heard Dr. Hobart run the water, which made a loud thrumming sound on the metal floor of the sink. Jimmy was rooting through the top drawer, which was filled with papers and spare boxes of staples, when he heard Elizabeth make a sound. An odd little scream.

  Jimmy swiveled around. She was now standing on the other side of a locker she’d pulled out.

  “What is it?” Hobart said, and the water stopped.

  “Sh-sh-sh-she’s . . .”

  Jimmy felt uneasy. He’d never heard her stutter before.

  “Yes?” Hobart said.

  Elizabeth bent her head. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Dr. Hobart hurried over. Jimmy stared, his mouth agape.

  “What do you mean, gone? Her family still hasn’t claimed the body.”

  Dr. Hobart came up to the locker, 12B, pulled it out another six inches. Even from where he was standing, Jimmy could see it was empty. Elizabeth looked at the doctor in confusion, wringing her hands.

  “Check the other lockers. Mr. Stearns, lend her a hand.”

  Jimmy dropped the bag on the floor. “Sure thing.”

  He walked to the end and began pulling open lockers. There were only two other corpses in them that he knew about: a drunk driver and a heart attack victim, both older women. He found the heart attack on the second pull, the drunk driver—God, what the dashboard had done to her face—in the fourth.

  Elizabeth was at the other end, working almost frantically. The lockers went hooooosh and then chunk as they pulled out and pushed back. Hooosssh, chunk, like a piston that needed oil.

  He pulled a bottom-row locker and stepped back as Margaret Post came rolling into view, the black thread around her throat where Dr. Hobart had sewn her up.

  He coughed. “Hey, here she is,” he said.

  Elizabeth came running over. She checked the locker number: 6C. Her mouth worked like a fish out of the water, and the back of her neck was as pale as alabaster.

  Her face tilted up toward him. “That bastard. Has Claude been having fun with me?” she said.

  Jimmy looked at her, startled. “Claude? What are you talking about?”

  Elizabeth Dyer’s right eye was twitching, and she looked like she was ready to scream. “I think he’s a low-down, terrible, terrible man.”

  “Ma’am, Claude never—”

  “Elizabeth!” Dr. Hobart touched Elizabeth on the arm, and Jimmy saw her color change just a bit.

  “Somebody moved her. I heard them. Just before Jimmy came in. Playing tricks on me.”

  “I don’t think Claude would do that. I really don’t,” said Jimmy.

  Dr. Hobart gave him a nod. He took Elizabeth gently by the arm and led her back toward the office.

  Jimmy watched them go. It worried him to see Elizabeth all roused up. Elizabeth’s door opened and closed, and he heard murmuring from behind the frosted glass.

  Jimmy then gazed down at the corpse laid out on the gurney.

  His left eyelid spasmed. T
here was something wrong with Margaret’s face. The skin had a luster that other bodies didn’t have. He was an amateur expert on the skin tones of dead people, and this one didn’t look like quite right. Her face looked . . . moist, like waxed fruit. Not dry and gray, like it should have been after two days. She honestly appeared to have just taken her dying breath the second before he’d pulled the locker.

  Margaret’s face was eggshell blue above the light blue plastic “modesty sheet” that covered her body, the eyes closed, the hair greasy. Her plump arms lay by her side, the red scratches that traced across the inner flesh near the elbow turned to black lines. He couldn’t smell anything off her, not even a whiff of decomposition.

  Jimmy came around the front of the locker and moved his head slowly so that his face was lined up with Margaret’s.

  People were saying she’d been cut up like a Christmas ham. He had to see. He had to tell Sam and them over at the coffee shop what the real deal was.

  He pulled down the thin coat of plastic.

  Jimmy’s face turned from boyish mischief to a look of retching horror. He said “Oh” once and looked away. Finally, he forced his eyes back and they drifted down. His eyes caught a glimpse of fresh scars—stitched with black thread—across her stomach.

  Jimmy whipped his head to the left. He let the plastic fall back. He felt like throwing up now. Like this morning’s breakfast was coming back up the sides of his throat, changed to acid.

  He took deep breaths of the cool, disinfected air that burned his throat.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  John Bailey followed Nat into his apartment. It was Tuesday night and they were both dog-tired. Nat was gray-skinned, his usual ironic smile replaced by a tight frown across his lips. His hazel eyes looked haunted.

  They’d spent the last two days together investigating the suicide of Walter Prescott, if it was a suicide. Nat had traded some shifts at the hospital, and the two of them had been at it like a pair of longshoremen. Sunday night, after his conversation with Becca, Nat had given John a condensed version: the chopped-up door, Becca’s dreams of a French-speaking man. John had gone up to her room after Nat and asked to speak to her alone, but she’d gone practically mute as soon as Nat had left the room. Bent over at the waist, gripping her arms across her chest, she would only shake her head yes or no. She seemed drained, almost lifeless.