Authors: Nicholas Wolff
God, he loved this stuff. Psychiatry had been so much more interesting when they’d known only half as much about it.
Cotard had focused on stroke victims, diabetics, and—this was a departure—the delusional. That must have been what brought Mademoiselle X into his office in 1880, a woman who swore that she was dead. Cotard became fascinated by her case and called her affliction
délire des négations
. He was the first to de
scribe the condition, so the medical authorities would give it the formal name Cotard delusion.
Mademoiselle X was clearly disturbed. Violently so. She not only denied the existence of God, which was a rather extreme position in Paris—even in 1880—but also told Cotard that she herself had died long ago. Interestingly, Cotard had done just what Nat had done with Becca; that is, pointed out the obvious. You’re alive, you’re standing, you’re breathing. Mademoiselle X had replied that she’d been cursed, and so had to wander the earth. Her bodily organs had been stolen—she didn’t say by whom—one by one. Her brain, nerves, chest muscles, intestines had all been taken from her body, leaving only the outer shell of skin and bones. Therefore, she felt no need to eat, as she was slowly decomposing and needed no nutrition.
I need a more detailed description of the interviews
, Nat thought. Family background, a fuller listing of the symptoms, any earlier signs of psychoses.
He read on. The article had broadened out to a discussion of the delusion throughout history. Cotard was most common in elderly women suffering from schizophrenia, though cases had been found in the young, often accompanied by clinical depression and/or organic brain damage.
No mention of a hysterical form able to be passed on from one family member to another. Walter Prescott hadn’t detailed any accidents or head injuries in Becca’s past. He’d have to ask him about that. But somehow Nat didn’t think so . . .
This paper was mediocre at best, a bare-bones survey. He was surprised that the
Neurology
editors hadn’t demanded more detail. But the syndrome was so rare that it might have been pitched as the equivalent of a human-interest story, light reading for the clinical trade.
Nat tossed the paper on the hardwood floor, feeling a sore
throat beginning to come on. He took a shot of NyQuil and crawled into bed in the top floor of the loft as gray light darkened the room. The rounded shape of Grant’s Hill outside his windows began to merge with the dusk.
He felt the sheets, cool on his skin. The room began to grow warmer. As his mind drifted away, he wondered if he’d set the thermostat too high again.
An image floated into his head, a black-and-white image in a black frame. Something from a book? A family portrait? He couldn’t recall one like it in his house growing up, and the outlines of the figures seemed smudged, refusing to come into focus. Something from a museum maybe? He hadn’t been to a museum since he’d been in New York two years ago. He let the image float away.
Then the beginnings of a dream. The face that swam into view as he sank into a pleasant stupor was his aunt, Aunt Sophie, his father’s sister. Aunt Sophie. Funny, he’d always called her that, even when she’d become a surrogate parent to him. After the accident that killed both his parents.
Aunt Sophie had been a highly unwilling substitute for his father and mother. She didn’t mince words, old Soph. She had her own money from a family inheritance that had kicked in at thirty-five and, ten years later, wasn’t looking to take on a moody, sarcastic thirteen-year-old. As far as he could tell, Sophie had the perfect life down pat, the envy of her married friends. A closet full of designer dresses, beaus in Boston and New York, trips to Europe whenever she felt like it. She was brutally direct, beautiful in a dark aquiline way and not at all motherly.
He’d have to drop Aunt Sophie an e-mail over to France, where she’d moved “to get away from the Northam pond scum.” Alone. Always alone.
It was the thing that Sophie had said to him, that first night in her sleek apartment off State Street, which had stuck with him. It
was two nights after his parents’ funeral, which he’d gotten through without shedding a single tear, much to the amazement and worry of his friends. But Sophie had tucked him into the bed in the strange room, which smelled of the perfumed clothes she’d stored there before he’d arrived, and studied his face on the first night of his new life.
“Do you know why your father died?” she’d said.
“No.”
Sophie had leaned over, and he’d smelled the alcohol on her breath, something he would never detect again on her. Rich, dark, slightly intoxicating fumes.
“Because he got close to someone,” she whispered.
Nat was speechless. He could only stare at her in the darkness, thinking that was a strange thing to say to a newly orphaned boy.
Sophie had leaned back, and the sadness in her face was soon overtaken by something else. Cunning. Ferocity.
“Never let people get close to you,” she said, getting up and walking to the door. She held the handle, then looked back at him. “They’re dangerous.”
She’d closed the door and never mentioned the subject again. But he had to admit, the advice had stayed with him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T
hat Sunday morning, Chuck Godwin knelt in the dank corner beneath the stairs of his basement. He was squeezed uncomfortably between a three-legged chest of drawers and cardboard boxes of old magazines and newspapers. The smell was musty, moisture combining with the decaying remains of paper. If he dug down to the bottom of the stacks, he was sure he’d find mold growing on the waxy cardboard.
Chuck knew he was distracting himself from the true object of his search. He’d done a lot of that lately. Telling himself stories, little pep talks, saying to himself
Buck up, Chuck
, all to drown out the voices that were always there now. Even when he couldn’t make out the words, he felt the hum like a small but powerful generator. Now the sound was growing louder, which is why he’d come down to the basement, to do something.
The rope . . .
He snapped his mind away from the thought. Or was it a voice? The two things had merged lately, his own thoughts and the whispery voice of the man from the woods.
A box tilted thanks to his rummaging, and suddenly its contents spilled onto the floor. Ancient
Better Homes & Gardens
magazines, dozens of them. If he didn’t watch it, Stephanie would become a hoarder. Already she was “collecting” things like twine and papers and photo albums and other stuff that no one in their right mind really collects. The photo albums sat empty; they had
no grandchildren to fill them up with pictures of outings at the beach, birthdays, graduation . . .
It was gritty down here. It smelled primeval, like iron and water. The arch of his shoulder began to throb, the bursitis kicking in.
. . . is in the basement.
Was it possible to make peace with the voices? To live with them? His father had gone through affairs, alcoholism, even taken up pottery making in what Chuck figured was a likely attempt to escape from the urgings from outside. Drown them out. He’d lasted a good few years before he’d stood in the little room in the basement of this very house with the sump pump in it, and hanged himself from an exposed rafter. The smallest room in the house. Dark, claustrophobic, reeking of earth minerals. A horrible place. Chuck never went in there.
The rope . . .
The pressure in his brain was increasing. He was afraid of seeing the man, the one from the woods in the khaki uniform. If Chuck had to face him, he thought he would run screaming from the house. Anything but that.
Chuck kept looking. It was here somewhere. He hefted one of the boxes—an old banana container now filled to the brim with stuff—and lowered it to the floor. JFK assassinated in Dallas,
Life
magazine. Everyone had one of those. Goddamn Stephanie saved the most obvious things.
He could feel the thing sitting at the bottom of the stack.
How does an inanimate object throw out waves of loathing and fearfulness?
But it did. He felt the waves of fear move through his chest.
. . . is in the BASEment.
The voice was louder now.
There it was, the thing he’d come to see. It lay in the half dark
ness, stained with oil. The rope, twenty shiny yellow feet of it. It had been his father’s, along with this house. There were probably dead skin cells ingrained in the twine from when his father hanged himself.
Pick it up.
God knew Chuck had enough reasons to kill himself. The anniversary of his father’s death was only three weeks away. But that he’d learned to live with. It was Billy, his only son, who’d crashed his car out on 95 South three Christmases ago, that truly haunted him. Billy being gone was the bad thing that outweighed every other bad thing in Chuck’s life put together. The only fact that gave it any competition was that he’d been a terrible dad, by turns angry and withdrawn.
“It should have been me,” Chuck said to the dank gray wall. His voice floated out into the basement, giving him the creeps.
Now.
He moved another box away, not caring when the top half of its contents went all over the floor. An old china gravy boat crashed to bits on the cement.
What Chuck really feared was that he would see the man’s face again.
But this time it would have changed to Billy’s.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
D
usk was spilling over the craggy ridge of Grant’s Hill. Nat glided down the condo stairs, looking up and down the street for his Saab. He had weekend duty all month, and he’d drawn the evening shift tonight, but unless he remembered where he’d parked the damn car, he was going to be late. As he scanned the street, shivering slightly in a bracing wind, he saw an unmarked black Crown Vic parked in front of a fire hydrant directly in front of his building. He ducked down and caught John Bailey’s profile in the front seat. Nat went up to the passenger window and knocked.
John glanced up. A look—sadness, fear?—passed across his face, and then he gave a half smile.
“I was just coming up to see you,” John said, rolling down the window.
Nat narrowed his eyes. “For what?”
“I want you to take a ride with me.”
Nat paused, hands on his thighs, crouched down. “You’ll take me to work after? I’m on second shift tonight.”
John gave a smile, tinged with worry, and nodded. Nat swung his shoulder bag into the backseat, then opened the passenger door and got in.
“You look like shit, my friend,” John said, eyeing Nat as he drove toward the center of town. “What’s going on?”
Nat rubbed his eyes. “Freaky dreams.”
John’s perked up.
“Not that kind of freaky,” Nat said. “Never mind. I think I need to get drunk. Frat-boy drunk.
Mark Prendergrast
drunk.”
A smile tugged at the corner of John’s mouth. In high school, Mark Prendergrast had gotten loaded on peach schnapps, undressed fully, and entered an unlocked house near the party they were all attending. It had been the home of the school’s principal, the unloved Mr. Cameron.
Mrs.
Cameron had found him, asleep on their French love seat, the next morning. Prendergrast’s first comment—
This doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?
—had gone down in Northam history as about the funniest line possible in such circumstances.
Nat watched John make a sharp turn onto State Street and gun the engine. State led straight across Bogg’s Hill to the Shan. He looked over at John.
“So where are we going?”
John met his eyes. “The Prescott house.”
Nat tensed. “What happened? Is it Becca?”
“No, she’s fine.”
Nat breathed out, then looked up and down the street.
“It’s the father,” John said.
“The old man?”
“Yeah.” John shot him a glance.
“What happened?”
“He hung himself.”
Nat felt a wave—like the last pulse of a concussion from a faraway blast—pass through him.
“Jesus,” Nat said quietly, thinking of Becca. “The whole goddamn family gone. He thought . . .”
“Yeah?”
Nat slammed his hand on the Vic’s dashboard.
“Hey!” John said. “Easy, brother!”
“He thought Becca would be next. I didn’t see it coming, but I should have. He was obsessed with the curse on his family, some bullshit to screen off his own depression.
Damn
it.”
“How the hell could you see it coming?”
Nat stared grimly at the gray macadam falling away as they topped Bogg’s Hill and headed down toward the Shan.
“Did he do it in the house?”
John shook his head. “No. Out back. In the woods.”
“Same place you found Chase . . .”
“Yeah,” John said softly. “Acting all crazy.”
The road ran under the Vic. The Shan didn’t see as much city money as the rest of Northam, and Nat could feel the gritty surface of the pavement vibrating through the car into his leg muscles. The two men were silent awhile.
“Well, FYI, that’s not all,” John said with a sigh.
“What do you mean?”
John stared straight ahead. “The old man’s hands were tied behind his back.”
Suicides were something that they both knew about—that and murder were the places where their two jobs overlapped. They both meditated on the implications of that detail.
They made the right onto Endicott, and Nat watched the houses begin to space out, the circular driveways, even a few colonnades of elms heading back to houses you couldn’t even see from the street.
“Did she see it?” Nat asked.
“Who, Becca?”
“Yeah.”
“No idea.”
Nat was getting that feeling in the pit of his stomach—roiling, electric, and black—that he remembered from the last time he’d been to 96 Endicott.
John pulled into the driveway. They could see the neon-like reflections of the police lights shining off the trunks of the dark woods in the backyard. Red and blue flashes. Nat looked up at the house as they passed in front. The bare branches of nearby trees
dipped and whirled to invisible currents, and the sound of torqueing, breaking wood filled the air. The gusts of wind whipped the dead leaves across the porch and a few had stuck to the panes of the first-floor windows, but everything about the house itself was completely still. It neither emitted light nor revealed the slightest motion. The curtains on the windows were closed, and the light by the front door was dark.