Free The Binding by Nicholas Wolff Page A

conversation with a nineteen-year-old girl? The still depths of her voice, the calmness of those eyes. It was eerie.
    “By whom?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps you can be my detective and find out.”
    “Perhaps I can. What happened on December twenty-first?”
    For the first time, she hesitated. Her lips formed into an unhappy shape, and tears rimmed her eyelids. “I was in my bed. I dreamt I was choking, and when I woke up a man had his hands around my throat. So I believe it would be called manual strangulation.”
    Nat glanced at the turtleneck, and suddenly a memory came floating back to him from his childhood. When he was a young boy, six or seven, his father used to play a record for him, an old 78 in a cream-colored paper sleeve from a children’s collection called Scary Tales for Littl’uns . It had been handed down from his grandfather, along with the upright record player with the musty webbed speakers that pulled out from the feet of the contraption on thin brown wires. Nat would sit in their basement, his ear close to the dusty speakers, and listen.
    This particular record featured a story told by a male narrator in a rich baritone, about a beautiful woman who wore a black velvet band around her throat. The woman never took the band off, not even when she bathed or slept. She grew up with it around her neck, had her portrait painted with it on—the family had money. When she turned eighteen, she met a man who became her lover, and at first he was intrigued by the velvet necklace, but eventually he grew annoyed by it and asked her to take the band off once so he could see the lovely lines of her ivory throat. She said no. This made the lover angry. As time went on, he became consumed with fury, more and more obsessed by the velvet band.He demanded she remove it. No , the woman told him lovingly. If you love me, ask me anything except this one thing. He insisted; she begged him to forget the velvet band. Finally, driven to a kind of madness, he screamed at her to take it off or he would do it himself. She said something debonair and eerie, something like Very well, my love , and with a smile, she reached up to her neck and pulled the band away.
    And . . . off . . . came . . . her . . . head! shouted the narrator through the hisses and skips of the record needle.
    Nat seemed to hear a faraway echo of the narrator’s voice now, distinctly, in his head.
    He shifted in the chair.
    “But,” he said, composing himself and raising an eyebrow at her, “I can see that you’re breathing. If I feel your pulse, I bet I’ll feel your heart beating.”
    The enigmatic smile again. “Yes. I’m aware that I appear to be living, but I’m telling you that it’s an illusion. I can’t explain how I’m still here when I should be in my grave.”
    I should ask her what was happening in her life before the “murder” occurred , Nat absently thought. About the relationship with her father. Did she feel isolated, perhaps, removed from life? But there was a shining intelligence in her eyes. Let’s play the game her way for a moment.
    “Who was the man who killed you?”
    She looked at her hands. “I’d never seen him before.”
    “Describe him to me.” Nat suddenly felt the urge to rough her up a bit verbally with a full-blown interrogation. She’d unnerved him—this whole house had unnerved him—and he wanted to get control of the situation.
    “Dark hair, long hair, mustache. Sunburnt. And his eyes were . . .” It all came out in a rush, as if she’d memorized it.
    “Were what?”
    “All black.”
    “Interesting.”
    She shook her head jerkily and took a sharp inward breath, as if she’d just seen the man standing behind Nat.
    “Becca . . .” he said quietly.
    “Yes?”
    “Is there anyone else living in this house besides you and your father?”
    Her eyes went cold. “I told you—”
    “He’s not your father. Yes, I remember. Anyone else besides the old man, then?”
    “I don’t