Part I
Long-Leggedy Beasties
Chapter 1
The fastest route from Logan Airport to downtown Boston is a mile-long tunnel called the Sumner. Dark, damp, and low ceilinged, the Sumner feels as though it were built a hundred years ago, which it very nearly was. And on Friday, April 24, a warm spring evening, a Boston University freshman ran out of gas halfway through the tunnel, reducing rush-hour traffic to just one slow-moving lane, instead of the usual two. Kate Priddy, who had never been to Boston and had no idea she would wind up in a tunnel under Boston Harbor, sat in the back of a stopped taxicab and began to panic.
It was not her first panic attack, not even of that particular day. She’d had one earlier that morning when she’d stepped outside of her flat in Belsize Park in London into a cold, gray dawn and suddenly felt like the whole idea of the apartment swap had been the worst idea she’d ever agreed to. But she’d done her breathing exercises, and repeated her mantra, and told herself that it was too late to back out now. Her second cousin, whom she’d never met, was on an overnight flight from Boston to London at this very instant. He was taking her flat for six months while she was going to live in his apartment in Beacon Hill.
But this attack, with the taxicab stalled in the dark tunnel, was far worse than anything she’d had for a long while. The glistening walls of the endless tunnel curved at the top. It was like being inside a massive constricting snake, and Kate felt her stomach fold within her, her mouth turn dry.
The taxicab crept forward. The backseat smelled of body odor and the flowery perfume of some car deodorant. Kate wanted to roll down the window, but didn’t know what taxicab customs were like in the United States. Her stomach folded again, starting to cramp. When did I last go to the toilet, she thought, and her panic ratcheted up a notch. It was such a familiar feeling: heart speeding up, limbs turning cold, the world sharpening before her eyes. But she knew what to do. Her therapist’s voice was in her head. It’s just a panic attack, an accidental surge of adrenaline. It can’t hurt you, or kill you, and no one will notice it. Just let it happen. Float with it. Ride it out.
But this one’s different, Kate told herself. The danger felt real. And suddenly she was back at the cottage in Windermere, crouched and cowering in the locked closet, her nightgown wet with urine, George Daniels on the other side of the door. She felt almost like she’d felt then, cold hands inside of her, twisting her stomach like it was a damp dish towel. There’d been the shotgun blast, then the terrible silence that lasted for hours and hours. When she’d finally been pulled from the closet, her joints stiff and her vocal cords raw from screaming, she didn’t know how she was still alive, how the fear hadn’t killed her.
The sound of an echoing horn brought her back inside the cab. She pushed the thoughts of Windermere, of George, away, and breathed in as deeply as she could, even though it felt like something heavy was sitting on her chest.
Face it. Accept it. Float with it. Let time pass.
The words weren’t working, and Kate could feel her throat closing, becoming a pinhole, her lungs frantically trying to pull in oxygen. The back of the cab now smelled like that closet had, mustiness and rot, as though something had died many summers ago in the walls. She thought of running, and that thought filled her with even more panic. She thought of her pills, her prescription benzodiazepines, that she rarely took anymore but that she’d brought anyway, the way a child who doesn’t need his blankie anymore still keeps it close at hand. But the pills were in her suitcase, which was in the bloody boot of the cab. She opened her dry mouth to say something to the cabdriver, to ask him to pop the boot, but the words didn’t come out. And that was the moment—one she’d had many times—when she became convinced that she really was dying. Panic attacks can’t kill you. Of course they can’t, she thought, and squeezed her eyes shut anyway, as though a train were barreling down on her. It was the worst thing to do. The world dissolved into a closet full of blackness, death choking her. Her insides began to liquefy.
Face it. Accept it. Float with it. Let time pass.
The cab jolted forward a whole car length, then stopped again, and that small movement made her feel slightly better, as though saying the mantra had caused the car to move in the first place. She repeated it again, while doing her breathing exercises.
The driver shook a hand, his fingers spread, and muttered something at the dirty windshield in a language Kate didn’t understand. For some reason, she’d thought that cabdrivers in America would be stereotypically American—short men with caps and cigar stubs and loud American voices. But this cabdriver was turbaned and heavily bearded; except for the fact that he was sitting on the left side of the car, she might as well have been in London.
“How long is this tunnel?” Kate managed to ask through the partition. Her voice sounded cracked and timid in her own ears.
“There’s something up ahead.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Sometimes,” the driver said, then shrugged.
Kate gave up and moved back from the partition. She rubbed her hands along her thighs. The cab kept jerking forward, a few feet at a time, but after it passed the stalled Chevy, two lanes opened up and the cab was moving again. Kate breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. She unclenched a hand and one of her knuckles cracked. She began to tap her thumb against her fingertips in ordered succession. The pinhole that was her throat opened up a little.
They cleared the tunnel, and Kate caught a glimpse of swollen clouds dominating the sky just before the cab dipped and swayed into another tunnel, but one in which the traffic was barreling along. The cabdriver made up for lost time before emerging onto another fast-moving road that wound along the Charles River. There was enough light left in the sky for Kate to make out the backsides of brick houses whipping past on her left. On the river, a rower on a scull skimmed along its placid surface.
The driver took a sudden, lurching left, doubling back to get onto a narrow road, square, brick houses on either side, blossoming trees along the sidewalk.
“Bury Street,” announced the driver.
“It’s 101.”
“Got it.” The driver sped up, then slowed down and halted suddenly, one wheel riding up onto the sidewalk, in front of a brick archway surmounted by a small stone on which the number 101 was carved. Kate could see into a courtyard with a low fountain. The apartment building, three stories high, ran along three sides of the courtyard. Kate’s stomach ached a little, a leftover from her earlier panic attack, and she thought guiltily of her second cousin, Corbin Dell, arriving at her unexceptional flat in North London earlier in the day. But he’d known what he was getting. They’d sent several e-mails back and forth. Her one-bedroom was cozy and conveniently located near a tube station, but Corbin’s place—she’d seen the pictures—was like something out of a Henry James novel. Still, she hadn’t been prepared for the courtyard entrance, very Italian, that seemed out of place with the small amount of Boston she’d already seen.
She waited on the curb while the driver removed her two bags—a large rollie and an even larger duffel bag. She’d gotten dollars at her bank in London the previous week and she paid the driver with the thin, papery notes, not quite knowing what to tip, so probably giving him too much. After he drove off, she balanced the duffel bag onto the rollie and made her way through the archway.