he could n't see what lay beyond the glass , but he 'd spent so much time at the window as a boy , he knew the scene by heart : an immaculate lawn , a gazebo , and a large shed that doubled as a hiding place if you wanted to get away from your life as the only child of beau prescott sr. , the last in a long line of prescott steel magnates that stretched all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century .