The dampness seeped through the back of my pants legs and I realized I was shivering. I moved my body again and struggled to pull my left hand free from under my thigh. It slid an inch or so, coming to rest against something slimy and fat and cold. Something that crawled.
This was a root cellar, I reminded myself. The thing I touched was probably a slug. It was Poe's root cellar, so most likely it was what he called a conqueror worm, waiting for me in my burial plot.
Why had I been stored here in this hole? What would my captors do to me when they returned, once the police moved their search away from this dank prison?
Now there were noises in an adjacent room above. "Every-thing," I heard Mercer say. "Open everything."
Lots of pairs of feet were traipsing through the tiny cottage, banging doors and moving furniture. There was a cupboard in the kitchen, I thought as I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the rooms we had seen earlier, but not even a closet in the parlor or bedroom.
"The fireplace," Mike said, "any trapdoors in there, at the back?"
Somebody was pounding up the narrow steps to the second floor. I could have saved them the time. There was nowhere to conceal anything upstairs.
Kathleen Bailey was trying to help them, answering someone's question about whether anything like this had ever happened here before. "Never. Nothing like this."
"How about the building foundation?" Mike said. It sounded like he was outside, at the top of the steps near the entrance.
"This side is solid rock," Mercer said. "I'll try the latticework on the left."
I heard several thuds and then the sound of splintering wood. Mercer had probably kicked through the decoratively carved front below the old porch.
"You been in here?"
An unfamiliar but welcome voice was close to me, unlatching the cellar door. I twisted around again, undoubtedly crushing the worm as I shimmied back and forth on top of it and grunted as I moved.
"They checked that already," someone answered. "It's empty."
The door that had been cracked open slammed shut again.
The entire inside of my mouth was chewed up by my efforts to loosen the gag. I could taste the blood as I swallowed.
Mike and Mercer were on my other side now, near the front steps of the cottage. "I'll take a ride around the 'hood. She's obviously not here," Mike said. "She's probably doing social work for the little bastard who punched out the kid on the playground."
"I'm not leaving," Mercer said. "I'd rather pull this damn park apart. She doesn't know the Bronx. I'm telling you she didn't run off anywhere."
"What coulda happened to her?" Mike asked. "We weren't out of sight for ten minutes. She's got a short fuse but I didn't think she was so impatient that-"
"Do it your way. Just leave a couple of uniformed guys here."
Stay with me, Mercer. Please just stay here with me.
I could hear Mike walk away from the building. "If you need a bloodhound, let me know. Or just sniff the floorboards for that Chanel shit she wears."
Floorboards. That's exactly what you need to think about. Stop your goddamn joking and come and get me.
I counted the five steps as Mercer walked up to the front door and reentered the cottage. Maybe it was my imagination but it seemed as though worms or spiders were crawling up the leg of my pants.
Minutes elapsed, and the frigid dampness continued to work its way into my bones. Now several people emerged from the house and stood on the porch, talking to one another before I heard one of them start down the steps.
Kathleen Bailey called out, "We don't use it, actually. It's too damp to store things in. It's been empty for years."
Footsteps rounded the far end of the cellar and stopped in front of the old entrance.
There were no voices this time. The latch was lifted and the door opened.
A man bent his shoulders to duck into the room. I tried to make sure it was Mercer but the slats were so narrow that all I could see was the sole of a large shoe and the dark leg of his trousers.
I braced my shoulders against the floor and pushed up with my hips. I knew that I had pulled the metal zipper of my ski jacket down to waist level when we had gone inside the cottage. I rubbed it as hard as I could against the plank above my stomach, creating the faint sound of a scratch. I whimpered through my gag.
The man standing over my head stopped and listened. He turned in place and kneeled, his ear placed against the boards beside me. I twisted again and gurgled a mixture of saliva and blood.
"I got you, Alex," Mercer said. "Hang tough, I'll get you out."
32
The technician pushed back the enormous shell of the MRI machine that had swallowed my entire body to take the images of my head and chest. "You can open your eyes now. Was that okay for you?"
I had balked at the idea of going back inside such a confining enclosure, the sense of claustrophobia still overwhelming me after the morning's experience. I nodded without enthusiasm.
"What time is it now?" I asked, having spent a long afternoon in the emergency room, being examined and completing a battery of X-rays before this scan was ordered.
"Almost six o'clock."
"Will I be discharged now that you're done?"
"Dr. Schrem has admitted you, Miss Cooper."
I sat up and retied the hospital gown. "I'm really fine. The headache is practically-"
"It wouldn't be smart to let you go without observing you overnight," he said, motioning me to sit in the wheelchair. "You don't even know what the object was that hit you on the head. A mild concussion alone would bear watching."
This was the wrong guy with whom to argue. He handed my record to an older gentleman whose sole job appeared to be to escort me from waiting area to waiting area within New York University's massive medical center. My driver took control of the handles and backed me through the double doors.
When they closed behind me and we started rolling down the corridor, Mike jumped off a gurney he'd been sitting on and grabbed the wheelchair handles.
"Look, I'm sorry I-"
"I don't even want to see you tonight, Mr. Chapman. Get your hands off my wheels-I wouldn't trust you to drive me from here to the cafeteria. I can't believe that you went off and left me for dead. What were you thinking? Where's Mercer?"
"Right here, Alex," he said, walking beside me and taking my hand in his. "You know Mike isn't really a heartless son of a bitch. He's just not a first-grader like I am. Might need to send him back to the Academy for a refresher course in detection. Nobody was going to leave that park on my watch."
"What's the room number, Pops?" Mike asked.
"Six-thirty. Elevator straight ahead."
"I want a drink."
"Not yet, kid. Doesn't mix with those painkillers the doc's got you on."
"Why can't I just take the medications and go home?"
"'Cause whoever tried to put a hole in that thick skull," Mike said, "left a sizable little lump that might have to be coated with peroxide if it sticks out any farther on your scalp. I just knew we'd get to play doctor together eventually."
I looked up at Mercer. "I'm not kidding. I really don't want him in my face all night. I don't want him anywhere near me. He's bad for my blood pressure."
"You want an apology, blondie? That's what you want?"
"I want to be alone," I said, Garbo accent and all.
We got on the elevator and rode it up to six while Mike chattered. "You want me to flog myself and put on a hair shirt for not having had the good sense to think you were walled up behind a door or buried alive with a black cat. Right? It just goes to prove my theory that this would never have happened if you put on a little weight."
"Shut him up, Mercer."
"Fat people are harder to kidnap. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Wallace? You never read in the paper that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact, and you can do something about it for
the future, young lady."
We wheeled in front of the nurses' station and Mike put the brakes on the chair. He lifted a bouquet of flowers from the top of the desk and dropped to his knees in front of several doctors, nurses, and visitors who were passing by.
"Coop, as long as I live I swear I'll never walk out on you again. I'll never criticize your perfume or your heels or your hair color or your temper or-"
I unhitched the brake and pushed myself away from the onlookers toward the wing that corresponded to the room number I had been assigned.
"I'll stop to look under the bed and inside the closet and even rip up the floorboards next time I can't find you."
"So much for my anonymity," I said to Mercer, who had taken charge of pushing me. "If they didn't know who I was before I got up here, I guess they'll figure it out."
A nurse followed us into the room. "Need any help getting into the bed?" she asked, taking my chart from the bewildered escort. "Stanley Schrem called. He'll be by for rounds later this evening."
She waited until I settled back against the pillow and raised the bed's metal railing before she and the escort left the room.
"Feel good?" Mercer asked.
"Safe and soft and clean and better. I would not say that 'good' is a word that comes to mind tonight."
Mike was in the doorway. He must have stopped in every room along the way and cajoled patients out of their flowers. His arms were loaded with assortments-ten or twelve of them in a wild variety of colors-pulled from their vases and dripping water down the front of his clothes and onto the floor.
"I'm just a fool whose intentions are good," he sang to me, crossing the room and laying the dozens of wet flowers across the crisp white sheets that covered my legs. "Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."
"Misbegotten, misguided, misogynistic, misinformed," I said. "Just add misunderstood to your long list of 'mis'es."
I looked over at Mercer, who was leaning against the windowsill. "So, the only person who knew we were going to be at the cottage was Zeldin. And I guess Phelps, the groundskeeper, must have heard him suggest it. And Gino Guidi. Maybe three people in the world. Doesn't that give you a head start?"
"Don't make yourself crazy tonight, Alex. We're working on it."
"I've been inside that torture chamber, with clanging noises pounding at my aching head, pinched and prodded and observed by the entire ER staff. What else have I got to think about but who clobbered me and why? And what they were going to do when they came back for round two?"
"Zeldin and Phelps were in a meeting with a dozen other staffers from the time we left the gardens. Guidi's secretary is the one who dispatched Kathleen Bailey to be our guide. He was downtown all morning. She's not even sure she told him about it when he called in."
"Well, is anybody going to tell me what happened to me?" I asked. "And would you please take these back to the other patients, Mike? It smells like a funeral parlor in here."
"I got a pizza on the way. Extra pepperoni, extra mushrooms, no anchovies. No worms, either. Special delivery. You'll be like new in no time," he said, scooping the flowers off my legs and walking to the hallway.
"Soup," I said to Mercer. "A hot bowl of soup is all I want. And a drink."
NYU Hospital was next door to the medical examiner's office. We had tested every deli and restaurant within sight of the morgue and I knew where the best chicken soup and the closest Dewar's could be found.
"The soup we can do. I think you're grounded on the alcohol."
"I suppose they have to put a cop on my door, too?"
Mercer laughed. "We're camping out with you."
"You can't do that. It's ridiculous. I understand they have to station someone outside the room, but you guys can go home and get a good night's sleep."
"Hush, Miss Cooper."
"Now you'll make me feel guilty on top of feeling stupid."
"Battaglia made a few calls. The room next door is empty. One of us will snooze in this chair and the other can stretch out in the bed. We'll take turns. Better us than some guy from the Thirteenth who doesn't know your favorite lullabies like we do."
"Yeah, we get demerits when bad things happen on our shift," Mike said, as he came back into the room. "I'm already down points 'cause of your antics today."
"I'm going to ask you again. What happened?"
Mike and Mercer looked at each other.
Mercer spoke first. "The cops in the precinct think it was a prank. They-"
"A prank? Are they nuts? Haven't they ever read Poe?"
"Hear me out." He stood up and walked to my bed, lowered the rail and sat beside me. "There was a mugging down at the end of the park, in the playground behind the bandshell. A fifteen-yearold girl was watching over her kid brother and she got roughed up by some homies. Threw her down, snatched her wallet, touched some body parts they shouldn't have."
"I heard the screams. I remember that much."
"It was three guys, part of a gang. Wannabe baby Bloods. Punks from the 'hood who were just running around roughing folks up."
"Were they caught?"
"Not yet. They scattered in different directions."
"I saw one run across the street."
"Yeah," Mike said. "He's the one I figured maybe you tried to follow."
"The girl who was mugged-she knows who they are?"
Mercer smoothed the bedcover. "She's not saying yet. She's got to live there on One Hundred Ninety-second Street without any protection-and she's smart enough to know that."
"And what does that have to do with me?"
"The cops figure the gang was just wilding. While a few of them were causing trouble at the south end of the park, a couple of them saw you standing alone and-"
"I was alone for maybe sixty seconds."
"It only took two to smack you over the head with a two-by-four."
"Is that what it was?"
"There was one at the bottom of the front steps. It's at the lab now, being tested for blood and hair," Mercer said. "Then they carried you into the root cellar, tied your hands with your own scarf, gagged you, and tucked you under the boards."
"How could they know? Why would they-"
"Trust me, Coop," Mike said. "It ain't nothin' they picked up spending time at the local library reading short stories. Ms. Bailey says that root cellar is just an empty little room that's been an attractive local nuisance for ages. It's too damp to keep any of their supplies in, it's got no security, except when the entire park is locked at night. All those floorboards are loose-it's not like they were nailed down or anything. Hoodlums break in all the time to sit there and smoke dope. These kids just picked up a few planks and dropped you in to scare you to death."
"And that part of it worked just fine. Tell them for me when you find them. What was I gagged with? And tied?"
"The gag was a sock," Mike said.
"Just like Aurora Tait," I said, thinking of our skeleton in the basement.
"Your scarf was around your hands. Really loose."
"Loose to you, maybe. I'm telling you I couldn't move a muscle. Somebody put me in there to kill me."
Mike looked at Mercer again.
"Don't treat me like a psycho, like I'm exaggerating this. Have they ever found anything under the floorboards there before?"
"Yeah. Dead animals. Half-eaten sandwiches. Weapons. It's a natural. It's like the local haunted house."
"And you're going to tell me no one saw anybody lurking around the cottage before this happened, or running away from it afterwards?"
Mercer hesitated. "We've got a 'scrip, actually. Two kids, probably part of the same gang that worked over the teenager."
"Well, what's the description?"
"What's the difference if you never got a look at them?" Mike asked. "You're not the one who's going to make an ID. The docs tell us even if you'd seen someone or heard them coming right before you got whacked on the head, the blow would have wiped out the short-term memory. You'd never call
it up."
"Who's the witness?" I asked.
"You know the rules."
"Well, I can only hope it's not you," I said to Mike. "After today I would hate to have to rely on you for anything. And just for the record, I want the police reports to say that whoever stored me in that-that hole in the ground-was either leaving me there to die-"
"Yeah, right. With visiting hours just about to begin."
"Or planning to come back and get me after dark and then take me somewhere to finish me off."
"These kids wanted you to wiggle loose and pop out of your box right in the middle of some school tour and give the third-graders from the suburbs an urban legend to take home with them," Mike said.
The phone rang. I stared at it and inched farther down in the bed. "Who knows I'm here? I don't want to talk to anyone."
"That's gonna be Sarah," Mercer said. "She's been concerned about you all day. I told her to wait until they got you into a room this evening before she called."
I took the receiver after he answered for me. "Do I still have a job?"
My loyal deputy had held down the fort for me through protracted trials, complicated investigations, and personal turmoil-or mental health days, as we liked to call them.
"How's the head?" It was good to hear the normalcy of Sarah's voice. "You know I wouldn't get to throw my weight around at all if you were here at your desk every day. I'd written you off for the course of the Upshaw matter anyway. The boss wants you to stay out for another week, and I'm just adding my vote to his."
We chatted for a few minutes, while Sarah assured me she was on top of everything that was pending. I thanked her for her friendship and hung up the phone.
By the time my doctor arrived, he had studied the test results and confirmed that I had neither fractures nor a concussion. If I was stable throughout the night, he would sign the release forms on his morning rounds.
Mercer called out for my soup while he and Mike were eating their pizza. We were waiting for the delivery when Mike turned the television on to catch the end of Jeopardy!
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