I turned the wheel sharply and tried to make a U-turn on the path, hoping to find a foot trail on which to drive. The little machine lurched and threw me forward against the dashboard, stalled in place. I played with the ignition but there was not even a flicker of life. The cart had run off its charge. It was dead.
The blunt nose had bumped against the curb on the left-hand side of the road. I jumped out and looked around to get my bearings, and decided to run for cover in the opposite direction from which I had come.
The ground was firm when I stepped onto it. I was glad the snow had melted from its edges so that no tracks would be obvious to anyone heading along this way. I looked for a clear path between the trees, and set off racing when I found a narrow hiking trail. A small sign identified a grove of Himalayan white pine, and their flexible branches covered with long green needles gave as much protection as I could have hoped for. I ducked and took myself as far off the roadway as I could navigate without much visibility.
The pair of lights got closer to me now and came to a stop in what I assumed was the vicinity of my abandoned cart.
Certainly, Mike and Mercer would be searching for me. There was no point in my trying to peer out of the foliage and see who had approached. If he were friend and not foe, he would have been calling my name.
The headlights cut off. My pursuer had decided to look for me on foot. I didn't hear him getting closer-maybe he had been fooled briefly by the direction in which the empty cart had been facing and started his search on the far side of the paved road. But I took the moment to climb deeper and higher into the woods, certain I would find an egress on the far side of the trail I had entered.
Seconds later, the intense beam of a high-powered flashlight made a 360-degree arc from the roadway where the man-probably Phelps-was standing. I crouched behind one of the fat pines. My clothes were navy blue and black. There was nothing shiny or bright to catch the attention of a flashlight, so I tried to stay calm and motionless.
When the glare no longer looked like it was focused on me, I found the trail again and kept walking, up a hilly slope and into a denser plot of trees. I patted my pants for my cell phone, but realized it was back in Phelps's kitchen, in the pocket of my blood-soaked jacket.
As I climbed higher I thought of Mercer and Mike. They knew I was inside the gates of the Botanical Gardens and they would know I would not have left here without them. Mike had sworn to me at the hospital after my spell beneath the floorboards at Poe Cottage that he would never again leave me behind without a thorough search. I expected to hear sirens any minute, and I knew they could call in choppers with infrared lights that were capable of finding my warm body in the darkest forest if it came to that.
I stopped for a few minutes, still spooked by the total silence of the woods around me. A groundskeeper who had lived on this property for more than twenty years would know every inch of the terrain, while I was feeling my way around like a blind person. I could walk myself in and around trails that Phelps would be able to trace from memory until I dropped from exhaustion, or I could shelter myself in the warmest place possible and let the NYPD come to me.
The long green fingers of the pine needles seemed as likely a cushion as anything I would find in this wilderness. I pulled at a few of the low-hanging branches, knowing I'd infuriate the garden's high-rolling contributors for destroying their plants and counting on their forgiveness if I survived the chase.
I covered the surface of the ground with several fronds and then seated myself atop them, pulling others over me as further camouflage. But the frozen turf beneath them was filled with the residual dampness of the winter's earlier storms, and fifteen minutes of sitting still chilled me more than I could bear.
On my feet again, I traipsed down the far side of the hill, hoping to find some way back to civilization. Now I could make out two sets of headlights, tearing across the roadway like a pair of bumper cars at an amusement park. What if Phelps had called on his army of teenage bandits to ferret me out?
Time to get off a comfortable path, I told myself. I bent beneath the boughs of several trees and started traversing the hillside. I wanted to be in a place where I couldn't see lights, and nothing short of night-vision goggles could spot me.
My cheeks tingled with the cold, and I wiggled my toes to make sure they were still moving. I soldiered on between and among the thick pine trees.
About thirty feet ahead, a dark gray mass seemed to loom behind the green foliage. I worked my way toward it, dragging several branches behind me to serve as a blanket, wondering whether spaces between the large boulders would offer any better respite for me.
I held on to a tree trunk and pulled myself up the last few feet, leaning on the side of the first rock I came to, gulping in the cold air to catch my breath.
A series of huge stones towered over that one, so I stepped around it to see whether there was a niche in which I could lodge myself. I was standing at the mouth of a small cave, and without thinking twice I stepped inside the black hole to get shelter from the elements-and from my pursuers.
It was dry inside, and I felt immediate relief as I tried to adjust my eyes to an even darker field of vision.
Looking at the ground so as not to twist an ankle or stumble on a rock, I got about eight or ten feet back into the cave, so that even a strong light beam would not catch me at the edge of the opening.
I didn't look up until my forehead brushed against something large and hairy dangling from overhead. I knelt on the floor in a panic as dozens of bats let loose with a volley of high-pitched squeals, routed from their roosts by my unexpected invasion. Some dove directly at me with their bared little teeth and extended claws displayed to my horror. Others flapped around my ears, ominously flaunting their four-foot wingspan before taking off out of the cave, leaving me quivering on its filthy floor.
44
I was flying now, flying downhill as fast as I could move myself, with furry little mammals shrieking above me as their own fear forced them out of hibernation into the bracing shock of cold air. They blackened the sky beyond the treetops and swarmed like an angry army as they tried to organize into some kind of formation.
In what direction could I find safety? I brushed at the wings that neared my scalp, worried that a bat would become entangled in my hair. Worried also that the most aggressive ones were likely to be rabid.
Suddenly, I had a more important fear. Even if the detectives were scouring the park, a flock of brown bats would have no significance to them. Sinclair Phelps would know their seasonal habits, would know I had disturbed the roost, and would know exactly where on the property the bat cave was located.
As I approached the roadway from halfway down the slope, a minivan without headlights pulled into view and braked to a standstill. I doubled back and ran uphill to the boulders, climbing up on top of the lowest ones, rather than reentering the cave, as I heard heavy breathing and something charging up the underbrush toward me.
Panting at my feet were two dogs, German shepherds who barked furiously as they tried to scale the rocks. The bats that fluttered overhead made passes at them, too, and the dogs raised their snouts at the creatures that taunted them.
"Down!" shouted a voice a few feet farther down.
At the sound of Phelps's command, both animals squatted on all fours and impatiently waited for their master. The shrill screech of the bats, some beyond the range of human hearing, must have been disturbing to the canines, both of whom whined and growled as they lay in place.
I glanced again at the sky: treetops, bat wings, and not too far overhead the steady stream of flights landing and taking off from La Guardia Airport, directly across nearby Long Island Sound. No sign of any helicopter above, nor any police flashers below.
I was wedged into place in the crevice between two boulders, the dogs twelve feet below me, snarling and salivating as they waited for orders to attack.
Phelps took his time climbing up to meet me. He used the high beam of
his flashlight to feature me as the bull's-eye within his target. When he reached the dogs they seemed to whine even louder, as though asking his permission to take a piece out of one of my legs.
"Shut up!" he said, and the whimpering stopped as they put their heads on their outstretched paws.
I saw that he was carrying a shotgun. I thought of the professor-Noah Tormey-and the marksman who had nearly taken him out that day at the Hall of Fame. How logical to need weapons-and a marksman-in an urban park like this, where so many vermin were likely to have wreaked havoc on the precious plant life.
"Now, I think you're going to have to climb down from that perch, Miss Cooper. We've got work to do."
I didn't respond. I thought I could hear police sirens in the background and I wanted Phelps to think the game might be over for him.
"I do hear that noise, Miss Cooper. But it's not for you the bell tolls. My boys are out stirring up a little trouble on Fordham Road. It's a very dangerous city beyond these gates. You know that better than anyone."
So his teenage thugs would create a diversion on a Bronx sidewalk and 911 calls would flood the switchboard. Even Mike and Mercer might think it was I who was in trouble out on the nearby street, that I had somehow been spirited off the garden grounds or had been stupid enough to follow the kids who had attacked Ellen Gunsher after Mercer told me he had seen them leaving the gate.
"Call off your dogs," I said, stalling for time. Some of the bats were still circling above us while others had settled on tree branches, wizened little faces staring into mine from their upsidedown positions.
"They're so hard to discipline, Miss Cooper. Coydogs, actually. I breed them. It's one way to keep the deer population down. Gets rid of the rabbits and moles that are so destructive to plants."
A mix of wild coyotes and feral dogs. They were rumored to be a vicious hybrid.
"Let's go," Phelps said, louder this time.
I heard an engine turn on and saw the minivan start to move. One of his young troops, no doubt, getting rid of the car so the police wouldn't make our location. My eyes followed the vehicle till it disappeared around the bend, but I didn't move.
"You can sit up there. You can even keep climbing to the top. But then where do you go? Besides, I've got hiking boots on and can overtake you in a couple of minutes," he said.
I wanted to tell him to shoot me-it would be faster than whatever he had in mind-but I didn't mean it. And I knew it wasn't his first choice of disposing of me because anyone out searching would hear the gunshots echo throughout this quiet preserve.
I started to inch myself backward up the large boulder but couldn't get a toehold without looking down. By the time I had raised myself a couple of feet, Phelps had put the shotgun on the ground and was making his way up to me. He grabbed my left ankle and wrenched it around, pulling me toward him. He lowered himself off the rocks and kept tugging at me until I landed in the dirt on my tailbone, smacking my head against the stony surface behind me.
"I certainly didn't mean to knock you out," he said, kneeling beside me. "Not before you help me carry a few of these."
Phelps gestured to the loose rock piles that some glacial movement had thrown off as it passed through the river gorge and woodlands a few thousand years earlier.
"Of course," he said, standing and extending a hand to me, "you're probably thinking I could just let the coydogs have a go at you. You've never seen them take down a deer, have you? They can each grab hold of a leg and head off together on a brisk run-and when you find the carcass in the woods a few days later it looks like it snapped in half as easily as a wishbone might at a Thanksgiving dinner."
I was on my feet, rubbing the back of my head.
"The problem with that is the poor dogs would suffer for it in the end. I've got them so well trained at this point, and Zeldin or someone else in the administration here would decide they'd have to be put to sleep for hurting you. Wouldn't that be a sorry trade?" Phelps said, shaking his head. "So what does that leave me instead?"
I didn't have to say it aloud. There could be only one thing he wanted to do to me in the cave.
"Perhaps you knew this, Miss Cooper, that the very first crypts were in caves? Deep, cool, wonderful recesses in which to entomb people. We're going to custom-make a crypt for you, Alex. Poe's way."
45
There was no point screaming. Not yet. I didn't want to be gagged or bound until I had exhausted every other possible means of helping myself get out alive.
"Start over there." Sinclair Phelps poked me in the back with the point of the shotgun. "You're a big girl-you can carry a few of those."
I could see his plan. He would arrange this to look like a rock slide, as though I had been trapped inside-running away from goodness knows what-had panicked and was unable to get help. That would only work if he thought no one else had put together the facts, as I had, that linked him to his victims.
I bent down and picked up a large rock-it must have weighed more than twenty pounds-and slowly walked with it to the mouth of the cave.
"Go in. Go on in," he said, prodding me again with the gun. "All those stories about bats are just myths. They're very timid creatures. Last place they'd want to be is in your hair."
I walked a foot or two into the cave, pushed farther by Phelps, who told me exactly where to drop my first load. Now I could see rows of the furry beasts hanging from their roosts.
"'A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat,' Miss Cooper. You know that one?"
I shook my head.
"Poe's 'Coliseum.' A lesser-known work." He watched me as I maneuvered the rock into place.
"Did Aurora Tait have to make her own coffin, too?" I asked.
Phelps laughed. "No, no. But then it was so much easier for me to get Aurora into my lair, Miss Cooper."
"I suppose all you had to do was promise her heroin."
"High-test. Best shit on the street. She came to me like a baby for its bottle."
"Why there? Why that building? Because it was Poe's house?"
"Keep moving," he said, conscious that I was stalling but pleased to show off what passed for his intelligence, after serving for all these years in a job that belied his educational background and knowledge of literature. "That was just a richly ironic coincidence. You know the story? You know 'Amontillado'?"
I was lugging another rock now, pretending to limp because I had twisted my ankle. "The ultimate tale of revenge," I said. "Of course I know it. You mean it was just chance that your construction work was in that particular basement?"
"The landlord was always having work done there. That dump probably wasn't fit for occupancy a century ago."
"And Aurora, she saw what you were doing?"
"She wasn't quite as sober as you are, Miss Cooper. Nor as well read. She found it amusing that I was a day laborer. She liked to watch me work, as long as she was high. I gave her the dope that afternoon and she obliged me by shooting up, getting herself into a stupor, as I knew she would. By the time I lifted her over my shoulder and stood her up behind the wall, she was almost ready to come around. Can you imagine the look in her eyes when she realized what I was about to do to her?"
At this very moment I was able to imagine it perfectly well.
"Betrayal. She earned every exquisite second of her miserable death. She was responsible for depriving me of everything I'd been promised from the time I was four years old. The bitch had tried to extort money-a lot of money-from my step-" Phelps stopped to correct himself. "From the man who raised me. She screwed up the whole plan, and in doing that she condemned me to the gutter."
I was on my third small boulder, peering out into the black-green forest for any sign of a rescuer.
"I'd spent my entire youth trying to please a man who never really wanted me under his roof anyway. He'd taken me in when my mother died," Phelps said.
I had heard much of the story from Gino Guidi, but I figured it would anger this strange man to let on that the detectives and I knew
more about his past-without knowing his identity-than he might have liked.
"It doesn't make any sense that he took you in if he didn't want you."
"I was too young to know. My mother was his housekeeper, and the woman who took care of me after my mother's death also worked for him, on the kitchen staff. She claimed he was keen to do it at the time. The rejection came much later on, when I was eight or nine. When he finally got married the new bride wanted her own children. Of course she didn't want the illegitimate kid of the parlor maid anywhere in the mix."
"Who-who was the man?"
Phelps was watching me build my coffin, eyeing me as I ferried heavy rocks from the hillside into the cave. He was leaning against the side of it, shotgun tucked under his arm, a jacket zipped up to his chin and a scarf and hat on his neck and head that seemed enviably warm.
"Phelps. Sinclair Phelps."
We'd been told that he'd been disinherited and disowned, that like Edgar Poe he'd never been formally adopted by his benefactor. "His name? He gave you his name?"
"I took his name, Miss Cooper. Not long after Aurora and I parted ways. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of twenty-five years without anyone discovering her body-well, her remains. I never thought I'd get away with it so cleanly. I did, after all, confess to any number of people that I had killed the poor girl," he said, grinning at me. "It's not my fault they didn't take me seriously."
"So your real name?"
"That hardly matters, does it? You see, if anyone put Aurora's disappearance together with the former NYU student who hallucinated about killing her, they'd be out of luck if they tried to find him. He just ceased to exist. One less junkie the world had to worry about. One less dropout never even likely to make an alumni contribution.
"But Sinclair Phelps? However you try to find him-the best private investigator, the most determined Cold Case Squad, even- what do you call it?-Google him on the Internet-and all it comes back to is a dead man, with no male heirs, who hardly ever left Keene, New Hampshire, when he was alive. There are so many periodical and philanthropic records that connect to Sinclair Phelps, owner of the largest paper-manufacturing company in the region, that a humble groundskeeper at a city garden doesn't even pop up on the screen. I simply reinvented myself."
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