Cemetery Dance

Chapter 21

Nora exited the subway at the 207th Street station. She walked to the north end of the platform, then climbed the stairs to street level, where she found a three — way confluence of streets: Broadway, Isham, and West 211th. This was a neighborhood she had never been in before, the northernmost tip of Manhattan, and she looked around curiously. The buildings reminded her of Harlem: prewar walkups, attractive and sturdily built. There were few brownstones or town houses: dollar stores, bodegas, and nail salons sat cheek — by — jowl with funky restaurants and whole — grain bakeries. Nearby, she knew, was Dyckman House: the last remaining Dutch Colonial farmhouse in Manhattan. It was a place she had always intended to visit with Bill some sunny weekend afternoon.

She pushed this thought from her mind. Checking the document she had printed earlier — a satellite view of the neighborhood, with the street names marked — she got her bearings and began making her way north and west, along Isham, climbing the rise toward Seaman Avenue and the setting sun.

She crossed broad, busy Seaman Avenue and continued down an asphalt path, tennis courts to her left and a large baseball diamond to her right. She paused. Ahead of her, across the fields, lay what appeared to be primeval forest. The map showed an extension of Indian Road passing through the northern end of Inwood Hill Park, which connected to a tight little unmarked neighborhood she assumed must be the Ville. The path was more direct and, she felt, perhaps more secure. It crossed the field and disappeared into a dark tangle of red oaks and tulip trees, their long shadows knitting together amid the rocky undergrowth. Their leaves glowed with autumnal glory, russet and yellow, with splashes of blood red, forming an almost impenetrable wall. She had heard this was the last wild forest in Manhattan, and it looked it.

Nora glanced at her watch: five thirty. Night was falling quickly and the air had taken on an almost frosty chill. She took a step forward, then stopped again, glancing uncertainly into the gloomy forest. She had never been in Inwood Hill Park before — in fact, she didn't know anybody who had — and she had no idea how safe it was after dark. Hadn't a jogger been murdered in here a few years back…

Her jaw set in a hard line. She hadn't come all this way just to turn back now. There was still plenty of light left. Shaking her head impatiently, she started forward, leaning toward the wall of trees almost as if challenging them to stop her.

The path curved gently to the right, running past a small grassy field before diving between the first massive trunks. Nora walked on quickly, feeling the shadow of the heavy boughs fall over her. The path split, then split again, the tarmac webbed with grassy cracks, plastered with fallen leaves, the bushes on either side crowding into the path. She passed an occasional gas lamp, once clearly elegant but now rusted and long disused. The oaks and tulip trees — some with trunks as massive as five feet across — were punctuated by dogwoods and ginkgos. Here and there, a rocky defile thrust up from the forest floor like the edge of a knife.

Soon the paved path gave way to a dirt track that wound its way sinuously among the trunks, climbing all the while. Through a gap in the trees, Nora could make out a steep slope plunging to a tidal basin, thick with mud and populated by noisy seabirds. Their cries followed her faintly as she continued climbing the winding path, her feet kicking aside drifts of fallen leaves.

After about fifteen minutes, she stopped at the foot of an ancient retaining wall, crumbling into ruin. The roar of Manhattan had receded to the sound of wind sighing in trees. The sun had fallen behind the rise of land, and an angry orange glow suffused the October sky. The chill of night was coming down. Nora glanced at the hardwoods crowding in around her, at the glacial boulders and kettle holes scattered treacherously about. It seemed almost impossible that two hundred acres of such wild forest existed here on the most urban of all islands. Nearby, she knew, were the remains of the old Straus mansion. Isidor Straus had been a congressman and co — owner of Macy's. After he and his wife died on the Titanic, their country house in Inwood Hill Park had gradually fallen into ruin. Perhaps this very retaining wall had once been part of the estate.

The path continued to drift westward, away from the direction she needed to go. She peered at the satellite map in the dying light and then, hesitating only a moment longer, decided to bushwhack northward. She left the trail and began pushing through the sparse undergrowth, away from the trail.

The land pitched sharply upward, shelves of exposed gneiss cropping out here and there. She scrambled up the defile, hands grabbing for purchase on bushes and small trunks. Her fingers were very cold now, and she bitterly regretted not bringing gloves. She slipped, falling onto a striated rib of rock. She clambered back to her feet with a curse, brushed the leaves off, slung her bag back over her shoulder, and listened. There were no sounds of birds or rustles of squirrels, only the gentle sigh of the wind. The air smelled of dead leaves and damp earth. After a moment, she scrambled on, feeling increasingly alone in the wooded stillness.

This was crazy. It was getting dark a lot faster than she'd thought. Already the lights of Manhattan had drowned out the last of the twilight, casting an eerie glow across the sky, the black silhouettes of the half — bare trees outlined against it, giving the scene the unreality of a Magritte painting, bright above, dark below. Ahead, at the top of the defile, Nora could make out the ridgeline, studded with spectral trees. Quickly now, she half ran, half scrambled toward it. Gaining the height of land, she paused a moment to catch her breath. An old, rusting chain — link fence ran east to west, but it was bowed and twisted from neglect, and Nora soon found a loose section and ducked beneath easily. She took a few steps forward, angled her way around a set of massive boulders — and then stopped again abruptly.

The vista that lay ahead took her breath away. Before her feet, the ground fell away in a cliff, ramparts of rock dropping toward the tidal waters. She had reached the uttermost tip of Manhattan. Far below, the waters of the Harlem River were black, running westward around the Spuyten Duyvil to the great vast opening of the Hudson River, the color of dark steel in the dying light, a vast waterscape glittering beneath a rising gibbous moon. Beyond the Hudson, the high cliffs of the Jersey Palisades stood black against the final light of sunset; in the middle ground, the Henry Hudson Parkway arched over the Harlem River on a graceful bridge, arrowing northward into the Bronx. A solid stream of yellow headlights flowed over it, commuters heading home from the city. Directly across the water was Riverdale, almost as thickly wooded here as Inwood Hill Park itself. And to the east, beyond the Harlem River, lay the smoky flanks of the Bronx, pierced by a dozen bridges, afire with a million lights. The landscape formed a confusing, bizarre, and magnificent spectacle of geologic majesty: a sprawling tableau of the primeval and the cosmopolitan, thrown together with supreme capriciousness over the course of the city's centuries of growth.

But Nora admired it for only a moment. Because, looking down again, a quarter mile away and a hundred feet below, she saw — half hidden in a thick knot of woods — a cluster of grimy brick buildings, dotted with the faint twinkle of yellow lights. They sat on a flat shelf of land, perched halfway between a ragged, trash — strewn pebble beach along the Harlem River and her own vantage spot atop the ridge. It was unreachable from her cliff — in fact, she wasn't quite sure how it could be reached at all, although through the trees she could glimpse a ribbon of asphalt that, she thought, must connect to Indian Road. As she stared, she realized that the surrounding copse of trees would render the community invisible from almost any angle: from the parkway, from the riverbank, from the cliffs on the far shore. At the center of the cluster was a much larger structure, evidently an old church, which had been added on to indiscriminately, again and again, until the whole lost any architectural cohesion. This was tightly surrounded by a tangle of small, ancient timber — frame buildings, divided by deep alleyways.

The Ville: the target of Bill's most recent article. The place he believed to be the main source of animal sacrifice in the city. She stared at it in mingled dread and fascination. The huge structure at its heart looked almost as old as the Manhattan Purchase itself: extravagantly dilapidated, part brick, part chocolate — brown timber, with a squat, crudely built spire rising from behind a massive gambrel roof. While the lower windows were bricked over, the cracked glasswork of the upper stories flickered with a pale yellow glow she felt certain could only be candlelight. The place lay apparently somnolent in the silvery moonlight, now and then falling into deeper darkness as a cloud scudded past.

As she stood, staring at the flickering lights, the craziness of what she had done became clear. Why had she really come — to stare at a bunch of buildings? What could she hope to accomplish here by herself? What made her feel so certain thatthe secret lay within: the secret to her husband's murder?

The Ville remained wrapped in silence as a chilly night breeze stirred the leaves around her.

Nora shivered. Then — wrapping her coat more tightly around her — she turned and began to make her way as quickly as she could back through the dark woods toward the welcoming streets of the city.