Death Angel

FORTY-ONE

“Why don’t we give Lucy a proper burial?” I said.

I needed to get Wicks to stop talking about his death-and mine-and focus him on the child he loved, maybe as a way of getting us both out of the cave. I was revolted at the suggestion that I help him kill himself.

“I did that once already,” he said. “Now you’re going to have to stand up. You’re going to have to come with me to see what I’ve prepared.”

“But-but this box looks-well, it looks practically new.”

“I didn’t have a coffin when Lucy died. I kept her here with me for several nights, sleeping right beside her, until I was able to bury her in a cemetery.”

Wicks grabbed my arm and started marching me-since I could only take small steps-toward the far wall and up the ramp that led to the higher part of the cave.

“How did you do that?”

“There’s a cemetery in the Park,” he said, squeezing my upper arm with his hand.

I couldn’t let him know that I was pretty well up to speed now on almost every corner of the Park, and there were certainly no cemeteries here.

“I’ve got a map. I-I didn’t see anything like that.”

Wicks had a tight grip on me. I was stumbling on the steep incline of the cave’s floor as we turned a corner and continued on.

“Move faster.”

“Untie my legs if you want me to go faster,” I said. “Where are you taking me?”

“Nowhere.”

“But-but it’s pitch-black ahead.”

“It’s a cave, Wisconsin. Don’t you have any of them back home?”

“I don’t know how you can see. I-I can’t see anything.”

Eddie Wicks was like a feral creature, accustomed to the cool dark space that no light seemed to penetrate, pushing me forward farther and farther away from the only opening that I knew existed.

“You don’t need to see, young lady. Only I do.”

“But Lucy,” I said, trying to appeal to his professed devotion to the child, “you’re leaving her alone back there. What cemetery are you talking about?”

“You wouldn’t know it, Wisconsin. There are three cemeteries in the Park, and nobody knows they’re even here.”

“But where?” I asked, tripping on a rock and falling to one knee.

Wicks grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me to my feet. “You can’t see the graves any longer. Nobody respected the dead, even though they’ve been there for two hundred years. The city built this Park right on top of all those lost souls, but that’s where I put Lucy to rest.”

Of course, I thought. All Angels’ Church. Three cemeteries for the three churches that once made up Seneca Village. The church buildings and houses had been razed to the ground, but the cemeteries of each had been left on-site and covered over when the Park was originally landscaped.

“I’m so thirsty,” I said, stopping in my tracks and trying to put Wicks’s story together. “Can’t I please have some water?”

“You can’t have anything,” he said as he pressed me to shuffle along.

“If you buried Lucy in the cemetery, why is she here? That doesn’t make sense.”

“You weren’t even born in 1971, were you?”

“No.”

“The whole world was looking for Lucy Dalton. The cops, the FBI, everyone at the Dakota,” Wicks said. “Did I say that name before? The Dakota is the place that Lucy lived.”

“I didn’t know.”

“The police treated me-they treated all of us in Miss Lavinia’s household-like criminals.”

He was indeed a criminal, and little wonder that Dr. Hoexter spoke of Wicks’s noted history of feelings of police persecution. Hoexter had called them persecutory delusions, but there was nothing delusional about them. Eddie Wicks, like the Dalton staff, must have been interrogated over and over again.

“But they were all so stupid they had no idea how to find Lucy.”

“Because you had buried her,” I said softly, trying to shake off his grip.

Wicks had turned around, facing me and moving backward, my wrists in his hands. His eyes were on fire now, the only thing I could see as I haltingly walked along with him.

“I wrapped her in a sheet that I brought here from the house, and I tied it with some of her favorite ribbons. In the middle of the night, I walked from this cave, holding Lucy in my arms.”

“And no one stopped you?”

“It was the ’70s, dear. You had to be crazy to be in this Park at night,” Wicks said. “And it isn’t far to the cemetery. It’s near 85th Street, just west of here.”

8521. I almost said the numbers out loud. I remembered the first day we had walked in the Ramble with the park rangers, and the reminder that every lamppost bore the number of the street location nearest to that point.

8521 was the number written on the Day & Meyer receipt that Mercer picked up from the dusty room on the ninth floor of the Dakota. It must have marked the place in the Park-in the very middle of what used to be Seneca Village-where Eddie Wicks had buried the body of Baby Lucy Dalton.

“I can’t walk anymore,” I said. “The ties on my ankle are too tight. And it’s cold in here. I need something to stop my chills.”

“You won’t be cold much longer,” Wicks said. “You shouldn’t complain so much.”

“But why is Lucy here?” I asked. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”

“Because someone had the bad judgment to dig up the area around the cemetery, to dig up the little village and churchyard.”

Nan Rothschild and the Barnard-Columbia project-the dig to examine Seneca Village a couple of years ago-must have unsettled Eddie Wicks completely.

“I had to go back and rescue Lucy-”

“Rescue?”

“I didn’t want anyone digging up that poor child, disposing of her somewhere else.”

Profilers and shrinks were going to have a field day with Eddie Wicks, if I could get both of us out of this godforsaken place alive. Behavioral scientists would claim that Wicks’s mind-set was shown by how he treated Lucy’s corpse. They would tell us that wrapping her in a sheet, decorating her shroud with her favorite ribbons, and burying her in a proper-if out-of-sight-churchyard demonstrated a degree of attachment to the child. The Lindbergh baby was tossed to the side of the road in the Jersey woods-a point often underscored-to be scavenged by animals.

“So you brought her body back here, before that dig?”

“Well now, there isn’t much of a body, Wisconsin, is there?”

“Let go of me, please. I can walk faster if you loosen the ties on my legs.”

“You looked in the box, didn’t you? She’s only just bones now. But I’m going to bury them with the proper respect, too. Right there, in the floor of the cave. And Lucy will be surrounded by the things she loved most.”

The Carousel, the Angel of the Waters and other silver pieces from the Dalton collection must have been part of what Eddie Wicks stole from the storage unit after his escape from Bellevue. Some of the other treasures-Belvedere Castle, the Obelisk, and even the ebony angel that undoubtedly came from underground, from somewhere in the churchyard that was once Seneca Village-must have become separated from this cache.

My thoughts flashed to Vergil Humphrey. He told us that the black figurine came from the churchyard that he and another man-a man he had known since his childhood-found when they were digging at Seneca. Had Wicks relied on the unreliable storyteller to help him retrieve the remains of Baby Lucy? Did Verge pilfer the black angel when he helped his old friend with the grim task of moving Lucy from the old churchyard?

I couldn’t help but wonder whether our Angel-the dead girl-realized that both men had something to do with this heartrending box of bones.

I had no doubt that Wicks was creating a shrine for the child he claimed to have adored.

“Please tell me where you’re taking me.”

“Almost there.”

“But I can’t help you hurt yourself. I’d never do that. Take me out of here with you and I’ll explain all this to the police. We’ll convince them that Lucy’s death was an accident.”

Wicks pulled on my hands again, and as I shuffled forward I kicked against an object that almost sent me flying over it. Something low, on the ground, that obstructed my path and scraped my shins.

I looked down and saw a platform of some kind, also wooden, as far as I could make out.

“You don’t have to hurt me, actually,” Wicks said. “You can just be my canary in the coal mine.”

“What-?” He was wide-eyed now and agitated. The canary was what miners sent ahead of them to test for deadly gases. What had his diseased mind conceived of as my fate?

“Step up on this, Wisconsin. Let’s see if I’ve got it right this time.”

“Got what right?”

“You step on this. Come, come. It will hold your weight quite easily.”

When I didn’t move, Eddie Wicks walked behind me and lifted me onto the improvised stand. That’s when I saw the pink gauze.

The metallic strands of gold in the precious fabric glittered above my head. I craned my neck to look up at the odd display.

While I’d been wriggling against my binds earlier, Eddie Wicks had come up here, to this second level of the vast man-made vault, and wrapped lengths of Lucy’s sparkling material around the tip of one of the boulders that jutted into the cave.

Wicks had fashioned a noose from a long piece of heavy rope and covered it with fragments of the pink-and-golden gauze that had crushed the life out of the little child. He was determined to kill himself this time, but he was more determined to kill me first.