Entombed

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."

On the distant roadway below us I could see headlights moving slowly along. The red bubble flasher on top of it illuminated the blue and white colors of a patrol car.

Phelps pivoted and pushed me back inside the cave, pinning me against the wall and holding the shotgun to my cheek.

"They'll find us, you know. They're good at that," I said. "There's all kinds of equipment they can use to search for bodies in an area like this."

"It worked long enough for bin Laden, didn't it? My bet's on the guy inside the caves."

"Why here, Mr. Phelps?" I asked softly. "Why a groundskeeper at the gardens?"

"It's the perfect solution, don't you think? At least it was for a good while. I like working outdoors-that part never bothered me. And it's as close as I'm going to get to living like a Phelps. A nineteenth-century carriage house surrounded by hundreds of acres of the most glorious park and plantings in North America. Time for my poetry, and then there's Zeldin himself, who dropped into my lap with the world's greatest collection of Poeiana. I had access twenty-four hours a day to all those privileges of the Raven Society. It's not a bad way to go, Miss Cooper, if you've got to work for a living."

Phelps had stepped back and ordered me to continue lifting and carrying rocks. The car had passed through without any sighting of us.

"You identify with Poe?" I knew there was a name for this syndrome in the psychiatric literature but I was too terrified to pull it up.

"I'm not foolish enough to think my own writings can compare, but he was always, shall we say, my inspiration."

"He's the reason you killed Aurora?"

"Not at all. I had reason enough of my own to do that. It's just that he had composed the most brilliant manner in which to do it. It still excites me every time I think of what her final thoughts must have been when she realized that I was sealing her behind that wall. Alive."

The rock slipped from my hands. I was losing my focus.

"Every time there was another insult in my life, another rejection, another defeat, I consoled myself by the thought that Poe had overcome all those similar things and more to become the greatest writer of his time."

I thought about the tragedies that had overwhelmed Poe's life from infancy. He had all the psychological torment that could have created a monster, a serial killer. Aaron Kittredge believed he might have been one. It seemed more plausible to me with every second in Phelps's presence.

"Don't I get any credit for my rehabilitation, Miss Cooper? After Aurora's death, I was-well, nearly a model citizen for a very long time."

"Until you murdered Emily Upshaw."

"Emily knew too much." Phelps sighed. "Once the newspapers showed such an interest in the skeleton, it wouldn't have taken long for her to spill her guts about me."

"She knew you as Phelps?"

"It's not the name I used in those days," he said, "but she certainly knew who my stepfather-well, whatever you want to call him-she knew who he was. She knew my story."

And that led to Dr. Ichiko, I thought, stacking another rock on the pile. Undoubtedly the shrink had all the information in his old patient files to help him piece together who "Monty" really was.

"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.

"Now there's a man who wasn't all that clever. Information isn't of any value unless you use it properly. Dr. Ichiko was just unfortunate."

"He was smart enough to find you," I said, wiping some debris from the corner of my eye.

"He got partway there. He knew enough to look for someone named Phelps. He remembered my affinity for Poe-some kind of psychological transference, he liked to say it was. So he did his research and called information for the Raven Society number, just to see if perhaps there was a member with my name. There's a Manhattan listing that goes to Zeldin's home, Miss Cooper. But if you check the Bronx directory, the same number rings at the mill. And when he dialed over here, I just happened to answer the phone. He didn't know that at the time, so when I heard the nature of his inquiry, I pretended to be the great Zeldin and invited him here to discuss the information he thought he had so brilliantly uncovered. He should have watched his step more carefully."

Once the cover-up had been set in motion, Sinclair Phelps had not been able to stop. It was the fear that someone would come here to his sanctuary-whether it was Aaron Kittredge more than a decade ago, or Dr. Ichiko or Noah Tormey most recently. Someone with a connection to Aurora or a link to Emily, someone who would expose the quiet life he had created for himself and connect him to the murder of Aurora Tait, someone who would walk through these gates and shatter the illusory world in which he lived.

"And your little punks-why did they attack Ellen this afternoon? What was that about?"

"Quite frankly, Miss Cooper, they had orders to go for you. I didn't know they'd be creative enough to impale someone on that gruesome plant, but they're good at being bad. I told them you'd be the woman asking all the questions-the ever-inquisitive Alexandra Cooper," Phelps said, shaking his head in my direction. "I understand you were uncharacteristically quiet today. They mistook that other lady for you."

The boulders were stacked waist-high now. My time was running short.

I stepped back out into the fresh air and looked in vain for any sign of human life. I stalled for a minute, reaching into my rear pants pocket and realizing for the first time that I hadn't left my gloves in the ski jacket back at Phelps's house. Something stung me sharply as I tried to withdraw my hand.

Stuck tightly to the fine knit of the woolen gloves were several leaves of the plant-the ferocious plant-that I had pulled from the wounds on Ellen's face. The long thorns pierced the tips of my fingers and I winced in pain.

I had pocketed the treacherous needles so they wouldn't accidentally injure anyone coming to Ellen's aid. Now they might be my only defense against Sinclair Phelps.

Holding the gloves in my hand, I picked up a smaller rock, one that I could carry with a single arm. Phelps was leaning against a large boulder and had placed the shotgun on top of it. He was toying with a piece of material that I assumed would be my gag and binds-ripping it into several lengths of cloth.

There would be no second chance for me. If I didn't make a clean strike, it would be my very own, very premature burial.

I approached the mouth of the cave and walked directly in front of Phelps. He started to say something to me and as I turned to look at him, I shifted the rock to my left arm. With a single thrust, I rammed the thorn-encrusted black gloves into his eye with my right hand, pushing as hard as I could.

Sinclair Phelps howled as the prickly needles embedded themselves in his eyelid. He doubled over, covering his face with his hands. I lifted the rock and brought it down as hard as I could, pleased with the sound it made as it cracked against bone. Blood trickled from his ear as he fell to the ground.

The two coydogs leaped to their feet and charged at me.

I grabbed the shotgun from the boulder, pointed its barrel straight overhead, and discharged several rounds into the quiet night.

The dogs whimpered and circled each other in distress, frightened by the blasts of the gun. Dozens more bats swooped out of the cave, dipping their wings and blackening the sky above us. I clutched the weapon in my hand and ran down the slope as fast as I was able to move.