The DeadHouse

34

"We're going to take a short walk," Shreve said, working to undo the knot on the piece of fabric that bound my ankles. "Perhaps it will calm you to get you away from Charlotte."

He placed his hand around my elbow and hoisted me onto my feet. The blanket slipped to the ground and he bent to lift it, then replaced the hood of my parka over my matted hair. I tried to steady myself without touching him for support, but my legs were numb from the combination of the cold and the hours of immobility.

Shreve guided my tentative steps past the cabinet of morgue trays and the frozen body of the young student toward the entrance arch and out of the ruined building.

A hundred yards away, to the south, stood the massive remains of the Smallpox Hospital. He led me that way on the slick footpaths, both of us bowing our heads against the ferocious gusts of wind that kicked up off the East River. When I lifted my eyes from time to time to check our course, I could see the crenellated parapets of the eerie giant looming before us.

I chided myself for the scores of times I had looked across from the FDR Drive at the elegant outline of this Gothic masterpiece and imagined it as a place of romance and intrigue. Now this hellhole where thousands of souls had perished before me might become my snowy tomb. What had Mike said to me on our drive to work? The luckiest girl he knew? The thought was almost enough to make me smile.

Wooden posts, like elongated stilts, supported the rear walls of the ancient granite structure. Shreve stepped around them, leaving our footsteps to be covered again by falling snow. When hi stepped inside a doorway, he withdrew from his pocket a small flashlight and turned it on to ease his way through the littered flooring of the abandoned rooms. The light from the tiny plastic instrument was too dim and too concentrated to be seen across the river. Besides, I knew it would be masked completely by the floodlights that were focused on the great facade of the hospital from the ground outside, the ones that had made it possible for me to admire Renwick's skeleton as I drove home most nights.

As with the Strecker Laboratory, there was no roof left covering this building. Although abandoned for the better part of century, its crumbling interior was clearly familiar to Shreve. Without hesitation, he led me through a maze of half-walled spaces that had once been patients' rooms.

Nan Rothschild had not exaggerated her description of how abruptly the city had abandoned these haunted properties. Old bedsteads were still in place, pairs of primitive crutches were scattered on the splintered floorboards, and glass-fronted cabinets with broken windowpanes held empty bottles on their dilapidated shelves. We had crossed through what I assumed had once been the formal central hall of the hospital and continued on to a room in the very corner of the building. For the first time in hours, the precipitation seemed to have stopped. I looked up and saw, instead, that someone had fashioned a makeshift ceiling out of a thin layer of plywood.

Shreve moved forward and my eyes followed the track made by his light. Here was an alcove that had been transformed into a sort of shelter in this outpost of exposed ruins. On the floor in the corner was a slim mattress from one of the old hospital beds. Not even two inches thick, the mattress had faded ticking that barely showed from decades of wear and exposure. A small table sat beneath the long stretch of open space that had once been a window, and assorted pieces of rubble had been carried in to prop up the boards overhead.

"Sit there," Shreve said, pointing to a wooden seat with a high back that had once been a wheelchair. He eased me onto the slats, which tilted backward and tottered as he knelt to retie my ankles. He stood behind me and reached around to place the handkerchief in my mouth again, tying it in back.

He walked out through the threshold of this small chamber and disappeared into the blackness of the adjacent rooms. What was he up to now? I wondered. Chills raced through my joints, my head still pounded, and my empty stomach ached and growled at me in the quiet of the very late night.

I stiffened my neck, shook off an array of grim thoughts, and pulled myself upright. Glancing out between the stone blocks, mitred at the top to form a pointed window frame, I could see from this direction the glitter of Manhattan's skyline muted by the endless flakes of falling snow. Straining my eyes, I could make out the spire of River House directly across the water from my corner seat.

Shreve must have made a call from his cell phone and left me alone so I would not overhear his conversation. But his voice echoed from within the thick gray walls of the neighboring area and I heard him ask for Detective Wallace. Why would hi anything about Mercer?

"Mr. Wallace? Winston Shreve here. Professor Shreve." Something about having just returned to his apartment and finding a message on his answering machine from Wallace. I had no idea what time it was now, whether it was still late Monday eve the early hours of Tuesday morning, the very last day of the year.

Of course, if I had been missing for any period of time, even Mercer would have been brought in from home in the effort to find me.

Shreve, in his most professorial manner, was telling him didn't mind repeating something he had told Detective Chapman earlier in the evening. "The two ladies got into my car in front of the school and I headed onto the West Side Highway to go up to Westchester. Sylvia was complaining of nausea and dizziness. We thought perhaps it was something she had eaten for lunch was making her sick. We'd just gone over that bridge into Riverdale when she sort of fainted, I guess you'd say."

Wallace must have asked a couple of questions and Shreve mumbled more answers that were inaudible to me. Flashbacks were coming to me now, just as drugged victims described emerged from the haze. I remembered being in the minivan and drinking the cocoa that the professor had bought for us.

"No, no. It was Ms. Cooper's idea. She suggested I get turn around. We drove immediately back to New York Presbyterian Hospital. Ms. Cooper knew where the emergency room was. Said she'd been there many times to see victims. I didn't waste time looking for a place to park, so she waited in and I carried Sylvia inside.

"Then when the doctor made the decision to admit her, I went back out to tell Ms. Cooper that I wasn't going to leave the hospital until I knew that Ms. Foote would be all right."

Wallace had questions. I rooted for him to break this goddamn alibi.

"Yes, Detective, Alex insisted on coming inside and waiting with me. I called the Lockhart house and told Skip's mother that we'd encountered a problem and wouldn't be able to keep the meeting after all. Alex came into the waiting room and-"

Shreve must have turned around and faced the other direction. It was more difficult to hear him but it sounded as though he was explaining how I'd passed the time while Sylvia was being treated by the medical team.

Whatever Shreve had drugged us with, I had no memory of the hours after the session in Sylvia's office broke up. It must have had amnesiac qualities. Is it possible that I actually had been inside the emergency room waiting area at New York Presbyterian? And if not, what a clever ruse. That place was a perpetual zoo. An endless procession of gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents, drug overdoses, women in labor, and miscellaneous misery of every sort. Most admissions were accompanied by strings of relatives and friends-whining, wheedling, bawling, and generally filling every inch of the enormous holding tank in which they waited for news of a loved one's condition.

The wind carried Shreve's words back to me. He must have shifted position again.

"For hours, Detective. She was there for hours. Watching television a bit, like everyone else. Making some phone calls."

Wallace was trying to figure out when I had left the hospital.

"Must have been close to nine o'clock. Yes, yes, of course. It was after they told us that Sylvia was awake and responding, but that they were going to keep her overnight for observation. I didn't want to leave without seeing her myself, but Ms. Cooper seemed impatient at that point. Told me she'd just grab a cab out on Broadway and get herself downtown."

Shreve hesitated before he threw in the next suggestion. "Seemed to be in a bad mood, Mr. Wallace. Something about a row with her boyfriend. Her beeper had been going off repeatedly and she paid it no attention. Rather willful, I'd say."

No one would argue with him on that point.

Shreve hadn't missed a detail. How stupid of me to have announced aloud to Mike that I had an unhappy boyfriend when my beeper had gone off at the beginning of the meeting in Sylvia's office.

"You mean come into the station house? Right now? But I've just told you everything that I know about-"

Break his balls, Mercer. Shreve'll never make it through a fact to-face encounter with you.

"Certainly, Mr. Wallace. No, no, thanks, I don't need a ride.'

Shreve's footsteps crunched again on the packed snow as r walked closer to my little sanctuary and bent his head to come in under the plywood covering. He ungagged me and stood in front of me to explain that he was going to leave for a short while.

"What did you give me to knock me out? What did you do to Sylvia?"

"You needn't worry. Nothing with long-term effects. Just sedative to make sure I could get you here and get her out of the way."

"A lot of a sedative. I can't remember anything."

Shreve smiled. "Gamma-hydroxybutyrate."

"GHB?" I knew it better than most. A colorless, odorless, tasteless designer drug, and I had quickly ingested it in my hot choc late in a matter of minutes. Most ironic of all is that it was making the rounds as a date-rape drug, being slipped into drinks of unsuspecting women to render them unconscious for several hours.

"Amazing what you can buy on the Internet. I didn't know anything about these drugs until Charlotte died, but it's all there on the Web."

He wasn't exaggerating. Earlier in the year, a joint task force city detectives and DEA agents had run a sting in which they bought two gallons of GHB from a Web site called www.DreamOn.com for several thousand dollars. It was simple to do.

"But surely the doctors will find traces of it when they Sylvia." I didn't believe that he had really taken her to the hospital and was trying to challenge him to admit that.

"You should know better than that, Ms. Cooper. The ER admission is for a seventy-year-old woman who became ill after lunch while sitting in a car with a college professor and a prominent prosecutor. Why in the world would anyone suspect something like a date-rape drug to be the cause? They just pumped her stomach and were thankful when she came round. Keep her in overnight and she'll be released in the morning."

Shreve was right once again. Unlike cocaine and heroin, which leave trace material in the bloodstream for days, GHB doesn't even show up in blood. And it's evacuated from the urine within twenty-four hours of ingestion. No one would even think to look for it in Sylvia's case, and they would be likely to credit this brief physical disturbance in an elderly woman to a bad reaction to something in her last meal.

"I'm taking the tram over to talk to the police. I should be back in less than two hours."

That meant it could not be much later than midnight. The tram shut down at 2 A.M., and he was planning to return before it stopped operating.

Shreve wasn't telling me any more details about how he had gotten me here, but I was beginning to understand it. After Sylvia and I passed out, eagerly gulping down our potions, he must have driven across town and come onto the island with his van. It would already have been dark when he let himself into the deserted southern end and deposited my body in the Strecker Lab before taking Sylvia back to New York Presbyterian Hospital.

He would then have spent four or five hours making himself visible to the nurses and doctors in the waiting area, inquiring solicitously about his dear colleague. In the meantime, inches of snow would have completely obliterated the tire tracks that had taken me to the old morgue, and I would have been sleeping off the toxin that had felled me.

He must have redeposited his car safely in his garage so that it would be dry and warm if the police decided to examine it, and then returned by tram to begin his encounter with me. He obviously hadn't counted on a mandatory midnight visit to the detective squad.

"Don't worry, Ms. Cooper. I am coming back for you. You don't have to die, you know. If that were my intention, it would have happened already. As I said before, you can help me out of all this." Although Shreve had removed the gag, he left me tied in place. He had not wanted me to scream in the background while he had been on the telephone, but now there was no one to hear me.

"I just need to calm your colleagues," he went on. "Chapman's brought in this other fellow called Wallace. They're worried that they haven't heard from you."

"I can tell you an easy way to relax Chapman about me," I said to him softly.

Shreve looked back at me quizzically.

"I mean if that would get you back here faster so you'll let me go." I wasn't taking odds on the fact that he truly might release me at the end of this ordeal, but I was hoping to send a signal to my friends.

"What would you suggest, Ms. Cooper?"

I twisted in my seat and the old wooden slats creaked in response. "We watch Jeopardy! almost every night."

"You watch what?"

"It's a game show, on television. Do you know it?" Shreve had PBS written all over him and he stared at me blankly. I explained the final question to him and he laughed at me in disbelief.

I racked my brain for ideas, trying to make this work. I reminded him that Mike had known about Petra and discussed it with Shreve when we first met him. "You, uh… you could tell him we were watching the show together while we were waiting at the hospital for word about Sylvia. You could tell him that I insisted on watching the last question."

He was beginning to think about the idea. "There'd be no other way for you to know that about me, and about Detective Chapman, unless you and I had been together at seven-thirty tonight. You know, we were just chatting and I was telling you about these silly bets we make against each other." I was trying not to sound too much as though I was pleading with him, but everything about me was on edge. "He'll be convinced I was all right while the two of us were together."

For God's sake let him go along with me on this one. I took the next step. "I'll make up something for you. Mike was obviously much too busy to have been watching television tonight. He was probably talking to old Orlyn Lockhart, or had left White Plains on his way back to the city when the show was on. Just make it some category he doesn't know very well."

I furrowed my brow and pretended to come up with a question. "Like feminist stuff. Tell him-I know, tell him that the last answer was the name of the first woman doctor in America. And if you add that it stumped me, too, he'll buy right into it."

Please do exactly what I'm telling you and please let Chapman recall that we were together last week when that very subject came up: Who was Elizabeth Blackwell? I needed Chapman to remember that and then Chapman would know that Shreve was lying through his teeth. And with any luck he would also realize that I was somewhere on Blackwells Island.

"We'll see whether that helps things, Ms. Cooper. Then when I come back, I want you to think about how cooperative you're going to be about helping me find the diamonds that are buried on the island."

I was stunned. Winston Shreve believed that the diamonds were really still here? And what did he think I knew about how to find them?

"We'll talk about Lola later. Perhaps you're not even aware of the information you have," he said. I hadn't even thought about Lola Dakota since regaining consciousness. Shreve must be after something I had come across in the investigation. But what?

"I've got a legitimate right to those diamonds, Ms. Cooper. Not like those other fortune hunters. They belonged to my grandfather."

"Your grandfather?"

"Yes, Ms. Cooper. There were men like Orlyn Lockhart who were, shall we say, the gatekeepers of the island at the time. And then there were the men who spent their time here on the inside. The patients in this hospital, doomed as they were. And just a hundred yards away, the prisoners in the penitentiary.

"Freeland Jennings, Ms. Cooper. Freeland Jennings was my grandfather."