"And that night?"
"We drove over here together. I've got a master key, of course to
get inside the gates. I'd brought a couple of bottles of wine Charlotte
got to explore all the hideaways she'd wanted to see and we lay on the
blanket for hours, looking at the constellation and talking about her
life. But she became agitated, the more she drank. Got up and started
climbing around the old buildings, was afraid she was going to fall and
hurt herself. I tried to slow her down, but she was euphoric, acting
like she was hallucinating
"That's when I realized she must have been taking pills, in addition
to the alcohol."
"Did you ask her what?"
"Of course I did. She was behaving so irrationally that it was
obviously something that had reacted badly with the alcohol, Ecstasy,
she told me. Lots of Ecstasy."
Lessen her inhibitions. Enhance her sexual experience. Create a
false euphoria. Turn an evening at the lab with Winston Shreve into a
psychedelic delight.
I asked my question softly. "What happened to her?"
"A seizure of some sort. First she had a panic attack. I tried to
grab her and convince her to get in the car so I could take her to
doctor. But she screamed at me and ran farther away. I chase after her,
but she was breathless and agitated. I wasn't aware, at first, that it
was some kind of overdose, but that must have been what happened. She
was flailing wildly, twitching and shaking uncontrollably. And then she
just collapsed in my arms."
"Didn't you try to get her to a hospital?"
"Charlotte was dead. What good would that have done? She had a
massive paroxysm."
I'd seen cases like that related to my work. Kids who overdose with
what they considered a harmless drug at nightclubs and rave
parties.
Dead before the ambulance arrived. "I know that can
happen,
Mr. Shreve. Why didn't you call the police? Get help?"
"At the time, I didn't understand why she died. Now I've read about
the drugs and realize they can be deadly, but I had no idea of that the
night Charlotte OD'ed. I, I guess I just panicked. I saw my entire
career wiped out. I sat on the far side of that wall," he said, and
pointed to the entryway, "holding Charlotte's body in my arms, and I
knew that everything I had worked for in my professional life had been
destroyed."
"So you just left her here?" I looked around at the decaying rubble
of the young girl's tomb.
Shreve was unhappy to be challenged. "I never planned to do that. I
needed the night to think. I needed to figure out how I could walk into
a medical center on a spring morning with this beautiful child in my
arms and tell them that a terrible accident had occurred. I needed to
find a way to explain her death to Sylvia Foote and the people at the
college who believed in me."
All he was concerned with was his own predicament.
"This was, after all, a morgue," he went on. "I put my blanket
around Charlotte, and I carried her inside here and put her down for
the night." I filled in the blanks: on a rust-covered metal morgue tray
in a rat-infested skeleton of a building, for the next eight months.
"And you never came back?"
"I thought I'd have a plan by the next morning, that I'd drive back
over and—. And I couldn't do it, I couldn't bring myself to come back
over here to see her. I knew that occasionally there would be workmen
in this area, and I expected one of them to find the body long before
now.
"In fact, I
wanted
them to find the body. But this part
of the island spooks everyone. I never expected it would be this long
before she could be taken out of here. If they autopsied Charlotte,
everyone would know she wasn't murdered. Don't you think they can still
tell that, I mean about the toxicology and how she died? There have
been other cases like this in the city, haven't there?"
"Other deaths like that, yes." Other bodies left to rot by a
brilliant self-centered anthropology professor? I doubt it.
"This building is actually designated to be converted into equipment
station for the new subway line. It will be renovated soon. Then they
can give Charlotte a proper burial."
Had he lost his mind completely, that he could walk away from here
and leave the girl behind another time?
I was certain, now, that I had left the administration building in
the company of Sylvia Foote when this afternoon's meeting broke up. I
forced myself to look in the direction of Charlotte body, to see
whether any of the other trays were occupied, snow fell steadily and
the shadows made it impossible for me to see.
"Sylvia Foote? Is she here, too, Mr. Shreve?" I thought of all my
battles with her over the years and all the times I had wished her
misery. "Is she dead?"
He pushed himself up from his windowsill seat and brushed his hands
together to clean off his gloves. "Not at all, Alex. Sylvia's my alibi
for this evening. I've spent hours with her a hospital, since late this
afternoon. Took her there myself, into the emergency room. Stayed with
her while they exam her and pumped her stomach. I was at Sylvia's side
the whole time. Treated her with kid gloves until she was out of the
woods and the resident cleared her to be admitted for the night, just
to be safe.
"Some dreadful attack of food poisoning. Must have been something
she drank."
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."