Entombed (31 page)

The sets of footsteps
walked away, with Mike going to ask the cops in the radio motor patrol
car if they could phone in to locate me.

"I thought she was
coming out of the cottage right behind me," Bailey said. "She might
have just dashed out the gate. I-I just didn't see."

Mercer's deep voice
was still in range, calling after Mike, "Alex may swim fast, but I
wouldn't bet on her in a sprint through the side streets. It's not like
her to take off on a footrace like that."

Don't leave me,
Mercer, I prayed silently. How ironic that this was like Poe's classic,
the officers standing right over the buried body, chatting pleasantly,
making a mockery of my horror but hearing nothing.

I writhed and wriggled
in my box. The noise of my clothes rustling against the old boards as I
moved sounded as loud as thunder to me. Why couldn't anyone outside
hear it? I gnawed on the gag, but quickly grew dizzy from the shortness
of breath. I urged myself to lie still until someone returned to the
cellar door. I urged myself to believe that someone would.

The dampness seeped
through the back of my pants legs and I realized I was shivering. I
moved my body again and struggled to pull my left hand free from under
my thigh. It slid an inch or so, coming to rest against something slimy
and fat and cold. Something that crawled.

This was a root
cellar, I reminded myself. The thing I touched was probably a slug. It
was Poe's root cellar, so most likely it was what he called a conqueror
worm, waiting for me in my burial plot.

Why had I been stored
here in this hole? What would my captors do to me when they returned,
once the police moved their search away from this dank prison?

Now there were noises
in an adjacent room above. "Every-thing," I heard Mercer say. "Open
everything."

Lots of pairs of feet
were traipsing through the tiny cottage, banging doors and moving
furniture. There was a cupboard in the kitchen, I thought as I closed
my eyes and tried to visualize the rooms we had seen earlier, but not
even a closet in the parlor or bedroom.

"The fireplace," Mike
said, "any trapdoors in there, at the back?"

Somebody was pounding
up the narrow steps to the second floor. I could have saved them the
time. There was nowhere to conceal anything upstairs.

Kathleen Bailey was
trying to help them, answering someone's question about whether
anything like this had ever happened here before. "Never. Nothing like
this."

"How about the
building foundation?" Mike said. It sounded like he was outside, at the
top of the steps near the entrance.

"This side is solid
rock," Mercer said. "I'll try the latticework on the left."

I heard several thuds
and then the sound of splintering wood. Mercer had probably kicked
through the decoratively carved front below the old porch.

"You been in here?"

An unfamiliar but
welcome voice was close to me, unlatching the cellar door. I twisted
around again, undoubtedly crushing the worm as I shimmied back and
forth on top of it and grunted as I moved.

"They checked that
already," someone answered. "It's empty."

The door that had been
cracked open slammed shut again.

The entire inside of
my mouth was chewed up by my efforts to loosen the gag. I could taste
the blood as I swallowed.

Mike and Mercer were
on my other side now, near the front steps of the cottage. "I'll take a
ride around the 'hood. She's obviously not here," Mike said. "She's
probably doing social work for the little bastard who punched out the
kid on the playground."

"I'm not leaving,"
Mercer said. "I'd rather pull this damn park apart. She doesn't know
the Bronx. I'm telling you she didn't run off anywhere."

"What coulda happened
to her?" Mike asked. "We weren't out of sight for ten minutes. She's
got a short fuse but I didn't think she was so impatient that-"

"Do it your way. Just
leave a couple of uniformed guys here."

Stay with me, Mercer.
Please just stay here with me.

I could hear Mike walk
away from the building. "If you need a bloodhound, let me know. Or just
sniff the floorboards for that Chanel shit she wears."

Floorboards. That's
exactly what you need to think about. Stop your goddamn joking and come
and get me.

I counted the five
steps as Mercer walked up to the front door and reentered the cottage.
Maybe it was my imagination but it seemed as though worms or spiders
were crawling up the leg of my pants.

Minutes elapsed, and
the frigid dampness continued to work its way into my bones. Now
several people emerged from the house and stood on the porch, talking
to one another before I heard one of them start down the steps.

Kathleen Bailey called
out, "We don't use it, actually. It's too damp to store things in. It's
been empty for years."

Footsteps rounded the
far end of the cellar and stopped in front of the old entrance.

There were no voices
this time. The latch was lifted and the door opened.

A man bent his
shoulders to duck into the room. I tried to make sure it was Mercer but
the slats were so narrow that all I could see was the sole of a large
shoe and the dark leg of his trousers.

I braced my shoulders
against the floor and pushed up with my hips. I knew that I had pulled
the metal zipper of my ski jacket down to waist level when we had gone
inside the cottage. I rubbed it as hard as I could against the plank
above my stomach, creating the faint sound of a scratch. I whimpered
through my gag.

The man standing over
my head stopped and listened. He turned in place and kneeled, his ear
placed against the boards beside me. I twisted again and gurgled a
mixture of saliva and blood.

"I got you, Alex,"
Mercer said. "Hang tough, I'll get you out."

32

The technician pushed
back the enormous shell of the MRI machine that had swallowed my entire
body to take the images of my head and chest. "You can open your eyes
now. Was that okay for you?"

I had balked at the
idea of going back inside such a confining enclosure, the sense of
claustrophobia still overwhelming me after the morning's experience. I
nodded without enthusiasm.

"What time is it now?"
I asked, having spent a long afternoon in the emergency room, being
examined and completing a battery of X-rays before this scan was
ordered.

"Almost six o'clock."

"Will I be discharged
now that you're done?"

"Dr. Schrem has
admitted you, Miss Cooper."

I sat up and retied
the hospital gown. "I'm really fine. The headache is practically-"

"It wouldn't be smart
to let you go without observing you overnight," he said, motioning me
to sit in the wheelchair. "You don't even know what the object was that
hit you on the head. A mild concussion alone would bear watching."

This was the wrong guy
with whom to argue. He handed my record to an older gentleman whose
sole job appeared to be to escort me from waiting area to waiting area
within New York University's massive medical center. My driver took
control of the handles and backed me through the double doors.

When they closed
behind me and we started rolling down the corridor, Mike jumped off a
gurney he'd been sitting on and grabbed the wheelchair handles.

"Look, I'm sorry I-"

"I don't even want to
see you tonight, Mr. Chapman. Get your hands off my wheels-I wouldn't
trust you to drive me from here to the cafeteria. I can't believe that
you went off and left me for dead. What were you thinking? Where's
Mercer?"

"Right here, Alex," he
said, walking beside me and taking my hand in his. "You know Mike isn't
really a heartless son of a bitch. He's just not a first-grader like I
am. Might need to send him back to the Academy for a refresher course
in detection. Nobody was going to leave that park on my watch."

"What's the room
number, Pops?" Mike asked.

"Six-thirty. Elevator
straight ahead."

"I want a drink."

"Not yet, kid. Doesn't
mix with those painkillers the doc's got you on."

"Why can't I just take
the medications and go home?"

"'Cause whoever tried
to put a hole in that thick skull," Mike said, "left a sizable little
lump that might have to be coated with peroxide if it sticks out any
farther on your scalp. I just knew we'd get to play doctor together
eventually."

I looked up at Mercer.
"I'm not kidding. I really don't want him in my face all night. I don't
want him anywhere near me. He's bad for my blood pressure."

"You want an apology,
blondie? That's what you want?"

"I want to be alone,"
I said, Garbo accent and all.

We got on the elevator
and rode it up to six while Mike chattered. "You want me to flog myself
and put on a hair shirt for not having had the good sense to think you
were walled up behind a door or buried alive with a black cat. Right?
It just goes to prove my theory that this would never have happened if
you put on a little weight."

"Shut him up, Mercer."

"Fat people are harder
to kidnap. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Wallace? You never read in the paper
that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're
always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact,
and you can do something about it for the future, young lady."

We wheeled in front of
the nurses' station and Mike put the brakes on the chair. He lifted a
bouquet of flowers from the top of the desk and dropped to his knees in
front of several doctors, nurses, and visitors who were passing by.

"Coop, as long as I
live I swear I'll never walk out on you again. I'll never criticize
your perfume or your heels or your hair color or your temper or-"

I unhitched the brake
and pushed myself away from the onlookers toward the wing that
corresponded to the room number I had been assigned.

"I'll stop to look
under the bed and inside the closet and even rip up the floorboards
next time I can't find you."

"So much for my
anonymity," I said to Mercer, who had taken charge of pushing me. "If
they didn't know who I was before I got up here, I guess they'll figure
it out."

A nurse followed us
into the room. "Need any help getting into the bed?" she asked, taking
my chart from the bewildered escort. "Stanley Schrem called. He'll be
by for rounds later this evening."

She waited until I
settled back against the pillow and raised the bed's metal railing
before she and the escort left the room.

"Feel good?" Mercer
asked.

"Safe and soft and
clean and better. I would not say that 'good' is a word that comes to
mind tonight."

Mike was in the
doorway. He must have stopped in every room along the way and cajoled
patients out of their flowers. His arms were loaded with
assortments-ten or twelve of them in a wild variety of colors-pulled
from their vases and dripping water down the front of his clothes and
onto the floor.

"I'm just a fool whose
intentions are good," he sang to me, crossing the room and laying the
dozens of wet flowers across the crisp white sheets that covered my
legs. "Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

"Misbegotten,
misguided, misogynistic, misinformed," I said. "Just add misunderstood
to your long list of 'mis'es."

I looked over at
Mercer, who was leaning against the windowsill. "So, the only person
who knew we were going to be at the cottage was Zeldin. And I guess
Phelps, the groundskeeper, must have heard him suggest it. And Gino
Guidi. Maybe three people in the world. Doesn't that give you a head
start?"

"Don't make yourself
crazy tonight, Alex. We're working on it."

"I've been inside that
torture chamber, with clanging noises pounding at my aching head,
pinched and prodded and observed by the entire ER staff. What else have
I got to think about but who clobbered me and why? And what they were
going to do when they came back for round two?"

"Zeldin and Phelps
were in a meeting with a dozen other staffers from the time we left the
gardens. Guidi's secretary is the one who dispatched Kathleen Bailey to
be our guide. He was downtown all morning. She's not even sure she told
him about it when he called in."

"Well, is anybody
going to tell me what happened to me?" I asked. "And would you please
take these back to the other patients, Mike? It smells like a funeral
parlor in here."

"I got a pizza on the
way. Extra pepperoni, extra mushrooms, no anchovies. No worms, either.
Special delivery. You'll be like new in no time," he said, scooping the
flowers off my legs and walking to the hallway.

"Soup," I said to
Mercer. "A hot bowl of soup is all I want. And a drink."

NYU Hospital was next
door to the medical examiner's office. We had tested every deli and
restaurant within sight of the morgue and I knew where the best chicken
soup and the closest Dewar's could be found.

"The soup we can do. I
think you're grounded on the alcohol."

"I suppose they have
to put a cop on my door, too?"

Mercer laughed. "We're
camping out with you."

"You can't do that.
It's ridiculous. I understand they have to station someone outside the
room, but you guys can go home and get a good night's sleep."

"Hush, Miss Cooper."

"Now you'll make me
feel guilty on top of feeling stupid."

"Battaglia made a few
calls. The room next door is empty. One of us will snooze in this chair
and the other can stretch out in the bed. We'll take turns. Better us
than some guy from the Thirteenth who doesn't know your favorite
lullabies like we do."

"Yeah, we get demerits
when bad things happen on our shift," Mike said, as he came back into
the room. "I'm already down points 'cause of your antics today."