My answer-“Take this off”-was muffled, and I doubt he understood me.
Wicks put his hands in the pockets of my jeans, front and back, rolling me from side to side. My ID was in my wallet in the glove compartment of Mercer’s car. In my effort to travel light this morning, I had nothing on me with my name or professional credentials. There was only half a protein bar that he removed and tossed aside.
“Who were you talking to out there?”
I shook my head from side to side.
I didn’t know much about psychiatry, but all my amateur instincts kicked in. Eddie Wicks was bipolar, and if he was indeed living in this cave, he was likely to have been off his meds for an extended period of time. He appeared to be agitated and jumpy, and from the deep rings beneath his eyes he looked as though he had not slept well in days.
He was literally twitching with indecision. He wanted to find out who I was and why I was there, but he didn’t dare release the gag. Meanwhile, the clumps of dirt in my mouth were pushed toward my throat every time I tried to speak. I knew that if I panicked I would have even greater trouble breathing.
“Why are you here?” Wicks asked, prodding me in the side with his foot.
“Birds,” I said.
“Words?”
I didn’t want to upset him by speaking more loudly and cause him to hurt me. I was beginning to choke on the dirt particles, and my chest was heaving up and down as I tried to urge myself to say calm.
I spoke the word again. “Birds.”
“Birds?”
I nodded my head up and down.
“Atlantic Flyway,” I said, having no idea what that sounded like through the gag but hoping that the bits the park rangers and Commissioner Davis had taught us would sound like birder talk.
Eddie Wicks understood what I had said. He muttered “Flyway” as he stared at me. He didn’t seem any happier to have me in his space than I was to be here.
“Birds don’t live in caves.”
I was biting at the gag, trying to moisten it with my saliva to make it move, to bring it down off my mouth so that I could engage with Wicks. “Swallows. Cave swallows.”
“And that’s why you were climbing out of the stream, looking for swallows?” He was standing almost upright in this black hole. The silver objects were behind my head, out of sight. I was on my back, struggling to keep an airway open, and all I could see around me was the darkness, and Eddie Wicks’s pale, pasty face looming over me. “I don’t think so.”
I knew better than to try to play the homeless card. My jeans had been laundered and pressed, my cotton shirt bore a designer label, my nails were manicured, and there still might have been a whiff of my favorite scent if fear had not consumed all of it.
“What are you looking for, miss?”
Wicks’s eyes were bulging. His paranoia was on full display, even though I was shaking my head from side to side in the negative.
I started coughing because of the dirt that was going down my throat. “Sit me up, please.”
He was pacing the floor behind me. I had surprised him in his lair, and he was obviously concerned with what to do about me.
“Why should I listen to you? Why should I care if you choke to death?”
I used my tongue to move the gag even lower. “Look, mister. I don’t know who you are or why it freaks you out to see me. I’m not from around New York. I’m just exploring the Ramble and looking for birds and glacial rocks-”
Half of him wanted to hear me, and half of him looked like he wanted to put me out of my misery-and out of his way.
“If you just let me out of here, you know I’d never be able to find this hole again. I’m turned around as it is, I-I’m lost and-”
There would be no reasoning with Eddie Wicks. He was so strung-out looking-dirty and disheveled, stinking like someone who hadn’t bathed in weeks, and always that crazed, bug-eyed look about him as he stared down at me like I was an animal in a cage.
“Shut up!”
“Please let me sit, sir. I can’t breathe.”
I was clinging to what I knew from his mother, from Jillian Sorenson, from his Bellevue records-and to the hope that Eddie Wicks didn’t have a violent history. If I could reach him on some human level, if I could find some chord to connect with him, then maybe I could talk my way out of the cave.
He walked away, several steps at least. I was tallying any advantages I might have, and added that he was close to sixty years old to the fact that I knew more about him than he could hope to guess about me. Surely if I could work my way out of the material that bound me, I would be faster and stronger than he could possibly be.
Now Wicks stepped closer to me, one foot next to each of my ears. He leaned over and again reached under my arms, dragging me across the floor of the cave-over rocks and sticks that scraped my back. He stepped out of the way as he propped me against the uneven stone wall, so that my head bobbed and struck against the pointed end of a boulder.
He knelt beside me and tried to adjust the gag to fully cover my mouth, then thought better of it until he found out more about me.
“Tell me why you are here, damn it.”
“I’ve told you, it’s just a mistake.”
Wicks slapped me across the face. My head rocked back and forth, and my cheek stung from the smack.
“Think about it while you have some time to yourself,” he said.
He stood up, walking across the cool, damp space until he was almost out of sight. Then he returned, carrying a huge rock that caused him to bend practically in half as he positioned himself to place it in front of the hole through which I had entered.
Half the daylight-and most of my hope of somehow staggering safely down the steps-disappeared. Four more loads of rock and it was entirely dark around me.
Then Eddie Wicks disappeared, too, in the same direction from which he’d moved the rocks that formed his portable door-there must have been some other kind of exit. I squinted and focused my eyes on that area, and as it came more clearly into view, there appeared to be an incline-not an opening to the outside-that curved around the corner of the largest interior boulder.
Suddenly above me I heard noise. He was walking just overhead, the rubber-soled steps of his footwear only made audible by the echoing nature of the cave. Surely there was another way of egress, which meant an alternate opening for Mike to find a way in to me.
I leaned my head back and tried to make myself go through my options. Eddie Wicks wasn’t a killer. He was mentally ill, in desperate need of treatment, unlikely to trust me no matter what I said. He seemed to have abandoned his plan to hurt his mother. And now, if all the psychiatrist’s predictions were to be believed, what he was most at risk to do was to kill himself.
I didn’t want Wicks to hurt himself, nor did I want to be an accidental casualty of his paranoia and self-loathing.
I looked to the right and saw the shiny silver figures that had been stolen from Lavinia Dalton’s storage vault. Had Wicks been giving his possessions away, as the Bellevue shrink suggested yesterday, in preparation for taking his own life? Had he been getting his things in order? Or had the homeless girl who wound up in the Lake stumbled upon something that distressed him-something that caused him to hurt her?
My wrists were tied in front of me. I knew that if I had enough time, I could work loose the binds. The material was no stronger than the gag in my mouth.
I glanced again at the Carousel as I wriggled my hands. And then at the miniature form of the Angel of the Waters-or the death angel, as Mike had called her just a little more than one week ago. I shivered as she stared back at me with her icy-blue eyes. I didn’t want her to claim another victim.
Five minutes, maybe ten went by. I didn’t hear any noise above me, and not a sound from outside, not even the stream whooshing below this solitary spot.
At last the cotton material started to give slightly as I pulled on it. I got up on my knees, faced the sharp-edged boulder that made up the foundation of the cave’s wall, and rubbed the strip against the edge, slicing it in two.