"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.