The Deadhouse (45 page)

I drifted off again and wakened later still. Now I could see a brick
wall a few feet away from my head, the side of whatever building I was
in. I arched my back and saw, two or three feet above the floorboards,
the empty frame of a window. Get to that, I directed myself. Get to
that and find out where you are.

Turning back onto my side, I started to wriggle my feet, making sure
I could control their movement. I bent my knees and drew them up toward
my waist. Slowly, like some primitive, reptilian apoda, I extended my
legs as far as possible and edged my body forward toward the wall.
Repeating the motion eight or nine times, I worked myself across the
splintered floor until my head touched the crumbling rows of brick.

I rested there for several minutes before trying to slide my body
into an upright position. Sitting up would bring back the dizziness,
since the oxygen would flow away from my brain. Expect that, I reminded
myself. Mental and physical processes were all operating in slow
motion. Don't fight it, I said, forming the words with my mouth.

Inch by inch, I righted my body and twisted to lean my back against
the wall. It felt sturdier than its uneven surface appeared, and I knew
it could support my weight. My head pounded as I forced it to remain
erect. I settled there for several more minutes, adjusting my eyes to
the darkness around me.

Something moved within the walls of my enclosure. I blinked and
tried to clear my vision, tensing for the arrival of my captor. But
these were scratching sounds, sharp and rapid, playing off the icy
surface of the floor.

Rats. Two or three of them, chasing each other through an open
portal and out the gaping hole where glass once fitted in a window.

For the first time, I had a reassuring thought. Large rodents
terrified me, but I was relieved to think the odds were good that I was
still somewhere in New York City.

Now I saw the outline of the building walls. The window beside me
was on the ground level, but it looked as though there were two tiers
of empty frames on flights above—three stories in all, though the
flooring was missing from all but the foundation The four sides,
without a roof, seemed to be the entirety of the structure. Too small
to be an institution, but too grim to have been a private home.

I dragged myself closer to the smooth orange brick that marked the
window jamb closest to me. My left ear ached anew as the wind howled
past. Straining my neck to look out the rough stone archway, I saw
sharp icicles jutting down from every overhanging surface.

Cutting through the storm's gray haze was the glare of huge red neon
letters. Read the words, I charged myself. Over my shoulder, the rats
danced again, in and out of the asymmetrical cavities at the far end of
the building.

I concentrated on the giant script sign, which was like trying to
make out the object inside the dome when a snow globe has been turned
upside down.

Pepsi-Cola.
I read it four or five times to convince
myself those were the words.

Why did I know that graphic? A huge red advertisement that I had
seen more times than I could ever count, I thought. Focus on it, I
urged myself. Make the pieces come together. The district attorney's
office, my home, the skyline, the city. Make each image relate to
another. Every night when I left the office and headed uptown on the
FDR Drive, I saw the
Pepsi-Cola
sign, several stories high,
shining across the East River from its enormous perch along the Queens
side of the water.

I twisted farther to the left, an icy stalagmite gnawing at my chin
as I tried to widen my view. Yes, there were the four great smokestacks
of Big Allis, belching dense clouds into the night sky, blowing back at
nature's offering.

So this must be the island in the middle of the river. Not
Roosevelt, not the one I had visited several days ago. But Blackwells.
Some gutted shell of a nineteenth-century building that had been
abandoned and was waiting to be explored by scholars and students,
historians and treasure seekers.

Now I began to reconstruct the puzzle. I remembered being at my
office with Chapman. I had a clear recollection of our ride uptown to
the King's College meeting with Sylvia Foote. But then everything
turned hazy, and I couldn't figure whether I had sustained an injury to
my head or ingested something that affected my memory.

It was difficult to move because of my restraints, but it was
impossible for me to remain still. With my hands bracing my behind my
back, I pushed away from the window and prop myself in the opposite
direction, toward what looked like gabled opening of the building
entrance.

Wrenching myself back onto my knees, I tried to read an inscription
that had mostly faded from a plaque on the wall bottom corner credited
the Bible, and from what was left of the letters it looked like Hosea.
Something about ransoming son from the power of the grave and redeeming
him from death. I didn't know the biblical context but I cherished the
thought

In the dim light, I could make out larger letters carved in the
plaque into the terra-cotta panel that bordered the archway:

STRECKER MEMORIAL LABORATORY.

I sank back to the floor as though I had been punched in the gut.
This was the morgue.

What had Nan told us about it? One of the first path-laboratories
built in America, she had said. This must have the place to which all
the bodies on Blackwells Island had taken. Why was I here? Who had
bound me and left me in this frigid shell?

I could hear the screech of rats again, sprinting closer 1 entryway.
I half crawled, half pulled myself to the far side of the door, fearing
that the filthy animals would find me in their path.

Another window sucked in frigid air from the night sky slithered
past it, trying to get to one of the building's corners a bit more
shelter. My feet were tied so tightly together that unable to raise
myself and stand on them. My back bumped against the contour of a
wooden cabinet and I came to a stop. The top and edges had rotted
completely and come loose fro support, jutting out into the room and
making my passage difficult.

I rested for a minute then pushed forward around this antique
chamber, but my jacket snagged on a rusted metal strip that I had not
seen, ripping a tear down the length of the sleeve.

I backpedaled to free the fabric and saw for the first time what had
snared me. The mouths of the cabinets were agape as I turned to
disengage my arm from the metal spike. Side by side were three drawers
of morgue trays, each mounted in double rows, the wood decayed but the
metal still intact.

The steel grooves were fixed in place, some rolled back into the
drawers and others hanging partway into the room. This is where every
plague-ridden patient on Blackwells had been stored, studied, and
dissected.

As my bound hands ripped away, I jerked forward and bumped my head
against the middle set of drawers. On the bottom tray I could see the
profile of a small body, wrapped in a blanket of the same plaid design
that had covered me. I was swept by another wave of nausea.

Beside the feet, closest to me, was a slim leather-bound book. I
leaned my arms toward it and pulled it out onto the floor.

As quickly as I could, I pushed myself away from the gruesome
cabinet, kicking the book before me with my knee. It spun around and I
tipped back the cover, revealing the title page of the volume of Garcia
Lorca's poems, and the small print of the owner's name in the top
corner.

I was here alone in the morgue with Charlotte Voight.

33

By the time Winston Shreve stepped through the old doorway, I had
dragged myself back into the farthest corner of the deteriorated
laboratory—away from the remains of Charlotte Voight, away from the
rats, and away from the man who had kidnapped me.

He was dressed for the occasion—with a ski jacket, jeans, and heavy
boots—and now I remembered I had seen him at the college, in Sylvia
Foote's office during the afternoon, when he had worn a blazer and
slacks. I still had no memory of how I had left the administration
building and what had happened.

I shuddered when he spotted me in the dark recess into which I had
crawled, but I had been shivering with cold for hours.

Shreve's tread crunched on the packed snow as he walked toward me,
stopping to pick up the blanket that had fallen off my body as I'd
moved myself around the room. He kneeled in front of me and replaced it
around my shoulders.

"I'm not a killer. That's the first thing you've got to understand."

My eyes must have expressed my terror. He spoke to me again.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Alex. I've brought you here because I
need your help tonight. I'm not a killer."

It was difficult to believe him with Charlotte's body between me and
the front door.

"You've got something I need, I think, and we're going to have to
trust each other for a while." He reached behind me and removed the
binding from around my wrists. I could see that it was a man's necktie.

"I'm going to remove the gag from your mouth, too. Maybe that will
help convince you that I'm not going to do anything extreme." He undid
the knot in the handkerchief and then used it to wipe some of the
moisture off my forehead and cheeks. I noted that his tools had been
those of an amateur—spare pieces of clothing—rather than ropes and duct
tape, and tried to draw hope from that fact.

I moved my jaw around, opening and closing my mouth. It was sore and
stiff from the restraint. I was unconvinced by his removing the gag.
Now that I knew my whereabouts, I assumed that there was not a living
soul within a mile of us. Water surrounded us on three sides, and there
was a wasteland of debris to the north that was gated off from the
population of Roosevelt Island by metal fencing and razor wire. Even
without the bluster of the fierce wind, there was no one to hear me
scream.

I found my voice. "Is that Charlotte Voight?

"The anthropologist was standing in front of me, and he turned to
look at the cabinet of steel morgue trays before he answered. "Yes. But
I didn't kill her." He repeated his denial, slowly but firmly, as
though it made a difference if I believed him.

"I was infatuated with Charlotte. There was nothing I would ever
have done to hurt her."

I thought back to the students we had interviewed and their rumors
about affairs between faculty members and undergraduates. It should
have been obvious to me that Winston Shreve would be a likely offender.
Hadn't he told us when we questioned him that his ex-wife, Giselle, had
been one of his students when he taught in Paris? How typical to have
repeated the pattern. H was probably a classic case of arrested
development, fixated on twenty-year-old students and consummating that
original love affair over and over again.

"This is one way you can help me, Alex," he said, squatting again
and lifting the blanket off my shoulders to cover my head as well. "As
a prosecutor, I mean. I can explain this to you and then you can tell
them that I am innocent."

If he was waiting for a response, he got none. "Charlotte and I had
been having a relationship for month Oh, there were boys now and then
whom she got involved with but she was as enamored of me, I think, as I
was of her. She was nothing at all like most of the kids. She thought
like a woman, not a child."

How many times had he used that bullshit line on some unsuspecting
adolescent?

"I brought her over to the island to get her involved in the
project. She didn't have much interest in the work here, but she loved
the place itself. Not the new part," he said, waving his arm in the
direction of the residential half of the island. "She liked mysteries
about the past, about the history. And she loved walking through the
ruins."

Of course Charlotte Voight would have liked it here. She w an
outcast herself, isolated from whatever home and family she had come to
New York to escape, and alienated from many of t kids her age at the
college. This, the centuries-old island of outcasts, had worked its
spell on her, too.

"During last winter, there were many nights Charlotte had come to my
apartment. It's easy to be disapproving, but I was a hell of a lot
safer company than the hoodlums who were trying to keep her doped up
all the time. But then, one night last April, she wanted to come here,
to the island.

"It was a beautiful spring evening. She thought it would be romantic
to make love out in the open, looking back at the city."

"That sounds more like
your
idea." It sounded exactly
like what Shreve had told Mike and me he had done when Lola Dakota
first introduced him to Roosevelt Island. "A romantic evening on a
blanket in front of the ruins, watching the tall ships and the
fireworks, drinking wine, looking back over at River House, where your
father grew up."

Why could I remember last week's interviews so well and have no idea
about what had hit me today?

"It hardly matters whose idea it was at this point, does it? The
unfortunate part is that I couldn't get Charlotte to give up the drugs,
no matter how hard I tried. She'd been using them back home in South
America since she was thirteen, experimenting with anything that anyone
offered to her. So on her way to meet me, she stopped to score some
pills. But I didn't know it at the time, you've got to understand that."

"We spoke with her friends. She never got to Julian's. Is that what
you mean, pills from what they called the 'lab'?"

Shreve sat in the window frame to answer me. "When Charlotte said
she was going to the lab,
this
is what she meant."

How stupid of me. Strecker Memorial Laboratory. The pathology lab.

"Ghoulish, you'll say. But that was Charlotte's humor. She wanted to
get high and wander around the lab and the old hospital. See what
ghosts she could conjure. These things didn't scare or repulse her as
they do most young people. She thought it was almost mystical, like a
connection to another generation, another period of time."