Entombed (45 page)

My cheeks tingled with
the cold, and I wiggled my toes to make sure they were still moving. I
soldiered on between and among the thick pine trees.

About thirty feet
ahead, a dark gray mass seemed to loom behind the green foliage. I
worked my way toward it, dragging several branches behind me to serve
as a blanket, wondering whether spaces between the large boulders would
offer any better respite for me.

I held on to a tree
trunk and pulled myself up the last few feet, leaning on the side of
the first rock I came to, gulping in the cold air to catch my breath.

A series of huge
stones towered over that one, so I stepped around it to see whether
there was a niche in which I could lodge myself. I was standing at the
mouth of a small cave, and without thinking twice I stepped inside the
black hole to get shelter from the elements-and from my pursuers.

It was dry inside, and
I felt immediate relief as I tried to adjust my eyes to an even darker
field of vision.

Looking at the ground
so as not to twist an ankle or stumble on a rock, I got about eight or
ten feet back into the cave, so that even a strong light beam would not
catch me at the edge of the opening.

I didn't look up until
my forehead brushed against something large and hairy dangling from
overhead. I knelt on the floor in a panic as dozens of bats let loose
with a volley of high-pitched squeals, routed from their roosts by my
unexpected invasion. Some dove directly at me with their bared little
teeth and extended claws displayed to my horror. Others flapped around
my ears, ominously flaunting their four-foot wingspan before taking off
out of the cave, leaving me quivering on its filthy floor.

44

I was flying now,
flying downhill as fast as I could move myself, with furry little
mammals shrieking above me as their own fear forced them out of
hibernation into the bracing shock of cold air. They blackened the sky
beyond the treetops and swarmed like an angry army as they tried to
organize into some kind of formation.

In what direction
could I find safety? I brushed at the wings that neared my scalp,
worried that a bat would become entangled in my hair. Worried also that
the most aggressive ones were likely to be rabid.

Suddenly, I had a more
important fear. Even if the detectives were scouring the park, a flock
of brown bats would have no significance to them. Sinclair Phelps would
know their seasonal habits, would know I had disturbed the roost, and
would know exactly where on the property the bat cave was located.

As I approached the
roadway from halfway down the slope, a minivan without headlights
pulled into view and braked to a standstill. I doubled back and ran
uphill to the boulders, climbing up on top of the lowest ones, rather
than reentering the cave, as I heard heavy breathing and something
charging up the underbrush toward me.

Panting at my feet
were two dogs, German shepherds who barked furiously as they tried to
scale the rocks. The bats that fluttered overhead made passes at them,
too, and the dogs raised their snouts at the creatures that taunted
them.

"Down!" shouted a
voice a few feet farther down.

At the sound of
Phelps's command, both animals squatted on all fours and impatiently
waited for their master. The shrill screech of the bats, some beyond
the range of human hearing, must have been disturbing to the canines,
both of whom whined and growled as they lay in place.

I glanced again at the
sky: treetops, bat wings, and not too far overhead the steady stream of
flights landing and taking off from La Guardia Airport, directly across
nearby Long Island Sound. No sign of any helicopter above, nor any
police flashers below.

I was wedged into
place in the crevice between two boulders, the dogs twelve feet below
me, snarling and salivating as they waited for orders to attack.

Phelps took his time
climbing up to meet me. He used the high beam of his flashlight to
feature me as the bull's-eye within his target. When he reached the
dogs they seemed to whine even louder, as though asking his permission
to take a piece out of one of my legs.

"Shut up!" he said,
and the whimpering stopped as they put their heads on their
outstretched paws.

I saw that he was
carrying a shotgun. I thought of the professor-Noah Tormey-and the
marksman who had nearly taken him out that day at the Hall of Fame. How
logical to need weapons-and a marksman-in an urban park like this,
where so many vermin were likely to have wreaked havoc on the precious
plant life.

"Now, I think you're
going to have to climb down from that perch, Miss Cooper. We've got
work to do."

I didn't respond. I
thought I could hear police sirens in the background and I wanted
Phelps to think the game might be over for him.

"I do hear that noise,
Miss Cooper. But it's not for you the bell tolls. My boys are out
stirring up a little trouble on Fordham Road. It's a very dangerous
city beyond these gates. You know that better than anyone."

So his teenage thugs
would create a diversion on a Bronx sidewalk and 911 calls would flood
the switchboard. Even Mike and Mercer might think it was I who was in
trouble out on the nearby street, that I had somehow been spirited off
the garden grounds or had been stupid enough to follow the kids who had
attacked Ellen Gunsher after Mercer told me he had seen them leaving
the gate.

"Call off your dogs,"
I said, stalling for time. Some of the bats were still circling above
us while others had settled on tree branches, wizened little faces
staring into mine from their upsidedown positions.

"They're so hard to
discipline, Miss Cooper. Coydogs, actually. I breed them. It's one way
to keep the deer population down. Gets rid of the rabbits and moles
that are so destructive to plants."

A mix of wild coyotes
and feral dogs. They were rumored to be a vicious hybrid.

"Let's go," Phelps
said, louder this time.

I heard an engine turn
on and saw the minivan start to move. One of his young troops, no
doubt, getting rid of the car so the police wouldn't make our location.
My eyes followed the vehicle till it disappeared around the bend, but I
didn't move.

"You can sit up there.
You can even keep climbing to the top. But then where do you go?
Besides, I've got hiking boots on and can overtake you in a couple of
minutes," he said.

I wanted to tell him
to shoot me-it would be faster than whatever he had in mind-but I
didn't mean it. And I knew it wasn't his first choice of disposing of
me because anyone out searching would hear the gunshots echo throughout
this quiet preserve.

I started to inch
myself backward up the large boulder but couldn't get a toehold without
looking down. By the time I had raised myself a couple of feet, Phelps
had put the shotgun on the ground and was making his way up to me. He
grabbed my left ankle and wrenched it around, pulling me toward him. He
lowered himself off the rocks and kept tugging at me until I landed in
the dirt on my tailbone, smacking my head against the stony surface
behind me.

"I certainly didn't
mean to knock you out," he said, kneeling beside me. "Not before you
help me carry a few of these."

Phelps gestured to the
loose rock piles that some glacial movement had thrown off as it passed
through the river gorge and woodlands a few thousand years earlier.

"Of course," he said,
standing and extending a hand to me, "you're probably thinking I could
just let the coydogs have a go at you. You've never seen them take down
a deer, have you? They can each grab hold of a leg and head off
together on a brisk run-and when you find the carcass in the woods a
few days later it looks like it snapped in half as easily as a wishbone
might at a Thanksgiving dinner."

I was on my feet,
rubbing the back of my head.

"The problem with that
is the poor dogs would suffer for it in the end. I've got them so well
trained at this point, and Zeldin or someone else in the administration
here would decide they'd have to be put to sleep for hurting you.
Wouldn't that be a sorry trade?" Phelps said, shaking his head. "So
what does that leave me instead?"

I didn't have to say
it aloud. There could be only one thing he wanted to do to me in the
cave.

"Perhaps you knew
this, Miss Cooper, that the very first crypts were in caves? Deep,
cool, wonderful recesses in which to entomb people. We're going to
custom-make a crypt for you, Alex. Poe's way."

45

There was no point
screaming. Not yet. I didn't want to be gagged or bound until I had
exhausted every other possible means of helping myself get out alive.

"Start over there."
Sinclair Phelps poked me in the back with the point of the shotgun.
"You're a big girl-you can carry a few of those."

I could see his plan.
He would arrange this to look like a rock slide, as though I had been
trapped inside-running away from goodness knows what-had panicked and
was unable to get help. That would only work if he thought no one else
had put together the facts, as I had, that linked him to his victims.

I bent down and picked
up a large rock-it must have weighed more than twenty pounds-and slowly
walked with it to the mouth of the cave.

"Go in. Go on in," he
said, prodding me again with the gun. "All those stories about bats are
just myths. They're very timid creatures. Last place they'd want to be
is in your hair."

I walked a foot or two
into the cave, pushed farther by Phelps, who told me exactly where to
drop my first load. Now I could see rows of the furry beasts hanging
from their roosts.

"'A midnight vigil
holds the swarthy bat,' Miss Cooper. You know that one?"

I shook my head.

"Poe's 'Coliseum.' A
lesser-known work." He watched me as I maneuvered the rock into place.

"Did Aurora Tait have
to make her own coffin, too?" I asked.

Phelps laughed. "No,
no. But then it was so much easier for me to get Aurora into my lair,
Miss Cooper."

"I suppose all you had
to do was promise her heroin."

"High-test. Best shit
on the street. She came to me like a baby for its bottle."

"Why there? Why that
building? Because it was Poe's house?"

"Keep moving," he
said, conscious that I was stalling but pleased to show off what passed
for his intelligence, after serving for all these years in a job that
belied his educational background and knowledge of literature. "That
was just a richly ironic coincidence. You know the story? You know
'Amontillado'?"

I was lugging another
rock now, pretending to limp because I had twisted my ankle. "The
ultimate tale of revenge," I said. "Of course I know it. You mean it
was just chance that your construction work was in that particular
basement?"

"The landlord was
always having work done there. That dump probably wasn't fit for
occupancy a century ago."

"And Aurora, she saw
what you were doing?"

"She wasn't quite as
sober as you are, Miss Cooper. Nor as well read. She found it amusing
that I was a day laborer. She liked to watch me work, as long as she
was high. I gave her the dope that afternoon and she obliged me by
shooting up, getting herself into a stupor, as I knew she would. By the
time I lifted her over my shoulder and stood her up behind the wall,
she was almost ready to come around. Can you imagine the look in her
eyes when she realized what I was about to do to her?"

At this very moment I
was able to imagine it perfectly well.

"Betrayal. She earned
every exquisite second of her miserable death. She was responsible for
depriving me of everything I'd been promised from the time I was four
years old. The bitch had tried to extort money-a lot of money-from my
step-" Phelps stopped to correct himself. "From the man who raised me.
She screwed up the whole plan, and in doing that she condemned me to
the gutter."

I was on my third
small boulder, peering out into the black-green forest for any sign of
a rescuer.

"I'd spent my entire
youth trying to please a man who never really wanted me under his roof
anyway. He'd taken me in when my mother died," Phelps said.

I had heard much of
the story from Gino Guidi, but I figured it would anger this strange
man to let on that the detectives and I knew more about his
past-without knowing his identity-than he might have liked.

"It doesn't make any
sense that he took you in if he didn't want you."

"I was too young to
know. My mother was his housekeeper, and the woman who took care of me
after my mother's death also worked for him, on the kitchen staff. She
claimed he was keen to do it at the time. The rejection came much later
on, when I was eight or nine. When he finally got married the new bride
wanted her own children. Of course she didn't want the illegitimate kid
of the parlor maid anywhere in the mix."

"Who-who was the man?"

Phelps was watching me
build my coffin, eyeing me as I ferried heavy rocks from the hillside
into the cave. He was leaning against the side of it, shotgun tucked
under his arm, a jacket zipped up to his chin and a scarf and hat on
his neck and head that seemed enviably warm.

"Phelps. Sinclair
Phelps."

We'd been told that
he'd been disinherited and disowned, that like Edgar Poe he'd never
been formally adopted by his benefactor. "His name? He gave you his
name?"

"I took his name, Miss
Cooper. Not long after Aurora and I parted ways. I didn't think I'd
have the luxury of twenty-five years without anyone discovering her
body-well, her remains. I never thought I'd get away with it so
cleanly. I did, after all, confess to any number of people that I had
killed the poor girl," he said, grinning at me. "It's not my fault they
didn't take me seriously."