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
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,
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.'
'And that night?'
'We drove over here together. I've got a master key, of course to get inside the gates. I'd brought a couple of bottles of wine Charlotte got to explore all the hideaways she'd wanted to see and we lay on the blanket for hours, looking at the constellation and talking about her life. But she became agitated, the more she drank. Got up and started climbing around the old buildings, was afraid she was going to fall and hurt herself. I tried to slow her down, but she was euphoric, acting like she was hallucinating
'That's when I realized she must have been taking pills, in addition to the alcohol.'
