The DeadHouse

'Did you ask her what?'

'Of course I did. She was behaving so irrationally that it was obviously something that had reacted badly with the alcohol, Ecstasy, she told me. Lots of Ecstasy.'

Lessen her inhibitions. Enhance her sexual experience. Create a false euphoria. Turn an evening at the lab with Winston Shreve into a psychedelic delight.

I asked my question softly. 'What happened to her?'

'A seizure of some sort. First she had a panic attack. I tried to grab her and convince her to get in the car so I could take her to doctor. But she screamed at me and ran farther away. I chase after her, but she was breathless and agitated. I wasn't aware, at first, that it was some kind of overdose, but that must have been what happened. She was flailing wildly, twitching and shaking uncontrollably. And then she just collapsed in my arms.'

'Didn't you try to get her to a hospital?'

'Charlotte was dead. What good would that have done? She had a massive paroxysm.'

I'd seen cases like that related to my work. Kids who overdose with what they considered a harmless drug at nightclubs and rave parties. Dead before the ambulance arrived. 'I know that can happen, Mr. Shreve. Why didn't you call the police? Get help?'

'At the time, I didn't understand why she died. Now I've read about the drugs and realize they can be deadly, but I had no idea of that the night Charlotte OD'ed. I, I guess I just panicked. I saw my entire career wiped out. I sat on the far side of that wall,' he said, and pointed to the entryway, 'holding Charlotte's body in my arms, and I knew that everything I had worked for in my professional life had been destroyed.'

'So you just left her here?' I looked around at the decaying rubble of the young girl's tomb.

Shreve was unhappy to be challenged. 'I never planned to do that. I needed the night to think. I needed to figure out how I could walk into a medical center on a spring morning with this beautiful child in my arms and tell them that a terrible accident had occurred. I needed to find a way to explain her death to Sylvia Foote and the people at the college who believed in me.'

All he was concerned with was his own predicament.

'This was, after all, a morgue,' he went on. 'I put my blanket around Charlotte, and I carried her inside here and put her down for the night.' I filled in the blanks: on a rust-covered metal morgue tray in a rat-infested skeleton of a building, for the next eight months.

'And you never came back?'

'I thought I'd have a plan by the next morning, that I'd drive back over and-. And I couldn't do it, I couldn't bring myself to come back over here to see her. I knew that occasionally there would be workmen in this area, and I expected one of them to find the body long before now.

'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.