The DeadHouse

He must have redeposited his car safely in his garage so that it would be dry and warm if the police decided to examine it, and then returned by tram to begin his encounter with me. He obviously hadn't counted on a mandatory midnight visit to the detective squad.

'Don't worry, Ms. Cooper. I am coming back for you. You don't have to die, you know. If that were my intention, it would have happened already. As I said before, you can help me out of all this.' Although Shreve had removed the gag, he left me tied in place. He had not wanted me to scream in the background while he had been on the telephone, but now there was no one to hear me.

'I just need to calm your colleagues,' he went on. 'Chapman's brought in this other fellow called Wallace. They're worried that they haven't heard from you.'

'I can tell you an easy way to relax Chapman about me,' I said to him softly.

Shreve looked back at me quizzically.

'I mean if that would get you back here faster so you'll let me go.' I wasn't taking odds on the fact that he truly might release me at the end of this ordeal, but I was hoping to send a signal to my friends.

'What would you suggest, Ms. Cooper?'

I twisted in my seat and the old wooden slats creaked in response. 'We watch Jeopardy! almost every night.'

'You watch what?'

'It's a game show, on television. Do you know it?' Shreve had PBS written all over him and he stared at me blankly. I explained the final question to him and he laughed at me in disbelief.

I racked my brain for ideas, trying to make this work. I reminded him that Mike had known about Petra and discussed it with Shreve when we first met him. 'You, uh… you could tell him we were watching the show together while we were waiting at the hospital for word about Sylvia. You could tell him that I insisted on watching the last question.'

He was beginning to think about the idea. 'There'd be no other way for you to know that about me, and about Detective Chapman, unless you and I had been together at seven-thirty tonight. You know, we were just chatting and I was telling you about these silly bets we make against each other.' I was trying not to sound too much as though I was pleading with him, but everything about me was on edge. 'He'll be convinced I was all right while the two of us were together.'

For God's sake let him go along with me on this one. I took the next step. 'I'll make up something for you. Mike was obviously much too busy to have been watching television tonight. He was probably talking to old Orlyn Lockhart, or had left White Plains on his way back to the city when the show was on. Just make it some category he doesn't know very well.'

I furrowed my brow and pretended to come up with a question. 'Like feminist stuff. Tell him-I know, tell him that the last answer was the name of the first woman doctor in America. And if you add that it stumped me, too, he'll buy right into it.'

Please do exactly what I'm telling you and please let Chapman recall that we were together last week when that very subject came up: Who was Elizabeth Blackwell? I needed Chapman to remember that and then Chapman would know that Shreve was lying through his teeth. And with any luck he would also realize that I was somewhere on Blackwells Island.

'We'll see whether that helps things, Ms. Cooper. Then when I come back, I want you to think about how cooperative you're going to be about helping me find the diamonds that are buried on the island.'

I was stunned. Winston Shreve believed that the diamonds were really still here? And what did he think I knew about how to find them?

'We'll talk about Lola later. Perhaps you're not even aware of the information you have,' he said. I hadn't even thought about Lola Dakota since regaining consciousness. Shreve must be after something I had come across in the investigation. But what?

'I've got a legitimate right to those diamonds, Ms. Cooper. Not like those other fortune hunters. They belonged to my grandfather.'

'Your grandfather?'

'Yes, Ms. Cooper. There were men like Orlyn Lockhart who were, shall we say, the gatekeepers of the island at the time. And then there were the men who spent their time here on the inside. The patients in this hospital, doomed as they were. And just a hundred yards away, the prisoners in the penitentiary.

'Freeland Jennings, Ms. Cooper. Freeland Jennings was my grandfather.'

35

'Really, Ms. Cooper, you don't believe that all of us who grub around in the groves of academe have purely intellectual motives? Each of the scholars you've met has a selfish goal, whether it stems from the Blackwells project or his or her own special interests. Grenier stands to make a fortune from the drug companies for his research, Lavery's success would solve all his problems with the scandal, Lockhart gets on a fast track for tenure-' He interrupted himself when he mentioned that name.

'Do you have any idea how sick it made me to hear Skip pontificate about his grandfather leading the raid on the corrupt scum of the penitentiary? My grandfather died in that raid. My family was destroyed by those events.'

'Did Professor Lockhart know that Freeland Jennings was your grandfather?'

'He's blinded by his own greed. And I had no intention of telling him, anyway. It just would have made him and the others more intent on their own ends.'

'I'm not sure I understand the connection either,' I said. In fact, I couldn't make sense of anything any longer. Dizziness had yielded to simple exhaustion, and the cold was numbing.

'My grandmother was Ariana, Freeland Jennings's beautiful young wife. The eye-talian, as Orlyn Lockhart used to say. After my grandfather was convicted of killing Ariana, his sister took my father in. He was only seven years old. But once Granddad was murdered during the raid on the island, that sister and the rest of the Jennings family put my father in an orphanage.'

He paused. 'They weren't quite sure whether Freeland was really his father, after all. So why bother to split that lovely Jennings' fortune with a possible bastard? No one protested when it was decided to send the child out West. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of the will.'

'And that's what became of your father?'

'That was the plan. But in the end, Ariana's lover took him off their hands. You see, it was the Church orphanage that was making all the arrangements to send the boy out West-very common in those days. Brandon Shreve apparently had reason to believe that he might be the father. Either that, or he loved Ariana enough to want to keep her child.' He hesitated, then said what we both were thinking. 'I suppose your DNA technology would answer all this for us today. But not in those times.

'So Brandon Shreve just gave the Church double the money the Jennings family had offered to lose every trace of the child, and both sides were happy. Shreve adopted my father and, of course, changed his name.'

'But the boy remembered, didn't he?'

'Vividly. He talked to me about it all the time. Shreve was a good father, but my father's first seven years as a Jennings had instilled in him an interest in the Jennings birthright. Those diamonds were meant to be his, Ms. Cooper. Now they're meant to be mine.

'So I'm going to leave you for just a little while. If the snow breaks off, it's not a bad view. It's the same vista my grandfather had from his room in the penitentiary-straight across the water to his home in the River House. I'll be sure to give your regards to the gendarmes.'

Shreve led himself out with the tiny flashlight and I was once again surrounded by darkness in my frigid quarters. Outside and on the ground just below the window frame, a spotlight beamed up at the brilliant architectural detail of the building's trim. If I could concentrate its aim just thirty feet lower, someone far away might be able to see the ghostly outline of a desperate woman and come to save me.

Dreaming about rescue didn't help. I tugged at my ties and squirmed to loosen the knots around my ankles. I told myself to slow down and make the attempts one at a time. I was far too rattled and weak to take on both