Death Angel (31 page)

“The tail of Lucy’s shawl caught in the door when the dumbwaiter closed, many flights above, choking the baby, before the material ripped apart as the machine carried her down to me.”

I recoiled against the wall of the cave, shuddering at the picture of the dumbwaiter beginning its descent, slowly asphyxiating the vibrant three-year-old, who was on her way to an adventurous afternoon in the Park, wearing her princess-like shawl wrapped around her shoulders and neck.

I thought I was going to be sick. “Please don’t—”

“Don’t tell you any more? I live with that image of Lucy every day of my life. It’s more than I can bear, so don’t tell me not to say it, now that you’ve found her broken little body.”

“Didn’t you try to get help?”

“She was dead, young lady. No question about it. Her face was blue, her neck was mangled, and though her body was still warm, Lucy was dead. And I knew I’d be blamed for her death.”

“But you didn’t leave her there,” I said.

“In the dumbwaiter? Of course not,” Wicks said. “I brought her here. I knew this place well. The Indian Cave, they called it when the Park was designed. But then there was trouble inside it from time to time, and it had to be closed up. I found a way in—the same way that you did—when I was just a boy. It’s where I came to get away from people who were mean to me.”

I didn’t say a word.

“There wasn’t a speck of blood. There was nothing to mark the place where Lucy died. No one had to know,” he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I found a laundry bag in one of the washrooms, and I put Lucy inside it, as gentle as I could be, and I carried her out in my arms, past all the workmen near the back door. It was a big building, you know, and an important one, but everyone there was used to seeing me come and go. And there wasn’t anybody who cared to talk to me. Not that day, not ever before.”

“And you came to this—this cave?”

“I know every inch of this Park, every last inch of it. I wanted Lucy to be somewhere safe. I wanted her to be somewhere I could see her and watch over her.”

What a sick idea had taken over Eddie Wicks’s mind all those years ago.

“And most of all, I wanted to die beside her. I wanted to kill myself, miss, but I found out that I was too much of a coward to do that.”

“That’s not being a coward. That’s—”

Wicks was walking toward me, holding out the same gauzy fabric that had been the instrument of death for Lucy Dalton.

“I’ve tried to kill myself, and I’ve even failed at that. I’ve tried four times, maybe five,” he said, and I knew the most recent one had resulted in his Bellevue hospitalization, “and I haven’t been able to do that right, either.”

“Let me take you out of here and get you help,” I said.

“I’ve got a better idea, although the last person I tried to enlist in this endeavor wound up dead herself,” Wicks said. “An impetuous girl, actually, who should never have made it her business to tell anyone about Baby Lucy.”

I thought of the body in the Lake—the homeless girl who thought she was best at helping wounded people, damaged people like Eddie Wicks.

“I know about her, I think. I read it in the papers last week,” I said. “The girl who was found at Bow Bridge.”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Wisconsin,” Wicks said, his eyes bulging as he tightened the ties on my legs. “All you have to do is kill me. Make me know the pain that Lucy knew in the minutes the life was sucked out of her. Maybe that will be the way you can get out of this burial chamber alive.”

“Why don’t we give Lucy a proper burial?” I said.

I needed to get Wicks to stop talking about his death—and mine—and focus him on the child he loved, maybe as a way of getting us both out of the cave. I was revolted at the suggestion that I help him kill himself.

“I did that once already,” he said. “Now you’re going to have to stand up. You’re going to have to come with me to see what I’ve prepared.”

“But—but this box looks—well, it looks practically new.”

“I didn’t have a coffin when Lucy died. I kept her here with me for several nights, sleeping right beside her, until I was able to bury her in a cemetery.”

Wicks grabbed my arm and started marching me—since I could only take small steps—toward the far wall and up the ramp that led to the higher part of the cave.

“How did you do that?”

“There’s a cemetery in the Park,” he said, squeezing my upper arm with his hand.

I couldn’t let him know that I was pretty well up to speed now on almost every corner of the Park, and there were certainly no cemeteries here.

“I’ve got a map. I—I didn’t see anything like that.”

Wicks had a tight grip on me. I was stumbling on the steep incline of the cave’s floor as we turned a corner and continued on.

“Move faster.”

“Untie my legs if you want me to go faster,” I said. “Where are you taking me?”

“Nowhere.”

“But—but it’s pitch-black ahead.”

“It’s a cave, Wisconsin. Don’t you have any of them back home?”

“I don’t know how you can see. I—I can’t see anything.”

Eddie Wicks was like a feral creature, accustomed to the cool dark space that no light seemed to penetrate, pushing me forward farther and farther away from the only opening that I knew existed.

“You don’t need to see, young lady. Only I do.”

“But Lucy,” I said, trying to appeal to his professed devotion to the child, “you’re leaving her alone back there. What cemetery are you talking about?”

“You wouldn’t know it, Wisconsin. There are three cemeteries in the Park, and nobody knows they’re even here.”

“But where?” I asked, tripping on a rock and falling to one knee.

Wicks grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me to my feet. “You can’t see the graves any longer. Nobody respected the dead, even though they’ve been there for two hundred years. The city built this Park right on top of all those lost souls, but that’s where I put Lucy to rest.”

Of course, I thought. All Angels’ Church. Three cemeteries for the three churches that once made up Seneca Village. The church buildings and houses had been razed to the ground, but the cemeteries of each had been left on-site and covered over when the Park was originally landscaped.

“I’m so thirsty,” I said, stopping in my tracks and trying to put Wicks’s story together. “Can’t I please have some water?”

“You can’t have anything,” he said as he pressed me to shuffle along.

“If you buried Lucy in the cemetery, why is she here? That doesn’t make sense.”

“You weren’t even born in 1971, were you?”

“No.”

“The whole world was looking for Lucy Dalton. The cops, the FBI, everyone at the Dakota,” Wicks said. “Did I say that name before? The Dakota is the place that Lucy lived.”

“I didn’t know.”

“The police treated me—they treated all of us in Miss Lavinia’s household—like criminals.”

He was indeed a criminal, and little wonder that Dr. Hoexter spoke of Wicks’s noted history of feelings of police persecution. Hoexter had called them persecutory delusions, but there was nothing delusional about them. Eddie Wicks, like the Dalton staff, must have been interrogated over and over again.

“But they were all so stupid they had no idea how to find Lucy.”

“Because you had buried her,” I said softly, trying to shake off his grip.

Wicks had turned around, facing me and moving backward, my wrists in his hands. His eyes were on fire now, the only thing I could see as I haltingly walked along with him.

“I wrapped her in a sheet that I brought here from the house, and I tied it with some of her favorite ribbons. In the middle of the night, I walked from this cave, holding Lucy in my arms.”

“And no one stopped you?”

“It was the ’70s, dear. You had to be crazy to be in this Park at night,” Wicks said. “And it isn’t far to the cemetery. It’s near 85th Street, just west of here.”

8521. I almost said the numbers out loud. I remembered the first day we had walked in the Ramble with the park rangers, and the reminder that every lamppost bore the number of the street location nearest to that point.

8521 was the number written on the Day & Meyer receipt that Mercer picked up from the dusty room on the ninth floor of the Dakota. It must have marked the place in the Park—in the very middle of what used to be Seneca Village—where Eddie Wicks had buried the body of Baby Lucy Dalton.

“I can’t walk anymore,” I said. “The ties on my ankle are too tight. And it’s cold in here. I need something to stop my chills.”

“You won’t be cold much longer,” Wicks said. “You shouldn’t complain so much.”

“But why is Lucy here?” I asked. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”

“Because someone had the bad judgment to dig up the area around the cemetery, to dig up the little village and churchyard.”

Nan Rothschild and the Barnard-Columbia project—the dig to examine Seneca Village a couple of years ago—must have unsettled Eddie Wicks completely.

“I had to go back and rescue Lucy—”

“Rescue?”

“I didn’t want anyone digging up that poor child, disposing of her somewhere else.”

Profilers and shrinks were going to have a field day with Eddie Wicks, if I could get both of us out of this godforsaken place alive. Behavioral scientists would claim that Wicks’s mind-set was shown by how he treated Lucy’s corpse. They would tell us that wrapping her in a sheet, decorating her shroud with her favorite ribbons, and burying her in a proper—if out-of-sight—churchyard demonstrated a degree of attachment to the child. The Lindbergh baby was tossed to the side of the road in the Jersey woods—a point often underscored—to be scavenged by animals.

“So you brought her body back here, before that dig?”

“Well now, there isn’t much of a body, Wisconsin, is there?”

“Let go of me, please. I can walk faster if you loosen the ties on my legs.”

“You looked in the box, didn’t you? She’s only just bones now. But I’m going to bury them with the proper respect, too. Right there, in the floor of the cave. And Lucy will be surrounded by the things she loved most.”

The Carousel, the Angel of the Waters and other silver pieces from the Dalton collection must have been part of what Eddie Wicks stole from the storage unit after his escape from Bellevue. Some of the other treasures—Belvedere Castle, the Obelisk, and even the ebony angel that undoubtedly came from underground, from somewhere in the churchyard that was once Seneca Village—must have become separated from this cache.

My thoughts flashed to Vergil Humphrey. He told us that the black figurine came from the churchyard that he and another man—a man he had known since his childhood—found when they were digging at Seneca. Had Wicks relied on the unreliable storyteller to help him retrieve the remains of Baby Lucy? Did Verge pilfer the black angel when he helped his old friend with the grim task of moving Lucy from the old churchyard?

I couldn’t help but wonder whether our Angel—the dead girl—realized that both men had something to do with this heartrending box of bones.

I had no doubt that Wicks was creating a shrine for the child he claimed to have adored.

“Please tell me where you’re taking me.”

“Almost there.”

“But I can’t help you hurt yourself. I’d never do that. Take me out of here with you and I’ll explain all this to the police. We’ll convince them that Lucy’s death was an accident.”

Wicks pulled on my hands again, and as I shuffled forward I kicked against an object that almost sent me flying over it. Something low, on the ground, that obstructed my path and scraped my shins.

I looked down and saw a platform of some kind, also wooden, as far as I could make out.

“You don’t have to hurt me, actually,” Wicks said. “You can just be my canary in the coal mine.”

“What—?” He was wide-eyed now and agitated. The canary was what miners sent ahead of them to test for deadly gases. What had his diseased mind conceived of as my fate?

“Step up on this, Wisconsin. Let’s see if I’ve got it right this time.”

“Got what right?”

“You step on this. Come, come. It will hold your weight quite easily.”

When I didn’t move, Eddie Wicks walked behind me and lifted me onto the improvised stand. That’s when I saw the pink gauze.

The metallic strands of gold in the precious fabric glittered above my head. I craned my neck to look up at the odd display.

While I’d been wriggling against my binds earlier, Eddie Wicks had come up here, to this second level of the vast man-made vault, and wrapped lengths of Lucy’s sparkling material around the tip of one of the boulders that jutted into the cave.

Wicks had fashioned a noose from a long piece of heavy rope and covered it with fragments of the pink-and-golden gauze that had crushed the life out of the little child. He was determined to kill himself this time, but he was more determined to kill me first.

“What have you stuffed in your pockets?” he asked. He was standing in front of me again, reaching for the noose. “They’re bulging.”

Wicks patted me down, finding and removing the small silver objects with which I’d hoped to defend myself.

He dropped them on the ground, then stood squarely in front of me and smacked me across the face. “They belong to Lucy, you fool.”

I tried to lift my bound hands to my cheek, to lessen the sting, but Wicks grabbed them and held them directly in front of me.

“This is going to be painful for you, I know.”

“And what is it about watching me die that you’re looking forward to?” I asked. “Will that excite you?”

“Nothing about watching you excites me. I want to see how much it hurts you so I’ll know how much it will hurt me. The slower it is, the better,” Wicks said. “I’d kill my mother, too, if I could.”

“Your mother?”

“She made the scarf for Lucy. If she hadn’t made the damn thing in the first place, the child would still be alive.”

Wicks looked down to see why the platform was shaking so violently on the uneven ground of the cave floor. He leaned over and put his hand on it to steady it for his coup de grâce
.

The moment he did—just as he started to straighten up—I lifted my hands over my head, seizing the noose and launching myself in the air, bringing my knees up behind me and then kicking my legs forward with all the strength I could muster.

Eddie Wicks doubled over. I swung back and forth, clutching the fabric-covered rope between my fingers—pumping my legs like a child on a swing—and this time I brought my feet up, scoring a hit directly in my captor’s groin.

He howled in pain, falling to the ground and rolling onto his back.

I lowered myself onto the platform. Although my hands were still tied, I was able to pull apart the binds on my legs, the ones I had been stretching before Wicks came back to get me.

I walked to the rock wall and rubbed the restraints on my hands against it for several seconds, till they tore in half and I was loose.

I guided myself back to the lower floor, running my hand along the cold stones. I had to try to uncover the entrance again, though I didn’t know how long it would take Wicks to get to his feet.

I ran back over to the silver pieces on the floor beside Lucy’s bones. I picked up the statue of the Bethesda angel and stuck her in my waistband.

Then I turned to the business of trying to move the boulders.

I was frantic and had no reason to be quiet. I reached for the one on top and dislodged it after pulling on it for almost a minute, stepping out of the way so that it fell to the ground with a loud thud.

I heard a noise and looked over my shoulder, but I figured it was Wicks still moaning, still recovering from my powerful kick.

The second and third rocks were somewhat easier to move. I pushed and pulled on them until both fell outside the cave, crashing down against other boulders, splashing into the stream of the Gill.

The hole was too small for me to exit easily. It was still light outside, so I took deep breaths, wiping the dirt from my mouth as I tried to calm myself. The last thing I needed was to get stuck trying to make my escape.

I struggled with the next two rocks—both very large—and seemed only to be making progress with one of them when I heard Wicks, coughing, coming down the incline.

“Don’t come near me,” I said. My hands shook, slowing me down, but nothing could dampen my determination to get out of this dank space.

There was still fabric wrapped around Wicks’s hands. I was sure he would try to bind it around my neck if he could get close enough.

“You’ll die here with me,” he said, reaching out both arms to me.

I stepped up onto one of the boulders that had tumbled to the ground. He tried to grab me, but its surface was so uneven that I slid backward and he missed.

When I found my balance seconds later, I reached for the silver statue, tucked under my shirt in the waistband of my jeans.

In a single motion, I swept her up above me and brought her down squarely on the top of Eddie Wicks’s head. He screamed out in rage—not words, but like a beast that had been felled by a hunter. I smashed it against his skull again, knocking him to the ground and opening a wound that bled freely onto the dirt.

I didn’t care about making the hole in the rocks any larger. I hoisted myself up onto one of the higher boulders and pushed out onto the ledge leading through the opening.

I screamed for help as loudly as I could while I lowered myself headfirst against the rough surface of the cave’s exterior. When the large tree limb seemed within reach, I grabbed it and clung to it with both hands, righted myself, and came to rest on a small precipice to the side of stone steps—the ones that had first appealed to my curiosity.

Barefoot and bruised, I made my way down that primitive staircase, crossed the stream, and stepped back into my driving moccasins.

The path was empty, and my scream hadn’t drawn anyone to my aid. Mindful of the lampposts and the guidance they provided to get me out of the Ramble, I ran as fast as I could downhill to extricate myself from this deadly maze.