“You must be ignorant, young lady. She’s a very famous little girl,” Wicks said, his bug-eyed sneer seeming so sinister in the dark surroundings of the cave. “She was kidnapped a very long time ago. More famous than the Lindbergh baby, people say.”
I couldn’t tell if he was getting madder because I claimed not to know the story of Lucy Dalton, but there was no going back on my decision to play dumb about her.
“Are you the one who-?” I asked. “Did you hurt your friend?”
“That’s a stupid thing to say, isn’t it?” Wicks said, raising his voice as his cheeks reddened. “She was just a little girl, only three years old. I had no reason to hurt her.”
I picked up my head to look at him. “But she died, and-”
“It was an accident. All the brilliant reporters and the police investigators and even the servants who knew me as well as they knew Lucy, they all got it wrong. And I couldn’t tell them the truth because Lucy was with me when she died.”
Eddie Wicks sat on the floor of the cave, just inches away from me. He started to stroke the fabric that was wound around my legs-not my legs themselves but the gauzy cloth. And then he began to cry as he continued to talk.
“We loved this place-this Park. It’s what Lucy and I had in common. The zoo, the Carousel, all the playgrounds. And one day she asked me to take her with me to the Park, to play there in the afternoon.”
The crying stopped. He was angry again. The mood swings were violent and abrupt.
“We lived in a big house, in a great big house, right near the Park. It was Lucy’s house, and sometimes I felt like it was my house, too. I thought it was the safest place in the world,” Wicks said, now winding the gauze more tightly around his own hands, holding them up in the air like he was playing a game of cat’s cradle.
“I don’t want to know any of this,” I said. I wanted to buy time by talking about almost anything, but I feared that if he disclosed too much to me about Lucy’s death, he would become more determined to do me harm.
“But you can’t go now, dear. That wouldn’t be right. There has to be someone to tell the truth to people after I’m dead, don’t you think?”
“You’re very much alive. And you’ve frightened me horribly. And if the child’s death was an accident, then just let me go and you can tell them that by yourself.”
“I might not be alive for long,” he said. “It’s a terrible burden to live with this.”
“With what? To live with what?”
“Lucy’s dead because of me,” Wicks said. “My father’s dead because of me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was thirteen when my father jumped out of the kitchen window in our home. I was sitting at a table ten feet away from him, and I didn’t stop him. Do you understand how that made me feel? Do you understand how people blamed me for that-my mother? My sister? How they told me it was my fault?”
“But you were a child yourself. I doubt you could have stopped him,” I said, trying my amateur psychology on a man who’d been through years of treatment, most unsuccessfully. “If he was intent on killing himself-if those were his demons-then he would have succeeded another time whether you stopped him that day or not.”
“But I didn’t even try.”
Survivor guilt, I knew, was a powerful paralytic.
“But the child- Is her name Lucy?” I asked. “You said her death was accidental.”
“Do you think anyone would have believed me at the time? Do you think anyone would have believed that if they had found her little body?”
“I don’t know what people would have thought. You’re a very intelligent man. I’m sure someone- Was your mother alive then?” I asking, feigning lack of knowledge. “I’m sure someone would have believed you.”
“My mother was a housemaid,” he said, baring his teeth as he snarled at me. “Nobody cared what she thought. Even I didn’t care what she thought.”
“I’m sure-”
“It was a day in June when the accident happened. A much cooler day than this one. I was staying in a room above Lucy’s home because my school year had finished. And because I didn’t have any friends to keep company with.”
“Why are you-?”
“Shut up,” Wicks said as he pulled on my restraints. “I told Lucy I’d take her to the Park. I promised her, even though no one would have allowed me to do that. To them, you see, I was damaged. I was my father’s boy, and too damaged to be around that happy child.
“After her nap she came upstairs looking for me. We had all these wonderful rooms in the house where we could hide from the adults, where I could amuse her and do magic tricks that made her laugh.”
I thought of the endless string of rooms we had seen yesterday at the Dakota-the quirky layout, the labyrinth of spaces, some private, some public-all removed from the living quarters where Lavinia Dalton and her pampered grandchild were cared for.
“Lucy had a dress on-a smock, really. Pink-and-white gingham, because her grandmother always insisted that she was dressed in pink.”
Then Wicks stopped and adjusted his position to get closer to me, to look me in the eye to make sure I was listening to him.
“And Lucy had this on, too,” he said, holding his hands out to me.
“This?”
“This beautiful material that her grandmother had ordered for Lucy from Paris. And my mother had sewn into a party dress for the child.”
It was the gauze that he had bound me with, the gauze he had primed in his hands for use on something-or someone.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Lovely.” I had nothing else to say.
“So pretty and so much of it that my mother made a shawl out of it for Lucy, too. A long strip that the child used for dress-up, that she liked to put around herself when she was pretending to be a princess,” Wicks said. “She wanted to wear it out to the Park, even though I thought that was kind of silly. That it was too warm to wear it. But she insisted on it because it was so light and filmy, not warm at all, and so I couldn’t disagree.”
“But how were you going to take her out if no one in the household would allow that?”
Eddie Wicks rocked back and forth again, never taking his eyes off me as he told me what happened-testing me, perhaps, to see how his story went over.
“I had a plan, of course, so that we wouldn’t be seen. No one would miss us because they’d all assume we were playing in the attic, that Lucy was happy to be with a friend who was part of the household.
“There was a dumbwaiter,” he said. “It could go all the way from the top floor of the building to a service room on the ground floor. Nobody used that room anymore, and nobody really used the creaky old machine.”
I thought of the archaic device, and even what an attractive nuisance-almost a game-it might have been for an inquisitive child.
“Lucy? Well, the dumbwaiter was her favorite place to hide. It wasn’t meant to fit people-just loads of laundry or cleaning supplies or dirty dinner service-so it could only hold a child at best. We decided together-” Wicks said, pausing for a moment before he went on.
We decided, I thought-a damaged teenage boy, possibly sexually charged during one of his manic phases, and a three-year-old child who was his favorite companion.
“Lucy got in the dumbwaiter, in her gingham smock with her princess shawl wrapped twice around her shoulders and neck like a scarf, as she always wore it, smiling and laughing about our secret trip,” Wicks said. “That’s how I left her, how I always want to think of her.”
I tried to conjure up that cheerful image but brought to mind only a wooden box full of bones.
“I pressed the button to send her to the ground floor, and then I ran down the servants’ staircase-the rear staircase-just as fast as I could, so I’d be there to help Lucy out, so we could go on our way, through one of the back doors.”