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.
FORTY-THREE
“You know better than to think I would have left you out there on your own,” Mike said. He was sitting in the stern of a rowboat, in front of the boathouse on the Lake, as the last moments of twilight were giving way to darkness. “I figured you were pouting ’cause I wasn’t talking to you about anything personal. You said you were tired, and I thought you’d just walked on back down to the street.”
I was sitting on the grass next to the boat, my feet in the water. Mercer was on a bench behind me, rubbing my shoulders.
“How often have I quit on you?” I asked.
“I thought it was different this time,” Mike said. “You know, different since-”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Then I heard on the walkie-talkie that Mercer had talked the six-shooter right out of crazy Jessica Pell’s hot little hands, and I flew out of the Ramble and across to the Sheep Meadow like I was Usain Bolt.”
“That probably puts me next on Pell’s hit list,” Mercer said. “After she gets discharged from lockdown.”
“I just assumed you’d be with Mercer,” Mike said. “Not a good day for spelunking alone, kid.”
“Sorry?”
“Spelunking. Isn’t that French for cave exploring?”
“It’s not French for anything. Drop it there, okay?” I said. “I didn’t plan on going into a cave alone. I didn’t know it was a cave, and I thought you were right behind me. I counted on the fact that you’d see my shoes and sweater on the ground beside the stream, if nothing else. That you heard me calling to you.”
“I did. And I told you to wait.”
“You need to see a doctor, Alex?” Mercer asked.
“That toothbrush took care of all my medical needs.” The Loeb Boathouse had become the hub of all the police action again, as it had been on the Friday morning that Angel’s body had been found. One of the rookies had been dispatched to buy some toiletries for me so that I could clean up. I wasn’t leaving the Park until I had answers to most of my questions.
The Emergency Service guys were setting up floodlights so that Crime Scene could do its work above us, in the Ramble. Mike had been allowed to question Eddie Wicks before an ambulance took off with him to New York Hospital, cuffed and under arrest for the bludgeoning death of Janna Dixon, the homeless girl whose journal had been found in the cave, next to the box with Lucy’s bones.
I had been debriefed by Manny Chirico and two other homicide detectives from Mike’s team. I told them everything that Eddie Wicks had said to me.
“What did Wicks tell you?” I asked Mike.
“I read the diary first,” Mike said. “That’s what got the girl killed.”
“Jo was right, then,” Mercer said, referring to the homeless girl he’d brought to my office to be interviewed.
“Yeah. Janna’s life was pretty much all there, in her own words.”
“Where was she from?” I asked.
“Payson, Arizona. Nineteen years old.”
“Did you find her father? Have you called him?”
“I had no interest in speaking to that bastard,” Mike said. “She has an aunt who seemed to be Janna’s only lifeline. Her mother’s sister. I reached her an hour ago. We’ll fly her in tomorrow to make the ID and take the body home.”
I wrapped my arms around my legs and rested my chin on my knees. “It was all true, about the sexual abuse by her father?”
“Way too true. Years of it.”
“There’s so much help we could have given her here.”
“Wait till you read her words, Coop. The thing that Janna Dixon knew best was despair.”
“What a heartbreak. And why did her words get her killed?”
“It was Verge who introduced her to Eddie Wicks,” Mike said.
“Verge.” I straightened up with a start. “Have they found him?”
Mercer leaned me back to rest against his long legs. “He’s in the boathouse. Verge showed up in the Sheep Meadow while I was sweet-talking the judge, to see what all the ruckus was about.”
“And now?”
“The guys are inside, trying to make sense out of him. Seems he and Wicks knew each other way back as kids. Saw each other dozens of times over the years.”
“And the black angel?” I asked.
“It really did come from the graveyard of one of the churches in Seneca Village,” Mercer said.
“Verge helped Wicks take Lucy’s bones out of their resting place,” Mike said. “I don’t exactly think he knew what Wicks was doing, but he helped himself to the ebony carving while Wicks was up to his own business.”
“What about Janna?”
“She and Wicks got along at first. There are sketches of him in her journal. Stories about him, too, and how he showed her some of the Park’s secret places. He told her about the Indian Cave himself. That it had nothing to do with Indians, but it was just designed to be a mysterious part of the Ramble, with two entrances.”
“Two?” I said. “I’ll be damned if I could find a second one. I was counting on Mike to do that before he ran off on me.”