Linda Fairstein - Entombed

Phelps had stepped back and ordered me to continue lifting and carrying rocks. The car had passed through without any sighting of us.

"You identify with Poe?" I knew there was a name for this syndrome in the psychiatric literature but I was too terrified to pull it up.

"I'm not foolish enough to think my own writings can compare, but he was always, shall we say, my inspiration."

"He's the reason you killed Aurora?"

"Not at all. I had reason enough of my own to do that. It's just that he had composed the most brilliant manner in which to do it. It still excites me every time I think of what her final thoughts must have been when she realized that I was sealing her behind that wall. Alive."

The rock slipped from my hands. I was losing my focus.

"Every time there was another insult in my life, another rejection, another defeat, I consoled myself by the thought that Poe had overcome all those similar things and more to become the greatest writer of his time."

I thought about the tragedies that had overwhelmed Poe's life from infancy. He had all the psychological torment that could have created a monster, a serial killer. Aaron Kittredge believed he might have been one. It seemed more plausible to me with every second in Phelps's presence.

"Don't I get any credit for my rehabilitation, Miss Cooper? After Aurora's death, I was-well, nearly a model citizen for a very long time."

"Until you murdered Emily Upshaw."

"Emily knew too much." Phelps sighed. "Once the newspapers showed such an interest in the skeleton, it wouldn't have taken long for her to spill her guts about me."

"She knew you as Phelps?"

"It's not the name I used in those days," he said, "but she certainly knew who my stepfather-well, whatever you want to call him-she knew who he was. She knew my story."

And that led to Dr. Ichiko, I thought, stacking another rock on the pile. Undoubtedly the shrink had all the information in his old patient files to help him piece together who "Monty" really was.

"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.

"Now there's a man who wasn't all that clever. Information isn't of any value unless you use it properly. Dr. Ichiko was just unfortunate."

"He was smart enough to find you," I said, wiping some debris from the corner of my eye.

"He got partway there. He knew enough to look for someone named Phelps. He remembered my affinity for Poe-some kind of psychological transference, he liked to say it was. So he did his research and called information for the Raven Society number, just to see if perhaps there was a member with my name. There's a Manhattan listing that goes to Zeldin's home, Miss Cooper. But if you check the Bronx directory, the same number rings at the mill. And when he dialed over here, I just happened to answer the phone. He didn't know that at the time, so when I heard the nature of his inquiry, I pretended to be the great Zeldin and invited him here to discuss the information he thought he had so brilliantly uncovered. He should have watched his step more carefully."

Once the cover-up had been set in motion, Sinclair Phelps had not been able to stop. It was the fear that someone would come here to his sanctuary-whether it was Aaron Kittredge more than a decade ago, or Dr. Ichiko or Noah Tormey most recently. Someone with a connection to Aurora or a link to Emily, someone who would expose the quiet life he had created for himself and connect him to the murder of Aurora Tait, someone who would walk through these gates and shatter the illusory world in which he lived.

"And your little punks-why did they attack Ellen this afternoon? What was that about?"

"Quite frankly, Miss Cooper, they had orders to go for you. I didn't know they'd be creative enough to impale someone on that gruesome plant, but they're good at being bad. I told them you'd be the woman asking all the questions-the ever-inquisitive Alexandra Cooper," Phelps said, shaking his head in my direction. "I understand you were uncharacteristically quiet today. They mistook that other lady for you."

The boulders were stacked waist-high now. My time was running short.

I stepped back out into the fresh air and looked in vain for any sign of human life. I stalled for a minute, reaching into my rear pants pocket and realizing for the first time that I hadn't left my gloves in the ski jacket back at Phelps's house. Something stung me sharply as I tried to withdraw my hand.

Stuck tightly to the fine knit of the woolen gloves were several leaves of the plant-the ferocious plant-that I had pulled from the wounds on Ellen's face. The long thorns pierced the tips of my fingers and I winced in pain.

I had pocketed the treacherous needles so they wouldn't accidentally injure anyone coming to Ellen's aid. Now they might be my only defense against Sinclair Phelps.

Holding the gloves in my hand, I picked up a smaller rock, one that I could carry with a single arm. Phelps was leaning against a large boulder and had placed the shotgun on top of it. He was toying with a piece of material that I assumed would be my gag and binds-ripping it into several lengths of cloth.

There would be no second chance for me. If I didn't make a clean strike, it would be my very own, very premature burial.

I approached the mouth of the cave and walked directly in front of Phelps. He started to say something to me and as I turned to look at him, I shifted the rock to my left arm. With a single thrust, I rammed the thorn-encrusted black gloves into his eye with my right hand, pushing as hard as I could.

Sinclair Phelps howled as the prickly needles embedded themselves in his eyelid. He doubled over, covering his face with his hands. I lifted the rock and brought it down as hard as I could, pleased with the sound it made as it cracked against bone. Blood trickled from his ear as he fell to the ground.

The two coydogs leaped to their feet and charged at me.

I grabbed the shotgun from the boulder, pointed its barrel straight overhead, and discharged several rounds into the quiet night.

The dogs whimpered and circled each other in distress, frightened by the blasts of the gun. Dozens more bats swooped out of the cave, dipping their wings and blackening the sky above us. I clutched the weapon in my hand and ran down the slope as fast as I was able to move.

"Ratiocination, my dear Coop. Edgar Poe would have delighted in your use of it."

Mike Chapman was leaning against a bookshelf in the basement of the snuff mill, surrounded by ravens of every shape and size.

My shotgun volleys had rallied several pairs of police officers in the direction from which I had come running. Two intercepted me on the roadway and took me into their patrol car. They brought me back to Zeldin's office, the place from which Mike and Mercer had been tracking the search mission.

"Once I saw Phelps outside the door of his cottage paying off one of the kids, it all started to come together. It was a gang of teenagers who had assaulted Aaron Kittredge when he tried to visit here almost ten years ago. Phelps must have feared, then, that he might be spotted. He didn't want to risk an accidental encounter with someone who could link him to his other life. It was kids who hit me over the head, and who tried to-to bury me." I paused to take a deep breath. "Who put me under the floorboards at Poe Cottage."

Mercer refilled my water glass. "And the same kids-Sinclair Phelps's roving band of bad boys-who mistook Ellen Gunsher for you in the conservatory."

"He could have lived out the rest of his life here, undisturbed, if no one had been able to connect him to Aurora Tait. Or to Emily Upshaw," Mike said, folding his paperwork in quarters and tucking the pages in his blazer pocket. "Or to his own miserable past."

"Did you guys find Zeldin?" I asked. "Do you think he knew anything about Phelps?"