The pain was so intense that when I regained consciousness, I couldn't bear to open my eyes. I tried to inhale and give air to my aching brain, but there was something in my mouth that I gagged on as soon as I drew breath.
My pain was dwarfed by fear. I was in a box, smaller than a coffin. I didn't need to look. I could feel the wooden boards beneath my back, close to my arms on each side, and knew there was not enough space above me to allow me to pick up my head.
Panic prevented me from doing what I needed to do most- regulate my breathing and conserve whatever oxygen there was available.
Slowly, I opened one eye. A sharp pang sliced across my forehead, forging little lightning streaks in my line of sight. There was a board above me-several boards-and between them were slats through which the gray daylight filtered in.
I wasn't underground. I wasn't buried in the earth. I tried to eliminate those two horrors that had frightened me the most.
I sniffed the air as I breathed in. The odor was dank and moist and the wood beneath me was wet and cold.
I closed my eyes again and watched as the lightning streaks dissolved into yellowish blobs that floated back and forth across my eyelids.
Ordinary street noises seemed close by. Automobile traffic and honking horns, then police sirens too far away to be useful to me. I could hear voices of women-a group of women-speaking in Spanish but walking away from whatever sidewalk was near my temporary coffin.
Voices again. This time it sounded like men, coming from the opposite direction. It was Mercer Wallace, calling my name, opening and closing doors as he did. I must still be somewhere within Poe Cottage.
Surely he and Mike would think of the poet's bizarre tales of premature burial, one of which had launched us on this hunt for a killer. The "dull, quick sound" of my own heart beating-like that of the telltale one-seemed deafening to me. Surely they would figure to look everywhere for me before leaving and locking up the sad little house. How did Poe describe that telltale noise that haunted the murderer? Like the "sound a watch makes when enveloped in cotton."
Voices came closer, and footsteps on pavement, too. I was on my back; my arms had been folded behind me and loosely restrained-probably with my woolen scarf-my hands beneath my thighs. The walls of my confinement restricted me, and I couldn't free my hands, which were tingling from the lack of circulation. I moved my right leg to try to bring my knee up to knock against the floorboard above me. But the space was tight and I could only lift it an inch or two. It rubbed against the wood but made no noise.
The pounding on the back of my brain was intense. My neck strained as I raised my head, knocking the crown of it against the boards. My hair cushioned the contact and it seemed to me even less audible than my heartbeat.
"What's in here?"
It was Mike's voice, and I almost laughed with relief at how ridiculous I had been to panic with my two friends only yards away.
"Just the root cellar," Kathleen Bailey answered. "Nothing."
Of course I had noticed the slanted roof of the small addition that was off to the right of the cottage entrance. It had a door that faced the rear street, where we had circled around before parking the car. It seemed no larger than a dollhouse. No wonder there were boards on either side of me, too. They supported the uneven flooring as the ground beneath sloped down the short incline.
I saw more light as a door opened above me and to the side. I grunted and groaned against my gag but the sound was too muffled and the voices of Mike and Kathleen masked my own weak effort to be heard. Whoever had opened the door and looked in for a brief moment had closed it again and turned the latch.
"She's just dumb enough to have taken off after that kid if she saw him running out of the park," Mike said. "Let me talk to the guy in the RMP and see if they have her at the station house."
The sets of footsteps walked away, with Mike going to ask the cops in the radio motor patrol car if they could phone in to locate me.
"I thought she was coming out of the cottage right behind me," Bailey said. "She might have just dashed out the gate. I-I just didn't see."
Mercer's deep voice was still in range, calling after Mike, "Alex may swim fast, but I wouldn't bet on her in a sprint through the side streets. It's not like her to take off on a footrace like that."
Don't leave me, Mercer, I prayed silently. How ironic that this was like Poe's classic, the officers standing right over the buried body, chatting pleasantly, making a mockery of my horror but hearing nothing.
I writhed and wriggled in my box. The noise of my clothes rustling against the old boards as I moved sounded as loud as thunder to me. Why couldn't anyone outside hear it? I gnawed on the gag, but quickly grew dizzy from the shortness of breath. I urged myself to lie still until someone returned to the cellar door. I urged myself to believe that someone would.
The dampness seeped through the back of my pants legs and I realized I was shivering. I moved my body again and struggled to pull my left hand free from under my thigh. It slid an inch or so, coming to rest against something slimy and fat and cold. Something that crawled.
This was a root cellar, I reminded myself. The thing I touched was probably a slug. It was Poe's root cellar, so most likely it was what he called a conqueror worm, waiting for me in my burial plot.
Why had I been stored here in this hole? What would my captors do to me when they returned, once the police moved their search away from this dank prison?
Now there were noises in an adjacent room above. "Every-thing," I heard Mercer say. "Open everything."
Lots of pairs of feet were traipsing through the tiny cottage, banging doors and moving furniture. There was a cupboard in the kitchen, I thought as I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the rooms we had seen earlier, but not even a closet in the parlor or bedroom.
"The fireplace," Mike said, "any trapdoors in there, at the back?"
Somebody was pounding up the narrow steps to the second floor. I could have saved them the time. There was nowhere to conceal anything upstairs.
Kathleen Bailey was trying to help them, answering someone's question about whether anything like this had ever happened here before. "Never. Nothing like this."
"How about the building foundation?" Mike said. It sounded like he was outside, at the top of the steps near the entrance.
"This side is solid rock," Mercer said. "I'll try the latticework on the left."
I heard several thuds and then the sound of splintering wood. Mercer had probably kicked through the decoratively carved front below the old porch.
"You been in here?"
An unfamiliar but welcome voice was close to me, unlatching the cellar door. I twisted around again, undoubtedly crushing the worm as I shimmied back and forth on top of it and grunted as I moved.
"They checked that already," someone answered. "It's empty."
The door that had been cracked open slammed shut again.
The entire inside of my mouth was chewed up by my efforts to loosen the gag. I could taste the blood as I swallowed.
Mike and Mercer were on my other side now, near the front steps of the cottage. "I'll take a ride around the 'hood. She's obviously not here," Mike said. "She's probably doing social work for the little bastard who punched out the kid on the playground."
"I'm not leaving," Mercer said. "I'd rather pull this damn park apart. She doesn't know the Bronx. I'm telling you she didn't run off anywhere."
"What coulda happened to her?" Mike asked. "We weren't out of sight for ten minutes. She's got a short fuse but I didn't think she was so impatient that-"
"Do it your way. Just leave a couple of uniformed guys here."
Stay with me, Mercer. Please just stay here with me.
I could hear Mike walk away from the building. "If you need a bloodhound, let me know. Or just sniff the floorboards for that Chanel shit she wears."
Floorboards. That's exactly what you need to think about. Stop your goddamn joking and come and get me.
I counted the five steps as Mercer walked up to the front door and reentered the cottage. Maybe it was my imagination but it seemed as though worms or spiders were crawling up the leg of my pants.
Minutes elapsed, and the frigid dampness continued to work its way into my bones. Now several people emerged from the house and stood on the porch, talking to one another before I heard one of them start down the steps.
Kathleen Bailey called out, "We don't use it, actually. It's too damp to store things in. It's been empty for years."
Footsteps rounded the far end of the cellar and stopped in front of the old entrance.
There were no voices this time. The latch was lifted and the door opened.
A man bent his shoulders to duck into the room. I tried to make sure it was Mercer but the slats were so narrow that all I could see was the sole of a large shoe and the dark leg of his trousers.
I braced my shoulders against the floor and pushed up with my hips. I knew that I had pulled the metal zipper of my ski jacket down to waist level when we had gone inside the cottage. I rubbed it as hard as I could against the plank above my stomach, creating the faint sound of a scratch. I whimpered through my gag.
The man standing over my head stopped and listened. He turned in place and kneeled, his ear placed against the boards beside me. I twisted again and gurgled a mixture of saliva and blood.
"I got you, Alex," Mercer said. "Hang tough, I'll get you out."