"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."

The technician pushed back the enormous shell of the MRI machine that had swallowed my entire body to take the images of my head and chest. "You can open your eyes now. Was that okay for you?"

I had balked at the idea of going back inside such a confining enclosure, the sense of claustrophobia still overwhelming me after the morning's experience. I nodded without enthusiasm.

"What time is it now?" I asked, having spent a long afternoon in the emergency room, being examined and completing a battery of X-rays before this scan was ordered.

"Almost six o'clock."

"Will I be discharged now that you're done?"

"Dr. Schrem has admitted you, Miss Cooper."

I sat up and retied the hospital gown. "I'm really fine. The headache is practically-"

"It wouldn't be smart to let you go without observing you overnight," he said, motioning me to sit in the wheelchair. "You don't even know what the object was that hit you on the head. A mild concussion alone would bear watching."

This was the wrong guy with whom to argue. He handed my record to an older gentleman whose sole job appeared to be to escort me from waiting area to waiting area within New York University's massive medical center. My driver took control of the handles and backed me through the double doors.

When they closed behind me and we started rolling down the corridor, Mike jumped off a gurney he'd been sitting on and grabbed the wheelchair handles.

"Look, I'm sorry I-"

"I don't even want to see you tonight, Mr. Chapman. Get your hands off my wheels-I wouldn't trust you to drive me from here to the cafeteria. I can't believe that you went off and left me for dead. What were you thinking? Where's Mercer?"

"Right here, Alex," he said, walking beside me and taking my hand in his. "You know Mike isn't really a heartless son of a bitch. He's just not a first-grader like I am. Might need to send him back to the Academy for a refresher course in detection. Nobody was going to leave that park on my watch."

"What's the room number, Pops?" Mike asked.

"Six-thirty. Elevator straight ahead."

"I want a drink."

"Not yet, kid. Doesn't mix with those painkillers the doc's got you on."

"Why can't I just take the medications and go home?"

"'Cause whoever tried to put a hole in that thick skull," Mike said, "left a sizable little lump that might have to be coated with peroxide if it sticks out any farther on your scalp. I just knew we'd get to play doctor together eventually."

I looked up at Mercer. "I'm not kidding. I really don't want him in my face all night. I don't want him anywhere near me. He's bad for my blood pressure."

"You want an apology, blondie? That's what you want?"

"I want to be alone," I said, Garbo accent and all.

We got on the elevator and rode it up to six while Mike chattered. "You want me to flog myself and put on a hair shirt for not having had the good sense to think you were walled up behind a door or buried alive with a black cat. Right? It just goes to prove my theory that this would never have happened if you put on a little weight."

"Shut him up, Mercer."

"Fat people are harder to kidnap. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Wallace? You never read in the paper that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact, and you can do something about it for the future, young lady."

We wheeled in front of the nurses' station and Mike put the brakes on the chair. He lifted a bouquet of flowers from the top of the desk and dropped to his knees in front of several doctors, nurses, and visitors who were passing by.

"Coop, as long as I live I swear I'll never walk out on you again. I'll never criticize your perfume or your heels or your hair color or your temper or-"

I unhitched the brake and pushed myself away from the onlookers toward the wing that corresponded to the room number I had been assigned.

"I'll stop to look under the bed and inside the closet and even rip up the floorboards next time I can't find you."

"So much for my anonymity," I said to Mercer, who had taken charge of pushing me. "If they didn't know who I was before I got up here, I guess they'll figure it out."

A nurse followed us into the room. "Need any help getting into the bed?" she asked, taking my chart from the bewildered escort. "Stanley Schrem called. He'll be by for rounds later this evening."

She waited until I settled back against the pillow and raised the bed's metal railing before she and the escort left the room.

"Feel good?" Mercer asked.

"Safe and soft and clean and better. I would not say that 'good' is a word that comes to mind tonight."

Mike was in the doorway. He must have stopped in every room along the way and cajoled patients out of their flowers. His arms were loaded with assortments-ten or twelve of them in a wild variety of colors-pulled from their vases and dripping water down the front of his clothes and onto the floor.

"I'm just a fool whose intentions are good," he sang to me, crossing the room and laying the dozens of wet flowers across the crisp white sheets that covered my legs. "Oh, Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

"Misbegotten, misguided, misogynistic, misinformed," I said. "Just add misunderstood to your long list of 'mis'es."

I looked over at Mercer, who was leaning against the windowsill. "So, the only person who knew we were going to be at the cottage was Zeldin. And I guess Phelps, the groundskeeper, must have heard him suggest it. And Gino Guidi. Maybe three people in the world. Doesn't that give you a head start?"

"Don't make yourself crazy tonight, Alex. We're working on it."

"I've been inside that torture chamber, with clanging noises pounding at my aching head, pinched and prodded and observed by the entire ER staff. What else have I got to think about but who clobbered me and why? And what they were going to do when they came back for round two?"